Personal Collection and the Museum Form: Racial Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and the Legacies of the Homestead Strike of 1892

This chapter establishes the interconnections between museums and racial capitalism, philanthropy, and settler colonialism. The wealth of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, which grounded the philanthropic art projects they are famed for today, can be traced to steel and more directly to the 1892 Homestead Strike, suggesting an intimate relationship between labor, property, and the politics of aesthetics. The chapter examines the Frick Collection in New York City and the Homestead Strike in order to investigate the connections between labor dispossession and the rise of the personal collection museum. The chapter argues that, in the developmental history of personal art collections, there is a tandem history of worker, racial, and land dispossession. In tracking this, the chapter materializes the wealth accumulated through the suppression of collective bargaining and the dismantling of labor, which was transferred to the site of the neutral and yet expressive art collection.