“An Open Letter to the Nation”: The National Gallery of Art Reckons with America in 250 | art

SStep into the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition marking America’s 250th birthday, and it immediately becomes clear that this is not the kind of chauvinistic, flag-waving orgy that Donald Trump is planning to throw on the Fourth of July.

Of course, there is a Statue of Liberty, but not as millions of tourists know it. Instead, the sculpture is evoked through a photograph of a black woman taken by South African photographer Zanele Muholi, and through a color screen print – geometric planes and shapes against a background of diagonal purple lines – by Roy Lichtenstein.

There’s also the Oval Office, but again in Liechtenstein’s cartoon-like blue, white and yellow rather than the caricature-like gold leaf of the President of the United States. The Lincoln Memorial is also visible but with a haunting silhouette on its steps: a 2014 photo taken by Carrie Mae Weems in honor of the black contralto Marian Anderson 75 years after she performed there.

Naturally, the Stars and Stripes feature prominently but as a backdrop to Ella Watson, an African-American civil servant surrounded by her broom and mop in Gordon Parks’ indelible American Gothic.

In short, the opening hall was a powerful reminder that although America has always built great monuments and been its own chief advocate, it has also been unique in its capacity for self-criticism. This month alone, it waged a futile war on Iran while also flinging explorers around the moon: “Am I contradicting myself? / Well, I am contradicting myself, / (I am huge, and I contain multitudes).”“

Titled “Dear America: Artists Explore the American Experience” and describing itself as “an open letter to the nation,” the National Gallery features more than a hundred works on paper by 95 artists, drawn almost exclusively from the gallery’s permanent collection of more than 160,000 works.

The exhibit has been in the works for years, says Carmen Ramos, the gallery’s chief curatorial and conservation officer. “We have one of the best collections of American art in the world. We have an embarrassing wealth of American art and our collection allows visitors to understand the extraordinary story of the American experience. It also encourages viewers to see America not just as a place, but as a living idea shaped by many voices.”

The exhibition centers around three themes – land, community and freedom – and creates provocative conversations across centuries, disciplines and demographics.

“We wanted to present an exhibition that explored how artists in the United States explored the American experience across different moments in time, different regions of the United States, and different historical moments, so it was meant to embody the completeness of the American experience,” Ramos adds.

This includes the inherent tension between the United States’ astonishing natural majesty and its relentless and often destructive appetite for development. The exhibition combines Thomas Moran’s sweeping, idealized nineteenth-century watercolors of the American West with Thomas H. Johnson’s stark 1860s photograph of Waymart, Pennsylvania, where rugged tree trunks in a landscape aggressively cleared for coal mining and railroads stand in contrast to the myth of the untouched frontier.

Thomas Hart Benton’s 1939 lithograph “The Departure of the Horse,” which was commissioned to promote the film The Grapes of Wrath, hangs next to Arthur Rothstein’s devastating 1936 documentary photo of a father and son fleeing a severe dust storm in Oklahoma. The Edward Ruscha Standard Station elevates the mundane architecture of Route 66’s “car culture” into a vibrant modern cathedral against a blue and orange sky.

The second section, Society, begins with four large multi-part works that fill the entire exhibition. On one wall hangs Richard Avedon’s “The Family,” a massive 1976 Rolling Stone work of 69 stark, uniform black-and-white photographs of the political, media, and corporate elite of the Bicentennial era (among them future President Ronald Reagan).

Displayed opposite in a glow of color is John Wilson’s “Young Americans,” delicate sketches from the 1970s that depict the artist’s teenage children and their friends hanging out at his house. The young men, shown with charcoal and crayons, wear military-style Nehru jackets, embroidered necklaces and short dresses. Their attitudes radiate amazing confidence.

One standout piece depicts Wilson’s son, Roy, an energetic, smiling “spirit” leaping from the boy’s body, flying alongside a peregrine falcon, known for its speed and migration—underscoring the father’s hopeful vision of the potential of the next generation.

Ramos reflects: “I loved the juxtaposition of Richard Avedon’s ‘The Family’ and John Wilson’s ‘Young Americans’ because of the way it showed these people from different walks of life – political and cultural figures on the one hand and then ordinary young people on the other.

This section also contains Tom Jones’ 2002 multimedia essay, “Dear America,” which served as the inspiration for the exhibition’s title. Jones, a Ho-Chunk Nation artist, covers historical postcards and footage of Indigenous people with lyrics from My Country’s national anthem, ‘Tis of Thee. Decorated with traditional glass beads and porcupine quills, this work is a clear interrogation of how Native Americans are represented—and erased—in popular culture.

The final chapter of the exhibition turns its lens toward freedom. There are scenes from the American Revolution and Civil War, including a Paul Revere print depicting the Boston Massacre of 1770, as well as historical portraits of figures such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and George Washington.

Faith Ringgold’s stunning 2007 print, illustrating Martin Luther King’s message from a Birmingham jail, sits near Parks’ soaring 1963 photograph of a Harlem rally, in which a sea of ​​hands are raised in a gesture that links political surrender with religious praise.

Kara Walker uses paper-cut silhouettes to reveal the lasting traumas of slavery, while Martha Roessler’s photomontage series, Sweet Home: Bringing War Home, incorporates harrowing combat photographs from the Vietnam War into glossy, authentic magazines of middle-class American interiors, effectively destroying the suburban illusion that the brutality of war was beyond our reach.

As visitors exit, they are met by Pop artist Robert Indiana’s bold, colorful screen print Liberty ’76. The piece, created for the bicentenary of 1976, creates “a slippage between 1776 and 1976, and speaks to the constant quest for freedom,” says Ramos. “That resonated with me too.“