In the run up to the US election, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art is hopeful about art’s role in a democratic future

On 26 October, the Museum of Effective Arts, Boston (MFA) opened Energy of the Individuals: Artwork and Democracy (till 16 February 2025), our first exhibition dedicated to artworks as main sources of democracy. That includes 180 works from 525BC to 2020 in broadly various media—there are ceramics, stone reliefs and inscriptions, oil work, textiles, books, marble sculpture, trend, prints and pictures—it’s drawn nearly solely from the museum’s personal holdings.

The exhibition is organised into three chapters, over three rooms: the promise, the apply and the preservation of democracy. The primary appears on the approach societies have idealised democracy, contrasting tidy, aspirational narratives with difficult tales. The second exhibits not solely how democracy can work and the way it appears in motion, but in addition what doesn’t work. Lastly, the third considers the significance of individuals’s voices in democracy—their duty to make use of it properly, together with their proper to it.

My curiosity within the myriad ways in which concepts about democracy are embedded in artworks is rooted in my educational coaching as a specialist in Greek and Roman artwork. However it’s also fuelled by my persistent—and presumably naive—sense of wonderment at the truth that 2,500 years in the past the traditional Athenians have been in a position to put aside their rivalries and create a brand new system of self-government, nonetheless imperfect and unique—Athenian residents needed to be free-born males of Athenian parentage.

Energy of the Individuals is before everything a platform for artists’ visible arguments for and in relation to democracy. It’s also an indication of the significance of museums as locations of civic studying within the twenty first century. The objective of making an informed citizenry was central to the unique mission of the MFA and different American encyclopaedic museums based within the nineteenth century within the picture of their European Enlightenment forebears. And the MFA is a real visible encyclopaedia of democracy—and different types of authorities—attributable to each the breadth and depth of our collections and the numerous roles Boston performed within the American Revolution and Abolitionism.

Museums as civic areas

Previously twenty years, museum educators have emphasised object-oriented studying as a path to growing a spread of abilities, together with constructing civic consciousness, and at the moment there’s a better appreciation for these of us who’re visible learners. In terms of studying about democracy, artwork has the potential not solely to construct data, but in addition elicit feelings—as a result of every particular person’s lived expertise of democracy is completely different. Artwork reminds us of our most celebrated citizen heroes and introduces us to the unrecognised or forgotten. It presents vaunted narratives of how democracies got here to be and on the identical time calls on us to query them. It calls for that we confront important questions: am I doing sufficient, and may I do higher?

Within the lead-up to the US presidential election on 5 November—the timing of our exhibition is just not unintended—we’re activating the MFA as a civic area. We now have hosted voter registration occasions at group celebrations and served as an early voting location. After the exhibition opened, invited audio system, group discussions and a efficiency by Emerson School college students of Assemblywomen, a comedy by Aristophanes from 391BC, inside the gallery will additional the objective of civic studying. Such programmes, particularly those who happen in and among the many artwork, make a long-lasting impression on audiences by inviting them to be current within the second.

The exhibition is being put in as I write this, and now I see it lastly coming collectively I’ve a couple of moments to mirror on its classes and people from whom I realized. This exhibition is the results of years-long conversations about democracy inside the museum and the bigger group we serve. Many individuals contributed to creating it a actuality—not least the artists whose visible storytelling and arguments have formed how we take into consideration democracy, and who’ve caused optimistic social change by way of their work.

My heroes are six teenage citizen-curators I mentored by way of the museum’s schooling initiatives. Through the 2022/23 educational yr, we met weekly with my curatorial colleagues to take a look at their collections by way of this lens. The teenagers chosen objects, shared their experiences of and aspirations for democracy, debated whether or not “it’s a factor” and contributed label textual content. Their dedication, honesty, intelligence and style make me eager for the way forward for democracy and for the function of artwork and museums in it.

Phoebe Segal is the Mary Bryce Comstock senior curator of Greek and Roman Artwork on the Museum of Effective Arts, Boston