In “Future Minded: New Works in the Collection,” Harvard Art Museums freshens up its collection with exciting new pieces. On view through July 21, the exhibition highlights works from various mediums and eras, but the photography selections are particularly noteworthy.
Baldwin Lee’s “Untitled” (1983-1989) is a remarkable photograph cited by the museums as an example of efforts to diversify its social documentary collection. It shows a young Black boy staring at the camera, next to an object burning on the curb. In the background, the boy’s silhouetted friends look on from their bikes, but their eyes are obscured.
“Untitled” is powerful but enigmatic; the wall labels tell us that it was acquired last year using the Fogg Museum’s Fund for the Acquisition of Photographs. In the convoluted operations of large institutions, these named funds are often endowed from specific donors, acting as line items in the museum budget. These bureaucratic details are dull, but consequential.
In this case, the Fogg Fund allows the Harvard Art Museums to diversify the artists in their collection. The museum labels for “Untitled” place Lee’s works in the context of other famous social documentary photographers in the collection such as Robert Frank, Ben Shahn and Walker Evans – the bulk of which were white male artists hired by the Works Progress Administration. But Lee is not of that ilk. He was a first-generation Chinese American, and a photography student at MIT. Likewise, Boston artist Melissa Shook’s portraits of 1980s and 1990s Pine Street Inn residents make a strong case that local photographers were an important part of the social documentary genre. Her work, like Lee’s, conveys the intimacy of sustained effort and interest, and the refusal to look away from suffering.
The jewel of “Future Minded,” is artist Guanyu Xu’s kaleidoscopic 2019 photograph “Worlds Within Worlds.” For the series, Xu, who is gay but never came out to his parents, turned their home into a studio after they left for work, creating an elaborate set filled with his own work. Unsurprisingly, the set construction process was so time-consuming Xu could make only one photograph each day. Seeing this work is intense: a form of analog overwhelm. In the way that being observed mid-scroll can shake you out of your digital stupor, Xu’s photograph makes the viewer self-conscious about their own gaze, showing how absurd (and affecting) it can be to make meaning through images.
Photography is just a small part of the show, and of the museums’ portfolio of more than 200,000 objects. But it’s a compelling part of an ongoing attempt to expand collections by living artists. The exhibition was co-curated by Jackson Davidow, a John R. and Barbara Robinson Family fellow in photography, who has made headlines over the past year for his work on the Tufts University Art Galleries exhibitions “As the World Burns” and “Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant.” Davidow has a skill for unearthing gems from the archives and for paying respect to Boston’s contributions to queer and photographic history. It’s impressive when the exhibition’s form matches its content. In this case, the works on view in “Future Minded” speak for themselves, but the show labels are often as surprising, beautiful and human as the works selected. When it comes to curating, transparency is an art unto itself.
“Future Minded: New Works in the Collection,” at the Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., near Harvard Square, Cambridge. Up through July 21.
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