Finding The Great America, 250 Years On. The Real One.

Just before the fireworks display was about to start for this year’s Fourth of July here, the White House lobbed a stink bomb at one of nation’s most conscientious recorders of American culture past and present, the Smithsonian Institution, accusing its National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism” and failure to present “patriotic” history.

The Trump administration was presenting its own version of such a history in the form of the Great American State Fair, which for two weeks took up a large swath of the National Mall with self-storage-unit-style “state pavilions,” artificial intelligence-generated animations of Founding Fathers, and a Secret Service recruitment station. It was heavy on hot dogs, light on the history.

You would not have guessed from this “Great American” event that the nation is and has long been home to ever-expanding globally-sourced populations — Asian, African, European, Latino, Oceanic and, of course, pre- “American” Indigenous — and continues to be energized by infusions of world cultures. Or that a wide range of socially alternative versions of living in the world were nurtured here from the start.

The Fair is now gone. The Smithsonian, subject to continuing scrutiny over its leadership and governance from the Administration, soldiers on. Below are a few short-term history-rich exhibitions that are well worth seeing right now. They offer a culturally representative account of our nation.

At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, you’ll find the long-running solo exhibition “Love, Queen” by the contemporary American artist Adam Pendleton. Organized by the museum’s head curator, Evelyn C. Hankins, with support from Alice Phan, much of the show is made up of abstract painting but it also includes a stirring video piece commemorating a political event that took place on the Mall itself almost 60 years ago.

The video, titled “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway),” incorporates documentary images of a vast tent camp of some 6,000 people set up on the Mall in the late spring and summer of 1968 as part of the Poor People’s Campaign conceived by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The campaign brought together African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino and European Americans and Native Americans in a peaceful demand for economic equity. Although delegations from the group met with government officials, the efforts yielded scant benefits, leaving the issues at stake as pressing now, in a nation split between rich and poor, more urgent than ever. If there were any mentions at all in the Great American State Fair of this valiant collective effort at communication and communion, I missed them.

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” through Jan. 3, 2027; hirshhorn.si.edu.

At The Smithsonian Castle

Steps away from the Hirshhorn are the brick towers of the Smithsonian’s original 1855 building, known as The Castle. And one of the city’s signal 250th anniversary exhibitions is here.

Titled “American Aspirations,” and organized by Lonnie G. Bunch III, the head of the Smithsonian, working with Abeer Saha and Harry R. Rubenstein from the National Museum of American History. The show is made up of more than two dozen historical objects, some of which refer to aspects of America progress — digital technology, the space race — highlighted in the recent State Fair, others of which got little attention there.

A relic of a personage widely revered as a sesquicentennial hero is here: the portable, laptop-size mahogany desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted the liberational Declaration of Independence, though you’ll have to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture (below) to get the full Jefferson story.

The Castle also has another icon of a universal American freedom in a miniature ceramic version of the Statue of Liberty, created by its designer, the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.

But this smaller version affords a slightly different view of the monument. Difficult to see from eye-level in the colossal New York Harbor figure, but clearly visible in the model, are the broken chains that lie at the figure’s feet, a reference both to the United States’ fought-for independence, but also — Bartholdi was clear on this — to its abolition of slavery.

And recently rotated into the show is a particularly fragile relic of American freedom, the Protestant hymnal owned by the former slave and activist Harriet Tubman, who used the spirituals printed in this book — she couldn’t read, but she knew them all by heart — as coded calls, directional and inspiriting, to map the route of the Underground Railroad. A 2020 “Black Lives Matter” street mural near the White House was destroyed last year under Republican pressure, but the presence of Tubman’s hymnal keeps a forward path symbolically open.

“American Aspirations,” through July 26, www.si.edu.

At the National Museum of African American History and Culture

It’s at this museum close to the Washington Monument that you’ll encounter the expanded Jefferson story.

Seek out a display called “Slavery and Freedom.” A famous 1800 portrait painting of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale is there, as is a set of iron slave-shackles, along with wall texts explaining the connection. Over his lifetime Jefferson, a rich Virginia landowner, enslaved more than 600 Black people, granting freedom to only two. (He was one of 12 presidents who owned slaves.) A short video, titled “The Paradox of Liberty,” on view in the gallery, is a tribute to them.

This fantastic museum, which opened a decade ago, seems to exist on a different planet from the one that produced the Fair. Where the Fair plodded in its telling of history, the NMAAHC pops, and nowhere more so than in the vivacious traveling exhibition called “At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”

An archival show enriched with examples of African and African-American art drawn from the collections of five of the nation’s leading Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs (Clark Atlanta, Florida A&M, Jackson State, Texas Southern, and Tuskegee), it documents a vivacious educational project in longtime progress across the country, with minimal early government or corporate support. At the end of this month the show will begin a tour to the schools it celebrates. (The Great American State Fair had an extensive display devoted to a single educational institution, Hillsdale College, a private, conservative, Christian liberal arts school in Michigan.)

“Slavery & Freedom,” ongoing; nmaahc.si.edu; “At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” through this Sunday, July 19.

At the National Museum of African Art

By coincidence, the Fair opened on the Thursday before Pride Weekend, though on my visit I came across zero reference to that freedom movement.

Happily, the Smithsonian is giving it major props in a substantial and globally-minded show called “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art,” organized by Kevin D. Dumouchelle at the National Museum of African Art.

As of this month, 33 out of 54 African countries outlaw homosexual activity. In Uganda, birthplace of the terrific young, New York-based sculptor Leilah Babirye, who has work here, it’s a capital offense. The show acknowledges that L.G.B.T.Q. safety remains precarious everywhere. In the current political climate in the U.S., gay marriage, and the democratic principles it represents, are under threat.

Yet in the NMAA show much of the work is quietly upbeat, from a steady-eyed self-portrait by the great South African artist and visual activist, Zanele Muholi; to a luminous photograph of an upwardly gazing male couple in a luminous photo by Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989); to an ethereal installation by Paul Emmanuel, an artist born in Zambia and now living between Johannesburg and Washington.

Combining a draped and translucent military parachute with two drawings, one of a pair of dark-skinned male hands, the other of light-skinned male feet, it might be read as a vision of safe landing in the supportive company of brotherhood across racial and affectional lines.

“Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art,” through Aug. 23; africa.si.edu.

At the Smithsonian Museum of American Art/Renwick Museum

Finally, if you want to see how dynamically creative, not to mention culturally wide-armed, a State Fair can actually be, head to the Renwick Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Gallery a few blocks from the Mall, and check out the genuinely Blue Ribbon show called “State Fairs: Growing American Craft.”

This survey of the fair as an American popular phenomenon skirts, without entirely avoiding, ideological politics, which is what the Freedom 250 edition is essentially about. And, calling on a true cultural rainbow of talent, it features a wide range of hands-on craftwork — weaving, sewing, ceramics, carving, sculpting — which the Mall presentation notably lacked.

Among the highlights: a brilliantly-colored 1960s dress sewn entirely from clipped butter carton labels; a turquoise-inlaid ceramic crown honoring “Miss Navajo Nation”; a sleek silver 1950s candelabra made by a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany; a contemporary patchwork portrait of a Black family in South Carolina before the Great Migration; a harrowing, diarylike pictorial quilt produced by a Kentucky collective of imprisoned women who called themselves Battered Offenders Self Help (BOSH); and a mosaic wedding picture, composed entirely of dried seeds and veggies, spelling out the names “Annie” and Molly” and the words “Celebrate Trans Love and Joy.”

This is all Great America, 250 years on. The real one.