Description

To coincide with the nation’s semiquincentennial in 2026, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFAB), will reinstall its eight galleries of 18th-century art in a way that will challenge entrenched colonialist narratives, foreground diverse perspectives, and celebrate both difference and connection. A diverse MFA curatorial team is developing ideas and content for these popular galleries in concert with stakeholders–scholars, artists, Native knowledge holders, educators, and community leaders. They are exploring how the art of this period can provide a powerful lens through which complex histories of empire and enslavement and values like liberty and freedom can be reconsidered and understood. The reinstallation’s expansive organizing themes will include the sea as a site of exchange and enslavement; Native and settler understandings and representations of land and resources; cross-cultural exchange anchored in the tea, coffee, and chocolate trades; Asian influences on art and design; the fluid politics of John Singleton Copley’s portraits; the domestic sphere as a microcosm of economies and politics; and the mythologies of Revolutionary-era New England.