Through fictionalized, photo-realistic oil and acrylic paintings, Yin subverts archival photographs and written accounts of Chinese Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and imagines “what could have been”—alternatives and contingencies that, according to scholar Lisa Lowe, lay within, but were later foreclosed by, determinations of modern history.

Mother and Child, curated by Micki Meng, gathers the works of 17 artists who square timeless iconography of motherhood with the immediacy of touch.

Working with archives at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and the National Museum of Anthropology, Syjuco desecrates colonialist photographs that aim, as Hito Steyerl argues, to “[measure] the resolution of the world as a picture.” She photographs early 20th-century ethnographic images and reproduces them as photogravures crumpled and mounted on cotton rag, pixelated ink jet Headshots, digital collages, and photo composites.

If Donald Trump anchored his political discourse in the nostalgia for an ethnically pure golden age of Jacksonian conquest, the history paintings and sculptures in the Capitol are portals to that mythological past—fictions shoring up fictions.