‘Embodied’: a new chapter at Newfields?

Embodied: Human Figures in Art at Newfields focuses on the human body — how we’ve adorned, modified, and depicted it — over a 4,000 year swath of history. It reflects a recent trend replacing geographical and chronological categorization in art museum collections with thematic curation.

In this exhibition, you will encounter some surprising juxtapositions.

Take Alison Saar’s “Nappy Head Blues”.  It’s a blue-painted wood portrait bust with found objects, which, by its placement beside traditional African work, disrupts the primarily ethnographic narratives you find when approaching many African art exhibits. In this work, Saar confronts the term “nappy” —   sometimes used to denigrate Black hair —   and uses it as a jumping off point to explore female empowerment. 

The hair, for Saar’s subject, becomes a vessel for important totems in her own life. “In Saar’s youth, her mother told her a story of a girl who wouldn’t brush her hair,” reads the wall text.  “Leaves, birds, and rats became entangled, living in a nest atop her head.”

Placing it side by side with a traditional vessel by a 20th century Mangbetu artist and an abstract vessel by Kenya-born Magdalene Oduno invites a dialogue about hairstyles, body modification, and cultural norms.

Oduno’s largely abstract sculpture makes reference to traditional Mangbetu hairstyles and to the practice of head binding. (The Mangbetu people live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) You see this practice depicted in the portrait bust of a female Mangbetu royal’s head atop the vessel adjacent to Oduno’s. 

In all three works, across the chasm of time and culture, the Black female body is envisioned, per the wall text, as “a sacred container of life.”

Walking through Embodied, you have an opportunity to consider how museums acquire the body of their work in the first place.

Consider that Harrison Eiteljorg (yes, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art Eiteljorg) donated the aforementioned Mangbetu vessel to the museum in 1989. Along with that gift, came a brass plaque depicting a warrior that you will also find in Embodied. Long before Eiteljorg acquired this brass plaque, in 1897 to be exact, a British military exhibition appropriated it by force from the Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria.  It is one of 868 plaques listed in Dan Hicks’ book  The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution, published by Pluto Books in 2020, a book that argues that these plaques should be repatriated.  

Formerly, when this plaque was exhibited in Newfields’ African galleries, there was no acknowledgement that this object was stolen. However, in Embodied, there is expansive wall text not only contextualizing this theft, but also making the following claim: 

The staff of Newfields acknowledge the history of colonial looting and embrace the opportunity for critical dialogue about these works.  Newfields has shared its data with Digital Benin, a project cataloging the globally dispersed artworks of the Benin Kingdom. We are actively engaging with scholars, curators, and authorities in Nigeria to return this object to its appropriate owner.

Those who argue for “art for art’s sake,” who get hot under the collar when they see such historical intrusions, might explode, as it were, when they see Roberto Lugo’s porcelain vase “The Expulsion of Colin Kaepernick and John Brown” by self-identified “ghetto potter” Roberto Lugo.  This traditional-style vase is adorned with some not-so-traditional depictions of famous men. Namely, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who took a knee for racial justice and the pre-Civil War era abolitionist who took up arms against slavery. Indeed, judging from some of the comments left on index cards, you might think that Lugo shoved a hot poker up the assholes of some museum patrons.  “Disgusting what Kaepernick does” reads one. “None of the art in this show has nothing [sic] to do with figure studies” reads another.  

“The Expulsion of Colin Kaepernick and John Brown” by Roberto Lugo

But the utilitarian aspect of much of the art in this exhibit is hard to deny, even if that aspect consists of making politically-charged work. Art is not just “figure studies.” That art always has some kind of useful aspect, I think, is a hard idea to argue against. 

Consider the “Portrait of Maria Jane Andrew” by Joseph R. Mason, painted in 1841 in nearby LaPorte County, which depicts a girl, who died at the age of seven, in a sitting pose. She’s wearing a black onyx medallion signifying her death, and the portrait behind her, is most likely her younger brother who predeceased her, at the age of three.  What you might remember most about this portrait is not the somewhat stiff portrayal of the girl but your own attempt to imagine the anguish and longing that led the parents to commission this posthumous portrait in the first place. This painting may not work as a perfect figure study, but it probably did the job for the artist who received money for painting it, and the family who used it to recall a lost loved one.

Nonfigurative, or abstract, art has a place in this exhibition also, as with Oduno’s aforementioned vessel and Barbara Hepworth’s  towering pair of bronze sculptures titled “Two Figures”. The curatorial text at the base of the work encourages debate with “If you imagined an emotional relationship between these two figures, what would it be?” But that question might just spur another question: How can non-figurative art be figurative?  

“Two Figures” by Barbara Hepworth

The female body figures prominently in this exhibition. "Glow of Gold, Gleam of Pearl" by William McGregor Paxton, painted in 1906 —   depicting an upright nude woman luxuriating in her fertile glow. It should be a familiar work for frequent museum-goers. (It normally resides in the rotunda across from the Louis Comfort Tiffany “Angel of the Resurrection” stained glass.) The portrait conforms to a classical realism. This includes the pubic area which is blank enough to please the prudish imagination of John Ruskin, the Victorian-era art critic, who apparently was revolted by his wife Effie Gray’s pubic hair (if you give credence to the eponymous biographical film written by one Emma Thompson).   

It’s not entirely surprising that one of the more interesting juxtapositions in “Embodied” has to do with nudity. Consider the placement of “Reclining Nude” by Frank Duveneck —   a realistic oil painting of an attractive nude woman reclining on a couch from 1892  — together with Richard Jolley’s “Reclining Male Nude with Extended Leg”, an abstract work of blown and sculpted glass. The juxtaposition begs the question that the curators ask in the wall text.  “How might this pose have shaped and perpetuated gender norms?” they ask. “How could the interpretation of a reclining nude shift when the subject is male or non-binary?” they ask again.

If Embodied feels somewhat unfinished as an exhibition, you might consider that this is the first broad attempt by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields to reorganize its collections for the 21st century. As a result, a number of questions asked either explicitly or implicitly by the exhibit lead to more questions, I think, than can be answered currently. It’s worth coming back from time to time just to see how things progress.