During the 1990s, artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood was driving along the 405 Freeway in San Diego when she spotted a yellow sign showing a man, a woman, and a little girl running in fear from an unseen threat. Above these people was a menacing word: “CAUTION.” The sign, informally known as “Immigrant Crossing,” was meant to warn drivers of illegal immigrants dashing through traffic and was pervasive at the time in California.
What were these migrants fleeing from? The question nagged at Jimenez Underwood, whose father, an undocumented Huichol field worker, was deported multiple times. She returned to it, in 2004, for a work called Run, Jane, Run!, for which she wove a version of the sign in cotton and threaded it with barbed wire. “All of America should see it,” she would later say. “Everyone should see this sign, how we have families running.”
Until last year, all of America could see Run, Jane, Run! in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which owns it. (The piece went off view last April, a museum spokesperson said, due to conservation concerns related to its materials.) At the time, one could see it alongside a 2012 Carrie Mae Weems video installation featuring footage of white supremacist rallies and a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece that maps the flow of refugees from Vietnam to all corners of the world, including the US, following American intervention in that country. All these pieces suggested that artists today are grappling with the ghosts of American history, giving a visual language to specters that some might prefer not to see.
And now, it seems like those in power here would rather let the past stay dead. In an executive order last week, Trump specifically targeted the Smithsonian Institution, saying that his administration would work to root out any “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from its various museums, of which the Smithsonian American Art Museum is but one.
“Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past,” Trump complained, “the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.” He alleged that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of divisive, race-centered ideology” and singled out a current show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” as supposed evidence.
Trump’s language is squishy and ill-defined, and it raises more questions than it answers. (I doubt Trump cares much about Cady Noland’s remarkable sculptures, for example, even though one would be hard pressed to find an artist more closely associated with crafting “anti-American ideology.”) Yet the writing is on the wall: Trump wants to make American art history great again. For him, that means the Smithsonian’s galleries should remain forever the same, thus trapping the canon in amber.
I bring up the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 2023 rehang because it suggested the opposite. The museum’s galleries suddenly showed that recent American art history will never be entirely fixed—that the canon is finally changing to account for women artists, queer artists, and artists of color, all of whom had been shut out of textbooks for so long. And you can see this playing out in other Smithsonian museums as well, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. (The latter was also an explicit target in Trump’s executive order from last week.)
But if Trump’s executive order is instituted by his administration, you can expect all that progress to be undone. That’s a serious threat to the way American art history gets told.
Trump saved most of his bile for the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “Shape of Power” show, which is in part about revisiting the past. Though “The Shape of Power” features a range of famed contemporary artists, including the Golden Lion–winning Simone Leigh, it also includes a smattering of older ones. Among them is Edmonia Lewis, whose 1875 sculpture Hagar depicts an Egyptian woman from the Bible who was impregnated by her enslaver’s husband. Carved from marble during the Reconstruction era, Hagar tells “a story relatable to the recently freed Black women who [Lewis] likely had in mind when she made the work,” as Shantay Robinson wrote in ARTnews earlier this year.
Lewis was working within the Neoclassical mode, recycling the stylings of ancient Greece for a new era concerned with enforcing the abolition of slavery. In that way, Lewis looked to the past and found that it was flexible, moldable for her own purposes. But if fulfilled, Trump’s executive order would ensure that artists cannot do this, because they must now keep telling the same old stories about “American excellence.”
What is “American excellence,” you ask? Trump only barely provides an answer, leaving its meaning purposefully elusive. It’s not difficult to imagine, though, that the terminology will be applied widely, in ways both exclusionary and terrifying. One could conjure a version of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Abstract Expressionism gallery that soon ejects the Ojibwe painter George Morrison, or a version of the feminist art gallery here that purges Judith F. Baca, one of the core members of the Chicano art movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Neither artist is still shown widely in the permanent collection of galleries of most US museums, which still skew white, and Trump very well may wish to keep it that way.
It can be no coincidence that Trump’s executive order comes roughly a year ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary. Next year will be a time of reflection, with many thinking through all that has been excluded from the canon of American art. Right now, the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. bear witness to many figures initially not given their due, but with Trump’s executive order, the canon may revert to its prior iteration—something no one should want.
The good news, at least for now, is that the Smithsonian has not entirely changed. At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, there are still works critical of American history—including a wonderful Kay WalkingStick painting that overlays the Rio Grande with patterns derived from Pueblo pots, asserting an Indigenous presence in a land sometimes denied to Native people. “The Shape of Power,” meanwhile, remains on view, with plans to stay that way through September 14. There are also works that interrogate the very notion of a “race-centered ideology” avant la lettre.
One such work is Barbara Jones-Hogu’s 1969 print While Some Are Trying to Get Whiter, in which Black faces can be seen screaming amid wavy red stripes and hooded Klansmen. Jones-Hogu has said that the work abstracts the American flag, with the Klansmen standing in for its stars. It’s a piece that suggests that the fabric of this very nation is finally coming apart at the seams. Finally, new figures are emerging in the process.
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