It is a strange thing to visit a museum these days—especially in Washington, D.C. I have restlessly visited galleries in this town for almost twenty years; in fact, I moved here largely because of the city’s large network of free cultural institutions. I was hoping to immerse myself in the world of art without paying dearly for the privilege. In my early years, I traveled to the National Mall nearly every day and methodically made my rounds through the National Gallery of Art and the various Smithsonian art collections. In this way I gradually became adept at identifying canonical artists and their work; I learned about art movements and rivalries and how art circulates into the wider world—sometimes through persistent effort by the artist, sometimes via happenstance, and oftentimes just dumb luck.
After a few years in D.C. I got a job that enabled me to visit Europe with some regularity, and I also began traveling abroad for literary work. The first thing I did upon landing in a foreign country was to find the local art museums. During my visits to galleries in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and elsewhere, I noticed that each dutifully covered the expected art history beats; even when an enterprising curator altered the timeline or placed certain pieces into unexpected configurations I saw the same artists repeatedly.
One afternoon, during a particularly busy month of travel, I found myself in a modern art museum in Cologne, Germany. As my knowledgeable guide walked me through the galleries I experienced an intense moment of dislocation—the kind of bodily vertigo that unsettles your sense of place and meaning. I was fatigued and unanchored. I scanned my surroundings; everything looked familiar and featureless; the people who were walking past and around me were from everywhere and nowhere. There were no signs, no national markers, just the same paintings I’d seen everywhere else. It was only after my guide led me to a hallway that I saw a placard advertising tours of the Cologne Cathedral. I remembered where I was.
It was at this point, after years of eager wandering, that I began to think of art as a commodity. I still admired many of the pieces I encountered in D.C. and elsewhere, and sought to emulate—in certain ways—the artists who had created them, but for the first time I became aware of how virtually all the museums I’d visited were merely nodes in a larger narrative that advanced a unified and persuasive story about art history. I began to think of these spaces as separate rooms in a kind of world museum, far-flung curators working assiduously to make the same points over and over again.
Of course, I had arrived at this conclusion decades after a range of artists and academics had made similar arguments, and decades after various programs had been launched to address these issues. I had come to visual art as an amateur, someone who had no idea about the vast sums of capital that flowed through and around international art institutions. I had unquestioningly appreciated what these museums showed me, how they changed my relationship with shape and color, the exciting and unexpected ways they reformatted my mind and my heart. But now, whenever I entered a museum, I wondered whether I was complicit in advancing a narrative that inevitably undermined scores of artists, and edged others out altogether.
Like so many others, I stopped visiting museums in 2020. First because of the pandemic, then because of what followed—the global uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd, and the institutional reckonings that rippled outward. Artists and critics began to confront the organizations that had long silenced or sidelined them, and visual art spaces began to shift their programming. Some awkwardly, others meaningfully.
At least one outgrowth of these efforts was on full display in Washington, D.C., during the spring and summer months of 2025, when a few of the major art institutions held exhibitions that commemorated the artistic contributions of Black women artists. The National Gallery of Art staged a retrospective of Elizabeth Catlett’s career that included early drawings from her time at Howard University and the sculptures, paintings, and prints she produced as an artist in full bloom during her later years in Mexico. Three floors above was an installation by Chakaia Booker, whose tire-based sculptures have challenged and expanded the field of abstraction for decades. Across town, the Phillips Collection opened a retrospective of Vivian Browne’s paintings.
As a longtime patron of D.C. museums, I felt this efflorescence of Black art at some of the most prestigious art institutions in the country to be rare and urgent. These museums have shown Black art before and featured Black artists in dialogue with local curators about their art and ambitions, but this was something else. This was evidence that the art-world power brokers were committed to adding additional rooms to their staid world museum. This was an assertion that artists like Catlett and Booker have defined what art is and can be.
Yet these shows were happening at a fraught moment for the arts in the United States. As I made my way through them last month, I felt a profound sense of dread, because President Trump, only a few months into his second term, had already begun his renewed assault on cultural institutions. Funding had been slashed, and right-wing think tanks were placing ideologues on museum boards. Never had I visited a museum with a sinking sensation that I was viewing art on borrowed time, but that’s what I felt as I carefully observed Catlett’s dazzling virtuosity, and then after I climbed to the top of the National Gallery to view Booker’s exquisite tire sculptures. I could not help but wonder if I were witnessing both a triumph and a final gasp, a moment centuries in the making that would soon be unceremoniously abandoned.
It also did not escape my notice that each of these artists were working in an explicitly political key. In my own work as a literary artist I have often batted away requests to work in a similar way; I have always insisted on the importance of “art for art’s sake,” resisting the notion that art by people of color is only valuable when it is overtly commenting on the struggles and setbacks that we have endured over the centuries. The call to produce political art—issued by critics, academics, and even fellow artists—always felt like an unnecessary burden, and compelling evidence that the gatekeepers in the art world remained far more interested in what Black artists and others had experienced and less about who they were. Yet as I studied Catlett and Booker’s work, I wondered about the utility of such art at this moment. To what extent do Black and Brown—or otherwise marginalized—artists have an obligation to create art about their experiences as a means of counteracting a regime that is dedicated to eradicating stories that don’t align with their preferred worldview? Are we all obligated to suspend our various artistic commitments in order to persuade the public of our importance, to show those who come after us that we were active members of The Resistance? Or is doing so merely a kind of capitulation, evidence that the efforts by Trump and his administration to make us spend our days defending ourselves and our art have been successful?
These were the questions that I contemplated as I entered the Elizabeth Catlett exhibition at the National Gallery of Art on a humid May morning. I’ve long known and admired her work, but mostly in fragments: a sculpture here, a print there, a detail in a yellowing textbook. I knew the broad contours of her biography—that she was born in D.C. and studied at Howard University, that she moved to Mexico in the 1940s and remained there for the rest of her life—but nothing much beyond these facts. I was immediately drawn to a piece that did not resemble the few Catlett pieces I’ve seen over the years—a delicate drawing, in charcoal, of a woman sitting on a stool with an indeterminate, almost insouciant expression on her face. Her head is tilted up slightly, and her body is in profile; her right hand grips her waist, and her left rests on her leg. The piece is called Student drawing (woman seated), which is less a title than a description. Catlett produced this image while she was a student at Howard University in 1932.
One of my favorite parts of seeing a retrospective exhibit at a museum is witnessing the growth and trajectory of an artist, from their earliest attempts at honing their voice, to their eventual arrival at their mature phase, where you encounter the art that likely prompted you to visit in the first place. My experience with this exhibit was no different, yet I found the image deeply affecting, though initially I wasn’t sure why. But now I know the answer—it’s because I know what comes next. Whenever I think about that drawing I can see a young Catlett sitting in a classroom, gazing at the model before her and the blank sheet on her desk, her ambition and yearning inscribed in each line. I wonder how the young woman who made this image would react if, by some miraculous feat, she were transported from her Howard classroom in 1932 to this gallery in May 2025, if she had an opportunity to witness all the art she would create in the years to come.
Since we’ve yet to master time travel I took the journey for her, and I marveled at the productivity and mastery of the older Catlett, an artist who was fully in control of her creativity and produced astonishing work in multiple media. Amid the masks and prints and paintings I found myself stopping short before another image—a linocut that Catlett made in 1970 called Watts/Detroit/Washington/Harlem/Newark. On the right side of the image a man peers through the naked frame of a house, which resembles prison bars. At the center two policemen facing opposite directions stand close to each other, almost back to back; the one on the right points his rifle at a Black man encased in a kind of cocoon. The other policeman also has a rifle in his hand, and he’s kicking another cocooned Black man. Two other cocooned men orbit the police officers. The whole scene is awash in red. The wall text notes that “the work marks U.S. cities where dramatic civil unrest followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.”
It’s a dramatic, uncompromising image, stark and resolute in its messaging. Catlett made this print in Mexico, where she had been residing, by then, for almost a quarter-century. Yet even while she was abroad she kept her attention on the Civil Rights movement and the various actors who were involved in that struggle. She produced advertisements for marches and talks, many of them on display in the exhibit, and immortalized the central figures of the movement in her work. She also created art that documented the struggles and triumphs of her neighbors and friends in Mexico, and Mexican laborers who were working to secure their rights. I slowly paced through the exhibit in a kind of daze, reading, studying, and looking, drinking up the imagery as patiently as I could.
After an hour or so I climbed some stairs, took a long escalator up, and then climbed an additional set of stairs before I reached the Chakaia Booker show on the top level of the National Gallery. Before me there were three monumental sculptures that had been affixed to the walls as if they were paintings, but paintings on which the color had gained dimension and mass, the various strokes writhing through and around each other. I knew that Booker had created these sculptures from discarded tires, and that each of the coils, ribbons, and knots I saw were actually scraps of rubber, but I was still not prepared for how utterly arresting they were. On the sculpture before me the coils were proliferating wildly beyond the borders of the piece. On the bordering sculptures the coils and ribbons grew smaller as you scanned each piece from top to bottom, almost as if they were spelling out a message in an unknowable tongue.
Booker began working with tires in the 1990s, collecting discarded ones from the streets of her East Village, New York, neighborhood. Since then, she has become internationally known for her shrewd and dazzling manipulation of this unconventional medium. One point of these sculptures, it seems, is to simply ask us to think about tires, where they come from and who they benefit. The wall text declared that “these products of rubber, plastics and petroleum-based materials that transport us across the globe relate to labor, migration and industrialization,” but I knew that something else is happening in her work, something at once more profound and straightforward.
As I saw these sculptures I thought of the pictures I saw as a graduate student of young Liberians transporting buckets of latex on their shoulders as they worked for almost no compensation in forced labor camps run by the Firestone Corporation. I also thought about the Uber I had taken to the museum almost two hours before, which had shepherded me through the streets of D.C. on tires made from the very same material as the sculptures in this room, piloted by a man who has been classified as an “independent contractor” and is thus subject to exploitation by another multinational company. I see tires constantly, everywhere, every day, and yet I never think about them. These sculptures, made from the detritus of our daily lives, insisted that I look again. Not just at the tires themselves, or the labor and extraction that produced them, but at the kinds of stories we elevate and those we bury. These sculptures asked me to consider the fact that modernity is premised on a kind of willful and perpetual blindness, on the continual act of ignoring what is right in front of you. It occurred to me that his simple act, of asking someone to really look at something they have ceased to see, is itself an explicitly political notion.
I had arrived at the National Gallery with a set of questions, and I left that day not with answers, but with renewed motivation. Catlett and Booker offered dissimilar but complementary approaches to making art at this moment. Catlett’s work is a model of political clarity—bold, direct, unambiguous. Booker’s sculptures offer a different path: they do not sermonize, but instead insist that we pay attention, that we notice what we have been trained to ignore. One kind of work tells you where to look; the other changes how you see. Yet both demand engagement. Both insist that art can hold complexity without losing its spine.
What struck me most about Catlett’s and Booker’s work is that neither succumbs to an externally imposed agenda but deepens—and thereby renews—our relationship with our surroundings. Political art, in this vision, is not simply a reaction to crisis; it is a method of living with and through crisis. It is a refusal to cede the terrain of imagination. In this way, Catlett and Booker show us that the question isn’t whether to make political art, but how to emphasize what is political in our art. Because all art, of course, is political, is attuned to the strictures and possibilities of the moment. Perhaps, then, the most political act one can make as an artist, especially if you are working from the margins, is to create work that offers an unobstructed view of your environment, or the ideas playing out in your mind.
When my Uber pulled up, I paused before getting in and glanced at the tires for a few moments. Then I greeted my driver by name. Small, almost inconsequential acts. But not entirely. They were political acts, evidence that I had been changed by what I had seen. And they were evidence, too, that art—if made with care, vision, and defiance—can outlast the room in which it is placed.
And if we’re lucky, the art we see and make might even teach us how to rebuild the room itself.
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*An essay-review of the exhibitions Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist (9 March–6 July 2025) and Chakaia Booker: Treading New Ground (5 April–3 August 2025) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
