Victorian Visual Culture

As the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum plans a reinstallation for its art galleries, they have created the “Relaunch Laboratory” in the entrance gallery to the museum. The exhibition models a vision for a new layout and display to be established in celebration of the museum’s 150^th anniversary in 2026. This vision aims to decenter Eurocentric and colonialist perspectives and reimagine the narratives the museum presents in its representation of marginalized voices. In its larger-scale work, the museum will focus on a largely chronological layout to its displays, rather than a layout centered around individual cultures. A chronological approach encourages cross-cultural analysis, and this was fostered in the “Relaunch Laboratory” exhibition itself.

The execution of this exhibition was a new experience. It not only felt distinct from every other gallery in the museum, but it felt distinct from exhibitions I’ve viewed at other museums as well. I chose to view the exhibition beginning with the oldest piece in the gallery, a jar from China from 2,800 BCE, and ending with a contemporary piece. Circling the room in this way, the first works I viewed were displayed in sets: a seated dog vessel from what is present-day Mexico was coupled with an epitaph made in the Roman Empire, a collection of similar shaped jars from Europe set next to one from the Middle East, or a Flemish painting with a vessel from present-day Mexico. The objects within each set were contemporaries, having been created in the same period as others in the set. I found this method of display new and effective. I felt I could see the spread of ideas across cultures over time, especially in the case of the set of jars, and it was interesting to see how similar ideas manifested visually across cultures. Some of the similarities between objects in the sets were presented in a museum label, while some were left for the viewer to investigate, and even in the cases where this analysis was excluded, I found the use of objects themselves to provide context and commentary to be both a new means of analysis and an impactful way of cross-cultural learning.

Some of the more contemporary works were displayed individually, rather than in sets. However, they remained connected to the other objects in the gallery through the historical context included on the museum label. El Anatsui’s Bird explores the influence of his West African heritage on his artistic practice, the tools made to manipulate the wood panels constituting the work calling back to the violence of colonization while the feather and wing motifs offer a compatible narrative of freedom. Though displayed differently than the sets on the other side of the room, the inclusion of this historical context in contemporary works made them feel connected to these historical objects, and the gallery itself cohesive. Similarly, the final contemporary work in the gallery circuit, Alexandria Smith’s UnearThings I, questioned the display of Mende masks in Western museums, which frequently decontextualize them from their traditional use. UnearThings I was initially displayed in an exhibition honoring the unnamed African American women buried at The Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground in Queens, New York, and this context connects the piece to the 2,800 BCE jar at the entrance to the gallery, which was itself a funerary object. Overall, this exhibition achieved a sense of cohesion that complemented its cross-cultural focus. Its display of objects in temporally connected sets fostered a new type of analysis, and I am excited for the application of this method on a broader scale throughout the galleries and museum as a whole.