Hyphen American: Intersections of Identity

By L. Kent Wolgamott

Stephen Miller would hate “Hyphen American: Intersections of Identity”

For the art work in the Sheldon Museum of Art exhibition “communicate(s) the kind Americanness that does not strive for unity or assimilation” is diametrically opposite of the white nationalist view of the architect of the Trump administration’s racist assault on immigrants and refugees.

In fact, the exhibition is focused on the real multi-cultural multi-racial America of 300 years of immigration from around the world, a view driven home by the catalog, printed in the four most used languages in Lincoln: English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Arabic.

European immigration is the subject of a pair of century old photographs - Lewis W. Hines’ 1905 immigration experiences of “Slavic Mother Ellis Island” carrying bags with possessions on her back and Alfred Steiglitz’s famed 1907 photograph, “Steerage”, of a ship in New York harbor, teeming with passengers.

Notably, those passengers, who were forced into steerage, weren’t arriving in the U.S. They were being sent back to Europe, making it, perhaps, the only image that Miller would approve.

Christian Wurst, Sheldon’s Associate Curator for Exhibitions, selected 59 objects from museum’s collection for “Hyphen American” that range in date from 1751 to 2022.

The oldest object is a painting of “Girl with Rose and Book” from an unknown artist. A typical period portrait, the oil on canvas shows that the documentation of people has been a driving force in art here since day one.

It hangs in an array of portraits that is anchored by Walt Kuhn’s “The Guide (Adirondack Guide),” a 1931 depiction of a mustachioed outdoorsman wearing a broad-brimmed hat, smoking a pipe diagonally opposite from Grant Wood’s 1930 “Arnold Comes of Age (Portrait of Arnold Pyle),” a painting done for the 21st birthday of his studio assistant, Pyle.

That array, which encapsulates the exhibition’s view of Americanness, also contains two of the four artworks in the room that have direct Nebraska and UNL connections — the late Omaha artist Wanda Ewing’s “Girl No. 8” and Binh Danh’s 2011 photo taken from a series shot here “Vivian Nguyen Environmental Studies, UNL, Class of 2014.”

Also in the gallery are UNL painting professor Aaron Holz’s portrait of “Dana Ross” and NU grad Bruce Connor’s mixed media construction of “JULY GEORGE: PORTRAIT OF GEORGE HERMS”, a 1962 piece of wood, stone, rope and painted objects reworked in 1991.

And, while its not from here, Richard Avedon’s large black-and-white photograph of “Danny Lane, fourteen years old, Christine Coil, seventeen years old, Calhan, Colorado, 7/31’81” looks like a pair of kids I could have easily seen on a western Nebraska ranch in the ‘70s.

“Hyphen American” is not political per se, and is certainly not a display of “patriotic” red-white-and-blue American imagery.

The only flag in the exhibition is incorporated into Nicolas Galanin’s “The American Dream is Alie and Well,” serving as the “bear skin’ for the rug that has shell casings for claws as it critiques the Native experience with the U.S. government.

It lays on the floor of a space devoted to “Struggles” that appear to be historic. But the past struggles it recognizes continue today.

That’s particularly the case with civil rights, under assault from the Trump administration and its right wing allies, most recently seen in the Supreme Court’s further dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and Southern legislatures redistricting to eliminated Black majority congressional districts.

To say that gives an additional punch to Kara Walker’s lithograph “I’ll Be a Monkey’s Uncle,” a black-on-white silhouette of a young girl with a monkey, an examination of racist, dehumanizing stereotypes that sadly have not disappeared.

But its also true of Carlos Alfonso’s “Still Life with AIDS Victim,” a powerful abstracted depiction of a hospital bed and AIDS victim that calls to mind, first the government’s recalcitrance to address HIV and now the ongoing anti-vaccination effort and other public health horrors coming from departments under the auspices of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The exhibition’s only reference to Independence Day and, by inference, it’s 250th anniversary, is an abstract gouache on paper by Judith Godwin titled “July 4,1976,” the last time the country celebrated its anniversary.

Appropriately, it’s found in the “Community and Rituals” section of the exhibition that finds multiple American rituals and institutions that span the culture.

They include weddings, Dahn’s photograph of a group of monks in front of the old Linh Quang Temple “Vietnamese Buddhist Community of Lincoln” and Hung Liu’s drip-covered depiction of a Chinese “Meal II.”

I could go on and on talking about the art in the community room — Jacob Lawrence’s “Paper Boats,” a Gordon Parks photo, Bill Traylor’s folk art…

But I have to mention the 8 photographs by James VanDerZee, which capture life, families and dignitaries in Harlem a century ago. These masterworks of the Harlem Renaissance are some of my favorite of Sheldon’s artworks that have fascinated me for decades.

Fittingly “Hyphen American: Intersections of Identity” will remain on view at Sheldon through July 12: For it is a far better celebration of the true America than any speech, concert or fireworks display could ever be.