‘Beyond Granite’ exhibition reminds us what the National Mall could be

If you could see it with fresh eyes — and think about what it used to be, what it could be and what it would be if it was in any other country — the National Mall would seem a very strange, almost surreal place. It isn’t fringed with restaurants, it isn’t full of trees shading serpentine pathways and, except for one carousel near the Smithsonian, there is little to distract and delight the youngest visitors.

Since it was redesigned, rebuilt and repurposed by the McMillan Plan of 1902, the Mall has been a national forum, full of symbolism, fraught with meaning and history, and mostly barren of amenities. “Beyond Granite,” a month-long art installation intended to challenge the usual ways we tell stories on the Mall, has had a happy side effect: It offers a vision of the Mall as a much more agreeable, livable and urban space. With six installations that are smaller and more accessible than the permanent memorials and monuments, it reconfigures the Mall to human scale, a place less about grand and abstract ideas and more about the pure pleasure of being there.

The project is presented by the Trust for the National Mall partnered with the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service, and it’s curated by Paul Farber and Salamishah Tillet for Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based group devoted to rethinking how we make memorials and monuments. The goal of the project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, is to “create a more inclusive, equitable, and representative commemorative landscape on the National Mall.” It is billed as the first curated art exhibition to include multiple artists presented on the nation’s monumental greensward.

It is hard to believe — unless you live in Washington and understand the red-tape complexity of doing anything on the Mall — that this is the first time a serious art exhibition has been staged there. Other cities use their open spaces and parkland to create ongoing dialogue and engagement with the public. The paradox of the Mall is that, as it became laden with symbolic meaning and historic resonance, the potential to create new meaning began to shrink. One law protecting the Mall from rampant development dubs it “a substantially completed work of civic art,” which implies that it is also closed to new ideas and new interpretations. The more it is cherished, the more it is governed by this country’s unfortunate and reflexive zero-sum dinner-table metaphor: There are only so many seats, and so much food, and now we fight over the scraps.

Yes, the Mall is open for public gatherings and selective protests, and must remain so. But there are myriad other ways that public space can be open and dynamic, and the stewards of the Mall have been too resistant to them.

Until now, if everything goes right.

The six artists chosen by the curators have created half a dozen works, placed throughout the parkland that includes the Mall and Constitution Gardens. The locations are strategic and thoughtful, and they invite people to linger in places they might ordinarily pass through or by.

Tiffany Chung uses colored ropes strung across a giant map of the Earth to trace the migration patterns of Southeast Asians during and after the Vietnam War. Her sculpture, “For the Living,” is located on the gentle rise of what is called the “West Knoll,” near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The memorial isn’t visible from the temporary installation, but you can sense its presence. The gently sculpted West Knoll forms an earthen barrier between a permanent memorial to Americans who died fighting a faraway war on land that had been colonized by Western powers, and a temporary memorial to those whose lives were disrupted and scattered by that conflict.

Wendy Red Star’s “The Soil You See...” is located on an island in the Constitution Gardens lake, also the site of the 1982 memorial to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Her work on glass reproduces a giant image of her thumbprint, referencing one of the ways in which Native Americans signed treaties and land concessions to the U.S. government. The work’s title is taken from a longer speech, delivered by a Crow scout who worked with U.S. military forces, lamenting the loss of lands through the relentless appropriation and theft of a nation expanding westward: “The soil you see is not ordinary soil — it is the dust of the blood, the flesh and bones of our ancestors. … You will have to dig down through the surface before you can find nature’s earth as the upper portion is Crow. The land as it is, is my blood and my dead; it is consecrated, and I do not want to give up any portion of it.”

Again, the siting of Red Star’s work is strategic, next to the memorial to the signers of the nation’s founding document, on a patch of the Mall near which was once a canal and later a sewer. Constitution Gardens was intended as a pastoral respite from the formality of the more rectilinear Mall, on land that was until 1971 occupied by temporary buildings that served the military during World Wars I and II. This is land full of layers, land that has hosted a multiplicity of uses. When seen from the right angle, the Washington Monument rises behind the giant red thumbprint, a promise of civic virtue and fidelity breached too many times to count.

From the raised patch of gravel on which Derrick Adams has placed his piece, “America’s Playground: DC,” you can see both the former site of those temporary military structures and glimpses of the World War II Memorial. His installation is, in fact, a fully functional and inviting playground, and its proximity to places linked to the business of war and its brutal human toll is particularly poetic.

Adams bisects the play space with two large images of Black and White children playing together after a 1954 Supreme Court decision effectively desegregated playgrounds in the District. On one side of the photograph, equipment and safety surface are black, white and gray; on the other, they are vivid with color. But both images show children laughing and at ease together. One can read this multiple ways: The gray-scale of hope precedes the rainbow of promises and dreams fulfilled. But I came away thinking about the fine line between play and work and how we might productively substitute one word for the other in sentences such as: We must work/play together to finish anything worth doing.

Adams’s playground recalls the longer history of the Mall, before the 1902 redesign that tore out public parks, walking trails and other more parklike features in favor of a long, empty, visual axis between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. His installation doesn’t intrude on that sightline, and it opens a serious and necessary conversation about how we might better use the edges of the Mall to serve more vital human needs, such as play.

Other installations recall key moments in the Mall’s history as a site of protest and remembrance. Ashon T. Crawley’s “Homegoing” uses sound and music from the Black church to remember Black queer musicians and others who died of AIDS. The music enlivens an open-air shrine, the low profile of which creates a horizontal pattern reminiscent of one of the most poignant acts of memorialization on the Mall, the 1987 display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

And Vanessa German’s “Of Thee We Sing” uses mixed media, including empty bottles and artificial flowers, to create a portrait of Marian Anderson, whose 1939 Easter Sunday performance at the Lincoln Memorial created a trove of symbolism and poetics as enduring as anything built in stone on the Mall. Bottles break, flowers fade and music lives only in the moment we hear it. But fleeting and ephemeral things have a substrate, memory, which gives them a permanence beyond other, more seemingly durable material.

The final work and the one closest to the Capitol is Paul Ramírez Jonas’s interactive bell tower, “Let Freedom Ring,” placed on the 12th Street axis near the Smithsonian Metro station. When activated, the bells play all but the last note of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” a song Anderson performed with incantatory power in 1939. A 600-pound bell positioned at the base of the carillon is hand-operated, and visitors are invited to ring it, thus finishing the song. They are also asked to contemplate two ideas of freedom and make a wish that completes either one: “I want to be free to …” or “I want to be free from …”

The latter is often the precondition of the former: We must be free from restraint, want and care before we are free to do the things that give lives greater meaning. But “freedom to” remains an aspiration for too many Americans.

I visited the bells just after the installation opened and the temporary fencing came down, and they were instantly a hit, especially with children. They are suspended from an imposing steel frame, more than 22 feet high, which makes this the most “monumental” of the six installations. But it is the placement and the interactivity that really define its power. It makes the 12th Street axis a place to linger, inviting one to look out into the city, away from the Mall. It also puts visitors into a circle, looking not just at the carillon, but also at one another.

“Beyond Granite” is smart and well produced. There may be hitches, lines to ring the bell and some scratching of heads at the more conceptual work by visitors unfamiliar with the tropes of public art. But it proves something that has been obvious for decades: The Mall may be overstuffed with traditional monuments, memorials and museums, but it is no way a substantially completed work of public art. Exhibitions like this one should be an annual endeavor.

Beyond Granite continues through Sept. 18 on the National Mall between 12th Street and the Lincoln Memorial. beyondgranite.org.