More than a century and a half ago, the American Civil War filled the streets of Washington, D.C., with soldiers: Union conscripts marched and drilled, and the wounded from both sides filled makeshift hospitals all over town. Confronted with the “unprecedented anguish of wounded & suffering” he saw, Walt Whitman moved from Brooklyn to Washington to succor America’s “beautiful young men,” as he explained in an 1865 letter to William O’Connor, a friend from his day job at the Department of the Interior. Day and night, he changed their bandages, gave them fruits and sweets, wrote letters home for them, stayed by their bedside, held their hands, and wiped their brows.The cavernous marble halls of the Old Patent Office Building where Whitman once tended the troops are now home to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). For nearly a year beginning last November, SAAM has had on view “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibition that, in March, became the first ever to be attacked by name in a presidential executive order—the Crispus Attucks of our latest cultural revolution. To any regular museumgoer, the curators’ thesis is as conventional as their approach: to examine how sculpture influenced and reflected the understanding of race throughout American history. Curators Karen Lemmey, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura have placed works by contemporary artists among two centuries of sculptures drawn from SAAM’s permanent collection. The strength, depth, and complexity of the older works in the show is a revelation, utterly refuting the misconception that disparate experiences of race in a fundamentally multiracial country are somehow a recent liberal fixation. In every era, it turns out, Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives mattered to artists.Aaron J. Goodelman: Kultur, 1939, in “The Shape of Power.”©1940 Aaron J. Goodelman/Smithsonian American Art MuseumThe exhibition, on view through September 14, begins with the Founders. Titus Kaphar’s Monumental Inversion: George Washington (2017) features an array of amorphous glass blobs tumbling out of a partial mold of the first president on horseback. At the show’s center is Luis Jiménez’s monumental, airbrushed fiberglass Man on Fire (1969), depicting Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, set ablaze by Spanish soldiers. Both works depict the American origin stories we tell ourselves. Kaphar’s glass vessels, seductive and fragile, bear the traces of the negative form that shaped them. Jiménez’s figure, made a decade before Kaphar was even born, transformed his grandmother’s tales of a defiant martyr into a godlike superhero striding out of a Jack Kirby comic.Toward the end, “The Shape of Power” addresses lynching. Though racist violence continues, the metaphorical lynching in Nari Ward’s Swing (2010), a sneaker-studded tire suspended from a noose, does not land as powerfully as two adjacent works from the early 20th century, when lynching in America was at its height. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller created In Memory of Mary Turner as a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence (1919) as a memorial to a young woman, eight months pregnant, who was lynched in Georgia for protesting the lynching of her husband the day before. In the painted plaster maquette, an angelic mother holding a baby ascends from a cloud of angry faces. The monument has yet to be realized. Nearby is Kultur (1939), Aaron J. Goodelman’s attenuated pearwood figure of a Black man, hands shackled above his head. Goodelman, who had escaped the Russian pogroms and settled in New York, participated in exhibitions calling for racial solidarity against lynching. According to the work’s label, he chose the title for contemporary reasons: to condemn “the Nazi concept of cultural superiority.” Nearly a century later, with fascism again ascendant, it’s not such a mystery why this exhibition was attacked.Isaac Julien’s Portrait in Blue: Essex Hemphill (1996/2005) featured in “Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings,” at the Phillips Collection.Downtown Washington had largely emptied out by the time Trump’s ill-attended army birthday parade started on June 14. Instead, everyone, it seemed, was at the Phillips Collection in Dupont Circle for a raucous poetry jam celebrating the life and work of poet, artist, and AIDS activist Essex Hemphill, who died in 1995. (Staffers scrambled to accommodate an overflow crowd.) The event accompanied a posthumous portrait of Hemphill in the form of an exhibition, “Take care of your blessings” (on view through August 31). The hallucinatory images of Portrait in Blue: Essex Hemphill, a 2005 video work by Isaac Julien assembled from behind-the-scenes footage of Julien’s Looking for Langston (1991), which featured Hemphill’s voice, play on a monitor in one gallery. Mounted on the wall next to it, diagonal like a dark Flavin, is Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s 2017 readymade sculpture, The Brass Rail (after Essex). The worn brass handrail invokes Hemphill’s poetic ode to the raunchy basement of a lost DC hustler and drag queen bar which, early in the AIDS crisis, hosted one of the first HIV prevention outreach programs targeting Black men.Tiona Nekkia McClodden: The Brass Rail (After Essex), 2017; in “Take care of your blessings.”Courtesy the artistDownstairs from the Hemphill exhibition hangs the bedrock of the museum’s permanent collection: the half of Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel Migration Series (1940–41) that founder Duncan Phillips acquired in 1942. The last time the museum’s odd-numbered panels were reunited with their even-numbered counterparts, owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was in the fall of 2016. It closed the following January, just weeks before Trump’s first inauguration.Race, politics, history, science, gender, freedom, violence, hope, revolt, and union have always been as intrinsic to art and culture as beauty and aesthetics have been. Museums are a bulwark preserving these objects and presenting these shared histories. Maybe things look different in the growing light of other burning institutions. But at this perilous moment when they’re also under increasing attack, Washington’s museums, public and private, large and small, contemporary and historic, have never felt more interconnected and aligned in telling this country’s rich, complicated, infuriating, and promising story.Felix Gonzalez-Torres: “Untitled” (Leaves of Grass), 1993; in “Always to Return,” at the National Portrait Gallery.Photo Matailong Du/©Estate Felix Gonzalez-Torres/Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres FoundationAlways lingering in Washington, the spirit of Walt Whitman has loomed large amid the current cultural conflict. A portion of the last stanza of his 1865 poem “The Wound-Dresser” is engraved near the entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro station, as part of a memorial to the caregivers of D.C. residents who died of AIDS-related complications and “other devastating illness.” But when it was installed in 2007, the poem’s final two lines—“(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)”—were deemed too homoerotic, and were omitted. As a corrective of sorts, they were finally installed, at least for a season, at the National Portrait Gallery. In “Always to return,” an exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s portrait-related work organized with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, curators Josh T Franco and Charlotte Ickes added Whitman’s censored lines to “Untitled” (1989), a text frieze portrait most closely associated with the artist himself.Dubbed a “queer elder” of Gonzalez-Torres by the curators, Whitman presided over an exultation of homosocial love and mourning in the very rooms where he once tended his dying beloveds. Gonzalez-Torres’s light string, “Untitled” (Leaves of Grass), 1993, hung at the center of a darkened gallery between Thomas Eakins’s photograph of Walt Whitman, and “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, an endlessly replenished candy pile named after the artist’s lover Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS-related causes the year the work was created. In recent years the presentation of this work in particular has drawn criticism for “queer erasure,” as its owner, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the artist’s galleries and foundation have decentered or omitted its gay or autobiographical associations. Inexplicably, those critiques were lodged here too, at a historically nuanced show that might have been the queerest installation of Gonzalez-Torres’s work this century.View of Isaac Julien’s five-channel video installation Lessons of the Hour, 2019, at the National Portrait Gallery.Photo Mark Gulezian/©Isaac Julien/Courtesy Victoria Miro, London and VeniceElsewhere in the Old Patent Office Building is Lessons of the Hour (2019), Isaac Julien’s magisterial portrait of Frederick Douglass. On view through 2026, the semiquincentennial of the United States, the five-channel video installation weaves together many threads of Douglass’s life: reenactments of iconic speeches like “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”; his prescient analysis of photography’s role in the construction of a free, Black self-image; a lynching tree on the Maryland plantation from which he escaped enslavement; his celebrated speaking tours abroad; scenes filmed at Cedar Hill, his home in the southeast quadrant of Washington; and the often unsung labor of his wives. His first wife, Anna Murray, financed his manumission, while his second wife, Helen Pitts, disowned by her white abolitionist family for marrying Douglass, fought to preserve his legacy, which has never felt more vital or relevant.On a recent visit to Cedar Hill, now a national historic site, the visitor center was packed with students on field trips, shuttling between Douglass’s 15-acre hilltop home and the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum nearby. The home itself was quiet, as a local historian working for AmeriCorps, a public service program currently being dismantled, led a small group tour. Murray’s powerful presence is felt less in the room where Julien reenacted her sewing Douglass’s suits than in the magnolia tree he planted outside his library window after her death in 1882. It now towers over the house. Beyond that sits the Growlery, the small hut to which Douglass would retreat to growl in solitude whenever his traumas resurged. Pitts strove mightily to keep the house and its contents, including Douglass’s books, art, and furniture, together. After her death, journalist Ida B. Wells took up the cause, rallying the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs to establish Cedar Hill as “a sort of Mount Vernon” for Black America.Artist and art professor Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) in her classroom at Howard University (c. 1930s), where she taught and mentored students for nearly 50 years.Scurlock Studio Records, National Museum of American HistoryThe scene at Anacostia was livelier as schoolchildren on a scavenger hunt raced around an exhibition honoring some of Washington’s more famous art teachers. In the segregated 20th century, teaching in D.C.’s public schools was one of the few art-related jobs available to Black artists, and so the roster included such major figures as Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam, Lou Stovall, David C. Driskell, and Elizabeth Catlett. The show, on view through January 4, is dense, scrappy, and exuberant, focusing as much on each of their individual artistic contributions as on their collective impact in the community.Catlett is currently the subject of a major traveling retrospective, which was on view at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) through June. That show opened with a gallery devoted to her first major print series, “The Black Woman…” (1946–47), 14 linoleum cuts that show the contributions and labor of Black women to the fabric of the United States. At the NGA, its presentation was drawn from multiple museum collections. Meanwhile the prints at Anacostia are a complete set that once hung at Dunbar High School, the first Black high school in the US, from which Catlett graduated and where she later taught.Anacostia’s tiny bustling museum opened in 1967 as a sort of institutional reparation and civic experiment for D.C.’s most historically underserved neighborhood, and pioneered the concept of community-based museums. Its small scale and local integration give it a distinct character within the Smithsonian, grounding how the institution tells history as it’s made. In 1994, as tens of thousands of Cubans fled to the US for refuge, Anacostia exhibited and then acquired a tiny dinghy made of pitch-covered Styrofoam scraps. In 1992 two Cuban men had been rescued in this makeshift boat on the open sea by the US Coast Guard. It is now one of the most prominent objects in an exhibition previewing the forthcoming National Museum of the American Latino, approved by Congress in 2020 after nearly three decades of advocacy. The current administration is demanding the elimination of both institutions.Installation view of “Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960,” 2024–27; at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.Smithsonian InstitutionBack on the National Mall, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a slowly revolving series of deep cuts into the 12,000 works donated to the nation by uranium magnate Joseph Hirshhorn. The result is an embarrassment of riches. Hirshhorn’s voracious collecting extended far beyond his bulk purchases of canonical modernists like Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, and Henry Moore. Interspersed here are a First Nation portrait by early Canadian modernist Emily Carr; a tangled Ben Shahn that could be a Louis Fratino; scenes of domestic midcentury life by multiple Haitian students of Florine Stettheimer; and a wall full of Latin American abstraction that could have emerged from Anni Albers, one of whose early textiles hangs next to them.Unfortunately, the museum’s curatorial program has downshifted so dramatically, it may take another 50 years to mine the hidden treasures in Hirshhorn’s gift. Stunt shows prevail, and temporary installations seem to have settled in for the long haul. For more than a year, beginning this past September, the entire lower level has emptied out for an exhibition of a work apiece by Banksy and Jean-Michel Basquiat, two tourist-friendly artists who are sure to draw a crowd, to a show that says next to nothing. The only thing to say about “Endless Story,” the museum’s massive, kitschy Osgemeos show, is that it does feel endless.Installation view of “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” 2025–27; at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.Photo Andy Romer/©Adam PendletonStill, it’s harder to complain that eight years later, one of the Hirshhorn’s inner gallery loops is still filled with Mark Bradford’s painting cycle Pickett’s Charge, a reference to the failed Confederate assault during the Battle of Gettysburg. Civil war is back? Baby, it never left. And now Adam Pendleton gets his turn in the barrel. The other inner gallery ring is lined like a zoetrope with a series of large canvases in Pendleton’s signature graphic black print and paint. Its locus is a black-box gallery showing the 2024–25 video Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), an intense new iteration of a work exhibited at MoMA in 2022. It revisits the lost promises of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which aimed to unify the causes of racial and economic justice, and which was to end in a massive encampment on the Mall. In the wake of King’s assassination, the tumult, logistics, and weather conspired to leave Resurrection City a mess—a promise unrealized. Pendleton’s 9-minute video plays once every half hour, alternating with a 21-minute screensaver. Televising a revolution that’s two-thirds empty feels right where D.C. is at these days.Dario Robleto: Until We Are Forged: Hymns for the Elements, 2023–25; in “Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World,” at the National Gallery of Art.Courtesy the artistThe trail of ladybug stickers on the floor of the NGA seemed at first like an overly cute lure to an education department honeypot. Instead, it led to the exhibition “Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World,” a ravishing, desperate rallying cry for our civilization. Almost 500 years ago, after decades of religious persecution and war, Dutch artist-explorers like Joris Hoefnagel and Jan van Kessel began making exquisite paintings of insects and other “little beasts” that helped usher in a scientific and philosophical revolution in how humans see the world.The artistic objects on view, created at the dawn of the modern scientific era, are the first of their kind, but they are also proxies for every object our civilization has deemed important, beautiful, or inspiring enough to be remembered, preserved, and displayed in museums. Their conservation has been documented by Dario Robleto in Until We Are Forged: Hymns for the Elements (2023–25), a 43-minute video commissioned by the NGA. The conservators’ meticulous efforts are driven by the faith—or at least the hope—that someone far in the future will receive an object and continue its appreciation, study, and care.It is not guaranteed. The wars Hoefnagel was born into had already laid waste to the Flemish workshops that once made the most intricate tapestries in the world. Those techniques have never been recovered. The Taliban at Bamiyan, the US at the Baghdad Museum, ISIS at Palmyra: What cannot be instrumentalized for power would be destroyed. These museums and the systems that created them and the culture they preserve are now under actual, not hypothetical threat of a kind already too common in this century. Museums are filled with people dedicated to remembering. It is on the rest of us to protect them—and us all. A version of this article appears in the annual Top 200 Collectors issue, under the title “Around Washington, D.C.”