As Washington, DC, gears up for massive celebrations for America’s 250th birthday, artists and institutions are exploring and exploding the very concept of American aesthetics — and what American art can and should achieve. While Trump attempts to reshape DC in his image, including re-erecting a monument to an enslaver in Freedom Plaza, the city feels like the epicenter of an urgent artistic reckoning. From Faith Ringgold’s bloody flag painting at the National Gallery of Art to Gail Rebhan’s collages created with US census verbiage, national iconography, identity, and material culture challenge a myopic view of American art history. Note that significant street closures during the 250th celebrations may make it harder to get to museums on the National Mall.

Reset: Abstraction Embodied in Design

National Museum of African American History and Culture, 1400 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC
Ongoing

Reset features the designs of contemporary Black artists who use everyday objects to interrogate how our bodies engage with and create the spaces we occupy. Hadiya Williams, Jomo Tariku, Simone Brewster, and others transform chairs, rugs, lamps — designs that we often overlook in our everyday lives — into pieces interrogating identity, place, and utility. Also on view at the museum is Revelation, a companion show that focuses on Black abstract art from the mid-20th century to the present day.

Rip! Tear! Collage as Critique 

Eye Street Gallery, 200 I Street SE, Washington, DC
Through August 7

There is nothing more human than taking something apart and imagining it anew. In an era when artists’ work is routinely scraped and abused for generative AI, this exploration of collage posits the form as a fundamental rejection of appropriation and cultural extraction. Funded by the DC Commission on the Arts and the Humanities, the exhibition imagines how repurposing existing elements — colors, textures, and symbols — is allegorical not only of being an artist but being an American. Eye Street Gallery will host a lecture and live demonstration about DJ culture as sonic collage by King Britt on Saturday, July 18, and a collage workshop with the artists featured in the show on Thursday, August 6.

Gail Rebhan: What Questions Do We Ask? and Bonnie Lautenberg: ARTISTICA! Where Hollywood Meets Art History

American University Museum, 440 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC
Through August 9

The American University Museum debuts seven shows this summer, including two on photographers Gail Rebhan and Bonnie Lautenberg. Rebhan’s work utilizes the official language of the US census to explore race, disability, identity, and classification throughout American history. Meanwhile, Lautenberg explores the similarities and differences between groundbreaking works of abstract art created the same year as iconic films like Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Funny Girl(1968).The pairings, like Rebhan’s collages, challenge how language and aesthetics converse with one another.