The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art is featuring seven sculptures by Washington, D.C.-based Ethiopian American artist Tsedaye Makonnen. Photo by Brad Simpson, 2024, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution
By Sheila Wickowski
While New York’s “Museum Mile” – the Upper East Side Fifth Avenue museums – is a showcase of world art, the mile of museums here at home in Southwest DC has something to show from every one of the six inhabited continents in the world. Here’s a quick tour.
AFRICA
The objects in Benin Bronzes: Ambassadors of the Oba at the National Museum of African Art (through December 31, 2026) have a long history that spans from their creation for royal courts as early as the 15th century to their confiscation by the British colonial forces in 1897. In more modern times, ownership of 29 objects from the museum’s collection were returned to Nigeria. Nine of these objects, with permission from the kingdom of Benin, are now on long-term loan to the museum. A 16th century trophy head, ivory tusks and a copper figure of a rooster previously in the provenance of Walt Disney World are part of this rare exhibit.
More recent works by a Washington DC-based Ethiopian American artist encourages quiet reflection. Tsedaye Makonnen—Sanctuary :: መቅደስ :: Mekdes (Ongoing) consists of seven light tower sculptures made up of 50 boxes, each named after an individual “lost to violence, enshrining their names with love as a form of comfort and solidarity, with a sense of hope for a different future.”
ASIA
Japan and Benin are over 8000 miles apart, and yet a visitor can enjoy art works from both in a few minutes’ walk across the Enid Haupt Garden by traveling from the National Museum of African Art to the National Museum of Asian Art.
Here, the art work also spans centuries. The Print Generation (through April 27, 2025) presents 20th century artists who broke from traditional Japanese printmaking while Delighting Krishna: Paintings of the Child-God (opening March 15, 2025 – August 24, 2025) in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery presents joyful works from South Asia and the Himalayas.
NORTH AMERICA
The art of North America presented in Southwest’s museums reveals connections of art works as part of our shared history.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) offers the ongoing exhibit Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience. In the newly redesigned Visual Art and the American Experience gallery, it contains various modes of fine art production, including painting, sculpture, work on paper, art installations, mixed media, photography, and digital medial, all of which present the critical role American artists of African descent played in shaping the history of American art.
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A mile away is the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), where Sublime Light: Tapestry Art of DY Begay is at once fundamentally modern and essentially Diné. The artist has described the exhibit as an exploration of her passion for experiencing and interpreting her world from her birthplace and homeland on the Navajo Nation reservation through a lifelong curiosity to investigate the expressive power of color and design in developing her distinctive aesthetic.
Midway between the NMAAHC and NMAI, there is the Hirshhorn Museum with Mark Bradford: Pickett’s Charge. This ongoing exhibit, the monumental commission inspired by artist Paul Philippoteaux’s nineteenth-century cyclorama in Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania, depicts the final charge of the Battle of Gettysburg, often considered the critical turning point of the Civil War and, consequently, of American history. The combination of colored paper and reproductions of the original weaves “past and present, illusion and abstraction offers narratives about American history that are shaped and contested.”
SOUTH AMERICA
Without leaving the Hirshhorn, visitors can travel to Brazil with the current exhibit OSGEMEOS: Endless Story (to August 3, 2025). The largest U.S. exhibition of work by identical twins Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, known globally as osgemeos, the Portuguese word for twins, presents around a thousand works of their collaborative, multidisciplinary practice. It showcases the roots of their artistic language, inspired by their upbringing in urban Brazil, on a full circular floor which well fits what has been summarized as a “playful combination of universal themes with magical elements drawn from their heritage, urban art and graffiti traditions, and shared imagination.”
EUROPE
The Hirshhorn’s permanent collection also carries visitors to Europe, including a major survey of their modern postwar and collections at the Hirshhorn: Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960 (through April 20, 2025).
AUSTRALIA
A short walk across the mall to the National Gallery of Art also offers noted collections of American and European art. Soon to be opening is an exhibit on Australian art titled The Stars We Do Not See (October 18, 2025 – March 1, 2026). This is a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition includes 200 works by 130 modern and contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, showcasing the diverse and distinct visual iconographies of Indigenous Australia, from ochre bark paintings and experimental weavings to immersive sound and video art and powerful photographs.
GO UP – INTO OUTER SPACE
Not all the exhibits in the Southwest Quadrant are limited to our terrestrial earth. The National Air and Space Museum (NASM) goes sky high with these exhibits opening in 2025 (to be on display indefinitely). Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight features aviation pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s who pushed boundaries and blazed new trails in the air. Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall showcases some of the museum’s most iconic objects, arrayed along walls and suspended from the ceiling along with interpretive displays that provide background and context. Climate Change explores how aerospace innovations are advancing energy, agriculture, and aviation to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels while trying to strike a balance between the urgency of climate change and the hopeful possibility of individual and collective actions against it.
GO DEEP – INTO THE OCEAN
As they say, now that we’ve “explored our brains and gone to the edges of our universe” it’s time to plunge ”into the mysterious bioluminescent realm of the ocean twilight zone.” A few steps away from the Mall, there is a chance to go deep into the ocean while remaining in Southwest DC with January’s return of the ARTECHOUSE exhibit TWILIGHT ZONE: HIDDEN WONDERS OF THE OCEAN.
There you have it. Six continents, eight museums, dozens of ever-changing exhibits, thousands of works to inspire wonder – all in around a mile’s walk from home.