Reflections of my Memorial Day 2024 visit to our nation’s Capital

My art-filled visit provided important observations about our country’s unique history and empathetic principles.

One year ago, I arrived at Reagan National Airport to spend Memorial Day week in our nation’s capital, visiting art museums and meeting with people. The art I was about to enjoy featured diverse themes, and was displayed in museums in which people of all races and ethnicities conversed with each other about the work on display.

Our country and especially our capital have changed so much since then that I would feel hesitant to visit D.C. today. Changes include disparagement by our government of any type of art containing themes of diversity, equity and inclusion. And now that the city is preparing for Trump’s June 14 Army Anniversary Parade, I am more concerned. Will D.C.’s buildings be emblazoned with banners bearing Trump’s face? Will workers be bringing in hundreds of aircrafts and vehicles to be paraded down D.C.’s streets?

Yet fond memories bring me back to my 2024 visit there—with the hope that our government will revert back to valuing the kind of diverse, provocative, educational and historical art I’ve admired for decades, along with respecting our workers, constituents and the constitution.

I arrived in D.C. the night before Memorial Day, and toured the National Gallery of Art the next day. Approaching the neoclassical museum building, I was also captivated by the stately U.S. Capitol building two miles in the distance. I reflected on the drama occurring there over the last several years, including the January 6th insurrection, altercations within Congress, and threats to close down the Government.

On that national holiday, while most other museums nationwide were closed, visitors to the National Gallery on Constitution Avenue were friendly and seemingly unconcerned about the divisive politics in our country. Indeed, much of the modern and contemporary art on display conveyed harmony and inclusiveness, providing a respite from our social, political, and environmental clashes. I felt the healing power of art.

Entering the National Gallery, Alexander Calder’s large organically shaped mobile, “Untitled” (1976) soared above the main lobby. The fluid mobile, moving gently to wind currents, beckoned visitors of all ages, races and ethnicities to this palace of art, with work from many countries and genres.

Several exhibitions graced the three-story building. “American Places” included classic mid-20th-century artworks by Ansel Adams, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and others. The compassionate painting Adam Trujillo and His Son, Pat, Taos (1933) by Marjorie Content, depicted a Native American man gently counseling his small son. Philip Evergood’s Sunny Side of the Street (1950) captured African American children playing street hockey at a time when segregation was still prevalent.

These paintings were complemented by American Scene Paintings (20^th century narrative art), along with work by European artists Braque, Kirchner, Matisse, Modigliani, Mondrian and Picasso. Alexander Calder, an exhibition of more than 40 of the artist’s signature mobiles, stabiles, and paintings from the 1920s through 1976, transported me to a magical, uplifting world.

The next day, I visited the Baltimore Museum of Art, 50 miles away, to view Preoccupied, an exhibition of contemporary Indigenous work. The show debunked Native American stereotypes, while addressing colonial influences and attitudes, which have been (and still are) ingrained in white supremacy.

The display Enduring Buffalo addressed the centuries-long invasion of Native American land and lifestyles by European settlers. Didactics explained that the buffalo had long been essential to Indigenous life until colonizers and the U.S. government “attempted to eradicate the species in a calculated strategy to subdue Native people and to force them onto reservations in the late 19th century.” Artworks depicted buffalos and the people hunting them. The display Illustrating Agency expressed how Native American artists are challenging “outsider understandings of Indigenous identity.” This affirmation empowers them in assuming new power into their lives.

Wendy Red Star’s 1880 Crow Peace Delegation (2014)—also displayed in other museums around the country—is a series of digitally manipulated photographs of Native American men from the late 19th century. Many subjects wear Indian regalia, not from their own tribes, but randomly forced on them by white overseers. To each photo, Red Star adds handwritten notations in red ink, expressing what she imagines the defamed subjects to be thinking. One notation reads: “The ground on which we stand is sacred ground. It is the blood of our ancestors.” (Red Star was a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Grant Winner in 2024.)

Returning to Washington, D.C., I visited the Phillips Collection on Dupont Circle. Its extensive collection of American and European modern art is based on founder Duncan Phillips’ belief in art as a source of solace, a link to wellness, and an essential positive force in society. Phillips took risks to collect and exhibit then unknown Modernists soon after opening the venue in 1921. By purchasing work by Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Grandma Moses, Georgia O’Keeffe and others, he helped usher these artists to the center stage of 20th century art. He also championed the work of Mark Rothko, installed in the museum’s “Rothko Room.” Phillips said about his paintings, “They not only invade our consciousness but inspire contemplation.”

A popular Phillips story is about California artist Richard Diebenkorn who visited the Phillips in the 1940s while on Marine duty in Quantico, Virginia. In “The Art of Richard Diebenkorn” (1997), he discusses his encounter with Henri Matisse’s painting, Studio, Quai Saint-Michel (1916), “I noticed its spatial amplitude; one saw a marvelous hollow or room, yet the surface is right there … right up front.” Both the Matisse, which illustrates a woman lying on a daybed alongside an open window, and the similarly structured Diebenkorn painting Interior with View of the Ocean (1957), inspired by the Matisse, are owned by the Phillips.

With the Phillips museum’s passion for inclusiveness, it acquired Migration Series (1940-41) by Jacob Lawrence, often on display there. The lavish suite of 60 small tempera paintings on panel depict the relocation of African Americans from the South to the urban North in the early 20th century. These brightly colored narrative paintings extol the drama of the Great Migration, as a book or course on the subject cannot fully convey.

I concluded my week-long visit to D.C. at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art to view Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960.” With 270 artworks in numerous styles by 126 artists—many of them American and European superstars—the show explored western civilization and daily life during major growth, mechanization and modernization. Revolutions addressed how artists’ new approaches to formalism and aesthetic theories helped propel the art world to embrace modernism and abstraction.

The broad range and depth of what I viewed in our nation’s capital, just one year ago, confirmed the indispensable role of art in nurturing individual growth and social cohesion; my tour provided a testament to the unifying power of art. My experiences there also afforded me with important reflections about our society and its unique history and empathetic mission.

As Memorial Day approaches, I hope and pray that our country will return to the beatific principles as outlined by our founders in The Constitution of the United States, nearly two and a half centuries ago.

Below, Alexander Calder, Untitled (1976), aluminum and steel. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.