Catering to fringe groups, its exhibitions are holding it back.

I hadn’t visited the distinguished Newark Museum of Art in a few years but knew that it had decided to start championing the Oppression Olympics. I also knew it had chosen to sell $5.9 million in art at Sotheby’s in 2021 to balance its budget. While in Montclair, next to Newark, I decided to give the place a look. “How bad could it be?” I thought — always an optimist. “Could be worse,” it seemed to me after my visit. The museum might not be just another one of those slippery slopes to despair — the curatorial vision is awful — but it’s probably not on a Matterhorn descent to disaster. It’s getting a new director, and the place seems financially stable for once. But, alas, the board seems happy to make the museum into a community center specializing in grievance and grudges.

First, Newark’s unusual founding philosophy. It was founded by John Cotton Dana, the longtime chief of Newark’s public library system. Just as Dana had opted for open stacks and both-sides-of-the-issue reading materials to democratize libraries, he wanted, for the museum, a broad-based collection of art, material culture, history, technology, and science. He aimed to promote self-enrichment through curiosity and self-improvement, with variety and liveliness to keep the place from ever looking like a tomb.

The museum has a planetarium and, until a few years ago, also had a zoo. It’s still got a big, children-oriented floor devoted to animals. It’s in a nice 1920s building that looks like a department store — it was, after all, designed by an architect who built stores, banks, corporate headquarters, and train stations including Kansas City’s superb Union Station. The museum is grand enough to attract visitors but sleek enough not to be spectacular. It has expanded twice and bought a stately old house next door, the Ballentine House, built in the 1880s by a rich brewer. It’s decorated in high Victorian style.

Newark is famous for its Tibetan art, which came to it early and demonstrates Dana’s eclectic spirit. The high point is its Tibetan Buddhist altar, built in the late 1980s. Though the collection has about 300,000 objects, it’s not encyclopedic like, say, the Met’s or the Brooklyn Museum’s. The Tibetan collection started through a gift from a friend of a friend of Dana’s. The museum bought exceptional American Modernist art. There’s gorgeous work by Joseph Stella. His Voice of the City of New York Interpreted, from the early 1920s, is a superstar, as is a 1968 night-sky-blue Rothko. There’s a small collection of antiquities and Native American and African art, too. The African art gallery, which is recent, is very good.

These things are, more or less, left alone from curatorial axe-grinding, which the Hudson River School artists get hit with, by the Armory-full. We read much about slaves, of course, and “the brutal, systematic displacement of Native Americans,” erasure of both groups, omissions, historical fictions, power portraits, over and over again. What I’d like to see is refined, focused scholarship and not generalizations. There are hundreds of portraits, for instance, of Native Americans from the 19th into the 20th centuries.

So much sloganeering is lazy curating. So is slapping a contemporary — and ugly — portrait next to a 19th-century portrait. They look awful together and have nothing to do with each other except by noting how much things have changed in 200 years. No merde, Moriarty. In another gallery, Risham Syed painted a copy of a painting by Thomas Cole, which is displayed next to Newark’s own great, but different Cole. Syed installed her copy low to the floor, in front of two children’s chairs, suggesting that Native Americans were infantilized. That’s trite. We have to be kind to the things we steward as curators in our collections. If they’re truly incendiary, bury them in the vault. Otherwise, they ought not to be mocked.

I’d never heard of Syed. She’s Pakistani, and in her Destiny Fractured exhibition on the second floor she “prompts us to see hidden relationships and realities such as how the 19th century’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny fueled . . .mentality and behaviors” that meant “conquer, colonize, and industrialize.” She implicates colonialism, capitalism, and climate change. I’m not saying she’s not a talented artist, but she doesn’t seem to know much about America, and her observations are superficial. And I didn’t learn much about Pakistan, as failed a place as there is. Of course, there’s a copy of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist in the galleries.

The Ballantine House, which is now one wing of the museum, is installed with racial themes such as Yinka Shonibare’s Party Time: Re-Imagine America, which depicts a raucous dinner party among headless people of color dressed in 19th-century clothes. They’ve taken over a space, we’re told, that would have been forbidden to them in the Ballantine era. It’s fun for a minute, but it doesn’t have much depth. Shonibare is a British-Nigerian artist whose work I saw earlier this year when I visited Black Earth Rising, an exhibition on colonialism, capitalism, and climate at the Baltimore Museum of Art. His theme of racial and cultural stratification in Newark isn’t exactly fresh.

I loved the gallery displaying Thomas Armstrong’s impressive collection of Steuben glass. It’s one of a few points in my visit where I learned something new and saw art that’s beautiful. I left thinking the curators have a very narrow bandwidth. Linda Harrison, who left as director in May after a six-year run, came to Newark from the directorship of San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora. During her reign there, the diaspora museum was more or less a start-up in a city where everything is political, as I’m sure it is in Newark. Her biggest pickle was selling art for cash. The Newark Museum of Art sold two good Cole paintings, a Bierstadt painting of Columbus’s landing, which I’m sure they wanted out of the building ASAP, and an O’Keeffe flower picture, among other things. Alas, the Association of Art Museum Directors sanctioned this during the depth of the Covid crisis. The money had to be used for “collection care,” which can mean mostly anything.

In Newark, she made plenty of progress in digitizing the collection but redefined the museum, too, to be an ethnic and current-events venue rather than a traditional art museum. Possibly this is what the trustees want. Newark is Newark, and 41 percent of the museum’s budget came from the government last year. It has made big strides in private giving, too. Under Harrison, the museum also upgraded its HVAC system, an important though headachy project, and developed outdoor spaces for good public sculpture. The museum gets about 40,000 visitors a year, 83 percent of whom are black, Native American, or people of color. That’s low, considering that Newark has 304,000 people and Essex County, which it serves as county seat, has more than 800,000.  The museum’s art program — its exhibitions and use of its permanent collection — seem to be catering to fringe groups.

The museum hs many moving parts given the breadth of his collection and programming, five buildings, and a 300-seat auditorium. What it needs is a more rigorous curatorial program and deeper dives in the permanent collection. They should try doing something original, too. Still, Newark’s had endless problems since the 1960s. I’m glad they’ve managed to keep the museum going.