Americana Passé

How can we open galleries up to people of color to make them more than simply white man's land? Not by focusing on Caucasian nostalgia, like Royal Nebeker does at his ongoing exhibit at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University.

America's demographics are changing. We are increasingly becoming a brown nation, but we wouldn't know that by going to look at the art at Schneider. If we want our cultural resources to represent our whole community, then we need to exhibit work that doesn't present such a narrow view of American culture.

Nebeker is a neo-Expressionist who utilizes collage in nearly all of his work by juxtaposing text with his images. His painting is rich in texture, and vibrant in color from the sylvan blues of The Blue Bike to the oppressive shadow of Hands of Healing to the lonely maroon of Til Østbon. Twilight, in fact, is a favorite theme. It infuses everything in The Blue Bike and Til Østbon, and it approaches just off frame in Marbles at Twilight. Americana also weaves throughout his oeuvre. It's passive in his 1971 piece Mrs. Senior and Fern, but dances with twilight and violence in The Blue Bike, Marbles at Twilight and War Cry. The latter juxtaposes silhouettes of Indians and Arabs with a placard for Gene Autry's The Cowboy and the Indians which reads "war whoops ring.. war paths flame."

His Americana demonstrate exhibits nostalgia for a time of innocence, untouched by the brutality of racism and xenophobia. It negates the American-ness of experiences that have always been fraught by one race's ongoing oppression of the others. It's a comfortable fit for a venue as rooted in white privilege as an art gallery. It's a great fit for the America of the 1950s, but not for the America of 2014.

Cultural resources ought to be for everybody in the community, not just the white and/or privileged. To exist for the whole community, they need to exhibit work by and about more than just the white and/or privileged.