The Brooklyn Rail

Around 2020, we began to realize that an odd reference was cropping up across our various respective research projects—feminist art in the 1970s, abstract art by Black artists, immigrant artist networks in New York City. None of these subjects had overt nationalist overtones, to say the least, and yet the US Bicentennial anniversary of 1976 appeared repeatedly as an inspiration/occasion/funding source for reconsidering history, asking probing questions about what it meant to be American, and reflecting on what people wanted from civic life. We began to look actively for the Bicentennial, and found it everywhere, in artworks, exhibitions, texts and talks, and material culture objects, from David Driskell’s landmark exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art to the “500 Mile Sculpture Garden” that transformed roadside rest stops along Interstate-80 to Gilbert Baker's Rainbow Flag (1978).

At that time, plans for the 2026 semiquincentennial were undeveloped, but the emerging historical picture of 1976 was ripe with resonant parallels to the then-present. Both moments were shaped by galvanizing social unrest, producing wide-ranging, intense conversations about both foundational national history and histories of creative expression; institutions met demands with a surprising degree of receptiveness to questioning the status quo. What was the United States? Was it founded in freedom or oppression? Was it a single, exceptional place, or a loose assemblage of self-governing individuals and communities? Should its citizens value assimilation or diverse cultural heritage? And what would be needed to define and support the common good and a meaningful public culture?

Initiated in 1966, planning for the Bicentennial unfolded over three presidential administrations, spanning postwar prosperity, political protest, and socioeconomic uncertainty. Early aspirations for a centralized celebration in DC, Boston, or Philadelphia were replaced by a broad call for participation, yielding a sea of events and projects united by only the loosest of thematic dictates and bolstered by public and private Bicentennial funding funneled through state and local commissions. Commemorating the two-hundred-year anniversary of the nation’s founding was entangled in contentious debates about the actual nature of the history of the United States, and the role of that history in authorizing the nation’s contemporary reality and future direction. As in recent years, there was little appetite for hollow displays of national pride, yet the event of the Bicentennial itself revealed widespread investment in national identity. Cultural expression was granted renewed significance as the most tangible way to reckon with past, present, and future, and the synergy of Bicentennial planning and the founding of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in 1965 led to an explosion of community art centers, exhibitions, events, and commissions of public art.

Studying that decade through the Bicentennial lens productively zooms out from a narrow disciplinary account of art to reveal an expansive and exciting image of art’s social centrality—its role in culture writ large. And so we spent the next five years exploring the cultural production of the Bicentennial, making a case for its art historical and civic significance in our book What Was America? Art, Culture and Politics in the Bicentennial Era. If we began the research with an interest in the parallels between 2020 and 1976, as we approached 2026 the project concluded as a study in contrasts. There is little about the present moment that resembles the Bicentennial atmosphere of cultural support, lively conversation, and a shared claim to the nation. Paeans to plurality like the Festival of American Folklife have been replaced by a gilded, pseudo-populist, patriotic fever dream celebrating a single man. As historian MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska writes in this issue, on this Fourth of July, “the foundation of a democratic, participatory nation-state will be staged without significant democratic participation or input.”

The Bicentennial occurred at the height of national investment in culture; the semiquincentennial arrives in the wake of devastating blows to a public cultural infrastructure that had been gradually eroding since the 1980s. The Bicentennial activated artists, scholars, teachers, curators, and institutions to materialize a newly capacious and more historically accurate vision of American art, reconsidering the contributions of women, immigrant, Black, rural, self-trained, and Native artists in the context of larger social histories and a structural address of civic life. In 2026, the understandable response of the art world to the 250th anniversary has been largely one of withdrawn malaise.

In the lead up to the Bicentennial, the “Unfinished American Revolution” was frequently invoked as a call to action—a way to simultaneously hold civic pride and national disappointment. In a present moment that has seen a retreat from multifaceted debates about past and future, this Critics Page provides an occasion for reflection, inviting contributors to consider the state of history and culture in the contemporary national landscape. Our warm thanks to the brilliant writers, who bring their years and often decades of investment in public history, material culture, art, and the idea of a common good to bear in these texts. As contributing activist and writer Connie Young Yu wrote in 1976, “History, after all, belongs to the people.”