ART CENSUS

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The Civilians, a Brooklyn-based theatre company, is nearing the end of a yearlong stint as artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum. The term “residence” is only loosely applicable to the Civilians’ status within the institution’s walls. “We don’t have an office space,” Micharne Cloughley, a head writer with the company, explained the other day. “I spend a lot of time in the cafeteria.”

Recently, Cloughley and her colleagues could be seen roving the galleries of the American Wing, researching the production that is to serve as the culmination of their residency: an ambitious investigation of what it means to be an American, titled “The Way They Live.” The Civilians specialize in “investigative theatre”—interviewing people, then compiling a play out of their words. Curators in the department have been among their interview subjects, helping to identify a dozen works that will spark reactions. Next, Cloughley and her team expanded their investigations to include the galleries’ visitors: likely interview subjects are selected on the spot, with a view to getting a broad range of ages, nationalities, and ethnicities. People listening to the Met’s audio tour on headphones are left unmolested.

“Often, we are here in the morning, so then it’s literally everyone,” Cloughley said, as she walked through the galleries with a clipboard in her hand and a researcher, Tommy O’Malley, at her side. First target: a teen in bluejeans and a pink sweater who was hovering by the wall plaque for “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” She turned out to be Birgitta Gerlach, a high-school student visiting from Portland, Oregon, and told Cloughley and O’Malley that she recognized the painting. “It’s just an image you would know,” she said, though she allowed that it was much larger than her history textbook had led her to believe. She did not imagine that it was an accurate representation of events—Washington’s stance was “regal,” but not necessarily how one would position oneself in a smallish boat on a biggish river. “It’s pretty grandiose,” she said of the painting. “I’ve never learned about the British perspective on this event. There’s probably more to this than you can see.”

Cloughley looked delighted. “We’ve never had anyone say that before!” she said.

Next up: Reeta Parks, a teacher-librarian from Nashville, who was gazing wonderingly at Winslow Homer’s “The Veteran in a New Field,” in which a solitary Union soldier scythes a field of corn. Parks explained that she had grown up in Kentucky, in an extended family of farmers. “There were men getting out there and working very hard, and making the land work for them,” she said. Several of her male relatives had fought in the Second World War. “Three came back, and one of them was drastically changed,” she said. “They all worked the land. That was his solace. That was his comfort.” Parks’ s eyes grew moist. “I am getting emotional,” she said.

“That is what good art does,” O’Malley said, encouragingly.

In the Civil War gallery, Cloughley and O’Malley persuaded a skeptical-looking college student named Helen Bass to share her reactions to the painting that gives the Civilians’ show its name, Thomas Anshutz’s image of an African-American woman tending to a vegetable garden. Bass pointed to the woman’s red head scarf, and the red blossoms in the background. “Red means danger, psychologically,” she said. “There is a bunch of red. It could look like blood. There has to be some symbolic reason for it.” Bass found the image disturbing. “I appreciate old American relics like this, but it upsets me,” she said. “It’s just, like, a bad part of humanity that happened once.”

Last stop: “Black Jesus,” a work by Bill Traylor, a self-taught artist who was born into slavery in 1853, became a sharecropper, and started painting at the age of eighty-five. For Cloughley and O’Malley, finding a suitable interlocutor was something of a challenge. Not the older couple, who turned them down with polite smiles; not the young man charging purposefully through the gallery, studying the museum’s floorplan on his iPad.

Eventually, the Civilians benignly corralled a mother and daughter from Midland, Texas, Tracy Pierce and Chelsey Smith, in another gallery, and led them to Traylor’s work. “I don’t know if I see Jesus,” Pierce said, musingly. “It could be a self-portrait. Maybe he’s feeling crucified.” Smith said that she had recently moved to Virginia, where she works in a research lab. “It is interesting to see more diversity,” she said. “I am the only person born in America in my office. It’s pretty cool. You get different viewpoints. The more people you know, the more you grow.” Cloughley and O’Malley nodded with approval. Their work was done for the day. Cafeteria?