Betye Saar died at 99, four days before her centennial, having spent seven decades turning the debris of American history into monuments of Black resilience. The same week, the Smithsonian faced congressional hearings in which a Texas Republican asked whether Mickey Mouse was racist, and the Trump administration moved to subordinate one of America's foremost public institutions to partisan power. These are not coincidental news items. They are two sides of the same question: who holds the archive, and what does it mean when that archive becomes a battleground?
Assemblage as Counter-Archive
Saar's practice was, at its core, an archival act. She collected the cast-off images of American racism, the Aunt Jemima figurines, the pickaninny postcards, and recontextualized them as evidence, as shrines, as weapons turned inward on their own logic. Her 1972 work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima did not erase the stereotype. It armed it. That move, preserving the object while transforming its charge, is precisely the kind of curatorial thinking that institutions like the Smithsonian were built to protect. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is simultaneously navigating a budget crisis that threatens its civic function. The pattern is consistent: the infrastructure of cultural memory is under financial and political pressure simultaneously, from opposite directions.
The Archive and Its Enemies
Max Hollein has spoken at length about museums as civic infrastructure, not just aesthetic containers. His conversation on Culture Slop about open access and the future of curation feels newly urgent here. The Smithsonian hearing's most surreal moments, ranked in Hyperallergic's tier list, reveal something important: the attack is not really about content. It is about legitimacy. If you can make a public institution seem absurd, you can justify defunding it. Saar spent her career insisting that the objects other people threw away contained the most important truths. The institutions scrambling to survive right now are learning the same lesson from the wrong direction.