Art Controversy in the Obama White House: Performing Tensions of Race in the Visual Politics of the Presidency

While presidents historically have used a variety of visual forms to communicate their beliefs, attitudes, values, and policies, one mode of visual rhetoric that has yet to be examined substantively by rhetorical scholars of the presidency is that of fine art. This is surprising because there is ample evidence that contemporary presidents use White House art as a mode of rhetoric (Finnegan 2014). Art functions as one of the screens upon which presidents communicate ideas about themselves and what they value. In this article, we demonstrate the value of attention to presidents' relationships to art by exploring two instances in 2009 when art by twentieth-century African American artists selected for public display in the Obama White House produced controversy. In the first case we examine, a 1970 bronze bust by Charles Alston of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was falsely argued to have "replaced" one of Winston Churchill in Obama's Oval Office, angering those who claimed that Obama had "thrown Churchill out" and therefore potentially damaged the nation's "special relationship" with Britain. In the second case, a 1963 abstract painting by Alma Thomas, Watusi (Hard Edge), was attacked by rightwing bloggers as "plagiarism," and Thomas's art branded as inferior, because of the work's visual resemblance to a piece by Henri Matisse. Both controversies emerged during the first year of Obama's presidency as the new president sought to establish his authority, and American citizens eagerly sought to learn more about the political and aesthetic style of the newest occupants of the White House. The controversies could easily be dismissed as media frenzies whipped up by partisans looking for any reason to ridicule the new president. Yet to do so would be rash, for there is value in taking them seriously. Controversy, as Olson and Goodnight have argued, has the potential to "disrupt the taken-for-granted realm of the uncontested and commonplace," thus making explicit assumptions about the world which are often only implicit (1994, 250). In this article, we illustrate how the Obamas' choices about art, and the controversies that followed, constitute rhetorical statements about art, race, and politics that are worth investigating. Both Alston and Thomas were twentieth-century African Americans who achieved wide public recognition for their work in a time of deep division and ongoing racial unrest in the United States. They both trained as teachers at Columbia University (coincidentally, President Obama's alma mater), and though each pursued a different style--Alston's was more representational, Thomas's abstract--both publicly eschewed being pigeonholed as "Black artists." It is understandable why these artists working in the mid-twentieth century would resist the "Black artist" label, which could be used not only to marginalize their work in the art community, but also to limit their economic opportunities. By contrast, as the nation's first Black president, Barack Obama would appear to have the power and opportunity to place cultural contributions by African Americans in a prominent place on the public screen. Indeed, despite critiques that President Obama largely has ignored issues of race, the Obamas consistently have used the rich canvas of the White House to perform the value of diversifying Americans' ideas about what constitutes "American" art, politics, and history. Yet this interest in increasing the visibility of diverse cultural productions has left the Obamas vulnerable to the kinds of critiques we explore in this article. Taking such critiques seriously reveals the extent to which the nation's first African American president, especially in his first year, was challenged in his attempts to publicly value Black aesthetic experience. Indeed, the art controversies involving the Alston bust and the Thomas painting unearthed deep cultural tensions about art and race. These tensions, involving the role of imitation, the ways we place Black artists and their art, and the value of presence, shaped the debate about the art works chosen by the Obamas and ultimately, we conclude, visualized anxieties about Obama himself. …