New presentations of American history at the soon-to-reopen Harvard Art Museum:

“This has led to thought-provoking reinterpretations. The gallery that might once have been labeled �American� now reflects the transatlantic exchanges of European currency, images, and ideas with colonial and Native American culture. Copley portraits of Boston merchant princes clad in Turkish garb hang opposite portraits of Native Americans (drawn, explains Winthrop associate curator of American art Ethan Lasser, by a painter sent by the French government to render their likenesses). A Charles Willson Peale portrait of George Washington that was sent to Paris hangs near one of Benjamin Franklin, then in Paris representing American interests, portrayed by the French painter Joseph Duplessis. In the center of the room is a wrist ornament made of wampum, loaned (like the images of the Native Americans) by the Peabody Museum�a sign of increasing cooperation among University collections. Of the wampum and a nearby piece of British silver, Lasser says, �There are some similarities�: both are aesthetic art materials and materials of exchange. �Silver is money, but here it is also a bowl. Wampum is a kind of currency, but it is also a jewel.� And the wrist ornament depends on trade, �because the drills used to hollow the interior of the wampum beads were steel drills that Native Americans traded for.”

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Kao says that part of what allows the new museum to fashion itself as a teaching machine is its position in the larger ecology of Greater Boston art museums: �Unlike the Yale University Art Museum, which is the only game in town in New Haven, we don�t have that pressure.� The �magisterial American wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston tells the story of America in a monumental way. [Salem�s] Peabody-Essex Museum lets visitors understand the seafaring, Silk Road story in a powerful way.� Harking back to the museum�s innovative American gallery, she continues, �We felt the privilege of being in Boston� made it possible �to tell this other, integrated story�of the colonial Atlantic as a collision of world-views that gets played out in a kind of visual economics.�