Many of the Smithsonian’s recent troubles revolve around the misapprehension that its museums praise—and should praise—anything they show. The Trump administration seems animated by the conviction that Smithsonian museums use this power to advance a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” Perhaps for this reason, last year’s White House budget contained no funding for the not-yet-built Museum of the American Latino or for the Anacostia Community Museum, which is the Smithsonian’s only museum dedicated to the city it calls home. The latter is housed in a small, inviting building—there’s free coffee in the lobby—in a residential Black neighborhood a few Metro stations from the National Mall. It costs far less than most of its counterparts to run, making the threat to defund it read as hostility to the thought that ordinary Washingtonians deserve inclusion in the Smithsonian and, by extension, in the American story.
I visited the Anacostia Community Museum recently to see “A Bold and Beautiful Vision: A Century of Black Arts Education in Washington, D.C., 1900–2000.” D.C. is the home of the country’s oldest Black high school—Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, founded 84 years before Brown v. Board of Education began the process of school desegregation—and the exhibit traces its teachers’ and graduates’ influence on generations of nationally significant Black artists. One is Hank Willis Thomas, whose work I’d just seen at MOCA; another is Sam Gilliam, a Color School painter whose enormous, beautiful draped canvas Relative I’ve often visited in the National Gallery of Art, where it occupies 13.5 feet of wall. Its installment there is a statement of historical importance: It’s next to Helen Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea, generally considered one of the most influential Abstract Expressionist works to come after Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. By pairing them, the National Gallery’s curators seem to be arguing that Gilliam’s art, which has never received the same attention as Frankenthaler’s, matters just as much.
At the Anacostia Community Museum, Gilliam’s work tells another story entirely. “A Bold and Beautiful Vision” contains three of his paintings, presented not as grand works but as approachable examples of a former D.C. public-school art teacher’s achievement. Museumgoers’ drawings hang near them, suggesting continuity between Gilliam, who died in 2022, and the young artists of today’s D.C. Whereas the National Gallery includes Gilliam in a narrative formerly dominated by white painters, the Anacostia Community Museum uses him to include its visitors in the sweep of American art.