(Photo by Todd Franson, Metro Weekly)
Distinguished Service Award to David C. Ward
Presented by former GLAA President Craig Howell
GLAA 40th Anniversary ReceptionWashington Plaza Hotel
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
David C. Ward is an historian at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, where he has curated exhibitions on Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, among others. With graduate degrees from Warwick University (England) and Yale, he is the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (2004). David is also a poet and literary critic; his first book of poems, called Internal Difference, will be published this spring.
When the Portrait Gallery reopened a few years ago after a massive and seemingly endless renovation of its home in the Old Patent Office Building, one of its first exhibitions was "Walt Whitman: One Life," which, as just noted, David curated. Although this was a relatively modest, one-room show, it was downright revolutionary in its frank and uncompromising portrayal of Walt Whitman as, yes, a gay man--something America's literary elite and museums officials have been far too squeamish to acknowledge or talk about.
The simple honesty of David's path-breaking show on Whitman, in turn, positively floored art historian Jonathan Katz, who had been trying for years to find a museum brave enough to put on a show he was in the process of organizing. At Jonathan's urging, David agreed to co-curate the exhibition and persuaded the Portrait Gallery itself to host it.
The result of their collaboration was the landmark and nationally-acclaimed exhibition called "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," which ran from October 30 last year to February 13 this year. It considered the long-ignored or suppressed subject of the role of sexual difference in the depiction of Americans from the late 19th century through today, and demonstrated how art has reflected society's changing attitudes towards sexual identity. Over 100 works--from Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keefe, through Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, and on up to Keith Haring, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and David Wojnarowicz--were included. Attendance at the Portrait Gallery surged considerably during the exhibition's run. Even if this show had never leapt into the headlines, David would have earned our Distinguished Service Award just for bringing this magnificent vision into fruition.
But one month after the show opened, it was thrust into the 24-hour-news-cycle. First some of the usual nuttyfundamentalists and their cohorts in the media and on Capitol Hill swooned in horror at the now-famous clip of the "Fire In My Belly" video and other atrocities such as a photo of Ellen Degeneres mugging and holding her breasts -- even though nobody who had actually seen the show had protested anything about it. Then Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough panicked and tried to appease the Philistines by removing the "Fire in My Belly" clip from the show. In the uproar that followed Secretary Clough's hasty and ill-thought-out act of censorship, the one consistent voice of reason that could be heard was David Ward's, as he calmly but resolutely defended the integrity of "Hide/Seek" against attacks from both its avowed enemies and its supposed friends.
David's unflappability in the heat of our notorious culture wars reminds me of a line from a famous poem, altered somewhat to fit a Washington audience: "If you can keep your head about you, when all around you are losing theirs--Maybe you just don't understand the situation."
For mounting the first major American museum exhibit dealing forthrightly with Walt Whitman's sexuality; for co-curating "Hide/Seek" with Jonathan Katz; and for the courage and integrity not to back down in the face of unwarranted and overtly homophobic hostility, the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington presents the 2011 Distinguished Service Award to David C. Ward.
