The mystery provocateurs behind last week’s eight-foot-tall golden monument of President Donald Trump crushing Lady Liberty have returned to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall with another contribution to the genre of unauthorized presidential fan art—this time, video.

On Thursday morning, a life-sized, gold-painted television set appeared near Third Street NW, pointed squarely at the Capitol, the Washington Post reported. Its screen played a silent, 15-second loop of Donald Trump performing his now-infamous slow-motion dance moves—arms stiff, hips ambivalent, a slow-grinding shimmy—set against backdrops ranging from campaign rallies to a party with Jeffrey Epstein. The latter, for those who have forgotten, was the late financier and convicted sex offender who died while awaiting trial in 2019.

Above the TV sat a spray-painted gold eagle, wings spread in what might generously be described as majesty. Gold ivy trailed down the sides like a rejected Versace ad. At the base, a plaque read: In the United States of America you have the freedom to display your so-called ‘art,’ no matter how ugly it is. — The Trump White House, June 2025

The quote was pulled from a White House statement last week responding to the previous installation, Dictator Approved—a golden thumbs-up smashing the Statue of Liberty’s crown, accompanied by fawning quotes from Trump’s strongman fan club: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, and Kim Jong Un.

According to its National Park Service permit, the purpose of the video work is to “demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery.” Translation: trolling with a permit. The piece is allowed to remain on the Mall through Sunday at 8 p.m., barring executive orders to the contrary.

The White House, still nursing its bruised aesthetic sensibilities from last week, was again unamused.

“Wow, these liberal activists masquerading as ‘artists,’ are dumber than I thought!” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, in a statement presumably meant to be read aloud in all caps. “I’ve tricked them into taking down their ugly sculpture and replacing it with a beautiful video of the president’s legendary dance moves that will bring joy and inspiration to all tourists traversing our National Mall.”

She concluded: “Maybe they will put this on their next sculpture.”

As for who’s behind all this? Still a mystery. The materials and gallows humor are consistent with guerrilla works that popped up last fall in D.C., Portland, and Philadelphia: a bronze tiki torch, a replica of Nancy Pelosi’s desk topped with fake poop—part performance art, part lowbrow indictment of the January 6 insurrection.

Permit records list a “Mary Harris” as the applicant, though no contact details were provided. For those into clues: Mary Harris Jones was the real name of labor leader “Mother” Jones. Either the artist is playing a long game or moonlighting as a U.S. history teacher.

A gunman shot dead two Israeli embassy staffers on Wednesday night as they were leaving the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown Washington D.C. The victims, identified as Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinksy, had been attending an event at the museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) advocacy group.

“Two staff members of the Israeli embassy were shot this evening at close range while attending a Jewish event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC,” Israeli embassy spokesperson, Tal Naim Cohen, wrote on X. “We have full faith in law enforcement authorities on both the local and federal levels to apprehend the shooter and protect Israel’s representatives and Jewish communities throughout the United States.”

The event at the museum was advertised as the annual AJC Young Diplomats reception for promoting coalitions in the Middle East. On the AJC’s website, it says it backs Israel and fights antisemitism. 

Police have identified the suspect as Elias Rodriguez, 30, of Chicago. He was spotted “pacing back and forth outside of the museum,” according to Pamela Smith, the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department. While addressing journalists at a press conference in the wake of the shooting, she said the suspect “approached a group of four people, produced a handgun and opened fire striking both of our decedents.”

Diplomatic sources have told Reuters and AFP news agencies that Lischinksy had a German passport. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called the attack “despicable,” while President Donald Trump posted online that “Hatred and radicalism have no place in the USA.”

Speaking to the BBC, American Jewish Committee board member Jojo Kalin said that after the incident, the shooter walked into the museum. According to Kalin, the gunman displayed a keffiyeh, a garment worn in parts of the Middle East, and which has become symbolic of the Palestinian liberation movement in the United States. The gunman allegedly shouted inside the museum, “Free Palestine.”

Kalin added: “It’s deeply ironic that what we were discussing was bridge building and then we were all hit over the head with such hatred.”

Katie Kalisher, an eyewitness, told the BBC that “at around 9:07 p.m., we heard gun shots, then a guy came in [to the museum] looking really distressed, and we thought that he just needed help and shelter.”

“People were calming him down, bringing him water, taking care of him – little did they know that he was someone who had executed people in cold blood. He was the shooter,” Yoni Kalin, another eyewitness, told the BBC.

Rodriguez is currently being questioned in police custody.

The Great Depression began in the United States with the stock market crash in October 1929, which instigated a severe worldwide economic downturn. President Franklin Roosevelt responded with a series of programs and reforms called the New Deal to promote economic recovery and alleviate financial strain across various labor sectors, including farming and migrant labor. To get a comprehensive understanding of the depth of economic distress that workers faced, the government established a number of administrative bodies to document the nation’s social and financial landscape, both visually and through the written word. Among these documentarians was photographer Dorothea Lange, whose mission to capture the physical and psychological toll of the Depression on small farmers and laborers inspired countless future photojournalists and social activists, and helped the country come to terms with the economic reality of the day.

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Born in 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange—whose work is currently the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, DC—did not begin her career as a champion for social justice with her lens pointed at the most disadvantaged Americans. Her entrée into image making began in New York City, at Columbia University, where she studied with Clarence H. White, a fine art photographer and compatriot of Alfred Stieglitz. Later, still in New York, she worked as a studio assistant for the pictoralist photographer Arnold Genthe, who counted among his clientele the most recognizable names of the early 20th century, including Greta Garbo, Senator Robert La Follette Sr., Gene Tunney, and President Woodrow Wilson.

Later, in 1919, she moved to San Francisco, where she opened a photo studio that catered to the rich and famous of her own era, and ran it successfully for a decade. It was only in 1929, after the stock market crash paralyzed the global economy, that Lange began to document the harsh realities of American life on the streets of her adopted hometown.

After seeing firsthand the hardship imposed by the Depression, the rampant homelessness, the men in breadlines, Lange became an advocate for social justice, believing that an image could have the power to change the lives of the less fortunate.

Around this time, in the early 1930s, Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley, was working for the State Emergency Relief Administration, researching migrant laborers’ influx into California seeking farm work. After seeing Lange’s images, he sought permission to use one, and soon hired her to illustrate his reports about the terrible conditions these people suffered.

Agricultural reform was of paramount importance to Roosevelt when he took office in 1933. He swiftly established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which benefited primarily large landholding farmers, leaving small farmers, tenant laborers, and migrant workers to struggle.

To address worsening economic conditions, Roosevelt also founded the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1933 to provide federal funding to states for relief efforts. However, the funding often fell short of long-term needs, highlighting the inadequacy of relief efforts. Recognizing the need for more cohesive agrarian assistance, Roosevelt created the Resettlement Administration in 1935, later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

With assistance from Taylor, who became her second husband (in New York she’d married the painter Maynard Dixon), she collaborated from 1935 to 1945 with multiple agencies in Roosevelt’s New Deal government, including the FSA, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, the War Relocation Authority, and the Office of War Information. Like her fellow documentarians, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn, she traveled the United States for years, photographing the lives of those worst hit by the Depression.

Lange’s partnership with these agencies raises questions about the intent and ethics behind her photographs. Were they mere propaganda tools to garner support for government programs, or did they genuinely serve as evidence of dire need?

Lange’s most important photograph is Migrant Mother, an image that stands as an enduring symbol of an era fraught with despair and hardship. Captured in 1936, the picture embodies the collective struggle and resilience of American families during one of the nation’s most challenging epochs.

The image portrays Florence Owens Thompson and her children, offering a poignant glimpse into the everyday reality of poverty, destitution, and the pervasive struggle for survival experienced by countless families during that era. Its significance lies not only in the personal plight of the individuals depicted but in its representation of the larger social and economic turmoil.

The photograph became a touchstone for humanizing the widespread plight of Depression-era families. It brought visibility to the unseen and humanized the statistics, allowing viewers to connect emotionally with the harsh realities these families faced. The picture also proved a testament to the power of documentary photography to drive social change. Its impact was profound, leading to an awakening of public consciousness and influencing government policy. Following its circulation, the image spurred the government to act, resulting in the initiation of further aid programs for migrant agricultural workers and their families.

Migrant Mother is often celebrated for its artistic merit. Lange’s composition, use of light, and the profound emotional depth she captured contribute to its enduring legacy as a work of art. It’s a striking combination of visual storytelling and artistic finesse that elevates it from mere snapshot to a profound and evocative portrayal of an era. It stands as a poignant and powerful symbol of the adversity Americans faced during an unforgiving time, and its enduring legacy underscores the potency of visual storytelling in revealing truths, stirring emotions, and bringing about societal change.

Some critics have nevertheless questioned the authenticity of Lange’s work, and particularly Migrant Mother; they claim she staged or manipulated the scenes she photographed. Despite being known for documenting her subjects’ stories as well as their images, she collected very little information this time.

Lange came across the woman who would become the Migrant Mother and her family while driving home from a photo shoot of migrant laborers who had traveled West in search of farm work during the Depression. Along the way, she passed a sign for a pea-pickers camp. She drove by, but 20 minutes later, impulse made her turn around. By many accounts, Lange stayed no longer than 10 minutes, and left with the assumption that Thompson was among those seeking work among the California pea farms where she had just been photographing.

But that wasn’t the case. Thompson and her family were simply traveling, and had encountered car trouble. Thompson was waiting while her husband and son walked to the nearest town in search of help. Decades later, Thompson told her local newspaper she’d regretted ever allowing Lange to photograph her, and felt that her image had been misused.

“I wish she hadn’t taken my picture,” she said. “I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”

A MoMA One on One Series paperback by Sarah Meister reveals how tangled the history of Migrant Mother is. According to Meister, Thompson was a full-blooded Cherokee, a fact that, had it been known at the time, would likely have changed how the photograph was received by the general voting public. Ironically, Thompson was against the government support that Lange’s picture was meant to stimulate. In the book, Thompson’s son Troy Owens said her “biggest fear was that if she were to ask for help [from the government], then they would have reason to take her children away from her. That was her biggest fear all through her entire life.”

A description on MoMA’s own website calls the work “the single most recognizable image from the Great Depression,” yet inaccurately describes Thompson and her children as “huddled together in a tent at a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Meister proposed a theory as to why Migrant Mother is so often described incorrectly. The image appeared in a story filed by a United Press reporter who visited the Nipomo pea farms a few days after Lange and Thompson had gone their separate ways. When that story was published, the photograph was captioned with information from the United Press reporter’s story.

Since the invention of photography, there have been questions of veracity in photojournalism; a photographer chooses what to include, and exclude, before shooting the image. Still, there is little question that the portrait has come to represent the generation of Americans who suffered through the Great Depression, which speaks to the influence of photography and how images can be interpreted.

While Lange’s most popular images (those chosen by the government agencies who employed her) depict destitution, they often conveyed resilience and determination, and celebrated the strength of those enduring hardship, including African American farmers who faced discrimination in government relief efforts.

In 1941 Lange received a Guggenheim fellowship to continue her work for the FSA and make “documentary photographs of the American social scene, particularly in rural communities.” She chose however to defer the fellowship in order to work for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which led to one of her most powerful bodies of work: a series of photographs of Japanese Americans who were interned in detention camps following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. According to historian Linda Gordon, both the military and the WRA staff censored Lange’s photos of internment camps like the one in Manzanar, California. “US Army Major Beasley actually wrote ‘Impounded’ across some of the prints (luckily, not on the negatives),” Gordon said. The images were suppressed and went unpublished until after the war.

Lange remained active throughout her life, using her photographs to raise awareness of the struggles faced by Americans. In 1955 her work was included in Edward Steichen’s landmark photography exhibition The Family of Man at MoMA, and in the years leading up to her death in 1965, she photographed across the globe, often traveling with Taylor, by then a land reform consultant to the United Nations (the US Agency for International Development) and the Ford Foundation.

While the government used Lange’s photographs for propaganda purposes, she saw her work as a means of advocacy, aiming to assist those in need. Lange’s legacy endures as a testament to the power of visual storytelling in highlighting social injustice and advocating for change. Through her lens, she immortalized the resilience of those weathering the storm of the Great Depression.

In the slowly gentrifying northeast Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad, an old Baptist church slated for redevelopment is wrapped in steel panels reclaimed from a decommissioned border wall. Here their corrugations are turned to run horizontally, where they echo the Shake Shack-ish, rusticated wood skinning an event tent installed on the church’s parking lot. The tent is for Pre- and Post-Experience gathering for visitors to Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena (Virtually present, Physically invisible), 2017.

Iñárritu has worked for four years with his longtime collaborator and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and ILMxLAB to create an Experience of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the open desert. A virtual reality encounter, wrapped in a multi-sensory re-enactment, based in and followed by intense firsthand testimonies, Carne y Arena (Flesh and Sand) is designed for just one Experiencer at a time.

You enter alone the church building and sign a three-page agreement releasing the producers of the Experience from any responsibility for your injury, disability, emotional loss, or death. You enter a small, refrigerated holding cell with metal benches affixed to a freshly poured concrete floor. You read a bilingual instruction on the wall and place your shoes and socks in a steel cupboard. You may hear a voice ordering you to also remove your coat and scarf. You are being surveilled. You sit for an indeterminate time. You count mismatched shoes collected from the border desert, which are strewn around the room. You rise when an alarm sounds and a light flashes and move through a door that unlocks with a click.

Your cold feet touch cold sand in a square room, maybe 30 feet on the side, dark and featureless, except for a low, reddish horizon line set into the far wall. You walk toward the backlit figures in the center of the room, who instruct you and place a backpack on your back, a VR rig on your head, and earphones in your ears. You are told to explore freely but not to run, and that you will feel a tug on the top of your backpack if you get too close to a wall.

You then find yourself standing alone in the waning desert night, the horizon picked out with a dim glow. You discern a small group of anxious people emerge from the scrub and pause around you—women, men, a baby, a frightened child. You can approach them and watch and listen, though they do not react to your presence. Depending on where you are looking, the approach by and encounter with ICE agents startles you, or not. You watch as these refugees and migrants are ordered at gunpoint to take off their shoes. You witness their terrified interrogations and apprehension all around you, until suddenly you don’t.

You are relieved of your VR rig and sent to another cell to retrieve your shoes. You then see the faces and read the accounts of the real people who restaged their border crossing experiences for Iñárritu’s production. You leave this last room when you are ready and head, if you like, for a Post-Experience drink at the tent. The entire cycle takes around 15 minutes.

Iñárritu has described the experience of Carne y Arena as “cathartic and emotional,” offering visitors “a direct experience walking in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts.” At moments Carne y Arena is literally visceral and overwhelming. The mise-en-scène is extraordinary. The integration of physical space and sensation with virtual perception is highly effective. The authenticity of the migrants’ suffering bridges their CG avatars’ uncanny valley. If there is a failure within this Experience, it is that it ends too soon and too easily. We now know that the dangers of the border are just a beginning, and that ICE is meting out enough trauma to migrants, DREAMers, refugees, and their families to fill not just a VR sequel, but an entire series.

Germano Celant, curator at the Prada Foundation, which sponsored Iñárritu’s project early on, discusses Carne y Arena in the context of evolving cinema, but two divergent references seem more germane: the Parque Eco Alberto in Hidalgo, Mexico, has offered an adventure park-style, border crossing re-enactment experience since 2011. It seems to function primarily as an entertainment and/or migratory reality check for Mexico City millennials and Anglo gonzo journalists. The intensity of Iñárritu’s work also calls to mind Real Violence, Jordan Wolfson’s snuff VR work from the 2017 Whitney Biennial, even as its empathy stands in diametric opposition to Wolfson’s impotent nihilism.

Carne y Arena premiered at Cannes in 2017, then it began an extended run in Milan at the Prada Foundation, and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In both venues, the expensively ticketed Experience sold out completely. In Washington, D.C., Carne y Arena stands apart from its community partners, the Phillips Collection and the Atlas Performing Arts Center. And thanks to the underwriting by the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’ philanthropic and social justice organization, it is free.

Current plans call for Carne y Arena to be open 12 hours a day until August. At capacity, it is possible, then, for up to 12,000 people to experience Iñárritu’s piece during its Washington run. Who will they be? How will they be affected? What will they do afterward? Can it matter? In D.C.’s concentrated microclimate of political upheaval, these are very much not rhetorical questions.

Information and reserved tickets for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena are available at carneyarenadc.com. Visitors must be 14 years and older.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., announced that presentations of a Krzysztof Wodiczko projection on the outside of its building, which it postponed following the February 14 shooting in Parkland, Florida, have been rescheduled for March 7, 8, and 9, from 7 to 9:30 p.m.

The museum and artist  decided to delay the installation, which was previously slated for February 13, 14, and 15, due to its depiction of a gun. The projection was on view only the night of February 13.

“To me, the silence feels most respectful,” Wodiczko said in a statement following the postponement. “In this case, not showing the projection shows respect and sensitivity to the people who suffer from this great tragedy.”

The Hirshhorn’s decision to alter its plans for the projection received some push back. Notably, Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post wrote that “postponing it plays into a fundamental misunderstanding of how artworks like this operate, and it is an unnecessary concession to the new American troll culture.” He argued that, by displaying the work, the museum could “dramatize a choice we face, and a decision we have avoided for generations now.”

Wodiczko’s piece, which was first displayed in 1988, is three stories tall, and is being presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s” at the Hirshhorn.

Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday.

Today’s show: “Shirin Neshat: Facing History” is on view at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden opened today and runs through Sunday, September 20. The solo exhibition sheds some light on the cultural and political influences that have informed Neshat’s work throughout her career. The exhibit will feature a number of films, photos, as well as items from the artist’s personal library.

Rachel Farbiarz’s treatment of the subject matter in her first solo show—the trauma caused by war and other man-made and natural disasters—might have come off as preachy in the wrong hands. But the D.C.-based artist’s combination of narrative skill, emotional openness and a light touch lends her work a moving quality. Born in 1977, Farbiarz switched careers in 2008, abandoning her job as an attorney focusing on the civil rights of prisoners. She did not, in other words, follow the common path of art careers, a fact that may account for some of the work’s formal limitations. Yet her background has contributed to its particular sense of historical melancholy.

In addition to two assemblage sculptures, Farbiarz showed 12 drawings in the main gallery that variously combine collaged images of human figures, ships and buildings with drawn lines that often end in fanciful loops. In Memorial Hill (2013), dozens of small soldiers march, fight, celebrate or lie dead. Like the red and yellow flags and banners that wave above them, the figures are cut from old magazines, while pebbles, upright shovels and standing wooden memorials and signposts are drawn. Large stretches of empty white paper give the imagery a distant feeling. While these drawings do not break new aesthetic ground—they bring to mind Amy Cutler, the Royal Art Lodge and Saul Steinberg—the tiny scale of the activity manages to pull us in to look closer. The weapons and costumes seem decidedly low-tech, connected to the wars of the 20th century. Jarring juxtapositions—such as that between soldiers kneeling, about to be shot, and a shirtless GI lighting a cigarette—capture the mix of foolishness, bravery and sadness of an era filled with war.

In the 15 text-filled sheets that together make up Apology to the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants (2009), loopy handwriting transcribes an emotionally raw speech given by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd apologizing for the forced adoption of Aboriginal and poor white children within Australia as well as the forced migration of impoverished British children to the commonwealth up until the 1960s. The words wander over the page, shifting in scale, direction and style, with the smallest executed in straightforward cursive and the largest sending out tendrils and curlicues that occasionally cover other words or wrap around other lines. Seen from a distance, the drawings resemble maps, as lighter and darker areas describe the bulges, curves and clusters of geographical entities.

That these drawings also call to mind the stacked and interwoven notations in rabbinical commentaries seems no coincidence, given that several of them interweave Hebrew text. In a series of untitled collages from 2009 that appeared in the back room, Hebrew words become part of the image, sometimes as word bubbles, sometimes standing in for smoke, dirt or sky. In one of these, the sky above a 19th-century image of a commercial street with a ladder is filled with the repeated expression “a’yekah?“ (“where are you?”), the question God asked Adam and Eve as they hid after eating the fruit. The script is the kind of Hebrew writing (including indications of vowel sounds) found particularly in diasporic religious texts. The presence of writing used for prayers emphasizes the sense that these works are a meditative working-through of tragedy. As when grief is accompanied by incongruous laughter, their mournfulness is cut with playfulness, an expression of life.

 

 

Few of the millions of people who practice yoga understand its history or its mysterious origins, but an exhibition coming to the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery is sure to deliver some enlightenment.

Organized by Debra Diamond, associate curator of South and Southeast Asian art, “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” looks at yogic practices through 2,000 years’ worth of depictions, with ancient temple statuary, miniature paintings, and chakra charts, as well as films, books, and photographs from South Asia’s British-colonial period. Highlights include a fifth-century Indian tile portraying bony ascetics and a 1938 film of T. Krishnamacharya, the grandfather of modern yoga.

This is the first exhibition to study yoga as a visual metaphor spanning centuries, from its spiritual roots—found in Jain, Buddhist, Sufi, and Hindu traditions—to its current status as a global exercise technique.

With yoga studios popping up in cities throughout the United States, the Smithsonian decided to tap into the discipline’s popularity in a practical way. The museum collaborated with Yoga Journal and the Yoga Alliance to launch its “Together We’re One” campaign in May, raising more than $175,000—well over its $125,000 goal—on the crowdfunding website Razoo. That money supplements costs for shipping, publications, and public programming (including yoga classes) during the course of the show, which runs from October 19 to January 26. So don’t be surprised to see museum visitors engaged in downward dog and sun salutations in the coming months, hopefully bringing a degree of spiritual awareness to Washington, D.C.

A few thousand years from now, when aliens arrive on Earth, human beings and most everything they built will be gone.

Fortunately for the archeologists of the future, one type of structure will survive.

The stone creations of the Pillar Builders, a primitive culture that lived in the oceans, can be found all over the planet.

For a span of 2,500 years, the aquatic, obsessively flirty Builders made hundreds of permutations on their basic forms, like the classic Round Thing on top of a Triangle-topped Rectangular Pillar-Thing, or The Inside-Out Pillar-Thing.

They had three kinds of pillars–Boring, Frilly, and Very Frilly.

If this is starting to sound familiar, of course it’s because these motifs are known in our culture as Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian.

The Pillar Builders are us—and all the other cultures around the world that adapted the architectural styles of the ancient Greeks as their own.

That’s the premise of Ellen Harvey’s mischievous exhibition, Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington, DC., at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The show also extends to D.C. tourist venues, where unsuspecting Earthlings are being passed maps of the capital’s landmarks written by and for the aliens of the future.

The map identifies one structure combining a Triangle Top with a Circular Domed Pillar-Thing, thought to be a monument to the planet Earth. This is what we know as the Jefferson Memorial. Then there’s The Triangle-topped Pillar-Thing with Adjacent Rectangles, attached to a less common Oval-topped Pillar-Thing, a structure currently called the White House. The guide explains that it may have been used to house pets.

“Obviously they get it completely wrong,” says Harvey affectionately.

More whimsical than the movies in which Washington is blown to smithereens, not to mention Trevor Paglen’s morbid portrait of Earth currently orbiting in an Echostar XVI satellite, Harvey’s sci-fi archeology raises an interesting question about our values, or at least the way we use architecture to express them: Why are pillars so popular?

Or, as Harvey puts it, “What is it about classical architecture that makes democracy in Athens a cultural meme?”

“There’s no other style of architecture that’s been so successful,” she comments. “The Enlightenment, the European Empires, the colonies, the Fascists, the Americans. Stalin loved it.”

The Corcoran atrium has pillars, too, and that’s where Harvey has installed her handmade Alien Souvenir Stand, modeled after the ones that proliferate in Washington.

In the galleries is a massive accumulation of some 3,000 postcards (or, flattened cellulose covered with mechanical pictures, as the aliens describe them), depicting neoclassical architecture in manifestations ranging from a Polish synagogue to an Argentine court. It’s the Pillar-Builder Archive, an attempt to categorize Pillar Builder structures all over Earth.

Finally, in the rotunda, there’s the tall Alien Rocket Ship, the gleaming evidence of how Pillar Builders have now begun to influence extraterrestrials. Tall and sleek, it has a frilly appendage too.

“Once you become fond of neoclassical architecture, you have to make your own,” Harvey says.

For an alien’s-eye view of more Washington landmarks, click through the slide show.

[SlideDeck2 id=31707 iframe=1]All images in slide show: Details from Ellen Harvey, Alien’s Guide to Washington D.C. brochure, 2013. Photos courtesy the artist and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.