a day at the modern
looking at art in the wake of police action
My girlfriend and I spent this past weekend in Fort Worth, visiting some friends from college, and while in town we paid a visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. I have to say up front here: Fort Worth, I was not familiar with your game. The Modern is absolutely delightful.
I guess I’m what you would call a museum completionist. I have to stand in front of every piece for a few minutes and really soak it up and look. I have to read every placard and really take in the whole experience. The best museums can really get me lost in a headspace, and when I’m with a group I tend to sort of disappear.
That’s how I got to wandering around the Modern, thinking about spaces, contrast, intrusions and the violence of modern life. The gift shop wasn’t too bad, either.
On display this summer is American-Venezuelan artist Alex Da Corte’s solo show The Whale, collecting his work and works that compliment and influenced his style. The Whale focuses on Da Corte’s fascination with pop culture and our societal ephemera. In the exhibition pamphlet, he described his process as “analogous to the Jungian night sea journey, looking backward and collecting the past as an act of commingling with spirits, either cultural or personal.”
I wasn’t familiar with Da Corte’s body of work before this weekend, but I was really moved by his multi-medium works included video and paintings done on glass in the style of celluloid animation. I’m sort of a sucker for pop art, especially thinking about our tenuous relationships with stuff and the way advertisements and celebrity play on emotions, things like that. Plus, there was a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, which I’ve never seen in person (see above), and some Roy Lichtenstein pieces, who I like even if he’s been done to death by copycats. I like the colors. Sue me, I guess.
But I found my experience at the Modern clouded by a saga that I still just find completely bizarre and kind of chilling.
Last year, the Modern unveiled an exhibit called Diaries of Home. From the Modern’s website:
Diaries of Home features works by women and nonbinary artists, who explore the multilayered concepts of family, community, and home.
The artists included Nan Goldin, Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems. It seemed very cool. But just before Christmas of last year, the right-wing “newspaper” Dallas Express “reported” on “a tip” about Diaries of Home, alleging that the on-going exhibit featured “pictures of naked children and LGBTQ+ content.” (The Express was once a progressive, Black-owned newspaper in Dallas, now it’s a “pink slime” right-wing outlet owned by a local GOP megadonor)
At issue are two photographs by Sally Mann. One is a photo of a naked girl jumping on a table. Another features a young boy posed with what the Dallas Express called “an unknown liquid substance” on him with “his genitals exposed.” Other complaints in the article included a video on a TV screen “where an individual talked about her ‘queerness’” and photos showing “a topless woman exposing her breasts and a photo of two women together in bed.” It’s written very salaciously, and is a little funny when juxtaposed with some of the other images in the article, which appear to be stuff you could see in any art museum. The photos are of Mann’s children form her book “Immediate Family” which has been a subject of controversy before and features photos of her children in the nude as they grew up.
The writer then went to bother an employee about the pieces, who “pointed to a warning sign that said, ‘This exhibition features mature themes that may be sensitive for some viewers.’” The author immediately asserts that these pieces by Mann are child pornography, which he says randomly “is NOT protected under the First Amendment and is a criminal act.”
A brief google search will tell you that the staff writer who wrote this piece, Carlos Turcios, also works for the Tarrant County GOP.
The article also quotes two "Tarrant County residents.”
One, Kenya Alu, says that “pedophilia is not art. If this ‘artwork’ were on my phone, I would be arrested. Normalizing this is sick, and I want it to stop.” Alu seems to be a North Texas realtor who has written for right-wing outlet Texas Scorecard. Another concerned citizen, Leigh Wambsganss, said that “child rape is not art, it’s pedophilia.” Wambsganss called for museum board members and staff to be “held accountable.” It would probably not shock you to learn that Wambsganss works for Patriot Mobile, a right-wing mobile phone company based in the DFW area that appears to do very little mobile-phone company stuff but a lot of work to get Moms For Liberty-type candidates elected to North Texas school boards. The story ends with a quote from the executive director of conservative group Tarrant County Citizens Defending Freedom, thanking a “concerned citizen” for alerting TCCDF’s leadership about “deeply troubling” paintings at the Modern.
All of this is to say that whether or not anyone actually “tipped off” Turcios about the Sally Mann photos at the Modern, this story from the get-go is not exactly on the up-and-up. I wasn’t familiar with Sally Mann before this, but it seems like her work is definitely controversial, especially the nude photos. It’s not really my thing, but it’s certainly not something I looked at and thought “child exploitation.” The whole thing fits neatly into the ongoing push, in Texas and nationally, to sensationalize and scandalize about nudity and queerness in the name of “protecting kids.”
Anyway, this appeared to be the only blowback the exhibit recieved since it opened last November. Tim O’Hare, the Tarrant County Judge who is one of the most right-wing figures in the state, called for an investigation. Fort Worth police seized seized the photographs as part of an investigation into allegations that they were child pornography. The DA’s office opened a case and investigated, but eventually closed the case and filed no charges, probably because who they would even charge was up in the air. A North Texas lawmaker filed a bill that would fine museums that show “obscene” art up to $500,000 a year. It was all very ridiculous, and the show closed after finishing its run, although it’s unclear whether FWPD has actually returned the photos. What appears to be an entirely manufactured outrage has ended without accomplishing much other than making a lot of noise. Or did it accomplish something else?
All of this was on my mind as I took in The Whale. I couldn’t stop thinking about the seizure of the Mann photos as I walked around the quiet museum, my footsteps and the sounds of a distant video exhibit the only noise. What would it have been like to see police, clad in body armor with guns holstered, show up to the museum with a search warrant? To hear the wood floors creak under their boots? To watch as they pointed to the photos, ah yes, that’s the offender, the one with the penis, the one with the unidentified liquid? As one by one, they pulled the photos down and carried them to their black cars, to be taken back to the station to be processed and filed away in evidence closets like contraband? The scene played in my mind as I wandered the museum. Maybe I just didn’t take my ADHD meds that morning, but something was off. It deeply unnerved me. I could still feel the police presence months later, I could feel that there was unease in the dark concrete walls of the Modern. This was a place that was vulnerable, and I felt vulnerable. I felt myself looking around at the other people in the museum. A family with young children sat and watched a video. Would they find something perverted about it? Did they care? Did they even know what had happened?
It all got me thinking about two complimentary pieces in the Alex Da Corte exhibition; “Gun” by Andy Warhol and “A Time For Killing” by Da Corte. (I only have an image of one of these.) Both deal with violence.
“Gun” is fairly straightforward. It’s a black and white painting of a .22 caliber revolver, with a bright red afterimage offset from the original. The gun is cold and dark, lifeless on its own. The red represents the warmth of the person wielding it, the bloodlust and the life simmering just beneath the surface of an otherwise inanimate object. (It’s probably not a coincidence that the radical feminist Valerie Solanas tried to kill Warhol with a revolver in 1968.)
“A Time for Killing” is more multifaceted. Done as what Da Corte calls a “Slatwall painting",” its made by hanging found objects from the hangers found and used in retail stores. There’s not any good images of it, so I’d just encourage you to go to the Modern and see it yourself if you can. It's a purple and red background with standees from party stores used as its subjects. Elsa from Frozen lies upside down, and a Stormtrooper from Star Wars points a gun at her. There are red opera gloves, obviously meant to be blood. Da Corte, who is queer, has said the work was inspired by the Pule nightclub shooting in 2016, and it became clear to me that the piece was essentially a recreation of the shooting with found objects. It plays with the idea of violence in safe spaces. The stormtrooper points a gun at Elsa, the main character of a children’s film. The background is a dancefloor. The blood, the gun, these are foreign objects in a safe queer space.
Taken together, with the Sally Mann seizures in my mind, I began to think about the juxtaposition of men with guns in a place like the Modern. About how, like in “Gun” it felt like there was a scarlet bloodlust beneath the surface of the museum. Like in “A Time for Killing,” violence from outside had been brought into what should have been a safe space for creativity and ideas that push us.
I tried to get into the mindset of someone who would be mad enough at art, at the concept of nakedness or queerness in any context, to call the police and have it seized and put into storage and tried for the crime of existing. As a trans woman in Texas, in America, it chilled me to the bone. My existence is now considered just as perverted, just as unsuitable to children as Sally Mann’s photographs. Trump’s Project 2025 called for “transgenderism” to be classified as pornography and outlawed. Was I next? The merits of whether Mann’s photos are unsuitable for viewing, if her photos share private moments in public settings in a way that’s exploitative, can be debated by reasonable people. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’s Sally Mann today, and you and me tomorrow. That threat, like in “Gun”, invaded the museum and lingered just beneath the surface, a threatening red future just beneath the museum’s facade.
You don’t have to explain the last decade of American politics to me; I understand how we got here. But standing in an art museum where cops seized challenging photos over allegations of child exploitation pushed by a right wing newspaper bankrolled by a billionaire made me realize that we are here, and it is kind of a mindfuck to be here.
I promise I really did enjoy my visit to the Modern. I did, after all, buy a cool hat.
Thanks for reading. I’m going to try to blog semi-regularly again as a way to stay in practice when I’m not working and have a good creative outlet that isn’t related to my job. Feel free to subscribe to get this in your email when it comes out.