National Gallery of ArtNational Mall

Homelands

En ce moment27 juin 2026 – 1 août 2027Entrée libre

What does it mean to have a "homeland" when it's shaped by movement, memory, and change? East Building Mezzanine.

Site de l'exposition

À voir aussi à Washington

En ce moment Au programme en octobre 2026

One work here is a 12-foot wooden boat, painted orange inside. Luis Cruz Azaceta lived through Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and covered the hull in the kind of debris the flood left: broken fence posts, rat traps, electrical parts, and a sail rigged from an oar and electrical wire.

It's one of just over 20 works from the Gallery's own collection, hung in three sections in a single mezzanine gallery. You start with Claire Fontaine's large neon The Isle of Tears, about Ellis Island, move through works on memory such as Kay WalkingStick's painting of the Grand Canyon's North Rim, and end with works about longing for, or distance from, a homeland. The artists' starting points include Cuba, El Salvador, China and India.

It's in Gallery E214 on the East Building Mezzanine, free with no passes needed, until 1 August 2027. The gallery closes on 11 January 2027 while light-sensitive works on paper are swapped.

À ne pas manquer

Azaceta's Katrina Boat
Look for a 12-foot wooden boat strung with broken fence posts, rat traps and plywood scraps, its inside painted orange, a colour Azaceta associates with hell.
Azaceta's ARK
From the 1990s Cuban rafter crisis: a gaunt self-portrait whose arm has turned into an oar, with Polaroids of rafters and a shark hanging from painted ropes above him.
Maravilla's January 1984 Retablo
A painted scene of a boy dressed as a Transformer on a soccer field, a masked woman in pink tapping a triangle over him, inside a frame of spiky root-like forms.
Zarina's nine homes
Small etchings, each titled with a home she made and the years she lived there, from Bangkok 1958 to a four-and-a-half tatami room in Tokyo to New York.
Hank Willis Thomas's mirrored map
A map in stainless steel polished to a mirror finish, so you see yourself in it while it asks what homeland means for people of a diaspora.