We are pleased to share with you this open letter signed by professionals in the field of American art

urging the Newark Museum of Art not to monetize major works of American art in its collection.

We are sympathetic to the challenges of running an institution, especially at this moment, especially
when philanthropy has not always and presently may not be addressing the sites of greatest opportunity
even as the wealthiest Americans have continued to grow far wealthier over the last 14 months. We urge
greater New York and New Jersey supporters of the museum, lovers of American art, foundations and
private philanthropy to work together to ensure that Newark's art stays in Newark. We hope that this
expression of support for the museum's collection from a broad swath of the American art field serves as
a call for people to come together to save Newark's art for all America.

May 10, 2021

Dear Ms. Harrison,

We write to object to The Newark Museum of Art's senseless monetization of artworks from its
collection, including works by Albert Bierstadt, Burgoyne Diller, Thomas Eakins, Marsden
Hartley, Childe Hassam, Thomas Moran, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Charles
Sheeler, and a significant painting by Thomas Cole, The Arch of Nero.

While we object to the monetization of any and all artworks from Newark's great and important
collection, in the present moment The Arch of Nero commands specific attention. This painting
is an important and urgent address of America's republicanism. It speaks to the founding ideal
of the American nation, refers to America's failure to live up to its own ideals, and is a clarion
call for America to be the best version of itself. It belongs in a significant art museum, like
Newark.

The Arch of Nero specifically refers to the Roman emperor whose tyranny and extravagance
was believed to have contributed mightily to the decline and fall of the Roman republic. With
The Arch of Nero, Cole warned his countrymen about how republicanism was inherently subject
to corruption. The painting urges Americans to be on guard against the dilution and potential
dissolution of their republican experiment.

For northeasterners such as Cole, the prime source of corruption of American republicanism
was the Southern slavocracy and its unjust influence within the federal government. In 1846, the
year in which Cole painted The Arch of Nero, Southerners played a leading role in instigating an
American war with Mexico. For many northerners, the war was an unambiguous land grab by
what it called “The Slave Power,” a bald attempt to expand both slavery and white Southern
influence within the federal government. Cole made explicit his links between the corruption,
decline, and fall of the Roman republic, and America's present by clothing his figures in red,
white, and blue.

Throughout the late 1840s, the 1850s and the early 1860s, nearly every major American artist
addressed American republicanism within his work; many artists would warn that oligarchic
aristocracy corrupted republicanism, that disunion loomed, and that the crisis was real and
immediate. Newark's great The Arch of Nero was one of the earliest paintings to address these
issues. It should be a centerpiece of a great museum's American galleries.

And it has been. Yours. As you surely know, The Arch of Nero has long been installed with
Newark's great 1871 Arch of Titus, a major post-Civil War G.P.A. Healy painting about the
survival and extension of American republicanism after the war. These pairings have given
Newark an important, even unparalleled way to tell the story of artists' engagement with
America's founding idea, that idea's relationship to slavery and imperialist wars, and to consider
the way America deepened its commitment to republicanism in the wake of the Civil War. Over
the 175 years since Cole painted The Arch of Nero, American artists, sculptors and architects
have expanded on Cole's address of American republicanism. Think of Stanford White's 1891
Washington Arch in Manhattan, John H. Duncan's 1888-92 Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch in
Brooklyn, Eero Saarinen's 1947-65 Gateway Arch in Saint Louis, or Cady Noland's Metal
Fence, a highlight of the Cleveland Museum of Art's newly reinstalled contemporary galleries.
All owe a debt to The Arch of Nero.

Other artworks you intend to monetize are similarly important. The Moran and Eakins – which
are better pictures than the paintings in your collection by the same artists that you are not
planning to monetize – are a part of Newark's foundational collecting history. Works such as
these should be part of how institutions such as yours investigate and revise our understandings
of America's past and how art and artists contributed to it. Especially given that these works
have been on view for years and years, seen and learned about by adults and school groups
alike, they are particularly well positioned for revisionist examination – and public
understanding.

At a time when American republicanism has been diluted and diminished during our Second
Gilded Age, just as it was during our First Gilded Age, ideologically powerful artworks such as
Cole's Arch of Nero are more important than ever for American museums to study, interpret and
present. The Arch of Nero should be fundamental to how Newark shows how art both reveals
and has contributed to America's story. It is an important example of how artists have
interrogated America's then-present, and it should be an important example of how museums
should interrogate and revise our understandings of our past.

By monetizing this and other works, you and your trustees are inflicting irreparable damage to
your recently re-named museum of art and to the broader fields of history, art history, and
American history. We beseech you to cancel the self-diminishment and monetization of
Newark's art. Welcome The Arch of Nero and the other paintings and sculpture back into your
collection. Take this opportunity to tell the intertwined story of art and the American nation better
and louder than before.

Signed,

Henry Adams, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History, Case Western Reserve University

Maxwell L. Anderson, PhD, President, Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and Former President,
Association of Art Museum Directors

Alejandro Anreus, PhD, Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies, William Paterson
University, President Emeritus, Joan Mitchell Foundation

James K. Ballinger, director emeritus, Phoenix Art Museum and past president of the
Association of Art Museum Directors

Carrie Rebora Barrett

Tim Barringer, D.Phil, Paul Mellon Professor, Yale University

Adrienne Baxter Bell, Ph.D, Professor of Art History, Marymount Manhattan College

M. Elizabeth Boone, Ph.D, Professor, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture, University of
Alberta

Carolyn Kinder Carr, Ph.D, National Portrait Gallery Deputy Director and Chief Curator Emerita

William L. Coleman, Ph.D, Luce Foundation Associate Curator of American Art, Newark
Museum, 2017-19

Stiles T. Colwill, Past Chair Baltimore Museum of Art, former director and curator at the
Maryland Historical Society

Holly Pyne Connor, Ph.D, Curator Emerita, Nineteenth-Century American Art, Newark Museum

Katelyn D. Crawford, Ph.D, Curator of American Art, Birmingham Museum of Art

Meredith Davis, Associate Professor of Art History, Ramapo College of New Jersey

Barbara Dayer Gallati, Curator Emerita, Brooklyn Museum

Mary Anne Goley, Founding Director (Retired), Fine Arts Program, Federal Reserve Board

Tyler Green, author and critic

Wendy Greenhouse, Ph.D, independent art historian

Grant Hamming, Ph.D, American Art Research Fellow, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins
College

Eleanor Jones Harvey

Ena Heller, Ph.D, Bruce A. Beal Director, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College

Patricia Hills, Ph.D, Professor Emerita, Boston University

Melissa Ho

Erika Holmquist-Wall, Mary and Barry Bingham Sr. Curator of European and American Painting
and Sculpture, Speed Art Museum

Elizabeth Hutchinson, Tow Associate Professor of American Art History, Barnard

College/Columbia University

Wendy Jeffers, independent scholar

Leslie B. Jones, Director of Museum Affairs and Chief Curator, The Preservation Society of
Newport County

Lewis Kachur, Professor of Art History, Kean University

Wendy Katz, Professor of Art History, University of Nebraska

Joni L. Kinsey, Ph.D, Professor of American Art History, University of Iowa

Helen Langa, Ph.D, Associate Professor Emerita, American University, Washington

Karen J. Leader, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Art History, Florida Atlantic University

Valerie Ann Leeds, Ph.D, Independent scholar, Stockton, NJ

Karen Lemmey

Michael Lobel, Professor of Art History, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Margaretta M. Lovell, Professor of Art History, University of California, Berkeley

Mary Lublin, Ph.D, Mary Lublin Fine Arts, Inc.

Katherine Manthorne, Ph.D, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Laurette E. McCarthy, Ph.D, Independent Scholar and Curator

Andrew McClellan, Tufts University

Kelli Morgan, Ph.D, independent historian

Marguerite Mayhall, Ph.D, Art History Program, Department of History, Kean University

Meredith Massar Munson, Ph.D, Sam Houston State University

Kevin M. Murphy, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of American and European Art, Williams
College Museum of Art

Julia R. Myers, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Art History, Eastern Michigan University

Katherine Anne Paul, Ph.D, Birmingham Museum of Art; employed at the Newark Museum from
2008-2019

Andrea Foggle Plotkin, Principal, AFP Art Consulting, M.Phil, American Art, Graduate Center,
CUNY

Kathleen Pyne, Professor Emerita of Art History, University of Notre Dame

Jennifer Raab, Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University

Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Curator of American Art, Georgia Museum of Art

Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard University

Bruce Robertson, Professor Emeritus, History of Art & Architecture, UCSB; Director, Emeritus
Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UCSB

Janet Rodriguez, Founder, SoHarlem, Inc. & former Program Officer Geraldine R. Dodge
Foundation
Jessica Skwire Routhier, Managing Editor, Panorama, Association of Historians of American Art

Janice Simon, Ph.D, Meigs Distinguished Professor of American Art, University of Georgia

Susan M. Sivard, Ph.D, Columbia University

John W. Smith, director of RISD Museum (retired), former director of the Archives of American
Art

Rachel Stephens, Ph.D, Associate Professor of American Art, University of Alabama

Virginia Stotz, Ph.D, Professor Emerita, Kean University

Marin R. Sullivan, Ph.D, Art Historian and Curator

Diane Tepfer, Ph.D

James W. Tottis, Vice President Museum Affairs, Cheekwood

Peter Trippi, Editor-in-Chief, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, New York

Leslie Umberger

Bailey Van Hook, Professor Emerita of Art History, Virginia Tech

Alan Wallach, Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art and Art History and Professor of American
Studies Emeritus, The College of William and Mary

Jonathan Frederick Walz, Ph.D, Director of Curatorial Affairs & Curator of American Art, The
Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia

Gordon Wilkins, Robert M. Walker Associate Curator of American Art, Addison Gallery of
American Art

Melissa A. Yuen, Ph.D, Associate Curator of Exhibitions, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of
Nebraska–Lincoln

Judith Zilczer, Ph.D

Devin Zuber, Ph.D, Associate Professor of American Studies, Graduate Theological Union at
Berkeley

Karen Zukowski, Ph.D, Independent Historian