Every day, Agency employees walk past several abstract paintings that hang throughout the [hallways of the CIA’s] Headquarters…. These 29 paintings do not just break up the acres of wall space. They represent an elemental approach to art [and] a swashbuckling donor….
Thus begins an outdated description on CIA.gov of its Melzac Art Collection, which today comprises eleven abstract paintings by artists of the Washington Color School that were on loan and, in 1988, purchased by the Agency from the late Vincent Melzac, an art patron and former chief executive of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. (An additional 18 paintings were loaned by and returned to his estate in 2000 and 2015, respectively.) When Melzac died in 1989, his obituary, published in the Washington Post, noted that the most celebrated incident of his time at the gallery was a fistfight that he had with former gallery director Gene Baro on the crowded Corcoran atrium floor at a gala opening in November of 1972: “A minor argument erupted into a dispute in which Mr. Melzac hit Baro on the side of the head, opening a cut that bled onto his shirt front, and Baro threw a drink at Mr. Melzac.” Melzac seems to have had a reputation for exploits drawn from a James Bond plot; it is possible that he took inspiration from a purported holiday spent at Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s estate on the northern coast of Jamaica, where all fourteen original Bond novels were written.
It was the dearth of information---whether available or obtainable---describing the Melzac Collection and the particulars around the loans and acquisitions that prompted Johanna Barron to investigate and, ultimately, realize an ongoing project titled Acres of Walls. Acres of Walls is a series of three-quarter scale re-creations of works from the Melzac Collection that Barron painted, starting in 2014, based on the limited results of her years-long investigation. The paintings (along with Barron's numerous FOIA requests and attempts to communicate with the CIA, plus the redacted documents eventually provided to her) were first exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in November 2015 as part of a show called Chasing Justice. At the time, the works served as an exploration of the opacity of public institutions and dysfunction in the bureaucratic state. In our present era, the idea that we might need art to hint at the failures, malfeasance, and absurdity of our institutions seems quaint. Conspiracies are an assumed fact of life, though we argue about the masterminds and the perpetrators. The illusion of individual privacy is pierced not just by state surveillance but also by the fact that nations and global enterprises now depend on the satellite-based internet services controlled by a single person whose character, coincidentally, also is worthy of a Bond plot.
Yet art often shape-shifts across context and time. In an age of debates about appropriation, authenticity, and authorship, Barron’s paintings remind the viewer to consider the concept, gesture, and setting as integral to the story of art. Our presentation of Acres of Walls in Jamaica is a rejoinder to static readings and a reminder to demand recognition from rulers (be they Empire, Cold War superpower, or nascent technologies and their titans) for the act of transformation as something uniquely human and worth valuing.
Image List:
- Artist Johanna Barron with selections from her recreation of the Melzac Collection held by the CIA (2015) (photo by James Rexroad)
- Freedom of Information Act report from the CIA
- Acres of Walls installation view
- “Scaled Replica Gene Davis, Black Rhythm” 2015, acrylic on board (all images courtesy the artist/The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco)
- "Howard Mehring, Untitled” 2015, Acrylic on board (all images courtesy the artist/The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco)
- “Scaled Replica of Thomas Downing, Fold II” 2015, Acrylic on board (all images courtesy the artist/The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco)
- "Scaled Replica Thomas Downing, Rudder" 2015, Acrylic on board (all images courtesy the artist/The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco)
- "Scaled replica of Morris Louis, Gamma" 2015, Acrylic on board (all images courtesy the artist/The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco)