(gentle background music) (clock ticking) (clock ticking continues) - I'd like people to think about art as a primary source document.

When museums, we talk a lot about primary sources which means you look at the actual letter that somebody wrote, rather than looking at someone's writing describing the letter.

You know, go back to the original document and paintings are original documents.

They will show you firsthand what someone thought and what someone was trying to express.

And that way you can learn about history directly.

(upbeat background music) - History is written from one point of view and there are so many other things happening at the same time that we have events happening that different narratives can intersect.

And when you intersect the different narratives and you get a fuller narrative, the story is way cooler than any other, you know, narrative that you can get.

When you're talking about, let's say, for example, the Boston Tea Party.

Everybody loves to talk about the Boston Tea Party people, you know, throwing tea overboard.

But the narrative that we don't always get is that the protestors were dressed up as indigenous people.

That part's left out, why is that part left out?

First of all it wasn't appropriate to dress up as indigenous people, but we cut out the stuff that seems to make us uncomfortable.

When we talk about hard truths and history, we sugarcoat them.

And when people are looking to find those truths, which I think is happening now more than ever, you've got to be able to put yourself in a place of uncomfortability and sit with that.

(gentle background music) - We are reframing our narratives about paintings like this.

While we still value works that speak of a particular version of America's past, it's important that we see this through the lens of history and recognize the areas in which this is truly faulty and in fact quite hurtful.

This is the curatorial moment to be able to retell, recast, redefine what a painting like this means in its time and what it means for us today.

(gentle background music) - I think it's important to reframe these stories simply because it makes a more equitable space.

In the museum field, I think historic sites have so much potential in that they can and they should serve the local community first.

- Sometimes people think of historic house museums as frozen in time and that nothing can change.

And I think that it's useful to make it look like it did in that historic moment, but the stories we tell have to address the most urgent needs of our time.

These museums are not built for the dead, they're built for the living.

So they need to serve people who are here and now.

- This idea about reframing history, I think really opens up to understanding how there's a level of sort of naivete in a lot of the kind of historic painters and Hudson River school artists and how we can kind of look at their work with more multiplicity and with an eye to narratives that haven't been brought to the fore yet.

- It's been said that art is a lie that tells the truth, which I find really interesting.

That the paintings are depicting someone's personal and very subjective view of the world, or what's going on, or an issue and they are often trying to portray it in a certain light that might not be exactly the truth, but it is their attempt to make you feel a certain thing.

In Thomas Cole's paintings, he might be showing a mostly empty landscape with these beautiful hills, and carved fields, and and graceful trees, and all of these elements they just look like they landed that way and how did that happen?

Well, it was through a lot of work.

And so what he's not showing is there are a lot of people working out there making sure that that land is cultivated and cleared.

And so it's a lie in a way in that it just happened to be that way.

But the truth behind it is that a lot of people were really working hard to make the landscape look that beautiful.

- I would love to see us get to a place where we can stop with that erasure of different historically ignored communities and stop with the Santa classification of these myths that we tell ourselves about the exceptionalism of America and really get down to the nitty gritty of it.

Because honestly, it's just such a fascinating story when you look at everything that's happened and you're like, there are people just like me, just like me.

And so that's what I hope that we can get to.

(gentle background music) - Sponsored in part by Albany Medical Health Systems and by Robert Doris, Fisher Malis Hardy.

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