On Tuesday, President Donald Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to again denounce the Smithsonian. The museum network, he claimed, has only devoted itself to showing “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.” But his splenetic outburst also had a broader target: not only “Museums throughout Washington,” but also ones “all over the Country,” which he described as “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’”
“How bad Slavery was”? That’s not really the only thing these museums aim to portray. The comment itself suggests a limited and dangerous perspective on those institutions.
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Consider the galleries of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), one of the many institutions run by the Smithsonian. Those galleries do present the transatlantic slave trade as a horrible, violent institution, so Trump is at least correct in that regard. The NMAAHC’s collection testifies to this reality: visitors can find a pair of ankle shackles that bound enslaved men together, old photographs of constrictive structures used to hold people as property, and an 1848 advertisement that promises a $250 reward for the capture of “3 Negro Girls” described as runaways, among other objects. But here’s where Trump is off base: the NMAAHC is equally focused on notions of survival and liberation.
Within this same collection, visitors can also find a handkerchief owned by Harriet Tubman, and a monument to her, too, in the form of a 2007 sculpture by Alison Saar that depicts Tubman marching toward the South. In the galleries for visual art, there are prints by Jacob Lawrence that depict episodes from the life of white abolitionist John Brown, though he is not always the main subject of these works. One 1977 print shows Brown turned around, with his back to the viewer, alongside a group of liberated Black men who stare back at us unflinchingly.
On its website, the NMAAHC clearly outlines the goals of its gallery titled “Slavery and Freedom,” describing one of its core concepts as such: “African Americans constantly and consistently created new visions of freedom that have benefited all Americans.” Those visions of the freedom are the ones that Trump seems to ignore in favor of reacting to perceived slights when he decries exhibitions about “how bad Slavery was.” These shows are just as much about perseverance as they are about tragedy.
That, at least, was evident in one of the greatest Washington, D.C., shows in recent memory, “Afro-Atlantic Histories,” which appeared in 2022 at the National Gallery of Art, an institution that is not a part of the Smithsonian. A truncated and revised version of an acclaimed exhibition that debuted in São Paulo in 2018, this sprawling show centered around enslavement as it impacted peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, marshaling a range of artistic responses from both the past and present. Some works graphically pictured the violence wrought against enslaved people by white Americans and Europeans. One work featured here was a 2017 Arthur Jafa piece that appropriated an 1863 photograph known as The Scourged Back, in which an escaped man named Gordon bares his back to the camera, making visible his web of scars.
But the message of the show, given its focus on liberty and persistence, was ultimately uplifting. In the catalog, curators Adriano Pedrosa, Hélio Menezes, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, and Tomás Toledo noted, “The violent everyday conditions of slavery cannot be fully grasped without taking into consideration the utopia of freedom: a permanent aspiration for the Africans who were forcibly taken to the Americas.” Accordingly, there were also works such as a 2013 photograph by Nona Faustine for which the artist disrobed in New York’s Financial District, a site where a market for enslaved people once stood. It was an act that Faustine described as a “huge risk,” given that she could’ve been arrested for public indecency, and one that evinces a good deal of strength and courage on her part.
As National Gallery of Art curator Kanitra Fletcher noted in an interview with Culture Type, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” was “not just about slavery, but really what has been born from a terrible experience.” Significantly, she said it was also about “how the African Diaspora comprises all these voices and lives and experiences.”
Those experiences might have a place in his country’s museums, Trump suggests—if only some of their core elements are dropped from the narrative. That’s a dangerous proposition, because it risks further warping the country’s history until it is no longer accurate.
Trump has now promised that his lawyers will investigate museums. What will they be searching for, and what will they do with this information? He didn’t say in his Truth Social post, perhaps because it isn’t clear what legal authority he would have to require changes to the country’s institutions. But I suspect he is seeking to force—or at least to scare—museums into editing their presentations about enslavement, a gesture that would presumably involve removing from view artworks with themes of liberation.
As it currently stands, the NMAAHC and other Smithsonian museums have continued to exhibit those works, which is a hopeful sign.
Visitors can, for example, visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum and admire Martin Puryear’s Vessel (1997–2002), a wood sculpture of an oversized head containing an ampersand. Thanks in part to its title, the sculpture has commonly been compared to a slave ship, a line of thinking reinforced by other Puryear works whose titles more explicitly reference enslavement. (His 2014 Slavery Memorial, on view at Brown University, remains one of the more striking public artworks about the subject.) But the ampersand inside this head is telling, for it seems to communicate that Puryear is making art about enslavement and other topics. Vessel isn’t only a work about “how bad Slavery was.” It’s about that, and much more.
