What does it mean for artists and curators alike to offer care within a traditional museum space? Tender Loving Care, a collections exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, offers one answer to this essential question. Through innovative exhibition design, thoughtful and eclectic selection of art works, and community-involved events, the show provides a model for ways museums could more thoroughly welcome visitors.
Figure 1: Installation photograph of the well-loved gallery guides at the rear entrance to the exhibition. Photograph by the author, January 2024.
Along the entrance to Tender Loving Care: Selections from the Contemporary Collection is a set of well-worn booklets waiting for visitors to pick up (fig. 1). The vibrant orange books contain the didactics that would typically accompany the works on view as static labels throughout the gallery. The choice to include the labels only in the booklet might leave viewers confused about how best to engage with the diverse selection of paintings, furniture, jewelry, clothing, sculpture, and other mixed media works on view. On the other hand, by prioritizing the objects over the interpretive material, these booklets might empower the viewer to participate more actively in the process of learning about the works on view, since they would need to consciously consult the book.
The booklets are arranged according to the exhibition layout, encouraging visitors to progress through the six rooms: Welcome, Threads, Vibrant Matter, Thresholds, Rest, and Adoration. These titles seem to invoke other ideas about care evident in scholarship in and beyond the museum. “Vibrant Matter,” for example, may reference Jane Bennett’s book with the same title, in which Bennett conceives of a new materialism of things as having an inherent vitality.1
In “Welcome,” curators Michelle Millar Fisher and Kendall DeBoer lay the groundwork for what visitors can expect, using the opening wall text to emphasize the exhibition’s goal: “For museums to be places of care, they can’t just be where artworks come for safekeeping. They must also be where people and ideas of many kinds are tended to as well.”
Immediately, one encounters Finnegan Shannon’s Do you want us here or not (2020), a vibrant blue bench in wood and Formica which reads “museum visits are hard on my body… sit here if you agree” (fig. 2).
Figure 2: Finnegan Shannon, Do you want us here or not, 2020. Installation view. Photograph by the author, January 2024.
Shannon’s bench is one of several works placed throughout the exhibition from the museum’s “Please Be Seated” collection, which was initiated by the museum in the mid-1970s under then-Decorative Arts Curator Jonathan Fairbanks. Drawn from this collection of artisanal gallery seating, the bench is functional, since visitors are invited to sit on it, but it is also a work of art, graphically designed with raw wood edges starkly contrasting its blue form. Perhaps anticipating the ambiguity suggested by the works elsewhere—as functional art objects on view—the curators have added labels encouraging visitors to use them, to take “Please Be Seated” literally. The necessity of the directive labels indicates an important difference presented in these benches, as visitors are not usually permitted to interact with museum-quality functional objects.
The exhibition’s capacity to engage conversation about contemporary social issues through selection of works on view plays out in Diedrick Brackens’ shadow raze (2022). In a series of four large woven panels, black silhouettes use ropes to topple a stark white column (fig. 3).
Figure 3: Diedrick Brackens, shadow raze, 2022. Installation view. Photograph by the author, November 2024.
At eight feet tall, the works themselves feel massive. They surround the visitor in a visualization of people working together to challenge a system which might seem immutable as symbolized by the cracking column. Brackens’ choice to weave invokes the long history of textile creation which is often a shared labor formed by knowledge passed down through generations. In the next gallery, Nick Cave’s Sound Suit (2008) invokes police violence while offering a shield for the imagined wearer (fig. 4). Vibrant, sequined, and highly textured, Sound Suit is a layer of protection and a reclamation of joy in a society that encourages continued violence against the Black community.
Figure 4: Nick Cave, Sound Suit, 2008. Installation view. Photograph by the author, January 2024.
As evident in Sound Suit and shadow raze, the exhibition embraces diverse media, including textiles, furniture, and decorative arts in addition to the more traditional paintings and sculptures. Placed in the heart of the exhibition, the “Thresholds” gallery best demonstrates the thesis of Tender Loving Care: that all kinds of artists, especially those whose work or media is often undervalued, are welcome. Here, Miriam Schapiro’s large painted and collaged canvas, Welcome to Our Home (1983) fills one of the walls (fig. 5).
Figure 5: Miriam Shapiro, Welcome to Our Home, 1983. Installation view. Photograph by the author, January 2024.
The central image—a woman’s dress with a shadowed baby at the torso—suggests the gendered quality of welcoming visitors into one’s home. Or, in the context of the museum, we might read this as a “threshold” into a safe space of art, action, and community. Just as one’s life is littered with scraps and memories, Shapiro draws these ephemera together in a cohesive work that moves fluidly between inner self and self-expression, and between private home and shared museum space.
Because Tender Loving Care is a collections exhibition, the curatorial team organized three rotations for works on paper, textiles, and other light-sensitive works. Curator Michelle Millar Fisher described the labor-intensive process as “like making three exhibitions in one,” since the team republished a new print guide. In one iteration, Shapiro’s Welcome to Our Home is replaced with Rashid Johnson’s Bruise Painting "Lakefront Blues" (2023) (fig. 6).
Figure 6: Rashid Johnson, Bruise Painting "Lakefront Blues", 2023. Installation view. Photograph by the author, November 2024.
Johnson’s massive canvas was created forty years after Shapiro’s, but Johnson’s graffiti-like handling of paint across the surface invokes a similar dissolution of space between private and public worlds. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson’s painting suggests both enclosure through the window-like boxes and connection as the swirls of blue and black paint expand beyond the boundary lines. While Shapiro’s work invokes the 1980s era of feminist art, installation of Johnson’s work where Shapiro’s had been suggests a turn in attention towards more recent trends in contemporary art.
While the works themselves invoke consideration of care, the exhibition is thoughtfully arranged to encourage an embodied care practice. The “Rest” gallery is delightfully unexpected. The visitor must turn a corner to enter a secluded section of the exhibition, where movable beanbag-like chairs—Barbara Gallucci’s Topia Chairs—welcome them to sit and reflect (fig. 7).
Figure 7: Installation photograph of the “Rest” gallery demonstrating the low placement of the prints and photographs on view. Photograph by the author, November 2024.
While it is tempting to breeze by the gallery, the works themselves are exhibited at the perfect height for a visitor to view only when seated. Surrounded by soft green fabric and momentarily separated from the bustle of the museum, one is asked to pause. The images placed in this gallery invite quiet reflection as one takes in, for example, the deep intimacy envisioned in Jess Dugan’s Herb (2013), the embodiment of Black joy in Kerry James Marshall’s Supermodel (1994) or Becky Suss’ WT, TJ, and Blinky (2020), and the indefinability of life and memory in Lucy Kim’s Longing Pairs (Sketch) (2019) or Noda Tetsuya, Diary: February 11, 1995 (b); Sleeping Man and Newspaper (1995). Dugan’s, Marshall’s, and Kim’s works were included in one iteration of the show, while Suss’ and Tetsuya’s (shown above) appeared in another.
The “Rest” gallery is designed to allow visitors to form their own relationships with the works of art and the subjects depicted themselves, further enabled by the lack of labels beside each work throughout the galleries. The choice to remove the labels invokes a broader conversation in the role of the curator’s voice in contemporary curatorial practice. In the “Art of the Americas” galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curators have offered translated labels in languages relevant to select objects (such as a Wabanaki label translation in a work that invokes Indigenous land ownership) and an empty frame to attend to the absence of people of color in the gallery.2 Yet, these labels seem to suggest that a viewer should look away from the art itself to experience the curator’s interpretation instead of their own engagement with the work on view. Where some galleries exclude labels entirely to put viewers’ attention only on the formal elements of the works on view without adequate context, the Tender Loving Care booklet seems to offer an alternative to both overly explanatory labels and none. Rather than hide potentially challenging context, the booklet puts the choice of how and when to access more information literally in the hands of the visitor.
Through the exhibition design and curatorial choices, Tender Loving Care enacts care on the part of the museum while the works of art themselves visualize different aspects of care writ large. Artistic labor and community development inside and outside the museum is central to the exhibition. For example, the layers of colorful fabric in Marilyn Pappas’ Flight Suit (1972) encourage the visitor to think about both the effort it takes to produce such patchwork and, as the label invokes, the time and energy it requires for conservators to maintain the suit’s vibrance after fifty years spent mostly in storage. Outside the closing gallery, a video entitled “Many Hands” shows the over 100 staff members involved in researching, preparing, designing, installing, conserving, and interpreting the exhibition. The choice to make visible the work of exhibition development demonstrates an important model for transparency: recognizing the central role that the many members of a museum’s staff, including those in less visible positions, play in creating an exhibition of this scale.3
Figure 8: Joan Snyder, Resurrection, 1977. Installation view. Photograph by the author, January 2024.
In the final gallery, “Adoration,” visitors encounter Joan Snyder’s Resurrection (1977) (fig. 8). This monumental, eight-panel oil painting and collage engages with a long history of violence perpetuated by men across a vast historical arc. Read from left to right, the canvases begin with deep brown hues, moving through reds and greens and concluding with a bright yellow sun on the furthest panel. Up close, the visitor sees collaged newspaper articles, collected scraps, and stories pulled from across time. In one orientation, the work seems to build from a dark place to a suggestion of hope through the colorful conclusion in the eighth panel. Read in the other direction, it indicates the perpetual cycle of violence and restoration. As is true throughout the exhibition, ideas of “care” can and should coexist with rage, difficult memories, stories of racialized and gendered violence, and personal traumas. In the words of the exhibition, forms of care like passion, rage, and reverence “can also transform grief into an act of repair or remembrance.”
Tender Loving Care’s function as a collection exhibition, including holding multiple iterations within the same gallery layout, offers a model for what is possible in permanent galleries. Yet, the exhibition is still temporary. When it closes in early 2025 without a published catalogue, the exhibition’s call to change how we prioritize care in museum spaces cannot act on a broader scale until there are systemic changes within the institution itself. Facing the return of a contentious presidency, amid global crisis, climate collapse, and political upheaval, care is perhaps more important than ever. This exhibition echoes the work of the Feminist Art Coalition, which began in 2017 in the wake of the National Women’s March and resulted in a series of women-centered, feminist, and care-oriented exhibitions across the United States, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Tender Loving Care demonstrates that these values—collectivity, rest, vibrant matter, love—can be raised even when we are not in crisis. These are the essential building blocks for creating kinder and more equitable museum spaces.
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Toni Armstrong is a PhD Candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Boston University.
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