Thursday, August 21, 2025
Public art is rarely problem-free. Consider the following three works, here in the nation’s capital.
On June 19, 2020, Gaetano Trentanove’s bronze depiction of hirsute frontiersman and lawyer Albert Pike, dedicated at 3rd and D Streets NW in 1901 and controversial from the start, was toppled and set aflame. A Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry’s Southern Jurisdiction, Pike also served as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. After restoration by the National Park Service, the statue is to be raised again to its pedestal, on which a second figure, the Goddess of Masonry (the fraternal movement, not stone construction in general) sits, displaying a heraldic banner.
In 1942, “Man Controlling Trade,” a pair of massive limestone sculptures by Michael Lantz, each showing a muscle-bound man reigning in a muscle-bound horse, was installed outside the Federal Triangle headquarters of the Federal Trade Commission, known as the Apex Building. In his March 7 Washington Post column, Philip Kennicott cited Lantz’s horsemen to represent the potential cultural impact of the General Services Administration’s proposed disposition of federal buildings: “One of those works … symbolizes the larger possible damage to the public realm if a significant portion of this [GSA] list is actually sold.”
“Mountains and Clouds” of 1976, the only work by Alexander Calder to combine a stabile (the steel mountains) with a mobile (the aluminum clouds), dominates the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building. At last installed in 1986, 10 years after the sculptor’s death, the huge black sculpture — a forbidding counterpart to Calder’s colorful mobile in the atrium of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building — has been missing its clouds since 2014 due to safety concerns. The repeatedly postponed date for the reappearance of the four suspended “clouds” (their motor failed early on) now hovers over the second half of 2026.
Though these three works aren’t on the agenda, they may come up tomorrow, Friday, Aug. 22, when Dr. Nick Hartigan — a GSA fine arts specialist currently on administrative leave — leads a Living Room conversation called “Public Art in DC” at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW.
The event, from noon to 1 p.m., is included with museum admission ($20, $15 for seniors, $10 for students and educators and free for military and age 18 and under). Advance registration at phillipscollection.org/exhibitions-events is required.
Speaking not on behalf of GSA but in a personal capacity, Dr. Hartigan, a University of Michigan-trained art historian, plans to focus on three abstract works on view at the Phillips: Seymour Lipton’s “Ancestor,” Barbara Hepworth’s “Dual Form” and Angela Bulloch’s “Heavy Metal Stack: Fat Cyan Three.”
“Dual Form” by Barbara Hepworth at the Phillips Collection. Courtesy Phillips Collection.
Hepworth, who worked in the seaside Cornish village of St. Ives, is the most famous of the three sculptors. From a 1966 edition of seven, cast in bronze, “Dual Form” resembles her much larger “Single Form,” erected two years before as a component of the pool at the United Nations Secretariat.
The somewhat Cubist “Ancestor” of 1958, cast in nickel alloys, is from the New York-born Lipton’s “Hero” series, inspired by Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book on comparative mythology, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”
Born in rural Ontario in 1966, Bulloch, part of the Young British Artists group of the late 1980s and 1990s, now lives in Berlin. “Heavy Metal Stack: Fat Cyan Three” — designed on computer like her related works — was commissioned by the Phillips for the corner of 21st and Q Streets, where it was placed in 2018.
With these four pieces as “little case studies,” the underlying premise of the slide presentation, explained Dr. Hartigan, is: “How did we go from very little public sculpture to public sculpture everywhere all the time?”
Aside from monuments and memorials, public art in the modern sense in the U.S. owes a debt to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Art Association, established in 1872 and now known as the Association for Public Art. In the last century, the New Deal was key, putting thousands of artists and craftspeople to work, with the decoration of government-owned buildings funded through a “percent-for-art” program, allocating one percent of a building’s cost.
Local percent-for-art programs followed. The GSA launched its Art in Architecture program, which budgets one-half of one percent, in 1972 (a predecessor began in 1963). There are now more than 500 Art in Architecture works around the country.
The GSA’s Fine Arts Collection, likely the nation’s largest, comprises over 26,000 works by about 2,400 artists, including “more than 23,000 easel paintings, prints and small sculptures created during the New Deal,” according to the GSA website. Per Dr. Hartigan, an additional 30,000-plus murals are in post offices, with one U.S. Postal Service employee responsible both for them and for the buildings they occupy.
Though “a lot of public art can fade into the background,” public art, when noticed, is not always appreciated or even welcomed. “I encourage folks to give the artwork the benefit of the doubt,” said Dr. Hartigan. Controversy “is a constant in the field of public art,” with objections more visceral when a work occupies a place about which people feel a sense of ownership, versus a museum.
At GSA, Dr. Hartigan has sought to “forge stronger connections with local arts institutions” such as the Smithsonian, the National Gallery and the Phillips; during last fall’s exhibition at the Phillips, “William Gropper: Artist of the People,” he took a group to see Gropper’s 1939 Department of the Interior mural, “Construction of a Dam.”
Right now, he and others are “in limbo.” Fine Arts Collection staffing, said Dr. Hartigan, has been “reduced to a point where it’s effectively impossible to care for the collection,” roughly a third of which is in Washington, D.C. “We don’t know what’s coming next.”