Containing Multitudes: Three Museum Shows Reframe American Life Through Photography, Painting, and Protest
What does it mean to picture the United States without smoothing over its contradictions? Three museum exhibitions now on view take that question seriously, using photography and painting to probe how American identity is constructed, circulated, and contested — from the intimacies of everyday life to the pageantry of power.
“Containing Multitudes,” a photography exhibition titled after Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, approaches the nation as a set of overlapping, sometimes incompatible realities. The show gathers images that move between the tender and the unsettled, the celebratory and the unresolved, insisting that contradiction is not a flaw in the American story but one of its defining conditions.
The exhibition’s roster spans documentary lineages and more experimental strategies. Photographers including Dawoud Bey, Catherine Opie, Carrie Mae Weems, and Walker Evans appear among works that register both ordinary routines and moments of historical consequence. Portraiture anchors the show’s attention to individual lives: Jaida Grey Eagle’s “Leonard” (2025) depicts an Indigenous elder with a directness that resists simplification. Elsewhere, Stephanie Syjuco turns to community representation, portraying 11 Filipino women in native attire — an image that reads as both affirmation and inquiry into how identity is performed and seen.
Across the installation, public space and private interiority share the frame with labor, protest, and leisure. The cumulative effect is a layered social portrait that foregrounds people and places often left outside dominant narratives. Positioned as a semiquincentennial exhibition, “Containing Multitudes” pointedly avoids patriotic nostalgia, proposing instead that the country’s most persistent feature may be its unresolved tensions — and the ways artists have learned to picture them.
At Glenstone Museum in Travilah, Maryland, “Ties of Our Common Kindred” draws from the institution’s widely admired collection to survey American art of the last century. Names such as Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Cindy Sherman map a familiar arc from Abstract Expressionism and Pop to contemporary portraiture. But the exhibition’s organizing logic is less a timeline of styles than a web of relationships: between artists, ideas, and the historical pressures that shape what art can say.
Photography plays a crucial role here as well. Walker Evans’s images, long associated with the visual record of the Great Depression, appear in a portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, a sharecropper whom Evans documented over several weeks in 1936. The photograph’s endurance lies in its refusal to romanticize hardship; it offers a sober encounter with the lived realities that underwrote national myth.
Other works pivot toward the theater of governance and the machinery of mass culture. Thomas Demand’s photograph “Presidency” (2008) presents the Oval Office as an image of ceremony and control — a constructed scene that underscores how power is staged. Nearby, Barbara Kruger’s photographic silkscreen “Untitled (I shop therefore I am)” (1987) distills consumer identity into a blunt declaration. Rooted in the 1980s rise of capitalism and materialism in the U.S., the work still lands with unnerving clarity in a media environment saturated by branding and desire.
A third exhibition, “Pictures More Famous than the Truth” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (on view through July 26), makes the politics of representation explicit by pairing two artists separated by more than a century. Nineteenth-century painter Junius Brutus Stearns helped cement an idealized visual mythology of George Washington, offering scenes of leadership and unity that read as polished national scripture. The museum places those images in direct conversation with works by contemporary Black artist Titus Kaphar, whose practice interrogates what such histories omit.
Kaphar’s paintings and sculptures disrupt Stearns’s heroic narratives by foregrounding the people pushed to the margins of official memory. In “Shadows of Liberty” (2016), Kaphar depicts Washington on horseback, sword raised — then partially obscures the figure with nailed strips from another painting that resembles a historic document based on lists of enslaved people on Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation. The intervention is both material and moral: history, the work suggests, is not only written but physically enforced, and the images that survive often do so at someone else’s expense.
Taken together, these exhibitions argue for American art as a site of friction rather than consensus. Whether through the camera’s attention to daily life, the museum collection’s long view of modernity, or a pointed reworking of founding myths, each show insists that the nation’s self-image is not fixed — it is made, challenged, and remade in public.
