‘Is it an art gallery? A
plantation tour? A
museum? It’s almost
this astonishing piece
of performance art, and
as great art does, it makes
you stop and wonder.’
plantation tour? A
museum? It’s almost
this astonishing piece
of performance art, and
as great art does, it makes
you stop and wonder.’
Louisiana’s
River Road runs northwest from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, its two
lanes snaking some 100 miles along the Mississippi and through a
contradictory stretch of America. Flat and fertile, with oaks webbed in
Spanish moss, the landscape stands in defiance of the numerous oil
refineries and petrochemical plants that threaten its natural splendor.
In the rust-scabbed towns of clapboard homes, you are reminded that
Louisiana is the eighth-poorest state in the nation. Yet in the lush
sugar plantations that crop up every couple of miles, you can glimpse
the excess that defined the region before the Civil War. Some are still
active, with expansive fields yielding 13 million tons of sugar cane a
year. Others stand in states of elegant rot. But most conspicuous are
those that have been restored for tourists, transporting them into a
world of bygone Southern grandeur — one in which mint juleps, manicured
gardens and hoop skirts are emphasized over the fact that such grandeur
was made possible by the enslavement of black human beings.
On
Dec. 7, the Whitney Plantation, in the town of Wallace, 35 miles west
of New Orleans, celebrated its opening, and it was clear, based on the
crowd entering the freshly painted gates, that the plantation intended
to provide a different experience from those of its neighbors. Roughly
half of the visitors were black, for starters, an anomaly on plantation
tours in the Deep South.
And while there were plenty of genteel New
Orleanians eager for a peek at the antiques inside the property’s Creole
mansion, they were outnumbered by professors, historians,
preservationists, artists, graduate students, gospel singers and men and
women from Senegal dressed in traditional West African garb: flowing
boubous of intricate embroidery and bright, saturated colors. If
opinions on the restoration varied, visitors were in agreement that they
had never seen anything quite like it. Built largely in secret and
under decidedly unorthodox circumstances, the Whitney had been turned
into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery — the first of
its kind in the United States.
Located
on land where slaves worked for more than a century, in a state where
the sight of the Confederate flag is not uncommon, the results are both
educational and visceral. An exhibit on the North American slave trade
inside the visitors’ center, for instance, is lent particular resonance
by its proximity, just a few steps away outside its door, to seven
cabins that once housed slaves. From their weathered cypress frames, a
dusty path, lined with hulking iron kettles that were used by slaves to
boil sugar cane, leads to a grassy clearing dominated by a slave jail —
an approach designed so that a visitor’s most memorable glimpse of the
white shutters and stately columns of the property’s 220-year-old “Big
House” will come through the rusted bars of the squat, rectangular cell.
A number of memorials also dot the grounds, including a series of
angled granite walls engraved with the names of the 107,000 slaves who
spent their lives in Louisiana before 1820. Inspired by Maya Lin’s
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the memorial lists the names
nonalphabetically to mirror the confusion and chaos that defined a
slave’s life.
Mitch
Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, was among those to address the
crowd on opening day. He first visited the Whitney as the state’s
lieutenant governor in 2008, when the project was in its infancy, and at
the time he compared its significance to that of Auschwitz. Now he was
speaking four days after a grand jury in New York City declined to
indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, a black
man who was stopped for selling untaxed cigarettes; 13 days after
another grand jury in Missouri cleared an officer in the shooting death
of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager; and two weeks after Tamir
Rice, a 12-year-old black boy playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland
park, was killed by a police officer. Evoking the riots and protests
then gripping the nation, Landrieu said, “It is fortuitous that we come
here today to stand on the very soil that gives lie to the protestations
that we have made, and forces us as Americans to check where we’ve been
and where we are going.”
The
mayor concluded his speech by extending his hand to an older man
standing just offstage to his left. Stocky and bespectacled, with a
thick head of unkempt white hair, John Cummings was as much a topic of
conversation among those gathered as the Whitney itself. For reasons
almost everyone was at a loss to explain, he had spent the last 15 years
and more than $8 million of his personal fortune on a museum that he
had no obvious qualifications to assemble.
“Like everyone else,” John Cummings said a few days earlier, “you’re probably wondering what the rich white boy has been up to out here.”
He
was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the
museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans,
Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his
plantation.
He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager.
His disposition is exceedingly proper — the portly carriage, the trimmed
white beard, the florid drawl — but he dresses in a rumpled manner that
suggests a morning habit of mistaking the laundry hamper for the
dresser. As someone who had to hitchhike to high school and remains
bitter about not being able to afford his class ring, he embodies the
scrappiness of the Irish Catholics who flooded New Orleans in the 19th
century. But as a trial lawyer who has helped win more than $5 billion
in class-action settlements and a real estate magnate whose holdings
have multiplied his wealth many times over, Cummings personifies the
affluence and power held by an elite and mostly white sliver of a city
with a majority black population.
“I
suppose it is a suspicious thing, what I’ve gone and done with the
joint,” he continued, acknowledging that his decision to “spend millions
I have no interest in getting back” on the museum has long been a
source of local confusion. More than a few of the 670 residents of
Wallace — 90 percent of whom are black, many the descendants of slaves
and sharecroppers who worked the region’s land — have voiced their
bewilderment over the years.
So, too, have the owners of other
tourist-oriented plantations, all of whom are white. Members of
Cummings’s close-knit family (he has eight children by two wives) also
struggle to clarify their patriarch’s motivations, resorting to the
shoulder-shrugging logic of “John being John,” as if explaining a
stubborn refusal to throw away old newspapers rather than a consuming,
heterodox and very expensive attempt to confront the darkest period of
American history. “Challenge me, fight me on it,” he said. “I’ve been
asked all the questions. About white guilt this and that. About the
honky trying to profit off of slavery. But here’s the thing: Don’t you
think the story of slavery is important?” With that, Cummings went
silent, something he does with unsettling frequency in conversation.
“Well, I checked into it, and I heard you weren’t telling it,” he finally resumed, “so I figured I might as well get started.”
This
was a practiced line, but also an earnest form of self-indictment:
Cummings’s way of admitting his own ignorance on the subject of slavery
and its legacy, and by extension encouraging visitors to confront their
own. As with the rest of his real estate portfolio, which includes miles
of raw countryside and swampland, a 12-story luxury hotel near the
French Quarter, a cattle farm in rural Mississippi and a 1,200-acre
ranch in West Texas that he has never set foot on, he initially
gravitated toward the Whitney simply because it was for sale. (“Whatever
Uncle Sam and the bartender let me keep,” he likes to note, “I bought
real estate with it.”) Originally built by the Haydel family, a
prosperous clan of German immigrants who ran the property from 1752 to
1867, the grounds had been uninhabited for a quarter century.
“I knew I
wasn’t going to live here,” Cummings said as he drove past the
blacksmith’s shop that he spent $300,000 rebuilding, where a plaque
noted that a slave named Robin worked on the plantation for 40 years and
where the actor Jamie Foxx, playing a slave in “Django Unchained,” was
filmed being branded. “But aside from that, I didn’t know what I would
do with the place.”
It
takes just a few minutes of conversation with Cummings, however, to
understand that he would never have been keen on restoring the Whitney
in the mold of neighboring plantations, which rely on weddings and
sorority reunions to supplement the income brought in by picnicking
tourists. Pet projects he has taken up in recent years include outlining
for the Vatican a list of wrongs the Catholic Church should formally
apologize for and — to the chagrin of, in his words, “my friends who
have all had political sex changes in the past 15 years” — exploring
ways to curb the influence of conservative “super PACs.” Decades ago,
his interest in abuses of power led to his involvement in the civil
rights movement; in 1968, he worked alongside African-American activists
to get the Audubon Park swimming pool in New Orleans opened to blacks.
“If someone is going to deny someone rights simply because they have the
power to do it — well, I’m interested,” he explained.
“I’m coming, and
I’m going to bring the cannons.”
Still,
his plans for the Whitney might have gone in an entirely different
direction, if not for the existence of an unlikely document. The
property’s previous owner was Formosa, a plastics and petrochemical
giant, which in 1991 planned to build a $700 million plant for
manufacturing rayon on its nearly 2,000 acres. Preservationists and
environmentalists balked. Looking for avenues of appeasement, Formosa
commissioned an exhaustive survey of the grounds, with the idea that the
most historic sections would be turned into a token museum of Creole
culture while a majority of the rest would be razed to make way for the
factory. In the end, it was wasted money and effort: The opposition
remained vigilant, rayon was going out of fashion, the Whitney went back
on the market and Cummings inherited the eight-volume study with the
purchase. “Thanks to Formosa, I knew more about my plantation than
anyone else around here — maybe more than any plantation in America
outside of Monticello,” said Cummings, a litigator accustomed to teasing
secrets from dense paperwork. “A lot of what was in there was about the
architecture and artifacts, but you started to see the story of
slavery. You saw it in terms of who built what.”
CreditMark Peckmezian for The New York Times
After
digesting the study, Cummings began reading “any book I could find”
about slavery. Particularly influential was “Africans in Colonial
Louisiana,” by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a professor at Rutgers. Certain
details startled Cummings, like the fact that 38 percent of slaves
shipped from Africa ended up in Brazil. No wonder, he thought, that the
women he watched on television celebrating Carnival in Rio de Janeiro so
closely resembled those he saw dancing in the Mardi Gras parades that
surrounded him as a youth. “I started to see slavery and the hangover
from slavery everywhere I looked,” he said. As a descendant of Irish
laborers, he has no direct ties to slaveholders; still, in a departure
from the views held by many Southern whites, Cummings considered the
issue a personal one. “If ‘guilt’ is the best word to use, then yes, I
feel guilt,” he said. “I mean, you start understanding that the wealth
of this part of the world — wealth that has benefited me — was created
by some half a million black people who just passed us by. How is it
that we don’t acknowledge this?”
Cummings
steered the vehicle past the yellowing fronds of banana trees and
pulled to a stop in front of a sculpture, a black angel embracing a dead
infant, the centerpiece of a memorial honoring the 2,200 enslaved
children who died in the parish in the 40 years leading up to the
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. At traditional museums, such
memorials come to fruition only after a lengthy process — proposals by
artists, debates among the board members, the securing of funds. This
statue, though, like everything on the property, began as a vision in
Cummings’s mind and became a reality shortly after he pulled out his
checkbook. Perhaps most remarkable is that this unconventional model has
yielded conventionally effective results: at once chastening and
challenging, beautiful and haunting. “Everything about the way the place
came together says that it shouldn’t work,” says Laura Rosanne
Adderley, a Tulane history professor specializing in slavery who has
visited the Whitney twice since it opened. “And yet for the most part it
does, superbly and even radically. Like Maya Lin’s memorial, the
Whitney has figured out a way to mourn those we as a society are often
reluctant to mourn.”
Before
leaving the grounds, Cummings stopped at the edge of the property’s
small lagoon. It was here that the Whitney’s most provocative memorial
would soon be completed, one dedicated to the victims of the German
Coast Uprising, an event rarely mentioned in American history books. In
January 1811, at least 125 slaves walked off their plantations and,
dressed in makeshift military garb, began marching in revolt along River
Road toward New Orleans. (The area was then called the German Coast for
the high number of German immigrants, like the Haydels.) The slaves
were suppressed by militias after two days, with about 95 killed, some
during fighting and some after the show trials that followed. As a
warning to other slaves, dozens were decapitated, their heads placed on
spikes along River Road and in what is now Jackson Square in the French
Quarter.
“It’ll
be optional, O.K.? Not for the kids,” said Cummings, who commissioned
Woodrow Nash, an African-American sculptor he met at Jazz Fest, to make
60 heads out of ceramic, which will be set atop stainless-steel rods on
the lagoon’s small island. “But just in case you’re worried about
people getting distracted by the pretty house over there, the last thing
you’ll see before leaving here will be 60 beheaded slaves.”
The memorial had lately become a source of controversy among locals, who were concerned that it would be too disturbing.
“It is
disturbing,” Cummings said as he pulled out past Whitney’s gate. “But
you know what else? It happened. It happened right here on this road.”
A nation builds
museums to understand its own history and to have its history
understood by others, to create a common space and language to address
collectively what is too difficult to process individually. Forty-eight
years after World War II, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
opened in Washington. A museum dedicated to the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks opened its doors in Lower Manhattan less than 13 years after
they occurred. One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil
War, however, no federally funded museum dedicated to slavery exists, no
monument honoring America’s slaves. “It’s something I bring up all the
time in my lectures,” says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian
and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiery Trial: Abraham
Lincoln and American Slavery.” “If the Germans built a museum dedicated
to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you’d think
they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven’t yet figured
out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history.
To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.”
These
competing perceptions converge with baroque vividness in the South. The
State of Mississippi did not acknowledge the 13th Amendment abolishing
slavery until 1995 and formally ratified it only in 2013, when a
resident was moved to galvanize lawmakers after watching Steven
Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”
While some Southern states have passed
resolutions apologizing for slavery in the last decade, a majority,
Louisiana among them, have not. In 1996, when Representative Steve
Scalise, now the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, was
serving in the Louisiana State Legislature, he voted against such a
bill. “Why are you asking me to apologize for something I didn’t do and
had no part of?” he remarked at the time. This episode recently came to
light amid the revelation that in 2002 he addressed a gathering of white
supremacists at a conference organized by David Duke, formerly the
grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization founded the year the
Civil War ended.
Slavery
is by no means unmemorialized in American museums, though the subject
tends to be lumped in more broadly with African-American history. In
2004, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in
Cincinnati with the mission of showcasing “freedom’s heroes.” Since
2007, the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, S.C., has operated as a small
museum focusing on the early slave trade, on a site where slaves were
sold at public auctions until 1863. The National Civil Rights Museum,
which opened in Memphis in 1991 and was built around the Lorraine Motel,
where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, offers a
brief section devoted to slavery. Next year, the National Museum of
African American History and Culture is scheduled to be dedicated in
Washington as part of the Smithsonian Institution, a project supported
by $250 million in federal funding; exhibits on slavery will stand
alongside those containing a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong and
boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali. “It has to be said that the end note
in most of these museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is
wonderful,” says Paul Finkelman, a historian who focuses on slavery and
the law. “We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of
the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most
productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them.”
What
makes slavery so difficult to think about, from the vantage point of
history, is that it was both at odds with America’s founding values —
freedom, liberty, democracy — and critical to how they flourished. The
Declaration of Independence proclaiming that “all men are created equal”
was drafted by men who were afforded the time to debate its language
because the land that enriched many of them was tended to by slaves. The
White House and the Capitol were built, in part, by slaves. The economy
of early America, responsible for the nation’s swift rise and sustained
power, would not have been possible without slavery. But the country’s
longstanding culture of racism and racial tensions — from the lynchings
of the Jim Crow-era South to the discriminatory housing policies of the
North to the treatment of blacks by the police today — is deeply rooted
in slavery as well. “Slavery gets understood as a kind of prehistory to
freedom rather than what it really is: the foundation for a country
where white supremacy was predicated upon African-American
exploitation,” says Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor.
“This is still,
in many respects, the America of 2015.”
In
2001, Douglas Wilder, a former governor of Virginia and the first
elected black governor in the nation, announced his intention to build a
museum that would be the first to give slavery its proper due — not as a
piece of Southern or African-American history but as essential to
understanding American history in general. Christened the United States
National Slavery Museum, it was to be built on 38 acres along the
Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Va. Wilder, the grandson of
slaves, commissioned C. C. Pei, a son of I. M. Pei, to design the main
building, which would be complemented by a full-scale replica of a slave
ship. A number of prominent African-Americans, including Bill Cosby,
pledged millions of dollars in support at black-tie fund-raisers. The
ambition that surrounded the project’s inception, however, was soon
eclipsed by years of pitfalls. By 2008, there were not enough donations
to pay property taxes, let alone begin construction; in 2011, the
nonprofit organization in charge of the project filed for bankruptcy
protection. As it happens, it was during the same period Wilder’s
project unraveled that John Cummings, unburdened by any bureaucracies,
was well on his way to completing a slavery museum of his own.
For much of
the last 13 years, Cummings has been joined on the Whitney’s grounds by
a Senegalese scholar named Ibrahima Seck. A 54-year-old of imposing
height, Seck first met Cummings in 2000, when Seck, who has made regular
trips to the South since winning a Fulbright in 1995, attended a talk
at Tulane with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, the Rutgers professor. Cummings put
up Seck at the International House, the hotel he owns in downtown New
Orleans, and invited him to see the Whitney. Though at that point it was
little more than a series of decrepit buildings entangled in feral
vegetation, Seck was impressed that Cummings was thinking about it
exclusively within the context of slavery. As someone from the region of
Africa that provided more than 60 percent of Louisiana’s slaves, he was
disturbed by the way other plantations romanticized the lives of the
white owners, with scant mention of the enslaved blacks who harvested
the land and built the grand homes fawned over by tourists. After
walking the property with Seck for a few hours, Cummings invited him to
return to New Orleans the next year to help crystallize the Whitney’s
mission. Seck took him up on the offer, and for the next decade,
Cummings flew Seck in from Africa each year during the scholar’s summer
vacation.
Since
2012, Seck has lived full time in New Orleans to serve as the director
of research for the Whitney. “As historians, we do the research and we
write dissertations and we go to conferences, but very little of the
knowledge gets out,” Seck said one afternoon in his French-inflected
baritone while seated on the antique upholstered sofa in the parlor of
the property’s Big House. “That’s why a place like this is so important.
Not everyone is willing to read nowadays, but this is an open book.” He
took a moment to glance around the lavish room, its hand-painted
ceiling now meticulously restored. “Every day I think about how
remarkable this is,” Seck said. “One hundred and fifty years ago, I
would not be able to do what I’m doing here now. I would have been a
slave.”
The
alliance between the two men has been an auspicious one, with Seck’s
patience and expertise serving as a counterbalance to the instinctual
eccentricity of Cummings. While Seck researched the Whitney’s history,
Cummings became something of a hoarder, buying anything he thought might
one day be relevant to the project. When he learned about a dilapidated
Baptist church in a neighboring parish that was founded by freed slaves
in 1867, for example, he brought it across the Mississippi and had it
restored on the grounds at a cost of $300,000. When recordings of
interviews with former slaves that were made in the 1930s as part of the
W.P.A.’s Federal Writers’ Project were acquired, Cummings hired a
son-in-law who works as a sound engineer in Hollywood to clean them up;
he plans to install a speaker system near the slave cabins, where the
recordings will play on a loop, allowing visitors to hear the voices of
former slaves while staring into the type of homes in which they once
lived. After Seck unearthed in old court documents the names of 354
slaves who worked on the land before emancipation, Cummings bought an
engraving machine so they could be etched in Italian granite in a
memorial he christened the “Wall of Honor.”
“By
2005, it was clear to me that we were building a museum, but I’m not
sure John was thinking about it in those terms,” Seck said. “If John
feels something, he just goes ahead and does it. His stubbornness can be
frustrating, but who in the world is willing to put so many millions of
dollars into a project like this? If you find one, you have to support
it.”
In
his years of working on the Whitney, Seck has come to see the museum as
both a memorializing of history and a slyly radical gesture: Cummings’s
desire to shift the consciousness of others as his own has been
altered, and in the process try to make amends of a kind that have been a
source of debate since emancipation.
“If
one word comes to mind to summarize what is in John’s head in doing
this,” Seck said, “that word would be ‘reparations.’ Real reparations.
He feels there is something to be done in this country to make changes.”
In 1835, a biracial
child named Victor was born on the grounds of the Whitney, the son of a
slave named Anna and Antoine Haydel, the brother of Marie Azelie
Haydel, the slaveholder who ran the plantation at the time. One hundred
and seventy-nine years later, a group of both the black and white
descendants of the Haydels made their way to the Whitney’s opening in
December. Many were meeting for the first time, and the sight of them
embracing and marveling at the similarities in their appearances was as
powerful as any memorial on the plantation. Among the black Haydels in
attendance was one of Victor’s great-grandchildren, Sybil Haydel Morial,
a well-known local activist who is the widow of Ernest Morial, the
first black mayor of New Orleans, and the mother of Marc Morial, a
subsequent mayor. “I was with John when he helped get the pool in
Audubon Park opened to blacks,” she said in a later conversation. “Now,
with the Whitney, he has given us a place where we can come and clear
the air. If my slave great-grandfather had lived eight more years, I
would have known him. Yet growing up, whenever my elders talked about
slavery, they’d always get quiet when we kids were near.” Morial added
that she hoped “some people around here may find their views changing”
after visiting the Whitney, which seemed to be the case with some of her
white relatives at the opening.
“I
have to say, I was a little offended when I heard that slavery, of all
the stories, was going to be the focus,” Glynne Couvillion, a white
Haydel, said while standing inside the Baptist church, surrounded by
dozens of ghostly sculptures of child slaves that Cummings commissioned
to represent those interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project as they
would have looked when enslaved. “But after today, I’m just in awe and
proud to be connected to this place.”
For
all the time and money Cummings has dedicated to the Whitney — and he
is by no means finished, with plans to build an adjacent institute for
the study of slavery — the museum was built on a shoestring budget
compared with traditionally financed institutions. (The Holocaust
Memorial Museum cost about $168 million.) Besides Seck, there were only
two full-time staff members, an energetic young woman named Ashley
Rogers, who serves as the director, and her deputy, Monique Johnson, a
descendant of sharecroppers from the area, and it was evident that they
were still finding their footing.
Like the other plantations along River
Road, the Whitney can be seen only through a guided tour — the cost is
$22 — and a number of the docents struggled to find the proper tone.
(“Time to depress you a little more,” one could be heard saying at
various points.) Others struggled to answer questions about how,
exactly, sugar cane was harvested by slaves, responding instead with
generalities intended to incite emotion rather than educate: “It was the
hardest, most grueling slave work imaginable.”
Yet
this awkwardness might well serve as one of the Whitney’s strengths.
Talking about slavery and race is awkward, and the museum stands a
chance of becoming the rare place where this discomfort can be embraced,
and where the dynamic among the mainly mixed-race tours can offer an
ancillary form of education. A man who grew up in a “maroon community,”
as bayou enclaves founded by runaway slaves are known, was so moved
during his tour that he volunteered to work as a guide. A young black
woman mentioned that she avoided tours at another nearby plantation
because an ancestor was lynched on the grounds. Among the Whitney’s
first visitors was a black man named Paul Brown, whose father was a
field hand and who arrived dressed in a sharp blazer and a fedora on
opening day “to shake the man’s hand who made this place possible.”
During his tour, he offered personal anecdotes that served to buttress
the white guide’s skittishness — bringing the past into the present, for
instance, by pointing out how the images of slaves etched in one
memorial were reminiscent of portraits of his ancestors. “I wish some of
my white co-workers would come to this place,” he said afterward.
“They’d understand me in ways they’ve failed for 30 years.”
Jonathan
Holloway, a dean at Yale College and a professor of African-American
studies, arrived for a tour in late January. He was in the area to give a
talk at Louisiana State University about the ways the horrors of
slavery are confronted and avoided in heritage tourism, and he found the
Whitney to be a “genius step” in a long-overdue direction. “People have
tried to do a museum like this for years, and I’m still stunned that
this guy made it happen,” he said afterward. “There I was, coming down
to talk about how in trying to tell the story, it’s often one step
forward and two steps back, and boom, here’s the Whitney.” Holloway was
particularly taken by the museum’s subversive approach. “Having been on a
number of tours where the entire focus is on the Big House, the way
they’ve turned the script inside out is a brilliant slipping of the
skirt,” he said. “The mad genius of the whole thing is really resonant.
Is it an art gallery? A plantation tour? A museum? It’s almost this
astonishing piece of performance art, and as great art does, it makes
you stop and wonder.”
Cummings,
for his part, has been on the grounds every day since the Whitney
opened, where he is in the habit of approaching visitors as they enter
and telling them how they should feel afterward: “You’re not going to be
the same person when you leave here” — a line that some found more
grating than endearing. Inwardly, though, he was constantly making notes
on what could be done to improve the experience.
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