Trump is Trying to Bury American Museums—89-Year-Old Pat Hills Spent a Lifetime Opening Them Up
Patricia Hills in her home office in Brooklyn. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
Patricia Hills, PhD and professor Emerita at Boston University’s History of Art & Architecture Department, spent her entire academic and curatorial career helping to open up some of the top museums and cultural institutions in the nation to women, people of color, the poor, and other marginalized communities—everything the Trump administration is now attempting to roll back.
“What's been going on is this idea that Americans somehow should not know the full scope of American history,” Hills recently told Work-Bites from her home in Brooklyn. “That they should only know about the good parts—and that's very dangerous.”
Hills is that rare American who can tell you exactly what it was like watching U.S. naval ships burning and billowing black smoke in Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. She is a self-professed patriot who spent her formative years growing up on U.S. Air Force bases throughout the country and abroad, always embracing the strength and diversity she found there and tirelessly promoting that strength and diversity in her later work.
“I see that this is really the very, very late stages of capitalism,” Hills adds. “Capitalism is desperate. And that's why it is, through its ideology and through public education, trying to hold onto its political hegemony especially in the U.S.—so that they can keep capitalism going. The capitalists have got to keep earning their profits, you know?”
In 1973, Hills curated a groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York City called The American Frontier: Images and Myths. That exhibition helped expose the myth of “Manifest Destiny” as nothing more than propaganda for settler colonialism and later inspired the creation of one of the most contentious museum exhibitions of the early 1990s called The West as America—Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920.
That latter exhibition debuted at the National Museum of American Art—now known at the Smithsonian American Art Museum—one of the cultural institutions, along with the National Museum of African American History and Culture—the Trump administration is presently targeting for so-called “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology.”
Kicking fascist butt: Patricia Hills displays a creative protest sign.
Pat Hills knows exactly what fascism looks like because she’s seen it up close—and right now at age 89 it looks exactly like the Trump administration’s predilection for insular class elitism, and ongoing attacks on the museums and cultural institutions she loves.
“It's very clearly the move towards dictatorship and fascism,” Hills says. “In many ways, it's like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s marking off an elite. They don't say that, and Trump pretends that he's a populist person, but he’s no populist. His closest advisor is the richest man in the world [Elong Musk], so it's going to be a society of the elite. People who are the working class are going to have the worst jobs, the worst health care, live in the worst housing, drink the worst water, and be harassed and made to feel that they are stupid. It’s the ideology that the country really belongs to the elite, and there are a lot of people out there who are promulgating those ideas and have been throughout the 20th century, and even the 19th century.”
Helping to democratize American museums and cultural institutions in ways that many—up until now might’ve taken for granted—meant that Hills had to often take on the patriarchal “old boys club” running those museums and cultural institutions—self-satisfied white men like Trump himself who thought the women in their highly-esteemed workplaces were only suited for picking up the dry-cleaning and chasing around a desk.
“Nobody expected anything of us. My parents didn’t expect anything of me. The idea was you get married; you married a man who could support you. You have kids, you live in the suburbs, you drive a station wagon and you have an Irish Setter dog. Nobody expected me to do anything other than that.”
Hills recounts all that and more in a highly informative and moving forthcoming memoir called Art World Feminist: Personal, Political, Professional Journeys.
“The book does talk about my experiences—but it really taps into the experiences of many other women of my generation,” Hills says. “Nobody expected anything of us. My parents didn't expect anything of me. The idea was you get married; you married a man who could support you, you have kids, you live in the suburbs, you drive a station wagon and you have an Irish Setter dog. Nobody expected me to do anything other than that. And at some point, you know, I sort of rebelled.”
That kind of rebellion may have helped shaped the trajectory of the entire nation, but Hills now believes Trump’s executive orders, deportations, funding cuts, and crackdowns on free speech are rapidly turning back the clock on all the gains she helped to realize in the art world.
“At this point, the administration seems to think that it can do whatever it wants to do,” Hills continues. “There's another issue that's come up recently—and that is the administration has decided to close all the federal offices. They're going to close them down and sell the buildings. Architectural historians are worried about what's going to happen to them. Many of these buildings are good examples of 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s architecture. Many of them contain murals by many of the social realists of the 1930s—and if they destroy these buildings they might destroy the art and the murals. To me, this is a big part of American history, too.”
Patricia Hills discusses the features of Philip Evergood painting done in 1942.
In March, the Trump administration released an extensive list of 440 federal properties it unilaterally slated for closure or sale around the country. The list was later deleted, but concerns persists about what the administration is actually trying to do.
“It’s just very scary times,” Hills adds. “It’s like Nazi Germany with book burnings. Hitler came to office on January 30, 1933, and by May they had the big book burnings.”
As Hills recalls in Art World Feminist: Personal, Political, Professional Journeys, the work she did highlighting Black artists and women artists in the 1970s and 1980s simply would not have been possible a few decades prior during the era of McCarthyism when she was still trying to establish her trailblazing academic and curatorial career.
“And I'm afraid that we're going to revert to a lot of the kind of fear and nationalism that people had during the McCarthy years,” she explains. “It's not only the issue of freedom of thought and freedom of speech—it's the ability to have and archive the artworks and papers of people who had these views that may be contrarian views. Maybe they're leftist, maybe they're just contrarian—but the full range of human experience ought to be preserved through its art and its literature, and in its universities as well.”
As bad as things in the art world and the nation are overall, Hills hopes the forthcoming Art World Feminist: Personal, Political, Professional Journeys will give working class people—and all people of good faith—both the courage and knowledge needed to confront the rapidly rising tide of fascism all Americans now face.
“I hope that they come away with an understanding of what the history was for people like me and the sort of hurdles that I had to overcome,” Hills says. “Many of those hurdles are still with us. I guess the word I want people to remember is ‘courage.’ I want people to come away with the idea that there's going to be a struggle—and that you’ve got to have courage.”