Exhibition Review: Party Time: Re-imagine America, Ballantine House, The Newark Museum

Yinka Shonibare MBE
Party Time: Re-imagine America
Ballantine House, The Newark Museum
Runs Through January 3rd

Reviewed by Elise Freed Brown, Museum Educator for School Programs at The Newark Museum

    For years, the Ballantine House has been a popular attraction at The Newark Museum.  Purchased in 1937 from the Ballantine family, the Victorian mansion now houses the Newark Museum’s decorative arts collection.  The house is hauntingly beautiful; its dark wooden walls and rich decoration stand in stark contrast to the clean, white galleries of the rest of the museum.  Each room is full of antiques and reveals a part of the social structure that the Ballantine family lived with every day: how they received visitors, which rooms were private and which were public, what were men’s activities and what were women’s roles.  The Ballantine House offers a unique look into this family’s lives.
    But a change has come to the Ballantine House.  On the first floor, most of the rooms remain intact.  The dining room, however, has been invaded.  Usually, the table is set for a Christmas feast, a scrumptious turkey the centerpiece of an elegant setting, anticipating guests that would never arrive.  In contrast, Yinka Shonibare MBE has traded the cold Christmas dinner for a raucous party. The Newark Museum commissioned Party Time:  Re-Imagine America to animate the Ballantine House in new ways as part of the Museum’s Centennial anniversary.
    Party Time completely changes the space.  Eight headless mannequins, lavishly dressed in Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax fabric, strike dynamic poses around the table.  One spills wine, two are kissing, and yet another relaxes with her feet on the table.  Instead of Christmas fare, they indulge in foods with aphrodisiac associations, including cheeses, oysters, quail eggs, and a fully-feathered peacock on a silver platter.  Shonibare’s figures question the fine line between a person’s civilized and animal nature.  The exhibit is loud, fantastic, and fun, breathing new life into what may normally be considered a decorous, but empty room.
    Party Time is a site-specific piece that works powerfully with the Ballantine House’s carefully preserved Victorian atmosphere.  As Shonibare’s figures make themselves very much at home in this setting, their intrusion creates a friction of race and class that transcends time. Shonibare, born in London to Nigerian parents and raised in Lagos, creates installations as well as film photography, painting and sculpture to examine issues of colonialism and its impact. The MBE he adopted after his name signifies “member of the British Empire.”  In Party Time Shonibare presents the pleasures and privileges of the leisure class, reminding the viewer of the labors of the working class on whom the wealthy depend.  While these are all valid issues and certainly worthy of a museum setting, this is a strong and controversial statement about the Ballantine family.
    Educators at The Newark Museum interpret the Ballantine House as proof of the “American Dream.”  Peter Ballantine emigrated from Scotland in the early 1800s with very little money.  After learning brewery in New York, he moved to Newark and founded the Ballantine Brewing Company, contributing to Newark’s growing industrial might.  Peter’s son, John Ballantine, had the house built in 1885, giving his children the lavish home that his father could not afford and staying in the city where his family made its fortune.  This is a story of a family that earned their wealth through hard work and innovation.  Shonibare’s interpretation of an upper class that cares nothing for the struggling lower class could change the way that visitors view the Ballantine family.
    In an interview with the author, Ulysses Dietz, Curator of Decorative Arts at the Newark Museum, generously helped shed light on the difficult issue of the interpretation of historic houses in the twenty-first century.ⁱ  First, he imagines that visitors will be able to distinguish between the fantasy of Party Time and the interpretive voice in the rest of the house.  He also points out that in its own interpretation of the Ballantine House the Museum includes a working-class perspective through the device of a “story book” placed in each room of the house; the text explains what it is like to live in the house as a domestic servant.  Dietz also notes that there is a new trend among historic houses to acknowledge the complexities of race, class and ethnicity, instead of only presenting the house as an aesthetic piece, unquestioning of the wealthy owners.  The Ballantine House is a part of Newark’s cultural heritage but the Ballantines were not the only shapers of history.  This is a fact that may be easily forgotten amidst all of the treasures in the house. 
    Since much of the Ballantine House has been so well protected, it may feel necessary to protect the image of the family as well.  Party Time is not meant to disrespect the former inhabitants of the house, but to spark insight about race and class, then and now.  In the end, talking about these issues in the Ballantine House is the right—in fact the ethical-- thing to do.  To refuse to do so would be to refuse to acknowledge the working class who had to live it and those who still struggle with it today.  The Newark Museum shows the depth and complexity of the story, as it should.

ⁱ Interview with Ulysses Dietz, Curator of Decorator Arts, Newark Museum, by author, August 5, 2009.