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PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN WILKES
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By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences
How do you experience, really see, monumental loss?
As artist Suzanne Firstenberg and her team were installing In America: Remembered on the National Mall, I saw her vision come to life.
To walk amid the sea of flags, the staggering scale of loss is made visible: 693,000 flags and counting, each representing a life lost in this pandemic. I watched as loved ones kneeled, paying tribute to family members lost, or perhaps to strangers.
The art installation will close Sunday, but another artist, Stephen Wilkes, has memorialized this impermanent monument in a single, epic photograph (above).
Standing beside him on the mall, I watched as he selected his vantage point for the next two days with purpose, talking through the visual elements that would unfold over the next 24 hours: the Washington Monument placed centrally in the frame, serving as a sundial marking the passage of time; the sun rising over the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, a tribute to the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on communities of color; the hope that a nearly full moon would be visible in the sky; and the walking path as a central narrative element, leading visitors and your eye through the frame. (Below, two details from that single-frame photo, showing people passing the monument.)
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