Another Abstract Public Artwork Faces Trump’s Senseless Ire
The president wants to replace José de Rivera's “Infinity” (1967) outside the National Museum of American History with a statue of George Washington.
In a Truth Social post criticizing the Smithsonian Institution's “ideological activism” on Friday, September 11, President Donald Trump called on the National Museum of American History (NMAH) to erect a 30-foot-tall statue of George Washington and develop a five-year exhibition on “America’s Greatest Hero.”
In Trump's eyes, the colossal statue would ideally replace José de Rivera's kinetic sculpture “Infinity” (1967), the United States government's first abstract art commission, which has stood outside the NMAH entrance facing the National Mall for almost 60 years.
Deriding the late American abstractionist's stainless steel Möbius strip, which rotates on its axis every eight minutes, Trump called it a “strange modernist sculpture” that “tells visitors nothing about America, inspires no one, and honors none of our Great American Heroes.”
The president led with a call for the Smithsonian to display an existing 11-foot-tall statue of Washington outside the NMAH's Flag Hall for a dedicated Constitution Day celebration this Thursday, September 17. The gesture of replacing the work with an enormous statue, he said, would be underpinned by an urgently produced exhibition about Washington's life and work in anticipation of his 300th birthday, which is coming up ... in 2032.
Trump claimed that the NMAH had “failed to give George Washington and our other Founding Fathers the celebration they deserve” in its America 250 programming under the Smithsonian's “recently ended” leadership, referencing Secretary Lonnie Bunch III's retirement announcement. He also needled NMAH's now-defunct Center for Restorative History and its Decolonization Working Group for “focus[ing] attention overwhelmingly on those who have been oppressed.”
