America 250 was supposed to be a national anniversary. In Washington, it is already functioning as a test of whose version of the United States will be made visible.
The semiquincentennial celebration of the nation’s founding has unfolded against a backdrop of Trump-aligned imagery and programming in the capital. A nightly 24-minute video projection on the Washington Monument began on New Year’s Eve and repeated every 30 minutes for a week. Its animated history moved briskly from Christopher Columbus to Paul Revere, then to Lewis and Clark and the new World Trade Center. Sacagawea appeared as the lone woman, the lone Indigenous figure, and the lone nonwhite presence in the sequence.
The symbolism has extended beyond the monument. In February, reports said the National Park Service planned to install a decommissioned equestrian monument of Caesar Rodney, a Delaware delegate and slaveholder who signed the Declaration of Independence, on Pennsylvania Avenue in a plaza dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr. Rodney’s statue had been removed from Wilmington after the anti-racist demonstrations of 2020.
The machinery behind the celebration has also changed. In March, it was revealed that the contractors for the nonpartisan A250 Commission had been fired in 2025 and replaced by an events company founded by producers of Trump rallies, including the rally that became the January 6 insurrection. The new team has since received more than $26 million in no-bid federal contracts.
Against that backdrop, museums have largely stepped back from the front lines of current political conflict. That is a notable shift from 2017, when The Museum of Modern Art quickly organized a solidarity exhibition after the Trump Muslim travel ban, and from 2020, when museums positioned themselves as venues for public reckoning after protests over anti-Black police violence.
Still, the anniversary is not absent from museum calendars. Several institutions are using America 250 to revisit the country’s art and history, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with “A Nation of Artists,” the American Folk Art Museum with “Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States,” and the Rockwell Museum in Corning with “Native Now: Contemporary Indigenous Art at The Rockwell Museum” and “Gateways: African American Art from the Key Collection.”
The split is telling. Official commemoration in Washington is being shaped by spectacle and political messaging, while museums are approaching the anniversary through slower, more self-critical forms of interpretation. In a year meant to celebrate the birth of the nation, the argument over what America should remember is already well underway.
