Museum guards are too often an afterthought, all but ignored by other museum staff and visitors alike. But many of us are artists and writers too. Though we may be overlooked, we are also looking, quietly contemplating the institutions within which we work. I’ve been an “art guard” for the better part of my adult life, first at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for seven years, then at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston for another six. Not long after relocating to Baltimore, I began working with the frontline staff at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). So, although I haven’t worked in the higher echelons of an art museum, I have become quite familiar with their inner workings.
Art museums are like microcosms, responding to various developments both inside and outside the art world. It’s fascinating to play a small part in that exchange and to experience how cultural institutions keep up with an increasingly complex society. Last March, like most public buildings across the country, the BMA temporarily closed its doors due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Despite the closure, the Museum has remained as active as ever. The following is an account of the many ways in which the BMA has adapted to the current crisis.
Winter 2020
The year began auspiciously enough for the BMA. After a four-month run, a well-attended exhibition, Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, closed in late January. The critically-acclaimed show highlighted the significant contributions Black artists have made to the history of abstraction from the postwar era to the present. As Mary Lovelace O’Neal writes in Artforum:
The work in the exhibition’s first room was, in a word, breathtaking—a feeling that is rare and, for me, hearkens back to the 1960s and ’70s, when there were truly new things to experience, to think about, to wonder about, things that led us to wonder about art, to wonder if it was art. These days, when we see a great deal of what is being “produced” or “fashioned,” we know, to a mathematical certainty, it ain’t. Thank goodness a work of art—the work of Jack Whitten—survives him: a gigantic jewel box that stretches across a wall and our imaginations.
O’Neal was especially impressed by Whitten’s 9.11.01 (2006), which pays homage to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in both title and form; the late artist witnessed the fall of the twin towers from his home and studio in Queens, and later went to the site to collect ash and other detritus (including human remains) to incorporate into his monumental mosaic. The piece is both uplifting and foreboding. In hindsight, its inclusion in the Generations exhibition seems to have foreshadowed the cataclysmic year ahead.
JACK WHITTEN
American, 1939–2018
9.11.01, 2006
Mixed Media
Like a slow-moving flood, news of the coronavirus seeped into my world, only gradually at first. Reports of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, in late January and early February were disconcerting, but of only marginal interest to most Americans who were at that time more enthralled with the ongoing proceedings to impeach President Trump (for the first time). The TV in the break room at work was more likely to have images of Congress on its screen than news about the coronavirus outbreak. And the Museum itself was more focused on getting ready for its ambitious new installation, 2020 Vision: a yearlong rotation of exhibitions and programs set to open in March and dedicated to the achievements of female-identifying artists. Unfortunately, that noble mission would be thwarted by the pandemic.
Rumors about a staff member coming into contact with someone who had contracted COVID-19 spread across the Museum. It’s always hard to tell what’s true and what’s gossip in such a workplace. But soon after this rumor emerged, the Museum announced it would be closing temporarily. By mid-March the Museum was closed to the public and staff. Only a handful of security and maintenance personnel were permitted inside the building. Sadly, Candice Breitz: Too Long, Didn’t Read, a special exhibition focused on six refugees and a community of Cape Town sex workers by the South African multimedia artist, was on view for a mere few days before the closure.
Spring 2020
I decided to use this sudden hiatus from work to focus on my art and writing. Artblog, an independent online arts journal based in Philadelphia, invited me to become a contributing writer, primarily covering Baltimore’s architecture and built environment, and published several of my pieces over the following months. The journal also asked me to participate in its pandemic-specific series, Artists in the Time of Coronavirus, for which I wrote about my experience as a museum guard during quarantine. Like many artists, I am overeducated and under-employed; I hold degrees in art but have yet to move up in the museum world, let alone the art world. I had recently finished The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, in which she quotes choreographer Deborah Hay: “What if where I am is what I need?” This line stuck with me, and I wondered whether this was perhaps true of the world in this moment. I had no idea we’d still be waiting out the virus so many months later. Now I can’t help but think, “What if where we are is not what we need?”
Around this time, the BMA initiated a similar series, A Work on My Mind, asking Museum staff to reflect on individual works of art they might be thinking about while in quarantine. I thought of Van Gogh’s boots and wrote the following:
Ever since The Baltimore Museum of Art closed due to the coronavirus in mid-March, I’ve been thinking a lot about Vincent van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots (1887), part of the Museum’s renowned Cone Collection. It’s a fairly modest painting depicting a simple subject: a pair of work boots, one upright, the other turned over to reveal its worn sole. The Dutch painter captured his still life in a muted palette of beige, black and blue, with hints of olive green peeking through here and there. A loose bootlace was rendered with a single gestural brushstroke.
In a sense, Van Gogh’s boots are more portrait than still life. The tenderness with which he painted them hints at an inner life. Work boots suggest workers, which leads me to think of my own job at the Museum. In the context of the pandemic and related shutdown, A Pair of Boots takes on new meanings as many people continue to work their essential jobs, while others work from home or are laid off, wondering what the future holds while they wait out the virus. It’s fascinating how a work of art can be reinterpreted in new circumstances 133 years later. What will it mean 133 years from now?
In French, the term for “still life,” nature morte, translates to “dead nature” in English. From Ancient Roman mosaics to early modern vanitas images, the inclusion of skulls in still lifes symbolized mortality, often with the accompanying Latin phrase: Omnia mors aequat, or “Death makes all equal.” The pandemic doesn’t care who you are or what you do or what your social status is. Its devastation is indiscriminate.
VINCENT van GOGH
Dutch, 1853–1890
A Pair of Boots, 1887
Oil on canvas
Summer 2020
In June, Governor Larry Hogan loosened the restrictions for nonessential businesses and other public gathering areas in Maryland. The BMA chose to open only its outdoor sculpture gardens at that time. The guards who chose to cover the outdoor sculpture garden shifts over the summer received COVID pay at time-and-a-half the usual compensation. The restaurant Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen, which opens onto the gardens, also resumed business over the summer. A temporary food tent dubbed The Snow Cone Sisters Café (a witty reference to the Cone Sisters, who donated much of the Museum’s modern art collection) was set up in the sculpture garden to serve light refreshments during these warmer months as well. Only one entry point to the gardens was reopened; visitors had to enter and exit the same way as a means to control flow into the outdoor space.
Mickalene Thomas: A Moment’s Pleasure, installed a few months before the pandemic hit, remodeled the Museum’s modernist East Wing exterior into a series of Baltimore apartment buildings. Through a bit of stagecraft using large, high-resolution photographic images of building facades, Thomas reconfigured the plate-glass fronted museum entrance into a series of Baltimore rowhouses, complete with 3-D white marble stoops, so iconic of Charm City. The illusion is uncanny. Even from a short distance, this part of the Museum really looks like a city block. In May, after George Floyd was brutally murdered by police in Minneapolis, banners reading, “Can We Breathe” and “Black Lives Matter” were added to Thomas’ installation, further blurring the line between the rarified air of the Museum and the larger world’s response to racial injustice.
MICKALENE THOMAS
American, born 1971
A Moment's Pleasure, 2020
Mixed media
Additionally, the BMA installed several explanatory signs for other exterior artworks and exhibition spaces. Among these is the neoclassical Dairy or Spring House (1812), located on the West Lawn and designed by acclaimed architect Benjamin H. Latrobe, whose credits include parts of the White House and U.S. Capitol. Through his reference to a Greek temple in the Spring House design, Latrobe aligns American farming with the ideals of an ancient empire, one that also profited from a slave system.
A rotating short video was projected inside the Spring House last summer and early fall. National Anthem (2018), by California-based artist Kota Ezawa (b. 1969, Germany), is an animated sequence showing football players taking a knee, sitting, raising fists, or locking arms during NFL pregame performances of The Star-Spangled Banner to “call attention to police brutality against unarmed Black men and social injustice.” During the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key, who was a slave owner, penned his famous poem, which was later set to the familiar tune of the National Anthem. A slower, acoustic version of the paean performed by a cello quartet accompanies Ezawa’s animation of players’ protesting, creating a poignant and timely message. During the rotation of Ezawa’s video installation, the Museum contextualized the projection of National Anthem inside the Spring House with the following on their website:
The Spring House was one of several buildings in which enslaved Black men, women, and children were forced to work at Oakland, a plantation within the present-day city limits of Baltimore owned by U.S. Congressman and lawyer Robert Goodloe Harper (b. 1765–d. 1825) and daughter of a Declaration of Independence signer Catharine Carroll Harper (b. 1778–d. 1861). Located a few yards from slave sleeping quarters, the Spring House was a busy two-story barn and dairy. A typical workday began before dawn with women placing milk, eggs, and produce to cool in the fresh spring that ran through the building.
The Museum placed another sign near the Spring House facing a naked plinth across Art Museum Drive where a Confederate statue depicting the first meeting of General Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson once stood. The sign explains how that unfortunate piece of historical revisionism was removed by the city in August 2017 after a woman was killed during political unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the proposed removal of other local Confederate monuments. The area around the absent monument was recently renamed Harriet Tubman Grove. The naked plinth remains unadorned, but the letters “BLM” have been repeatedly spray painted onto its base.
The Spring House on the West Lawn of the BMA.
In addition to the signs made to accompany exterior artworks, others were placed as reminders to socially distance and wear masks in the garden and West Lawn areas at all times. Visitors complied for the most part. But things became confusing when they ordered food and drinks from the food tent or restaurant. How were they to eat their meal without lowering their masks? And how soon after eating should they put their masks back on? Why were people even coming to the Museum to begin with? Didn’t they know there was a pandemic? Were they really so devoted to art that they’d risk their own lives to see it? What about the lives of others? Is art essential?
Fall 2020
In mid-September, the indoor galleries began opening in phases. Museum visitors were required to register online for hourly timed entries. Several galleries and select portions of certain installations remained closed as their physical spaces were too limited for visitors to safely enter and for guards to be stationed at the proper distance. Frontline staff was encouraged to attend weekly Zoom meetings to express concerns or provide input regarding the reopening schedule.
Signs of the times.
Signs similar to those outside, reminding visitors to socially distance and wear masks, were strategically placed throughout the Museum’s interior. The signs’ Pop-like iconography of surgical masks had an almost avant-garde quality, as though they were the latest museum acquisitions, stylized pictograms for a sick world. Hand-sanitizing stations, like depositories of holy water, were placed here and there: kinetic sculptures for contemporary life in the “new normal.” Is civilization one large museum? A museum protects art, but who will protect us? Have I always been part of a larger work of art? We have broken the fourth wall. Now, we’re all unwilling participants in a global, public performance art project. “Keep your distance—I’m looking at art here!”
Along with the BMA’s adaptations made in the face of this novel virus, construction of two new spaces began in 2020: the Center for Matisse Studies and the Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs (PDP), which necessitated an ambitious remodeling of the first-floor gallery spaces and several office areas. The BMA is home to the world’s largest collection of works by Henri Matisse, the French modernist painter. This is largely due to numerous donations from the Cone Sisters, the wealthy and worldly Baltimore heiresses who, thanks in part to their acquaintance with Gertrude Stein, acquired many pieces by modern masters in the early twentieth century. The Cone Wing is devoted to the sisters’ collection, which includes works by Corot, Courbet, Gauguin, Monet, Picasso, Renoir, Van Gogh, and, of course, Matisse. Their Matisse holdings include several iconic paintings, but also many works on paper.
Empty display cases in the African Art galleries at the BMA.
Part of the Museum’s African collection, normally displayed in the first-floor galleries, was on view throughout the fall and winter in an exhibition about motherhood in African Art upstairs; the rest had to be temporarily removed to create a buffer zone around the construction area for the new study center. Some of the empty display cases in the African galleries still had their supporting armatures in place. Cases that once displayed traditional African figures, masks, and ceremonial artifacts, now contained nothing more than a few wiry-looking squiggles, like something Miro might draw. The empty containers displaying nothing seemed to be saying something nonetheless. At the very least, they indicated the many changes the Museum had undergone over the past year.
The construction of the new PDP center involved the temporary removal and later reinstallation of a large neoclassical archway by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Franzoni. Franzoni arrived in the United States in 1806 to work on the sculptural decorations of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. His sandstone archway formerly graced the façade of the Commercial and Farmers Bank, which stood at Redwood and Howard Streets in downtown Baltimore until it was razed in 1957 to make room for the Royal Farms Arena. In 1967, the Maryland Historical Society transferred the colossal arch, which consists of four large sections weighing two tons apiece, to the BMA where it was installed in what became the Garden Room, now the site of the new PDP Center. It’s comforting to know that after such a long journey, this architectural element will remain on view so many years after its creation.
Spandrel Arch from the Commercial & Farmer's Bank, 1813; Architect: Maximilian Godefray (French 1770-ca. 1827); Sculptor: Guiseppe Franzoni (Italian 1778-1814); Sandstone from Acquia Creek, VA; Gift of The Maryland Historical Society.
Standing signs and floor stickers were placed throughout the Museum, both in the public and staff-only spaces, indicating exactly how many people were allowed in each area. As with the mask mandate outside, these guidelines became somewhat confusing. If a floor decal instructed that only four people were allowed in a certain area, would others have to wait at the gallery threshold if that space was at capacity? Or would people naturally come and go at such a pace that this would not become an issue? For the most part, the latter was true. Visitors entered and exited galleries at a fairly languid but regular pace such that there were not many instances when they breached capacity limits.
Beyond the more explicit signage, there were many indications throughout the Museum that things weren’t quite right. Certain details suggested something sinister had transpired. Taped-off dishwashers and microwaves in the break rooms appeared as though part of a crime scene. Public water fountains and toilets were also taped off, creating unintentional readymade art. A urinal in one of the men’s rooms, wrapped in translucent plastic, looked like a Duchamp-Christo collaboration. A blocked-off stairwell near the construction for the Matisse Study Center recalls the conceptual and minimalist art interventions of the 1970s and ’80s. Like Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981), these temporary renovations blocked museum workers’ paths, forcing them to take alternative routes.
Blocked stairway.
A brief controversy emerged in October when the Museum publicly announced its plan to deaccession several major works in the collection for the purpose of using the revenue for operational and other expenses. Deaccession entails the permanent removal of artworks from a museum’s collection. Funds raised from deaccessioning typically go towards purchasing more art that would better round out a museum’s collection. The BMA wanted to use the proceeds from the planned sale to fund their Endowment for the Future, which would support their well-intentioned diversity, equity, access, and inclusion initiatives, as well as increase salaries.
Arguably, this raised an ethical dilemma: some of the staff choosing the pieces to be sold could gain from the sale in the form of raised salaries. Several former curators and board members spoke out against the planned deaccession that would put up for auction three works of art from the Museum’s collection: 3 (1987–88) by Brice Marden, 1957-G (1957) by Clyfford Still, and The Last Supper (1986) by Andy Warhol. Some board members, including artists Adam Pendleton and Amy Sherald, even resigned, though it’s not clear if their doing so was in response to the controversy. After much media coverage and community outcry, the Museum decided to pause the sale.
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If October was a setback for the Museum in terms of public relations, November brought a bit of good news. It was announced that local filmmaker and Baltimore’s self-proclaimed “Pope of Trash” John Waters would bequeath some of his art collection to the BMA. The collection consists of approximately 375 paintings, photographs, and prints including works by Diane Arbus, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Waters himself. In exchange, the Museum would rename two bathrooms in their East Lobby “The John Waters Restrooms” in honor of the cult director who himself is a visual artist and an aficionado of twentieth-century art history and theory.
Waters, whose longtime drag queen diva-actor Devine infamously ate a dog turd at the end of his film Pink Flamingos, was inspired in part by Duchamp’s found-object 1917 sculpture Fountain, a work of “anti-art” that would later inspire much of the postwar neo-avant-garde. But the decision to have the restrooms named after Waters also reflects the kind of art the filmmaker collects. “Renaming the bathrooms was my idea right from the beginning,” Waters said.
They thought I was kidding and I said, ‘No, I’m serious.’ It’s in the spirit of the artwork I collect, which has a sense of humor and is confrontational and minimalist and which makes people crazy. I have a piece by Tony Tasset called I peed in my pants. […] There’s also Wedged Lump by Mike Kelley that looks exactly like a giant turd. I also have George Stoll’s chiffon toilet paper. I have a lot of art that would work in a bathroom.
A domed space in the Museum’s European galleries will also be christened “The John Waters Rotunda.” But it’s the renaming of the bathrooms in the East Lobby that is most in line with the auteur’s ostentatious sense of humor.
Wrapped urinal in the men’s restroom at the BMA.
A short time later, more bad news befell the museum: the day before Thanksgiving, the BMA elected to close its doors to the public for a second time, responding to a projected spike in COVID-19 cases following the holiday. Initially planning to reopen after New Year’s, they later decided to extend the closure until February.
Winter 2021
Once again, the BMA began opening in phases over the course of February and March 2021. Guards reported for duty on a rotation and continued to receive COVID pay during this time. We also received a pay increase in early February, when the Museum set all base pay to an hourly rate of $15. Seeing as many other museums across the country have laid off much of their staff, the increase was especially welcome news.
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The many interventions the BMA made over the course of 2020—in response to the virus and political unrest, and with its own structural alterations—reveal how cultural institutions are sites of constant change. An art museum is not a static space or “white cube,” as is often said, but rather a place in flux. Museums are not simply repositories of history, but sites that make and reflect history as well. If nothing else, the closure of public buildings due to COVID-19 has proven how art museums, even when shuttered, are anything but arid tombs for cultural artifacts. Museums are vigorous places, ever adapting to environmental, political, and social upheavals. They change with the times or are lost to them.
It’s interesting to ponder what the museums of tomorrow will look like. How will they adapt to future calamities? How, for example, will they respond to climate change? There is a parallel here between art and nature: both must be preserved for posterity. In this sense, art museums are our cultural wetlands. We must remain vigilant to protect these institutions from devastation so that future generations can enjoy and learn from their holdings. Museums preserve, but they also persevere.
A version of this essay first appeared in Issue 5 of Full Bleed, the annual journal of art and design published by the Maryland Institute College of Art, in June 2021.
