Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Narrative
Two hundred and fifty years of America—in objects.
By Monica Nelson
Every day we inch closer to July 4, 2026, America is heating up. The sun is streaming through the temporary decals on the windows of Bank of America that read, “Celebrating 250 Years of the American Dream.” Printed summer picnic plates at Walmart go viral for their wording, “United States of America, 1776–2026.”
As people prepare for our nation’s “birthday,” and skim over the unpronounceability of the word “semiquincentennial” in articles about Donald J. Trump building a 250-foot neoclassical white marble arch in Washington, D.C., or the English architect Norman Foster designing a time capsule to commemorate the lasting allyship of Britain and America, the idea of “history” floats around like parade confetti. It is 2026—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At a moment when fewer and fewer people agree on what the great experiment we call “America” even is, a uniting factor is: things. New things, old things, red, white, and blue things.
America’s historical narrative rests largely on object narratives: the beads the Dutch used to purchase Manhattan, the Liberty Bell, the bus that Rosa Parks sat on. Objects are convenient symbols for whole swaths of experience, standing in for histories that are rarely as tidy as their material remains. Objects do what language no longer can. They are sturdy metaphors, unmoving, unflinching, and primed for assimilation. We give objects value with narrative, and vice versa: stories absorb value through objects.
The semiquincentennial is, officially, a federal initiative. A cry for programming. An invitation to the rodeo. Cultural institutions have answered the brief with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The Metropolitan Museum has a range of objects displayed in a small exhibit titled Revolution!, including an engraving designed by Benjamin Franklin, which depicts Britannia as a woman with her limbs removed, a teapot that says “No Stamp Act,” and the Antislavery medallion designed by Josiah Wedgwood. Carnegie Hall’s season festival, “United in Sound,” spans more than 35 concerts. The Smithsonian has organized Our Shared Future: 250 across its 21 museums and over 200 affiliates. The American Folk Art Museum has mounted Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States. PBS is airing Ken Burns’s12-hour, six-part documentary series, “The American Revolution.” Opening this month at the Huntington Library is a show titled This Land Is …, which borrows its title from an object on display: a guitar owned by Woody Guthrie. Also on exhibit, digging further into the land theme, is a hand-drawn design for a garden at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson, and a collection of photographs by Japanese American flower farmers in Los Angeles before and after the Japanese internment during World War II. Elsewhere, there are tall ships, drone light shows, commemorative coins, and a small fleet of “Freedom Trucks,” designed in part by conservative endeavor PragerU and led by the current administration, are going on tour as mobile museums where each visitor is greeted by an AI-animated painting of George Washington.
The efforts to historicize this moment in history have taken to the sky, the sea, the heart, and the land. What the semiquincentennial has not managed to produce, despite considerable effort, is a feeling. And that feeling, perhaps, is patriotism? Pride? Purpose? What we have instead is a vast collection of objects tasked with representing 250 years of narrative. What is on display is a dutiful, albeit lazy, response to a national mandate to historicize a moment for which there is no real collective spirit.
A few weeks ago, I stood in front of two painted maple side chairs on the lower floor of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in a small exhibition tied to the museum’s America 250 focus. The exhibit’s placement in the basement had no particular markings other than a version of the America 250 logo and wall text describing the Federal style and key late-18th-century American decorative arts movements. Employed widely during this period, these styles drew on the visual motifs of the European past and flattened them just enough to feel modern. The two chairs, from “Boston or Salem, Massachusetts, 1790–1800,” sit angled toward each other as if in polite conversation. Identical in design, both have silk upholstery fastened to spare cushioned seats by brass tacks. Their oval backs are painted with faux ormolu, floral embellishments, and ribbons. The only difference is color: One has a dark brown frame and pale yellow-striped jacquard seat; the other is painted white with gold ormolu and powder-blue moiré silk.
What did these chairs intend to communicate about America in the years just after independence? Their trompe-l’œil finishes—the look of gilding without its cost—are reminiscent of the linen floorcloths painted to look like marble in Southern antebellum mansions, or the colorful architectural elements flattened and rendered symbolic in the work of postmodern architects like Charles Moore. They are likely part of the “American Fancy” period, which relished in the presentation of ornament for ornament’s sake. More than any cohesive narrative, the side chairs brought to mind a line from Susan Sontag’s posthumously published journals, a prose-y thought sitting on the page unattached to anything else: “An essay with no ideas: description + modulations of description.”
Two hundred and fifty years ago, America began to design itself. Shaking off its colonial past, everything got a bit bigger, cleaner, and more established-looking. Having achieved independence some 30 years into the Neoclassical movement, the use of Palladian porticos with tall Corinthian columns, domed roofs, and Roman cubic proportions served as a potent reference for the country’s developing aesthetic identity. America wanted to appear as virtuous and stable as a Herculaneum ruin. The pride of the young republic was also evident in the development of symbolic representations of patriotism; the bald eagle, in particular, was chosen to represent strength and freedom. In early American antiques, eagles are everywhere. They are cast in brass, depicted in furniture motifs, carved in stone on buildings, woven into textiles, etched in metalwork and silver serving sets, and illustrated on porcelain. Like the painted ormolu of the chairs, the motif was symbolic. The look of a nation that wanted to rush its stability, to appear as if it had already arrived.
In 1876, during the nation’s centennial, the United States hosted its first official World’s Fair in Philadelphia. The sole purpose of the exposition was to showcase the country’s prowess through a citywide display of material goods and architecture. The 1876 fair was, in this sense, the Federal style writ large: aspiration dressed as fact, a trompe-l’œil finish applied to an entire city. Ten million visitors moved through Fairmount Park that summer, past the Corliss steam engine, the halls of textile machinery and silver plate and decorative furniture, and paid 25 cents to look at the torch-bearing arm of an unfinished Statue of Liberty. The official story was one of arrival. America, in its 100 years of freedom, was thriving. What the fair’s gleaming display cases could not accommodate was the counter-history running alongside it. Frederick Douglass, a guest of note but almost denied admission, later spoke of the conspicuous absence of Black Americans from a celebration of a freedom that had not been universally conferred. The fair’s “folk,” its artisans, its laborers, the hands behind the made things, were present only in posterity and only now “in plain sight,” as the historian Mabel O. Wilson says.
Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States, on view now at the American Folk Art Museum, is quietly circling some of these same ideas. The show traces how vernacular objects, weathervanes, quilts, trade signs, and carved portraits became shorthand for an idea of authentic American identity. It places objects as descriptions and representations. “Folk,” however, was never a neutral category. It developed alongside the art and antiques markets. Many collectors and dealers cite the enthusiasm surrounding the 1974 exhibition “The Flowering of American Folk Art” at the Whitney Museum of American Art as the birth of the folk art movement in antiques. It was also the brink of the Bicentennial (which, arguably, had way better branding than our current moment). Terms like “folk,” “nation,” and “patriotism,” as the museum’s curatorial team notes, carry layered and contested meanings. Objects were granted cultural significance not only by the people who made them, but also by collectors and institutions who deemed them legible as national symbols.
“America has a patchwork culture made of the dreams and songs of all its people,” Alan Lomax said of his work as an ethnomusicologist. In a project called An American Patchwork, Lomax traveled throughout the American South and Southwest from 1978 to 1985 to document regional folklore, music, traditions, and dance. Much of this is housed at the Library of Congress, not in any assemblage around the number 250. The music exists in the walls of the building, where he recorded many musicians, including a nine-hour session with Jelly Roll Morton in 1938. I sat in those archives the rest of the day I was in Washington, D.C. The documentation is a body of work that exists as a quilt does, an assemblage of other things of feeling, of something maybe like patriotism, of something more, something maybe, American.
There is a current curatorial theme in line with Sontag’s “essay with no ideas.” One that relies on objects as modes of description. Narrative is lacking, unraveling. Objects are honest. They hold their shape. They don’t equivocate. They sit in contrast with each other. The space between is what creates meaning, not the written description. The great experiment, at 250 years, is still legible in objects, in trompe-l’œil chairs and Liberty quilts and even Freedom Trucks. ⌂