What can a writing desk, a hymnal and a candlestand explain about a country? That is the question the Smithsonian’s “American Aspirations” sets out to answer — an exhibition that reads the nation’s founding through the furniture of ordinary life, according to the Smithsonian’s presentation of the show.
Video: Smithsonian Institution (official channel). Embedded via YouTube; Forever News Media does not host or copy this footage.
The curatorial wager is that aspiration is a material fact before it is a political one. A writing desk is where a farmer kept accounts and read the pamphlets that made a revolution thinkable; a hymnal is mass media before the phrase existed, carrying the same verses into thousands of households; a candlestand marks the hours after dark in which ideas were read, argued and copied out by hand. Put the objects of a founding generation in one room, the exhibition argues, and the abstract nouns of the founding documents — liberty, virtue, posterity — resolve into the furniture that housed them.
History you can sit at
The Smithsonian has been assembling the nation’s biography in objects for nearly two centuries, and the institution’s authority rests on exactly this move: the artefact first, the argument growing out of it. “American Aspirations” extends the method to the question Americans periodically re-litigate — what the founders aspired to, and whose aspirations counted. The desk, the hymnal and the candlestand do not settle that argument. They make it tangible, which in a museum is the more durable achievement.
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