At The Philadelphia Museum of Art, SWANA Curations Reinforce Colonial Legacies
By Razan Idris
As conversations regarding colonialism in the museum industry reignite, Philadelphia’s institutions haven’t gone unnoticed. Last year, the Mutter Museum faced criticism for its display of skulls obtained through grave robbery, and the Penn Museum, which came under scrutiny regarding stolen Indigenous artifacts nearly a decade ago, faces new pushback over Delisha Africa’s unburied remains. Yet the iconic Philadelphia Museum of Art — which holds collections from across the world — has somehow escaped public scrutiny. But to walk through SWANA collections at the PMOA is to be transported back to a colonial era.
In 1876, the PMOA was chartered for the Centennial Exposition, a series of Euro-American industrial exhibitions, which Timothy Mitchell, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies, argued that Europeans used to visualize the “”Orient” as a place to be industrially controlled and understood from the top downwards. Upon the PMOA’s completion in 1928, European colonialism and the expansion of the American empire were ongoing. So the museum organized its art collections as a place for wealthy white Americans to model their expectations of the rest of the world. But in nearly a century, this method of understanding and interacting with the world has not gone away.
The museum recreates the experience of a colonial-era traveler seeing the SWANA region as a place stuck in time.
The museum’s SWANA materials are housed in its Asian Art collection. The wing leads you through reconstructed rooms from the Sasanid Empire in the 500s, a temple hall from India in the 1560s, a Chinese reception hall from the 1600s, and a ceremonial tea house from Japan in 1917. Its layout recalls the “Far Eastern” displays of colonial-era exhibits, which cobbled together the “Orient” as one exotic locale unchanging since ancient times. By leading patrons through the recreated “ancient Sasanian artifacts” leading directly into 20th century carpet displays from Iran, the museum recreates the experience of a colonial-era traveler seeing the SWANA region as a place stuck in time.
If you walk through the PMOA’s SWANA display, you’ll notice that 139 artifacts from Iran are not accompanied by notes in Farsi, Pashto, or Dari. That may seem small but it’s an indicator that the Iranian community is not the intended audience of their ancestors’ own artifacts. Nearly all the artifacts have unclear provenance with the Iranian artist forever “unknown”.
The PMOA’s struggle to deal with its colonial history are not unique. Like nearly all major museums in the U.S, American researchers from the PMOA can easily go abroad while others find little opportunity for funding. This results in the museum’s conceptualization of the U.S. as “home” and abroad as the “expedition site”. With the East Asia collection, this imbalance further illustrates how museums are seen as Indiana Jones-esque “discoverers” and the SWANA artist is unimportant.
That comparision isn’t a reach. In fact, Hiromi Kinoshita, the East Asian collection’s current curator, likened PMOA’s first director Langdon Warner to Indiana Jones. Kinoshita described Warner to the Philadelphia Inquirer as “going off to Asian and collecting art…that’s why the [PMOA] has this great collection.”
But at the PMOA, change is being pushed at an internal level. Last year, workers at the PMOA went on a historic 22 day strike over a multitude of issues including low pay that locks curators from immigrant backgrounds out of finding sustainable museum employment. To see real disruption of the PMOA’s curations, these internal challenges are vital to shift how the museum interacts with not only workers but artists from the SWANA region at large.
Razan Idris is a Sudanese-American PhD candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania and the curator of the #SudanSyllabus, working on a project tentatively titled The Colors of the Earth: Blackness in 1930s Egypt.