The seven lakes in Pioneer Basin are spread across an alpine valley on the Mono Creek drainage, west of Rock Creek. Surrounding the valley are peaks named after the Big Four, pioneer California businessmen who backed the construction of the first transcontinental railroad – Stanford, Hopkins, Crocker, and Huntington. Pioneer Basin Backpacking – High Sierra TrailsHigh Sierra Trailshttps://highsierratrails.com 

Prestigious Rose Breeder Names Its New Bloom for a Black Gardener: For more than 60 years, David Austin Roses has named new varieties after historical British figures, All of them white. The Dannahue, which honors Danny Clarke, changed that. A headline in The New York Times.

Black people are better at everything. Said Rudi Spangenberg, while standing in our living room after trying to level an entrance awning.

The Huntington Museum and Library is located in San Marino, California. The first time I went there was probably in 1958 or 1959, when I was a freshman or sophomore in college. I was not impressed. San Marino, itself, was a white, upper-middle-class town, milquetoast from my angry young man’s point of view, and the Museum fit right in. The second and third times I went were probably in the early to middle 70s; I had discovered the desert and cactus and skipped the Museum and went directly to the garden, which was spectacular and still is.  

The fourth time I went to the Huntington was with Michele shortly after we first met, in the early 90s, and I wanted to show her the garden. The fifth time was last week when Michele took me down to greater LA for my birthday. We went to see the Huntington cactus and succulent garden. However, she also wanted to see a painting that the Huntington had recently acquired, and I wanted to see some prints – monotypes, I think – made from Gee’s Bend quilts.

Michele wanted to see a painting by Kehinde Wiley who is a Black artist whose career has taken off since his first show, at the Hoffman Gallery, in Chicago in 2002. Wiley’s career then went into hyperdrive after President Obama chose him – Wiley – to paint his – Obama’s – Official Presidential Portrait. A couple of days before we went to the Huntington, we saw a Wiley show in San Franciso’s de Young Museum. It was of several huge portraits of Black people, posing in traditional Old Masters style. Most of Wiley’s paintings are men and the images have a subtext that’s not natural. Are they dead? The whole show was shown in very dark galleries in which the only light was reflected off the paintings, which really showed off the paintings in an Elvis on black velvet sort of way. For me, even though the show was difficult to see because of the glare of the shiny paintings in the very dark rooms, the show was a knockout.

But those pictures were in San Francisco, and we were at the Huntington Museum, where, when we first walked into the American Art Building looking for the Kehinde Wiley painting Michele had read about, we passed a huge Sam Francis from his Grid series. Seeing a major piece of American abstract art at this staid Museum was a shock. It turns out that the Huntington Museum has transmogrified into a much more exciting place.

We had a hard time finding the Wiley, which was incongruously in the portrait gallery of the European Building. In a room full of what I would call vanity portraits of the rich, upper-class English gentry was the most famous treasure of the old Huntington, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The Museum purchased Blue Boy a hundred years ago, and, to celebrate the purchase’s centennial, they commissioned a complementary contemporary portrait. Blue Boy which I think was originally named A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, portrays a White, wealthy, young boy who just oozes his belief in his own class superiority. This was the Museum I remembered from my prior visits, but, across the room from the Gainsborough is a new Portrait of a Young Gentleman by Kehinde Wiley. The two paintings are wildly different and strangely the same.

One is White gentry, and the other is Black street, but they are both in the same pose and they both look down at us with a look of self-satisfaction. Neither is arrogant but they are damn close; they both seem to know they belong here.

I am not a big fan of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg but, in an interview probably ten years ago,o she said something that still haunts me. When asked when she would be happy with the number of women on the Supreme Court, she answered: “When there are nine women on the Supreme Court.” The interviewer sort of guffawed and said something like, “Seriously?” and RBG said “Why not? There were only White men on the court for over two hundred years.” Think about that for a minute, for well over two hundred years, only White men decided what was legal. Those same men – or the same class of men, to be more precise – ran everything. It just seemed like the natural order of things. It isn’t the natural order, and it shouldn’t be, but it did seem like it.

For most of that time, the White Male Power structure wasn’t even questioned. “Of course, women shouldn’t vote. They are too emotional.” “Of course, Black men shouldn’t coach an NFL team, they aren’t smart enough. Hell, they shouldn’t even play quarterback.” White men telling themselves that they are superior is the original Affirmative Action. When that Affirmative Action is eliminated, when the applicant pool can contain anybody, when results are all that count, often a White man isn’t the best person for the job. When being White doesn’t automatically give an advantage, the result is often different.

That is sort of shocking. I understand that shock; I can feel it in my soul, and I was brought up in a liberal family. For someone brought up knowing White men are superior, for someone who can’t see their own White privilege, it must be too shocking to take in. It is easy to justify not being at the top by thinking, even saying, “They cheated, they just got the job, position, award – whatever – because they are Black, they are obviously not better or more qualified than me.”

There must be hundreds of White men who are superb artists and could do a great job at painting a contemporary Portrait of a Young Gentleman, but, looking at the Huntington Gallery, full of White, entitled, men with Gainsborough’s Wiley’s Portrait at one end and Wiley’s Portrait facing it at the other end; it seems obvious that commissioning Kehinde Wiley was the right call.