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Melissa Chiu has been the director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden since 2014. During that time, she has focused on bringing the museum and its collections into the twenty-first century, with direct attention to what she terms “radical accessibility.”
We like to think of culture as providing a balancing and healing element for the human condition. And the present political circumstances all over the world make us all the more aware of how important such balance is—how important it is for us to act in harmony with, and with consideration for, each other.
Having followed Edmund de Waal’s work as both a writer and an artist ever since the publication of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), and Atemwendeb, his first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in 2013, I’ve come to realize how Edmund has managed to maintain a remarkable balance between on one hand the making, and on the other hand the writing.
As we think and re-think who we are as individuals, capable of integrating our inner and outer lives, we should question how we are related to the world’s economic machine, especially in relation to our constant consumption of things, and how we as individuals relate to economic forces that we are part of and at the same time try to maintain a certain distance from.
At home, former president Donald J. Trump is facing multiple criminal cases for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the US Capitol, in an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power, posing a great threat to American democracy.