The National Academy of Design, an American art institution founded in 1825 and recently relocated to New York’s Chelsea neighbourhood, is on the eve of its 200th birthday. While preparing the exhibition programming ahead of this milestone, in 2021 the National Academy’s staff drafted a statement they referred to as a "historical acknowledgement”. Distinct from a land acknowledgement—a speech act which formally recognises Indigenous rights to territories lost to colonisation—this concept sought to reflect upon the National Academy’s origin as an emblem of 19th century colonialism. Historical acknowledgement later became the base, as well as the subtitle for the Academy’s two-part exhibition Past as Prologue, the first instalment of which opened this past October.

The exhibition is organised by chief curator Sara Reisman and associate curator Natalia Viera Salgado and features American art primarily from the National Academy’s members, who are selected by their peers in recognition of their contributions to art and architecture. Some of the earliest works on display in the show recall a time when National Academicians were required to submit a portrait of themselves. Smirking at us in an 1809 watercolour-on-ivory self-portrait is Samuel F.B. Morse, recognised as the founder of the National Academy and acknowledged in the exhibition’s brochure as a “staunch supporter of slavery”. Other 19th-century works on display include oil paintings, engravings and bronze sculptures culled from the National Academy’s permanent collection. These traditional landscapes and portraits clue us into the preoccupations of its early members, who National Academician Eliot Candee Clark referred to as “opulent colonists” in his 1954 historical account of the institution. The romanticised pursuit of conquering territory is epitomised in paintings by National Academicians, who were some of the Hudson River School’s leading members. One among them is Albert Bierstadt, whose 1860 work On the Sweetwater Near the Devil’s Gate wishfully depicts the landscape in the American West as wild, untamed and scantly occupied. Although predominant subject matter and attitudes as they appear in the work of early National Academicians are telling, even more prescient are the subjects diminished or left out entirely.

Building a thesis in which contemporary art cannot be viewed in a vacuum is a noble task, but not an easy one.

Much like the concurrent reinstallation of the American galleries at the Brooklyn Museum on the occasion of its 200th anniversary, Past as Prologue presents a study in chronological contrast: dusted-off fixtures of a storied collection are installed with a range of contemporary contributions. Alongside work representative of its history, the National Academy has endeavoured to include work from its living National Academicians that speak to the violent repercussions and glaring absences of the 19th-century subject matter. Contemporary Indigenous artists riff off of the sentiment behind Hudson River School’s landscapes: Kay WalkingStick’s diptych Volute/Volupté (2009) overlays traditional Cherokee designs onto scenic vistas colonised by the United States, while Darby Raymond-Overstreet’s Woven Landscape: Monument Valley (2022) digitally layers Navajo patterns onto a photograph of Monument Valley, a site of deep cultural significance, proposing Indigenous sovereignty over the land. Some intervene directly with placid 19th-century renderings of groups who were historically massacred or enslaved. In his work Home Coming (2014), Sony Assu digitally alters Paul Kane’s painting of Western Canadian Natives in his 1848-52 work Scene near Walla Walla with an abstract form suggestive of Pacific Northwest Indigenous artwork. Meanwhile, Fred Wilson’s 2017 installation You Can’t Forget Anything That Hurt So Badly, Went So Deep, and Changed the World Forever features prints that depict Africans within groups of Europeans and Ottoman Turks. By carving out shapes in the prints’ vellum layer, Wilson illuminates the Black subjects present in the work, while including cowry shells in a vitrine below—a clever, self-referential formal decision that draws attention to the preservation of history within an institutional setting.

Other contemporary work in the exhibition draws attention to the grave aftermath of the early National Academian’s idealised colonialist acts, such as Howardena Pindell’s Columbus (2020), a commanding wall-sized work that directly confronts Christopher Columbus’ practice of mutilating Caribbean Natives and Luis Camnitzer’s U.S. Stamp Album 1847-2021 (2024) which draws attention to the United States’ frequent war patterns by replacing stamps with gauze inked to recall bloody bandages. Due to the relatively modest scale of the National Academy’s second-floor gallery, the ambitious breadth of Past as Prologue: Part I can feel disorienting—and without proper guidance from the accompanying printed materials that explain how to align the past and present works in conversation, a visitor may risk leaving the exhibition flat on feeling. That said, the research and thought behind the exhibition as a whole is meticulous and explicit and the written materials reveal a sturdy framework. Reisman’s essay The Storm We Call Progress, written to accompany Past as Prologue: Part I, begins by parsing a quote from German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s book Illuminations (1969). Applied to the context of a contemporary art exhibition, Reisman draws from it the National Academy’s intention of interpreting its past representatives through the present knowledge and values posited by its living members.

Attention to the ways in which current American artistic ideals fervently dismantle those of the past is especially resonant in an exhibition like Past as Prologue, where ideals across time share a physical space. Building a thesis in which contemporary art cannot be viewed in a vacuum is a noble task, but not an easy one. While it is simple enough to engage with 19th-century artworks as historically informative objects, it is more difficult for contemporary art to harness national sentiment in an ongoing present—especially as it unfolds in the real world time of an exhibition’s run. What’s on view at the National Academy now seems to buck against its designated focus of “land and territory”, and it remains to be seen how the second part, forthcoming in February 2025, will make its focus on “identity” distinct from the colonialist ideals addressed in the first. At the very least, it’s reassuring that the self-awareness inherent in a “historical acknowledgement” could provide a line of defence against weaponised nostalgia when it takes the form of past aesthetic ideals. Perhaps tracing some visible change between the past and present can invite the promise of change as continuous.

The first instalment of ‘Past as Prologue: A Historical Acknowledgment’ is on view at the National Academy of Design until January 11, 2025, and the second will be on display from February 05 through April 26.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)