The opening of the new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, was one of the major—if not the major—museum events in the United States in 2010. Accompanied by a tidal wave of publicity at the regional and national levels, the new wing expands the museum’s previous display space by over one-third; it showcases art from both South and North America, offering a more expansive definition of “America” than has been standard in museum collections; and it includes works of art ranging from 500 BCE (an Olmec mask) to the twenty-first century (“By the Numbers,” The MFA Takes Wing: Boston Globe Special Issue [November 14, 2010]: 9). “Success” for a curatorial project of this size is inherently difficult to judge, and might best be defined as having the capacity to provoke sustained critical inquiry. In this, the new wing is undeniably a triumph. The galleries are a dazzling delight, if occasionally frustrating, and they pose many profound questions about how the “Art of the Americas” defines itself. What roles do geography and national identity play (this question is addressed in the accompanying review by Justin Wolff)? How do different media (painting, sculpture, decorative art objects, photography, architecture, costume) function in the field of art history, and can they be successfully integrated in a single gallery setting? How important is chronology to the multi-disciplinary study of “American” art?

The master engine of the Art of the Americas Wing is chronology: each floor treats a single century of artistic production (with the exception of the first floor, which spans more than a millennium in its collection of pre-Columbian art). However, within those floors, galleries are organized around a wide variety of themes, several of which are commendably effective. In the gallery focusing on eighteenth-century Newport, for example, one encounters superlative examples of furniture made by the Townsend and Goddard families, as might be expected. More surprising, however, is an elaborate pair of Torah finials marked by the New York silversmith Myer Myers and made for Newport’s Touro Synagogue. While the finials were not made in Newport, they were used there, and their presence in the gallery demonstrates both the unusual religious pluralism of this small city and larger trade networks among the colonies. Another gallery takes on the question of “Regional Accents” and provides an opportunity to compare like objects from several different centers on the Eastern seaboard and in South America. The highlight of the gallery is a veritable army formation of eight side chairs which, when viewed in direct proximity to one another, reveal small but substantive variations in proportion and ornament that in turn translate into broader trends in taste. Less convincing, perhaps, is the gallery of Gothic Revival furniture and landscape painting, both from the mid-nineteenth century. The wall text compares the romantic impulses of both movements, and while the comparison seems chronologically justified, the installation is unable to bridge the significant aesthetic differences between the paintings and the furniture. The paintings, which would ideally be viewed both from a contemplative distance and with more intensive, close-range scrutiny, seem lost as they hang in between and above the louder, more visually aggressive decorative art objects.

Indeed, throughout its four floors, the galleries of the new wing admirably attempt to mix paintings, sculptures, and decorative art objects, as well as a few costumes and items of jewelry. However, decorative art objects, on the one hand, and paintings and sculpture, on the other hand, demand different kinds of viewing, and it can be difficult to integrate the two. Decorative art objects, in particular, are challenging to display because they demand at least two different viewing contexts: they need to be seen as formal objects, in which contours, overall composition, and ornamental vocabulary are assessed; and they need to be seen as usable objects, as tools for sitting, dining, writing, and pouring. To emphasize the former approach, objects might be arranged in single-row formation, against a wall, allowing the viewer to focus on form. To emphasize the latter approach, the most popular display technique has been the period-room setting. Introduced in U.S. museums in the 1920s, period rooms were originally celebrated for their ability to “present the arts humanly” (Henry Watson Kent, quoted in Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 78–79). While curators and the public continue to find such rooms useful for illustrating how objects might be arranged for everyday living, they pose many thorny questions about authenticity: Can a curator place objects in a period room that are not original to it? How do we know how the objects were arranged in the room? There are several period rooms, long in the MFA’s collections, that have been refurbished and reinstalled in the new wing. These rooms (along with, it should be noted, the period rooms currently installed in other U.S. museums) look a bit too immaculate and even contrived, providing a Disney-like gloss of perfection on historical spaces. Although the accompanying labels helpfully explain which objects in the room were original to the space and which are curatorial additions, the visitor is left to wonder how the room looked when it was actually being lived in.

In many of the larger, more important galleries, curators have mixed the decorative arts and paintings with an installation strategy that could be called an “along the wall arrangement.” Objects are placed on low platforms against the wall, allowing the visitor to study their form, and they are arranged in clusters that allude to use: a sideboard with knife boxes placed on top, or a tea table flanked by two side chairs. Paintings are hung above: above the sideboard, over the table, over the mantelpiece fragment, above the chair. This installation strategy has both drawbacks and benefits. On the one hand, it can be impossible to examine a painting up close because the object beneath it protrudes significantly from the wall. On the other hand, qualities latent in a painting or an object can suddenly, and gratifyingly, be revealed as a result of the dynamic interplay between the different art forms. In an early nineteenth-century gallery, for example, an 1815 still life by Charles Bird King has been hung above a Baltimore sideboard from ca.1800; as a result of this arrangement, the geometric crispness of King’s fruit and the harmonic balance of his composition is emphasized, while the grain of the wood veneer on the sideboard takes on a sensuous liveliness previously undetected.

Wallpaper is a complicating factor in many of the galleries where paintings and objects are combined. As a decorative art form, wallpaper has its own names, styles, and material qualities. Loud, busy patterns tend to dominate many of the new galleries. Not only does the wallpaper compete visually with the art, but there are no labels to identify it. Without a scholarly attribution, its presence seems hard to justify: Is there a chronological relationship between the pattern and the art? Is it being used to “decorate” the galleries? (And why do galleries need to be decorated?) The effect of the wallpaper, hung behind the arrangements of objects and paintings, is one of a quasi-period room: these galleries create the impression that people in a given period might have lived in such an interior, or looked at art in these configurations. In fact, these interiors have no relationship to any domestic space of the time, and their layered busy-ness is the creation of the curators.

Some of these complaints—that the paintings cannot be seen, that individual works of art are subordinated into a larger decorative scheme—echo the modernist critique of salon-style picture hanging that emerged in the early twentieth century and accompanied the new practice of hanging paintings evenly spaced in a single row. In the single-row arrangement, each painting can be examined up close, individually, with the formal scrutiny required by twentieth-century art history. To be sure, there are several galleries in the new wing with this now-standard configuration, although it must be admitted that they seem rather bland when compared to the complex installations in other galleries (and suffer, almost uniformly, from having the paintings hung about six inches too high; this is especially evident in the galleries of Copley’s portraits and Sargent’s masterpiece, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882)). However, despite the twentieth-century critiques of salon-style picture hanging, a dramatic gallery in the new wing devoted to the nineteenth-century salon experience begs viewers to reassess its value. In this third-floor gallery, the curators have hung paintings floor to ceiling, with the picture frames quite close to one another, weaving larger patterns across the walls out of the individual works. The introductory wall text explains the European origins of this style of picture hanging, and true to the historical model, there are no individual object labels on the walls; all of the information about the works of art is gathered in labels along the floor molding. The result is a viewing experience unlike any other in a contemporary major U.S. museum. Without the label metadata that is standard in contemporary museum practice, and without the supposed neutrality of the single-row hang, visitors are forced to trace multiple paths through the paintings: we compare paintings based on canvas size, on shared palettes, or on complementary subject matter. Ultimately, the salon-style hang encourages active participation from viewers as we critique, draw distinctions, and form our own opinions.

In an anachronistic irony, the experience standing before the MFA’s dazzling salon-style installation begins to seem like an apt metaphor for the way information is experienced in the internet age. If the single-row hang might be analogized to the page-by-page sequentiality of a book, then the salon-style hang can be analogized to a web page, where any number of embedded links allow the reader to pursue multiple possible paths and demand her or his active discrimination. At the new wing, the layered, “along the wall” arrangement found in so many galleries could be understood as a multidimensional salon-style installation for the twenty-first century. These complex installations of multiple kinds of objects constantly ask viewers to place art in new contexts, to trace competing narratives, and to evaluate the success of those contexts and narratives.

Moreover, the larger curatorial agenda of the entire wing has an internet-like multiplicity to it. By reading labels and engaging with numerous video kiosks, it is possible for the visitor to pursue numerous paths of information. In addition to the history of paintings and decorative art objects, for example, the new wing offers substantial information about object conservation and about the history of the formation of the collection itself. A visitor can follow any one of these (parallel? intersecting?) narrative threads through the galleries, and then find moments of narrative focus in specific galleries such as the one devoted to “How Furniture is Made,” or in one of the two “Behind the Scenes” galleries on the second and third floors. Here installations combining objects and video ask visitors to make choices about the conservation of a Mayan pot, or to choose which of four radios to put on display. Some of these video-enabled exercises explicitly ask for visitor engagement and seem indebted to a culture of Web 2.0, where readers almost reflexively post “likes” and comments on every corner of the internet. Yet in its larger, narratological multiplicity, the new wing operates like the best versions of the internet: it demands that viewers engage with the information and make decisions about what they want to learn.

Of course, the best thing about the new wing at the MFA is that it is not the internet—it is filled with real objects that shimmer under the glare of lights and continually surprise visitors with their physical presence. The delight of seeing so much great art, in such thought-provoking installations, should draw all of us away from our computer screens and into the Museum of Fine Arts itself.