There are American art museums all across the country—the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and many more. Each one celebrates the accomplishments of American artists from the past and the present, from monographic shows to carefully forged biennials of the “state of the art” in American art today. There’s a pantheon of great artists to choose from and a lifetime of exhibitions that can result from focusing on an artist’s unique contribution to the American canon. They all have well-regarded curators to make sure that the expert has conferred their stamp of approval on everything.

But what if the museum of American art became less a place of honoring, of confirming the status quo, or of charting a new one, and became more a site of questioning, of asking why and how this artist might be American and what that means to those of us living here today.

What would it look like if an American art museum were to more authentically reflect the American experience?

This simple question drives all programmatic decisions at the M: how to redefine the American art museum as a place where everyone can see themselves and their experiences in our exhibitions. It begins with the question: what actually is “the American experience” and how has it morphed, shifted, and expanded over the decades since American art museums came into being in the 20^th century.  Whose reality is being celebrated here and how does it connect with this constantly shifting landscape of ours? Who gets to claim “Americanness” and what is that anyway? We celebrate and investigate the work of American artists who represent the many different voices that make up that conversation.

One of the prisms through which we view the American experience is our local artist and maker community. We celebrate their work and place it in dialogue with what some might consider the canon of American art, or at least art that has passed some curatorial test of time. We create a rich dialogue of juxtapositions to help stir the pot of our expectations and those of our audiences.  Through this we hope to jumpstart conversations about the nature of the American experience and how art can truly be a catalyst to authentic, honest conversations about culture and identity in today’s America.

Here’s the kind of programming we’ve done recently to support this kind of new thinking and engagement:

• American Art: It’s Complicated, an exhibition with visiting curators to reconsider what American art means today.
• Seeds of Change: A Portrait of the Hmong American Farmers Association, looking at the impact Hmong farms and farmers are having on our local food culture.
• Coming up! Ken Gonzales-Day: Shadowlands investigates the history of racialized violence in this country through the photographs of this L.A. artist; a Hmong mural project with Australian artist Vanghoua Anthony Vue; and a reprisal of the American Art: It’s Complicated exhibition with state-wide community conversations, new voices, and renewed perspectives.

Let’s challenge ourselves and our institutions of “American Anything” to wade into the assumptions that defined us in the 20^th century and consider more honest, equitable, and inclusive ways to engage these issues today.  We will strive to make the M one of those NEW American institutions that fully embrace the beauty—and messiness—of what it means to be American in this day and age.