Reflecting the Time: The Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art

John J. Curley Associate Professor of Art

What can the Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art tell us about the historical moment in which certain objects were acquired? Certainly, students’ purchasing decisions reveal something of shifting artistic tastes since 1963, but what might they tell us about the social and political events of the time? In other words, how can these works illuminate the “history” part of “art history”? In this short essay, I will investigate these questions using the 1969 and 2021 art-buying trips as short case studies.

The late 1960s were among the most tumultuous years in American history. The protest movement against the Vietnam War was at its height, and the general disregard for authority was particularly strong on college campuses, even among the relatively conservative student body of Wake Forest. In April 1969, just after students from the 1969 buying trip returned from New York, Life magazine’s cover story covered the protests, sometimes violent, erupting on American college campuses. The sheer stylistic variety of the student acquisitions that year, as well as the content of particular works, engages with the nationwide culture of protest in 1969. (See J. D. Wilson’s essay in this volume for his personal recollections of this trip.)

The four students who traveled to New York in 1969 bought more works than any other art-buying trip group. When considered together, the 20 works represent a broad spectrum of artistic styles and practices. This becomes clear when we look at the 1969 trip’s artwork from some of the more famous artists: Paul Cadmus’ careful realism in Male Nude NM 59 from 1968, Adolph Gottlieb’s late example of Abstract Expressionism Green Ground, Blue Disc from 1966, and Roy Lichtenstein’s Hopeless, an exhibition poster from 1967 associated with Pop Art. Lesser-known artists continue this diversity of styles: Hungarian emigré Margit Beck’s lightly colored abstraction, German printmaker Paul Wunderlich’s surrealist figuration and Sidney Goodman’s deadpan depiction of a prosaic gas storage tank. Perhaps the variety and quantity of works can retrospectively reveal a moment of crisis over the role and function of art and the lack of cultural consensus circa 1969. Put simply, the stylistic chaos within this group of 20 works can mimic the larger social and political confusion of these four college students confronting their contemporary moment.

The content of several of the works purchased in 1969 also directly reflects the social turmoil of the moment.

Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi’s The Involvement III (1967-1968) depicts ghostly, white American planes in a black sky dropping bombs on an already-scorched, blood-red landscape. Jasper Johns produced his more politically subtle lithograph Flags in 1967-1968, featuring the American flag motif he has engaged repeatedly throughout his career. Johns used the optical tricks of complementary colors to make his political point: When viewers stare at the upper, miscolored flag and then shift their focus to the lower gray depiction, human perception creates an afterimage that renders the flag, in the perception of the viewers, in its familiar colors of red, white and blue. Johns seems to suggest that patriotism is something that is both deeply personal, seen only in an individual’s mind’s eye, and just a mere illusion.

Students most recently purchased art for the University during the spring semester of 2021, a time during which Americans were wrestling with another deeply consequential moment in history. First, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the very nature of everyday life. In addition to the trauma of dealing with a new, highly contagious and deadly virus, students’ classes and social lives largely moved online. The art-buying trip was also radically transformed; for the first time, students did not travel to New York and instead met with galleries on Zoom to make selections. Second, the brutal murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 led to a profound racial reckoning in the country that, among other things, addressed the structural and institutional effects of white supremacy in America. (The 2021 students marked this event directly, selecting Jorge Tacla’s May 25, 2020, a blurred rendition of a Black Lives Matter protest in the unsettling medium of pigment mixed with cold wax.) The group’s discussions transcended national politics and artistic strategies; they also critically examined Wake Forest itself, especially the lack of diversity in the Reece Collection. Works by artists of color and women only constituted a small percentage of the overall purchases since 1963. Students in 2021 offered a corrective — beginning to rectify this lack of diversity while also finding works that addressed the ways that the institution of art has long perpetuated histories of exclusion based on race, gender and sexuality.

Students purchased nine works, and none were made by a white-identifying man. This diversity of artists is unparalleled among the other trips: three artists identify as Black, four as members of the LGBTQ+ community, two as South Asian and three as Latinx. The issues presented in Zanele Muholi’s Thandiwe I, Roanoke, Virginia from 2018 can represent the students’ overall aims with their acquisitions. Muholi is a South African photographer who identifies as nonbinary, using the pronouns of they/them. Their photograph is a self-portrait taken about 100 miles from Wake Forest’s Reynolda campus — in Roanoke, Virginia — that depicts the artist with a headdress made of American currency. Not only does the money suggest the violent commodification of the body inherent to the slave trade, but the portraits on the bills themselves suggest a microhistory of American race relations until the Civil War: the so-called father of the country, George Washington, owned enslaved Africans; Alexander Hamilton was born in the eastern Caribbean, and his name is the title of the famous Broadway play that offers a revisionist account of the nation’s founding; Abraham Lincoln was the president during the Civil War who issued the Emancipation Proclamation; and Ulysses S. Grant was the Union general who defeated the Confederacy in 1865. The artist, framed by these white American men, stares intently at the viewer while standing in a Southern landscape — confronting the picture’s Wake Forest viewers with this racial history while also offering an image of a strong, resilient Black individual who can and will overcome.

Other works also carry a significant political charge. Betty Tompkins’ Women Words (Ingres #3) (2018), offers a deeply unsettling text about misogyny covering the body of a woman in a reproduction of a work by 19th-century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; Salman Toor’s The Meeting (2020) riffs on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles and subject matter to think about his identity as a queer Pakistani man in a cosmopolitan world; and Martine Gutierrez presents herself as a bold work of colorful art in a traditional museum in Queer Rage, Don’t Touch the Art (2018). This photograph suggests how stories like hers, a queer Latina with Indigenous heritage, have been ignored in most art museums. These three examples, with at least two others purchased in 2021, explicitly reference past traditional works to help viewers recognize and question art’s historical ties to the institutions of colonialism, misogyny, bigotry and white supremacy. When viewed among other works of art, they force us to reconsider our assumptions about the perceived neutrality of past works of art. They remind us of a vital fact: All art is political.

Since all art is political, we should be mindful that Reece Collection works acquired during less eventful years are as significant as any others. One of the real gifts of these works is that each trip’s selections are a snapshot of the participants’ hopes and fears told through works of contemporary art. If the only charge given to selected students is that the art they purchase reflect the times, the Reece Collection can serve as a window into how students negotiated their own experiences relative to larger social, political and artistic forces.