This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are commemorating the past as they move into the future.
As the nation’s 250th anniversary looms, museums are using art to celebrate, explore and uncover the heterogeneous meanings of being an American.
While some museums rolled out their exhibitions last year, most planned them for this spring and summer. The exhibitions showcase both the traditional and the unexpected, from portraiture to multimedia installations, from founding documents to found objects. Across the country, the joy, sorrow and humor of the nation’s history are on display. Here are some highlights:
We the People
Two immigrants to Virginia, arriving almost 150 years apart — one from what was then Prussia, one from Bolivia — would seem to have little in common. But “We the People: The World in our Commonwealth,” at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in Richmond, shows that while every immigrant experience is different, there are also similarities — such as the desire to carry beloved items from the homeland.
For Hulda Lange, who arrived in Virginia in 1865, it was a keepsake box full of notes from friends; for Giancarla Rojas, a blanket from her grandmother.
The exhibition — which is divided into nine themes — is on view until Sept. 7. It is part of the museum’s 250th initiative and includes photographs, objects and oral histories intertwining the history of more than 100 immigrants from 68 countries who, for many different reasons, ended up in Virginia. Parts of it will travel throughout the state this year.
The show’s stories are told through objects from the museum’s collection, loans, and gathered through a statewide listening tour conducted by the exhibition’s curator, Julie Kemper, and her colleagues.
“We talked to immigrants, second-generation folks, and also people who work with immigrant communities,” she said. “The first thing we asked was: ‘What does this exhibit need to say, and what story should we tell?’”
Six of the more than 100 people they spoke to tell part of their own stories in short videos that visitors can view at the show, including Rojas, the painter Sughra Hussainy, who escaped the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Chris Little, an Irish immigrant who came to the United States at 15.
Little, whose photo of his naturalization ceremony appears in the exhibition, seems to sum up the feeling of so many immigrants when he says in his video: “It actually seems like the more I embraced this country as my home the more I began to realize that Ireland is also my home. There was a long time when I felt like I have two homes but no home.”
Native Now
At the time of the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, a local couple, Robert and Hertha Rockwell, gifted their art collection to help establish what would become the Rockwell Museum in Corning, N.Y.
Now, as part of a celebration of the museum’s 50th anniversary and the country’s semiquincentennial, the museum — a Smithsonian affiliate — is presenting “Native Now,” 47 works by 35 present-day Indigenous artists. It is on view through May 4.
The artworks often incorporate traditional motifs and materials to produce edgy art with multilayered meanings.
“Pretendian,” by Hayden Haynes of the Seneca Deer clan, calls out people who, over the years, have falsely claimed to be Indians. Carved from moose and deer antlers, the 5.6-inch Pinocchio wears a mishmash of clothing, holding a jack-o’-lantern in one hand and a mask in the other.
“It’s a contemporary take on an old form,” Hayden said in an interview
While the art, almost all from the museum’s collection, often explicitly or implicitly incorporates the painful history of Native Americans, the overriding message is that such a vibrant culture should not be reduced simply to trauma and tragedy.
In the monotype “Boarding School Girl,” by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a young Indigenous girl appears almost imprisoned in a school uniform. In an interview excerpted on the wall label — all are written by the artists themselves or taken from published interviews — Smith said everyone in her family was taken by the military to boarding schools.
In all her work, she said, she is “trying to get word out that we’re still here, we’re still alive and we have something to say too.”
This Land Is…
It’s an unusual juxtaposition: A rare, annotated 1776 printing of the Declaration of Independence alongside a 1936 guitar once owned by the folk singer and activist Woody Guthrie with the phase “This machine kills fascists” etched on the back.
But that is one of the goals of the exhibition, “This Land is …” running June 14-Jan. 11, 2027 at the Huntington in San Marino, Calif. — pairing familiar objects in unfamiliar ways to create new ways of thinking about this country.
The exhibition is divided into six themes associated with the land, as the Huntington is also known for its expansive gardens and botanical collections: These themes — Roots, Uprootings, Amendments, Edge Effects, Disturbances and Regenerations. — have actual botanical meanings, but also political or cultural ones, said Josh Garrett-Davis, the museum’s curator of Western American history,
For example, the section “Uprootings” includes artifacts from the family of Harue Kuromi and his wife, Kiyo, who immigrated from Japan to Southern California in the early 19th century and founded a flower farm. They were uprooted during World War II when they were sent to an Arizona internment camp. Among their artifacts on display are watercolors painted in the camp.
After the war, the Kuromis built another flower business, showing a cycle of how people can “draw from the land, and how that can be stripped away, but then how you can also rebuild after that,” Garret-Davis said.
Visitors to the exhibition “might be inspired by some things and sad about others, or angry about something and proud about others,” he added. The goal is “holding all that complexity together.”
For example, he said, both Guthrie’s guitar, a copy of the handwritten lyrics of Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land is Your Land,” and the marked-up Declaration of Independence are works of protest while also expressing universal ideals.
Freedom Dreams
“Freedom Dreams,” showing at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia until Aug. 9, is an exhibition of five films, videos and installations exploring — in ways both starkly realistic and dreamlike — being Black in America.
The exhibition provides “a contemplative space, a space for reflection on this idea of freedom, who has been included and who perhaps has been left a little under the radar,” said James Claiborne, Barnes’s deputy director for community engagement and the show’s co-curator.
One of the shortest pieces at six minutes, “Pollinator” by the artist Tourmaline, was also shown at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. In a video about her film she said, “it’s designed to feel like a portal or as a pollinator entering a flower to disperse your experience.” It includes footage of the funeral of the Black artist and transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson, and of Tourmaline’s father goofing around in front of the camera and the artist herself adorned with flowers wandering through gardens.
The oldest work in the exhibition, “Love is the Message the Message is Death,” by Arthur Jafa was produced in 2016, and “we’re sitting with 10 years of this work that looks at Black life really broadly through the lens of politics and pop culture,” said Maori Karmael Holmes, a co-curator of the exhibition and chief executive of BlackStar Projects. “ You see the surveillance of Black communities and bodies. You see iconic moments of history. These works still ring with urgency and clarity 10 years later.”
Too often, Holmes said, the narrative of the United States is presented as fairly flat “and nothing is that. There are always more layers. What we’re really interested in is making sure that we’re troubling the narrative.”
Common Threads
The first room of the exhibition “America 250: Common Threads” at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., is covered floor to ceiling with George Washington wallpaper inspired by 18th and 19th century designs, as well as numerous portraits and souvenirs ranging from the 1830s to the present. It is, appropriately enough, titled “Washington Mania.”
“We’re going as over the top as possible,” said Larissa Randall, the show’s curator.
While Washington is perhaps the most famous image associated with America’s beginnings, the adjacent room offers the opposite experience. “Moments of History,” displays 250 photos by unknown artists of unknown people doing everyday things like blowing out birthday candles and posing during road trips. The photos, which range from the 1930s to the 1980s come from the Peter J. Cohen collection of vernacular photos.
The exhibition, which is divided into eight sections and runs through July 27, includes a number of participatory events, such as on-site quilting and Sheryl Oring, an artist known for her “I Wish to Say,” performances, where people dictate to her and she transcribes their words.
In the room “Democracy and Dialogue,” Oring’s own work appears on the wall — Xeroxes with phrases such as “Education Should Not Be a Privilege” and “Lead with Integrity.” She is also performing multiple times during the exhibition, Randall said. She will be dressed like an old-fashioned secretary, and visitors can answer her questions: ”What does independence mean to you?” and she will type the answers on a manual typewriter. Those responses will be posted on a wall in the room.
Regeneration
“Regeneration: Long Island’s Pursuit of Ecological Art and Care,” is the “life” part of the Parrish Art Museum’s yearlong program “USA250: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
“Regeneration,” which consists of 76 works by 11 artists with the theme of “how humans have interacted with the natural environment,” said Monica Ramirez-Montagut, president of the regional museum, which is based in Water Mill, N.Y., on the East End of Long Island.
A central point of the exhibition is art by Sara Siestreem, a Native American artist from Oregon, who created her pieces in collaboration with a Long Island collective of Shinnecock Indian Nation kelp farmers. The five works, which were commissioned for the show, consist of 30 objects, including panel boards covered with acrylic, graphite, and Xerox copies and 13 ceramic baskets that are made with a combination of materials like tobacco, kelp and beads.
Two other featured artists are Scott Bluedorn and Cindy Pease Roe, both of whom incorporate in their works — in very different ways — discarded material found locally.
And a piece initially made for the Parrish, which is now housed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, is back on loan for the exhibition: Maya Lin’s “Bay, Pond and Harbor” depicts three East End bodies of water using recycled silver.
“We can actually tell the whole history of the country through what happened in the East End,” Ramirez-Montagut said. Not all the big chapters of American history happened in the major central cities.”
Some other options for those seeking ways to commemorate the anniversary through art:
Fairfield (Conn.) University Art Museum, “For Which it Stands …” through July 25
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Revolution!” through Aug. 6
History Colorado in Denver, “Moments That Made Us,” through Oct. 18
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness,” through the end of the year.
The Peoria (Ill.) Riverfront Museum, “The Promise of Liberty,” through Jan. 3, 2027.
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