For the nation’s 250th birthday, providence has gifted us with the perfect metaphor: the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a site for contemplating America’s ideals and history, now befouled by cheap fixes, corrupt contracts and the hollow promises of a narcissistic autocrat.
While pundits point to the mess on the National Mall as a mirror for the state of the nation on our milestone birthday, a slew of institutions, from the Smithsonian to the Vermont History Museum (see page 42), see our likeness in individual artifacts, unearthed time capsules or revolutionary reenactments. One of the most poignant portraits, and one that feels deeply timely and relevant, appears through the eyes of more than 50 artists in A Farewell to the Western World, a major exhibition on view this season at the Hall Art Foundation in Reading. [...]
[...] By contrast, some of the works stress how little has changed. American David Opdyke’s Landslide, at the center of one gallery, is a sculpture of the country made from painted foam that looks like crumbling sandstone. All the places declared as “battlegrounds” in the 2004 election are rendered as literal fractures and fissures in the soil. The work instantaneously communicates a sense of imminent political collapse that has somehow persisted for years.
