Woody Guthrie's Anti-Fascist America
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| Woody Guthrie's guitar with inscription. Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle |
The Trump administration has been pressuring the Smithsonian museums to mark the nation's 250th anniversary with exhibitions of "unifying" history. One of the few museums outside of DC to venture a large 250th anniversary show is the Huntington. "This Land Is…," a sprawling survey of American history, will come with a twist. It will feature in title and content the American folk singer—and earliest Trump critic?—Woody Guthrie.
The singer's beef was with the Trump patriarch, Fred Trump. From 1950 to 1953 Guthrie and family lived in Beach Haven Place, a Brooklyn apartment owned by the elder Trump. In letters Guthrie complained about the apartment and its policy of not renting to Blacks. This led to a song, "Beach Haven Place Hate" ("I suppose Old Man Trump knows/Just how much racial hate he stirred up/In the bloodspot of human hearts.") Donald Trump first came to media attention defending his father's exclusionary policies in a 1973 suit filed by the Department of Justice.
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| Lester Balog photograph of Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie Archive |
The title of the Huntington show, "This Land Is…", alludes of course to Guthrie's best-known song, "This Land Is Your Land" (1940). The exhibition's Guthrie material is sourced from the Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa, and the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle. On view will be the only surviving Guthrie guitar inscribed with his trademark incantation, "This Machine Kills Facists." Carved into the back of the instrument, the inscription is barely visible. Another of Guthrie's guitars had the words painted on the front in large letters. That guitar ended up in a Greenwich Village repair shop, where the owner refurbished the instrument and sanded off the words.
Guthrie was a self-taught painter, and the exhibition will have his portrait of George Washington.
Also on view at the Huntington will be two annotated copies of the July 1776 Declaration of Independence broadside; Washington's survey of Mount Vernon; documents of the Walking Purchase, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Japanese-American internment; literary material relating to land by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Thomas Pynchon, and Octavia Butler.
"This Land Is…" will be in the Boone Gallery June 14, 2026, through Jan. 11, 2027.
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| Timothy O'Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the Canon de Chelle, N.M., 1873 |
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From Car and Driver:
This April, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) opens its new David Geffen Galleries, and among the thousands of sculptures, paintings, and other art installations will be a single, special car. It's one of the two personal Studebaker Avantis owned by Raymond Loewy, a designer of such prolific work as to have styled everything from stunning art deco locomotives to the iconic silhouette of the Coca-Cola bottle.
The Avanti came in several variants, the most high-performance of them called the R3. With a bored-out engine (304.5 cubic inches) and supercharger, this V-8 made north of 300 horsepower and set a speed record of 170 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats.
The museum has owned this car for over a decade, and a recent restoration has brought it back to its original glory. LACMA's exhibition will highlight California's contribution to car culture, with this Studebaker at the heart of it all.
As the museum is just a five-minute walk from the nearby Petersen Automotive Museum, anyone making that particular pilgrimage should plan on also checking out how the largest art museum in the western U.S. treats the automobile as art object.
A unique feature of LACMA is that it places all its art on a single level, with curators making an effort not to silo it by culture of origin. The idea is to present each object equally so that, for instance, a photograph and a painting are perceived as of equal value as art. Here, a midcentury Studebaker finds itself placed on the same level as some of the museum's better-known artwork, works from names like Magritte and Picasso. [End quote]
That's not totally correct since I think a Magritte or Picasso will be in BCAM, not the Geffen. But some contemporary works (natch) will be in the Geffen, while, for example, ancient Greek or Renaissance European will not be in the Broad building.
As for the Resnick building, I wonder if too much space in it continues to duplicate what's seen in a MOCA or Hammer. I mean I like contemporary art as much as the next person does, but, jeez, Christopher Knight also did make a good point.
Do you, though? Your honesty would be welcome, and contemporary.
Not when it's excessive. Even the Louvre - when it comes to older, traditional periods of art, of course - can seem like too much, too much. So it ends up being analogous to getting stuck in a room where someone is wearing way too much perfume.
In NYC, there's a better balance between the old and new. That's why this museum isn't necessarily a case of redundancy. It would be closer to that, however, if the Whitney's mission statement hadn't long been exclusive to US-based artists:
Newmuseum. org:
On March 21, 2026, the New Museum’s 60,000-square-foot building expansion will open with the exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, spanning the entire Museum alongside several major new commissions that will be on long-term view in and around the building.