‘Dear America’ at the National Gallery: an invitation to national self-examination

While the Smithsonian National Museum of American History endures accusations from the Trump administration’s thought police of “radical activist ideology” on their celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the National Gallery of Art seems fortunate to have escaped similar attacks. “Dear America: Artists Explore the American Experience” is the title of its stirring contribution to our country’s self-examination, and until September 20 it will be helping us to discover ourselves.

Anyone entering the Gallery’s 6th Street entrance to the West Building is offered first an overture of four pale-green galleries that handsomely present an unrivalled collection of colonial furniture from the major cities of early America. Interspersed among the gleaming wood and china are some of the Gallery’s finest paintings by John Singleton Copley, Rembrandt Peale, Gilbert Stuart (a full fourteen, including the Vaughan-Sinclair portrait of George Washington) and Thomas Sully (his incomparable bust of Andrew Jackson).

“Dear America,” which unfolds in the galleries that follow, is conceived as a letter from its artists to the public. Beginning with a thrilling room of knock-out pieces—Gordon Parks’s iconic photograph of “Government Charwoman” Ella Watson (1942), an Andy Warhol “Marilyn Monroe,” a stellar Robert Rauschenberg (though no Jasper Johns), Carrie Mae Weems’s haunting chromogenic print “Echoes for Marian” (Marian Anderson standing alone before the Lincoln Monument, from 2014), Roy Lichtenstein’s “I Love Liberty” (1982)—the exhibition shows how “artists bear witness” through the three themes of landscape, community and freedom.

Many visitors will be familiar with imagery of our vast land. We owe to Thomas Moran his commission of a series of photographs of the West. The great photographers Margaret Bourke-White and Ansel Adams brought both reporting and poetry to similar scenes. Clare Romano’s “Grand Canyon” (1977) is an abstract triumph, and Jane Hammond’s “The Wonderfulness of Downtown” simply seductive. You feel as well as see the dedication of the curators—Angelica Becerra, Sarah Greenough, Rena Hoisington and Shelley Langdale—when you come upon Alfred Stieglitz’s urban photograph, “From My Window at the American Place, North” (1931), hung cater-corner to Thomas Hart Benton’s rural “Departure of the Joads” (1939).

The exhibit climaxes in the largest single gallery of writings on community, featuring a gallery of 69 photographic portraits of prominent public figures by Richard Avedon. A patriotic series of American scenes by Tom Jones of the Ho-Chink Nation—after which “Dear America” is named—also hang inside. And John Wilson’s arresting model for his unfinished suite “Young Americans,” portraying his own children and their friends (1973-75), fairly jumps from the wall. As do other outsiders—Ruth Asawa’s interned Japanese father, gay men and women in varying social settings and Jacob Lawrence’s “Migrants Casting Their Ballots,” from his Great Migration series of 1974.

Two final galleries cast searing light on the theme of freedom, “a constant choice and pursuit,” the curators tell us, beginning with Edward Savage’s print of Thomas Jefferson presenting his draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress. Here too are prints of Paul Revere’s “The Boston Massacre” (1770), photos of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, soldiers from the Civil War and World War II—freedom costs lives—and a marvelous, partly abstract lithograph by Maya Freelon, “Look Down on War” (2009).

Throughout this memorable tribute to the nation, the work of the community and the committed individual weave stirringly together. Of the former, few objects are more arresting than Juan Sanchez’s color offset lithograph “Confused Paradise” (1996) with its inverted palm tree bearing the sun symbol of the Taino people, the original inhabitants of the Caribbean and his native Puerto Rico. But you may remember best John Wilson’s searingly sober etching of Martin Luther King Jr. in the same final gallery. Most praised for his bronze bust of King commissioned for the rotunda of the U. S. Capitol, Wilson sends us out from the exhibition with the solemn injunction to go and do likewise.