“Democracy Matters” Turns American History Into a Living Argument
At the New York Historical, the inaugural exhibition in the new Tang Wing for American Democracy begins with a broken monument and a question: who gets to define the nation? Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto for the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, “Democracy Matters” uses artworks and historical objects to trace the country’s recurring conflicts over power, belonging, and identity.
The opening gallery is anchored by fragments of the equestrian statue of King George III that once stood over Bowling Green in New York City before it was toppled in 1776. Most of the statue was later melted down and recast as musket balls, several of which are displayed beside four intact pieces of the original. An animation nearby shows silhouetted figures gathering, roping the monument, and pulling it down, echoing Johannes Oertel’s painted account of the event.
That pairing establishes the exhibition’s method: history is presented not as a fixed sequence, but as a set of contested images and objects. Mel Chin’s “Flag of America (2020)” offers one example. The work keeps the usual 50 stars, but divides them into two blocks of 25, a subtle disruption that hangs above the Declaration of Independence and a petition signed by 547 loyalists to the King, which the museum refers to as a “declaration of dependence.”
Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire,” the five-painting cycle made between 1833 and 1836, occupies a prominent corner and gives the show one of its most forceful historical arguments. Originally conceived as a warning about imperial expansion, the series reads here as a meditation on the fragility of cultural consensus. In Ikemoto’s framing, the work suggests that America has never meant only one thing — and may not survive if it tries to.
Other juxtapositions are quieter but no less pointed. John J. Audubon’s bird prints are shown alongside brooches of the same species made by Yoneguma and Kiyoka Takahashi, a Japanese American couple who worked with found materials while interned during World War II, along with some 120,000 other people of Japanese descent, most of them U.S. citizens. The comparison exposes the distance between national symbolism and lived exclusion. Audubon, too, was an immigrant, but his relative privilege allowed him to become a shorthand for American nature in a way the Takahashis were denied.
The exhibition also includes a nineteenth-century transparent ballot box, a map of Seneca Village, and a larger-than-life cast of a Thomas Jefferson statue removed from the New York City Council Chamber in 2021 and brought to the museum for contextualization. Taken together, these objects make a clear case: democracy is not a settled inheritance, but a continuing negotiation over memory, access, and power.
