“There’s a deliberate kind of deception being practiced here that is really cynical and really dangerous,” a historian tells the nineteenth.
Revealed by The nineteenth
Final week, the official social media accounts of the Division of Homeland Safety deviated from a collection of motion photographs of Secretary Kristi Noem and varied regulation enforcement officers to publish a portray from the nineteenth century.
“American Progress” portrays a floating White lady main the cost for homesteaders and technological progress, herding buffalo and Native individuals off Western lands.
The portray, accomplished in 1872 by John Gast, is on show on the Autry Museum of the American West, nestled within the hills of Los Angeles. Over the weekend, the museum hosted festivities for the Nationwide Day of the Cowboy and Cowgirl, throughout which Stephen Aron, the museum’s director, invited The nineteenth to go to and focus on what this portray represents about America, empire and White womanhood.
The picture of “American Progress” has been trending ever because it appeared throughout DHS’ social channels on July 23 with the caption: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” The portray is a deviation from the current content material on the official DHS Instagram web page, which since Trump’s inauguration has change into a set of memes, vintage-inspired propaganda posters and extremely produced hype movies of regulation enforcement officers.
On the Autry, the small portray is a part of an intensive salon tableau of wilderness canvases, depicting the American West as a fertile land to be conquered. Persons are secondary or absent in most works, with few exceptions. Subsequent to “American Progress” is a massive portrait of three White youngsters and a canine, exhibiting the kind of life settlers had been striving for in pursuit of manifest future.
In real-life Los Angeles, the place the Autry is situated, the town has been floor zero for the Trump administration’s federal immigration agenda, which has targeted on a specific model of “Homeland’s Heritage” — one about defending White girls and households.
Based in 1988 by Gene and Jackie Autry to share the heritage and legacy of the American West, the museum combines artwork, historic collections and cultural occasions. Central to its mission is bringing “together the stories of all peoples of the American West.”
That is exemplified by the format of the gallery the place “American Progress” lives. Aron factors out three large Navajo chief blankets are displayed throughout the room as a unique sort of panorama. In the course of the room is a gigantic sculpture, often known as “Grounded,” by third-generation Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson.
“American Progress” was acquired after it was displayed as part of a controversial 1991 exhibit on the Smithsonian Museum of Artwork that sought to reinterpret artwork of the American West with contemporary context on conquest and colonization. A number of lawmakers criticized the exhibit as overtly political, and threatened to defund the Washington, D.C., cultural establishment in retaliation. Critics and patrons felt the exhibition unnecessarily villainized America’s historical past — a pointy distinction to the shining beam of progress depicted in Gast’s piece.
It’s a response that’s echoing by means of American politics at present, because the Trump administration considers eradicating books about slavery from nationwide parks, erasing factual info that “disparages” American historical past and renaming a warship honoring LGBTQ+ activist Harvey Milk. Trump’s govt orders search to rollback mentions of gender, racial and ethnic variety from the federal authorities.
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Specialists on the Autry made clear that the capital-H “Heritage” celebrated within the DHS caption is a matryoshka doll of romanticization. The portray depicts three waves of “American Progress,” with a floating White lady bearing “the star of empire” ushering Indigenous individuals and animals out of the body, main the way in which for miners and homesteaders. It’s wanting again on the 1840s by means of the eyes of post-Civil Battle America, when the West represented a technique to sew collectively the nation and supply a rebirth, Aron advised The nineteenth.
To ensure that White Individuals to settle within the West, they needed to unsettle a various group of Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican individuals. And the principle image — and weapon — of settlement was the White household, mentioned Virginia Scharff, distinguished professor emerita on the College of New Mexico and chair of Western historical past on the Autry.
“The presence of White women is absolutely essential to the idea of permanent occupation of formerly Indigenous lands by the United States and the cementing of a legitimacy to occupy that land,” Scharff mentioned. White males first headed west alone, to work on railroads or as miners, however they didn’t start to occupy the land in a significant means on their very own.
Guests stroll by a statue of Gene Autry on the entrance to the Autry Museum in Los Angeles in Oct. 2016.
And in Gast’s portray, White womanhood looms massive — actually. Clad in classical white, the passive determine brings gentle westward; in distinction to the bare-breasted Indigenous lady, she embodies decency and civility.
As this spectre of “progress” claimed new states within the mid-1800s, the rights of girls diverged based mostly on racial and ethnic background. “There were always women who existed there prior to Americans coming, who had different ideas of womanhood, different roles in their communities, that often became under attack when a new government was established,” mentioned Carolyn Brucken, senior curator on the Autry, throughout a telephone name.
Mexican girls had extra rights than American girls within the East, together with the power to personal property, Brucken mentioned. Native girls, who participated in public councils throughout myriad tribal traditions, had been faraway from ancestral lands and completely different cultural beliefs had been compelled upon them.
On the identical time, Gast’s floating, symbolic lady erases the very actual contributions of girls on the frontier. “You miss how much women were active agents of change in the West,” Brucken mentioned. They fought for his or her rights and communities — Wyoming was the primary state to legalize girls’s suffrage in 1869. In distinction to the resurgence of conventional gender roles at present, gender roles could possibly be extra fluid in frontier communities with restricted assets, and girls slowly gained extra independence by means of expanded work and tasks.
Scharff sees the strategic deployment of the “American Progress” portray as deeply insidious. “The Department of Homeland Security is not sending scantily clad White women,” she mentioned, “but instead sending guys with guns and truncheons and masks to grab people off the streets.”
“There’s a deliberate kind of deception being practiced here that is really cynical and really dangerous, in my view.”
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DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin advised The nineteenth in an announcement that the company “honors artwork that celebrates America’s heritage and history.” She added: “If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook.”
However on the Autry, context is every little thing. “We’re doing everything we can, both in the physical space and also when we’re doing interpretive work, to try to contextualize this kind of art in American history,” Scharff mentioned.
She considers Simpson’s “Witness,” which is often displayed alongside “American Progress,” to be probably the most highly effective piece in your entire assortment. “It speaks to the people who are made invisible, muted and chased off the edge of the canvas by this type of art, but they’re still there,” she mentioned. “Their presence is undeniable if you just look.”
When Simpson’s work was displayed in an eighteenth-century dwelling, the artist commented on being “out of place.”
“There have been times when I wanted to speak only to people who could understand my work,” Simpson mentioned in an interview. “Yet if my sculptures are out of place, they’re actually working harder than if they’re surrounded by my context. I want my sculptures to go into difficult places; they’re intended to infiltrate.”
“Witness” has been quickly changed by its accompanying sculpture “Grounded,” a clay determine crouched on the bottom with black wings reaching to the ceiling. “Witness” was relocated to the ground under as part of a brief exhibit known as “Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology.”
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Upstairs, Aron explains, the artwork is supposed to remind patrons of the time earlier than the start mythologized by painters like Gast. “Future Imaginaries” is supposed to point out Indigenous historical past isn’t just previously, but in addition that there’s a current and a future.
In its momentary environment, “Witness” towers over Aron. He addressed its traditional placement whereas standing in entrance of the post-apocalyptic clay determine. “Bearing witness to the paintings of manifest destiny stands, I think, if not as a rebuke, then at least as a reminder of whose homeland, whose heritage, who’s first and who’s still here,” he mentioned.
