Michelle Obama on the New Whitney: ‘I Know the Feeling of Not Belonging in a Place Like This’

.”There are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers, and they think to themselves, ‘Well, that’s not a place for me,’ ” Obama told the gathered VIPs and press, “ ’for someone who looks like me.’ ”

“I guarantee you right now there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself. I know the feeling of not belonging in a place like this.”

The museum’s first show, the 600-work “America Is Hard to See,” seems to address that problem by including artists and works from diverse backgrounds, part of “a conscious effort to challenge assumptions about the American art canon.” The museum’s new efforts have already received some criticism, though: Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight writes that a Whitney wall text misrepresents his review of the 1993 Whitney Biennial show: “Being misquoted is one thing, but being completely misrepresented in an art museum wall text is quite another,” he says, before expanding: “The text seeks to evade the museum’s responsibility for its past focus on straight, white, male artists.”

Yet if the museum’s dedication ceremony on Thursday had a theme, it was inclusion. Mayor Bill de Blasio, in his remarks, said “we know when the doors of our cultural institutions are open wider and wider to every kind of New Yorker, when everyone knows they belong here, it uplifts this entire city. We know that walking through the doors of a great place like this, into the piazza, gives people a sense of belonging and gives them a pathway to a different and better future.”

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