NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE F or a few days, I’m here in Washington working on my biography of the great, eclectic art dealer Allan Stone. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the brand new, now gone, director of the Smithsonian’s in-the-works, waste-of-money American Women’s History Museum. It’s a $350 million boondoggle. The Smithsonian has too many museums under its wing and, besides, the topic is both vast and amorphous.

History made by women is best left to local and regional museums. They know who the overlooked movers and shakers were in their communities and are best equipped to give them the fanfare they deserve. A women’s history museum in Washington will focus on women who’ve had Washington careers. Women in business, science, the arts, universities, and local politics will inevitably lose, so the public and good history lose, too. The Swamp wins.

I seriously question the Smithsonian’s judgment these days. The first person it hired to run the Women’s History Museum was a woman whose last museum saw its storage facility burned to the ground, destroying half the collection! She was the director at the time. How careless, on the part of the director and the search committee.

The House Appropriations Committee, in a battle over the fiscal 2024 budget, recently voted 33 to 27 to ban the federal government from spending taxpayer money on another new Smithsonian museum, the Museum of the American Latino. When Congress authorized this museum in 2020, it was estimated to cost $700 million, of which taxpayers would pay half, which would mean, by the end, that they’d pay more than half and the cost would skirt $1 billion.

The Appropriations Committee vote reflected chagrin over the content and tone of the museum’s premiere exhibition, which opened last month in its 4,500-square-foot temporary space at the Museum of American History. Republican members, especially Hispanic Republicans, thought that this new show — ¡Presente! — defined Latino history as centuries of victimhood. It also was, committee members said, too political.

They could be right, I thought, and they could be wrong. No Republican, except Calvin Coolidge, gets it right all the time. Coolidge, by the by, is in the news. The 100th anniversary of his inauguration is on August 3. A Vermonter, though his political career started in Massachusetts, Coolidge was in tiny Plymouth in Vermont visiting his father when Warren Harding died. He was sworn in at 2:47 in the morning by gaslight. I’ll be there for the festivities.

¡Presente! is in the new Molina Family Galleries, named for David Molina, a California doctor and hospital entrepreneur, and his wife. Sadly, the show distills Latino history and culture, fascinating and rich but variegated in the extreme, into an angry, aggrieved brew. It’s bad. Not mean-hombre bad. It’s toxico bad. Send a message: Nada mas crappo. Kill this museum project.

Invasion, colonization, slavery, forced conversions, uprisings, racism, exploitation. These are the themes, in nearly every section, from beginning to end. The needle’s stuck. The exhibition is honest, at least, in pushing a single Latino identity as a political force. Honest, yes, but Americans of Latino descent are less Latino and more Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, Colombian, Salvadoran, or Guatemalan, with very different histories and cultures. The exhibition also conflates black, Latino, and indigenous people into one interest group. And it’s not history. It’s advocacy.

I spent about an hour in the exhibition and want to write about other Smithsonian shows I saw, so I’ll be more trenchant than deep. ¡Presente! is poison, and it’s a mess. A kiosk in the middle of the gallery reads, “For people with disabilities . . . there’s already so much going against us.” Huh? Plopped in the middle of an orgy of outrage, this seems odd and awkward. Is linearity too much to demand?

“Who is anyone to deny me my blackness?” blasts another, quoting Claudia de la Cruz, who runs a group in New York — the People’s Forum — that’s hosting a Revolutionary Summer School. Claudia can be as black as she wants. She’s a director of another group called Code Pink that’s pushing antisemitism. Why give her, of all people, a platform? Why profile José Julio Sarria, a drag queen who looks like Ethel Merman imitating Babe Ruth? And there’s a panel on Covid and Latinos as well as one on skin color and Latinos. Boring.

The graphics are too dense. Objects are props. Labels in cases are often in dark pools so they can’t be read. The website for ¡Presente! is a sly game of bait and switch. “There is no single immigration story,” it tells us. We see a photo of a young boy dressed as Superman, signaling that anything’s possible, family albums, and a Carolina Herrera dress. The reality is very different. But in the exhibit, there’s only one Latino trajectory, and that’s toward grievance and anger. There’s next-to-nothing about assimilation or culture.

“Oh,” the Smithsonian’s lobbyist cries, “the new director’s been there only a few months, and the show’s been in the works for years.” And, “Oh, this won’t happen again.” Don’t fall for a lament that’s a lampoon. It’s meant to kill a moment where a precious project’s getting cut. What we see and hear now in ¡Presente! is what we’ll get after spending $700 or $800 or $900 million.

If I were a young Latino, I’d leave ¡Presente! confused, misled, angry, depressed, and defensive. Is that what we want?

The problem with this museum, as a concept, is the subject’s enormity, complexity, and contradictions. And it shares a practical problem with the American Women’s History Museum. Everything in Washington is political now. Everyone knows the correct agendas, talking points, heroes, and villains, who’s in, and who’s out. Everyone recites them in their sleep. There’s no objectivity, since that involves facts, and there’s no subjectivity, which invites nuance and individual points of view.

The Smithsonian, consisting of a dozen museums and a zoo, doesn’t need two more museum mouths to feed. These two — the women’s museum and the Latino museum — will tell one in a thousand good stories, and the one they’ll pick is the one that pushes rich, guilty gringo agendas. These museums will be about these agendas, not about pride in Latino history and culture.

Until we free history and culture from the fetters of raw, relentless politics, Congress should put both these new museums on hold. The Smithsonian’s in expansion-all-the-time mode. Like every big university in America, it doesn’t feel right if it’s not raising hundreds of millions of dollars. It needs to focus on what it already has.

This past weekend, I went to the National Portrait Gallery. I always enjoy it, even when its exhibitions are lame or, worse, abysmal. I like portraits and history. The NPG seems immune to my advice, though. There’s still plenty of junk portraits in the permanent-collection galleries. The new video portrait of Dr. Fauci, the lilliputian liar and quack, is still on view, alas.

There are two good shows there. I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women (Part 11) is the clumsily titled but decent exhibition of photographs of 13 courageous, groundbreaking black women from the world of the arts, activism, sports, and politics. Created in the late ’80s, Lanker’s portfolio of 75 portraits came to the gallery as a partial gift and purchase in 2021. The museum is showing 25 in two installments, one last year and the second now.

I had never heard of Lanker (1947–2011), a newspaper and magazine photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 — at age 26 — for a photo essay on childbirth for the Topeka Capital-Journal. The large format photographs in I Dream a World are sometimes very good and sometimes obvious and in the realm of calendar art. Lanker was a workmanlike photographer who had his moments.

I loved the photograph of star athlete Althea Gibson, who’s glamorous and elegant rather than swinging a golf club. The odious Mary Frances Berry looks like a battering ram, but that’s what she was, and it took guts on her part. Photographs of Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers-Williams — widows, respectively, of Malcolm X and Medgar Evers — evoke endurance and dignity. They’re very moving.

Some of the photographs are ponderous and retreads of religious painting, as if the subjects are about to be beatified. And why is Angela Davis there? Lanker photographed 75 women, 25 of whom made the cut. Davis, acquitted though she was in a 1971 murder of a judge and three others, was a flagrant apologist for mass murderers who ran the Soviet Union, Cuba, and East Germany.

She was a booster of Jim Jones, of all people. She’d cheer the establishment of a system of gulags and toast “bon voyage” to your internment, esteemed reader, and also my own. She’s heinous, as is the antisemite Alice Walker, included in the first iteration of I Dream a World.

Photographs of Gwendolyn Brooks, Jackie Torrence, Ruby Dee, and Carrie Perry weren’t in the exhibition. As art, these works are very good, and the subjects are worth touting. Among the many treats in I Dream a World are the informative, inspirational labels, which, for many visitors, probably introduce these accomplished women. Carrie Perry was in the legislature and the mayor of Hartford when I was in Connecticut politics. I liked her, didn’t admire her especially but would rather spend time with her than with Davis, a Trot and a thug, with a Ph.D. and tenure, I know, but a thug.

With Oprah Winfrey’s photograph is a quote — “I was raised to believe that excellence is the best deterrent to racism and sexism, and that’s how I operate my life.” That’s a wise, bracing riposte to affirmative action’s assault on merit.

I also enjoyed the gallery’s Frederick Douglass: One Life exhibition. Douglass (1818–1895) was not only born a slave who, later, became an abolitionist, orator, memoirist, and Lincoln confidant. But through his copiously disseminated, distinctive image, he was among America’s most famous men. His very good hair and handsome face — serious, open, and inviting all at once — advanced his message of liberation and equality. He looked both reassuring and steadfast as well as dashing. There’s no discounting dashing in making a persuasive look.

The exhibition is roughly chronological. It’s a good example of the particular in equipoise with the universal. A ledger from 1818 documents his birth. From there, his image as he ages alternates with a pamphlet of his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech, his three autobiographies, and images of people in his circle. A deep-red wall color nicely sets the objects off. The labels are too long, or the type’s too small, but they’re worth the work to read. Douglass is a gift who keeps on giving.

I always tell friends to visit the National Portrait Gallery, if only for the good portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries and the dozen or so — out of 46 — presidential portraits that are actually good. Otherwise, the curatorial vision there is blinkered and bloodless.

I visited the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, too. I also tell friends, since I’m a geyser of guidance, that if they have time to visit only one museum in Washington and want that experience to be offbeat and special, they should go to the Renwick. It’s dedicated to the best in American craft and is always illuminating. Sharing Honors and Burdens taught me about Native American artists in Alaska, Washington State, Maine, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. It’s worth a visit, especially for the art and the videos of the artists.

The curatorial take is earnest and dull. The artists were selected by a committee of Native American curators and scholars charged with finding a Covid theme. Covid was “a time of unprecedented grief,” we’re told. “A time of unprecedented grief” would be the Civil War — 600,000 young men killed — or the Spanish flu — millions of young people dead — rather than a disease that killed the very old, very sick, and the obese, but this is Washington, where Covid’s a religion. Let’s get real.

Maggie Thompson made blankets with Native American beadwork doubling as body bags. A wall hanging is titled I Get Mad Because I Love You. Boring. The very good Erica Lord created what she calls beaded burden straps made from glass beads. To design them, Lord uses DNA strands associated with cancer, diabetes, leukemia, and other diseases that, the curators say, disproportionately affect Native Americans. They’re beautiful and joyous, as is Lord, whose video I watched. All of us carry funky kinks in our DNA.

Geo Neptune lives in Passamaquoddy Indian Township, Maine, on the Canadian border near Calais. He makes baskets, decorative shoes, and figures from black-ash wood. He’s using basket-making traditions he learned from his grandmother. He’s young and very talented. His video is great. It focuses on his aesthetic heritage but also the emerald ash borer, a beetle that’s destroying ash trees in northern New England.

If I were selecting artists for Sharing Burdens and Honors, would I have picked these and the other artists in the show? I wouldn’t have picked the theme, which, to say the least, is tiresome. The book is warm and fuzzy. There’s lots of baby talk. It’s not a bad show. I learned a great deal. Not every exhibition is a hit.