Progressive, If Mundane

“Classified Documents: The Social Museum of Harvard University: 1903-1931,” the newest exhibit at the Sackler Museum, asks a lot of the viewer. Namely, that we have enough faith in the museum not to leave after 15 minutes.

The curators seem to have recognized the yawn-factor inherent in displaying 120 educational panels from a now-defunct museum—established by Francis Greenwood Peabody, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals from 1886-1913—that was once the cornerstone of the now-defunct Department of Social Ethics.

ATTENTION-HUNGRY

The walls of the gallery kindle nostalgia for the condiment stand at a baseball stadium: ketchup red, mustard yellow, and pickle green.

The use of such garish and saturated colors offers déjà vu from the Fogg’s “DISSENT!” exhibit, a feeling that both distracts the viewer and cheapens the space.

While the three colors delineate the three sections of the exhibition, they seem mostly to be screaming, “Please, this isn’t boring! Give us a chance!”

The only decision bolder than the paint is the museum’s choice to host this show in its prime gallery space on the first floor. It was most recently home to exhibitions Sharon Lockhart, Frank Stella, and Edgar Degas—emerging, legendary, and eternal stars, respectively.

Most of the prints in this show, on the other hand, were taken by nameless or forgotten photographers. And, with few exceptions (most notably Waldemar Titzenthaler’s two portraits in the pickle-green room), the photographs are neither beautiful nor exciting.

So why stay any longer than to see the three photographs by Lewis Wickes Hine, from the famed Pittsburgh Survey? Why give the show a chance? Because after the initial shock of boredom, the exhibition becomes unexpectedly absorbing.

WORTH THE WAIT

The details within the photographs, and the connections among them, become endlessly fascinating.

Examine the peculiar photographs of the New Hampshire State Charitable and Correctional Institutions.

The photographs follow a standard form: each building is photographed at a three-quarter angle, filling the frame nearly to the edges, while the children of each institution line up alongside it—evidence of the charities’ good work.

A tension between the material and the personal resides within these photographs.

The formal qualities of the photographs focus on the physical building and treat the marginally-placed children as mere units of account—their illegible faces indicating the temporality of their stay.

The many photographs of dormitories throughout the exhibition feature a similar preference for the physical environments over the people for which they were intended.

In nearly every dormitory photograph, the beds are immaculate and tightly fitted, with no trace of the orphans, patients, or the itinerants who sleep in them.

These conventions, at the time meant to extol the virtues of these institutions, serve as a reminder of the vanities of the social reform movement.

At the same time, however, it is difficult not to be mesmerized by the many arrangements of the starched white rectangles, repeated again and again.

The most captivating photographs, however, do not neglect the human factor. In “Garabaldi Home Library”—taken by an anonymous photographer around the time of the founding of the Social Museum—we are privy to a group of “Italian boys of the North End.”

“Most of them work, and they meet in the evening,” we learn from typewritten text below the image. More children than there are chairs form a circle in the small library around a boy playing ring-toss.

While a man hollers behind the kids, the boy lets one ring loose just as the last ring he threw loops down and around the intended pole, a moment of serendipity amidst a controlled chaos.

“In The Neighborhood,” a photograph of the Francis E. Clark Settlement in Chicago, again unattributed and dated to circa 1903, is one of the most detail-rich prints in the show. An alleyway separates two apartment buildings.

Painted advertisements for appliances and liquor cover one wall, and theatre posters line the fence between the two buildings. An English-Italian bilingual sign announces a grocery store below the other building. A black man stands in front of the theatre posters with a shovel and a white man sits beside him, while a woman and child look out a top-floor balcony.

The great depth of field, which brings even the debris at the rear of the alley into focus, accentuates these details, which seem all too appropriate to describe the “melting pot” aesthetic of these social settlements of the early 1900s.

SOCIAL STUDIES

The original Social Museum attempted to order this cacophony into digestible educational panels. The panels were so numerous that the ‘new’ Social Museum at the Sackler, on display through April 22, includes only a fraction (120 out of more than 3,000) of the originals.

With this selection, however, the curators have been exceedingly timid. Fred Wilson’s groundbreaking “Mining the Museum” exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992 greatly expanded the possible approaches to exhibiting a museum within a museum.

However, the curators of “Classified Documents,” though they have included some provocative wall texts and some interesting non-photographic panels, seem to have tended away from Wilson’s daring reexamination of museum rhetoric.

Rather, despite the pizzazz the colorful walls suggest, the curators have presented the Social Museum quite plainly and un-critically, relying on the patterns, details, and idiosyncrasies of the individual photographs to carry the show. For some people, this may be enough, but others may feel either underwhelmed or unchallenged. No one, however, will be fooled by the paint.

—Staff writer Jeremy S. Singer-Vine can be reached at jsvine@fas.harvard.edu.