The following post takes a sudden turn. A weird and unpredictable one. I wonder if anyone will notice.

On my infrequent visits back to the Washington, DC area in recent years, I’ve repeatedly tried and failed to find tickets to the newest Smithsonian museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It’s been such a big draw since opening in 2016 that it had been impossible to get tickets (which are free) unless you could plan out a visit months in advance. And that’s not the sort of travel planning I tend to do. But finally, the demand seems to have finally eased and I was able to easily find tickets for this morning only three days prior.

The museum impresses even before you enter it. The design and colors are unlike anything else found on the National Mall, and yet it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. This is not akin to a modernist house that is plopped in the middle of an older neighborhood full of Craftsmen houses and the like. By combination of design and landscaping, the museum blends in well.

The design includes three important elements, as described by an exhibit dedicated to the museum itself:

THE CORONA

Dubbed the “Corona,” the three-tiered, ornamental form enveloping the building derives from multiple sources. The trapezoidal, stacked shape takes inspiration from the top portion of a sculpture by Olowe of Ise, an early 20th-century Yoruban craftsman. The upward angles of the Corona match the angle on the capstone atop the Washington Monument, a monument that adopts its own form from ancient Egyptian obelisks. For design ideas, the architects also studied images of people with arms uplifted toward the sky in gestures of praise and jubilation.

THE PORCH

The Porch is the covered area through which visitors enter the museum’s south-facing entrance. The architects designed a building that references the historical and cultural uses of the porch across the African Diaspora. The porch is a place for socializing, telling stories, and sharing lessons. The canopy on the museum’s Porch offers visitors a welcome moment of refuge as they transition from the promenade of the National Mall into the museum’s galleries.

BRONZE COLORED FILIGREE

The bronze-colored filigree panels that create the museum’s façade pay homage to the exquisite craftsmanship of enslaved and free African American artisans and metalworkers in Charleston and New Orleans. The filigree’s open weave helps to moderate the amount of light and heat entering the building. The luminescent bronze color brings new hues to the National Mall and works to monumentalize African American experiences.

And the interior is no less impressive:

As for the heart of the museum — the exhibits and artwork — I cannot say much. I started downstairs on the Concourse level where the history exhibits are located. I lasted 10 minutes before giving up and heading upstairs to the cultural portions of the museum. Those history exhibits are too small and placed too narrowly for the crowds the museum gets. Once in there, it’s impossible to move without bumping into people and blocking other people’s view of displays. It didn’t agree with my natural level of anxiety about such behavior.

The cultural exhibits upstairs were presented a bit better: the crowding wasn’t as bad in most exhibits.

Still, I have to say that my favorite section was… the gift shop… because… books! Yes, the gift shop was also crowded… but did I mention that there were books there? Lots and lots of books? I exhibited tremendous self control in not buying even 10% of the titles I was interested in. And I almost came away without giving into temptation at all, but then I found this one:

The purchase was in part because I’m interested in the Harlem Renaissance, of course. But what sold me on it was the memories that came flooding back. Yes, I bought the book in large part for sentimental reasons.

I took advanced level English with Mrs. Kaminsky in 11th grade of high school. That was back 1983-1984. We spent a significant period of one term reading from the movement’s most influential authors. She then sent us off on one of my favorite high school projects: we were to edit a compilation of the major works of the Harlem Renaissance, putting together a full table of contents and writing an introduction on the topic and explaining our choices for what was included. I loved it. I studied the period/movement further in my free time. My compilation was more than just a compendium of pieces from those authors we read for class. I ended up including not just short stories and essays, but also poetry and song lyrics. Mine reprinted major paintings and other visual art media. And I included an album (this predated the rise of CDs) featuring tracks popular from the era. And my introduction kicked ass, if I can brag in a bizarrely nerdy way. That’s one of the papers from high school that I wish I’d saved: though it’s been 38 or 39 years (ho. lee. shit!), I’m pretty certain that I earned an A+ on that project.

In a similar vein, our final project in that class was to write a presentation making a prediction about the future; specifically, something that would occur in the next 10 to 25 years, if I remember correctly. The more unlikely or difficult to predict, the better. But we had to back up our argument with sufficient research from reliable sources: no nonsense about flying cars allowed! In the past, one of her students had told classmates to be on the lookout for VCR technology. There were similar examples she cited but only that one has stuck with me. So what did I write about? Bear in mind that this was spring of 1984 when all eyes were on the Cold War and many of us were certain that nuclear annihilation was more a matter of “when” than “if.” Hardly anyone was thinking about terrorism on U.S. soil, and especially not domestic terrorism. I wrote that it was only a matter of time before some crazed group of citizens attempted a major terrorist event and backed it up with research from the FBI. I wish I could remember which of my classmates interrupted my presentation at school year’s end by exclaiming, “Bullshit!” And I wish further that I could have tracked him down 11 years later after Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people — including 19 children — when he bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Despite the weightiness of the topic, it was another fun project to have worked on, and another that I excelled at, getting another A or A+, as best as I can recall and if I can be allowed to brag about a school project from the previous millennium… six U.S. presidents ago. Oy vey.

Mrs. Kaminsky was one of four teachers in high school from whom I benefited immensely. She and Mr. O’Dell, my AP English teacher during senior year, both ensured that all of us in their classes made marked improvement in our writing skills. (As for the many grammatical and punctuation errors I make in this blog and else, bear in mind 38 years. Thirty… eight… years. Four decades. So how about you get off my ass about it, okay? 😉 Then there was Mrs. Koman whose 11th and 12th grade history classes taught many of us how to study, do research topic deep dives, and take notes on a college level. And Mr. Conti’s science classes — especially biochemistry my senior year — forced us to become more disciplined in our studies outside of school and hold ourselves to higher standards.

At this point, I should find a way to bring this all back around to the National Museum of African American History and Culture once again. But I got nothing. So instead, I’m going to throw up some pretty pictures from the exhibits. People like pretty pictures.

The Atlantic Creoles

Atlantic Creoles were people of African descent who moved easily between cultures and across landscapes.

Often born in port cities, they were multilingual and familiar with international trade. They served as liaison: interpreters, diplomats, and missionaries. As cultural mediators, they effectively navigated all sides of the Atlantic world and helped it come into being. This fluidity demonstrates that status was not yet firmly tied to ideas of race during this early period.

COLLECTING ART

Significant artifacts often come unexpectedly. Wanting to “keep it in the family,” the Blount, Holloway, and Edgerton families used the museum’s online form to offer Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp), a sculpture created by Harlem Renaissance artist Augusta Savage. Savage created these smaller-scale souvenir versions of her larger-than-life commission for the 1939 World’s Fair.

Arty is the centerpiece of Nelson Stevens’s triptych Unity, and was inspired by the archetypal Christian altarpieces from the Byzantine era. Stevens replaced the traditional white religious figures with an image of a young Black woman. To elevate African Americans to a position of reverence and respect, he painted this composition using the technique of forced perspective: the viewer occupies a position of supplicant, or child, looking up to what Stevens calls the “hero’s position.”

Stevens was a founding member of the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, or AfriCOBRA, a collective formed in 1968 to create uplifting art relevant to Black communities. His triptych was displayed in the group’s first exhibition, AFRI-COBRA I: Ten in Search of a Nation, in Harlem in 1970.

Purchased through the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative

We are still in the same fight that Harriet Tubman is in-the fight for Black people to be free and to be treated equally under the law.

Bisa Butler is an American fiber artist known for her quilted portraits inspired by historical photographs. This work is based upon a photograph of underground railroad conductor and abolitionist Harriet Tubman -newly discovered, added to the museum’s collection in 2017, and shared with the Library of Congress. Butler interprets and transforms this iconic photograph through her use of printed African-based fabrics such as Vlisco Dutch wax and Kente cloth, and intricate techniques. By doing so, she reveals Tubman’s complexity as a person, including her African ancestry, bravery, and legacy as an agent of change.

Partial gift of Jan Christian Braun, who curated the ground-breaking exhibition Black USA, in Amsterdam in 1990, for which the African-American Flag was created.

Museum purchase supported by The Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Marcus Garvey designed the African American flag, which looked like the Italian flag, except that it is red, black, and green. But it is so abstract, so pure, that the masses were frightened by it. I made my flag because I felt that they needed one like the U.S. flag but with black stars instead of white ones.

This African-American Flag was one in a series of five flags created for the art exhibition Black USA that opened in 1990 at the Museum Overholland located on the Museum Square in Amsterdam. Curated by Jan Christian Braun, Black USA was the first exhibition to specifically feature the work of Black artists in the Netherlands. In addition to Hammons, other featured artists included Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Martin Puryear, and Bill Traylor.

Following a meeting with Braun to discuss his vision for the exhibition, Hammons decided to create a full-size flag that would be flown on a flagpole located on the grounds of the Museum Square across from the American Consulate. The colors and symbols of his now-iconic artwork merge the red, black, and green colors of Marcus Garvey’s pan-African flag and the stars and stripes of the American flag. His commingling of colors and symbols of both flags simultaneously references Black pride and heritage and the ways African Americans have celebrated freedom while confronting America’s unfulfilled promises.