The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery has opened "State Fairs: Growing American Craft," the first exhibition since the Trump administration's August 2025 audit of all Smithsonian exhibitions, didactics, and collections. The audit, based on an executive order to "restore truth and sanity to American history," condemned discussions of racism, sexism, and oppression as revisionist history. The exhibition features over 250 works from across the United States, spanning the 19th century to the present, arguing that regional state and tribal fairs are essential sites for the development of American craft. It includes spectacular pieces like a 12-foot pair of Lucchese boots, a life-size butter sculpture, and works by artists such as Morgan Hill, Kelly Bohnenkamp, Betty Spindler, Linda Nez, Kaye D. Miller, and Peggie Hartwell.
This exhibition matters because it directly challenges the administration's audit by presenting American cultural pride as inseparable from histories of oppression and exclusion. Rather than offering a simplistic celebration of American culture, "State Fairs" uses the aesthetics of American nationalism to critique it, arguing that regional craft has always been central to American art and that fairgrounds have launched the careers of now-famous artists like Peter Voulkos, Consuelo Jimenez-Underwood, and Katherine Po-yu Choy. The show represents a brave institutional rebuke to government efforts to sanitize historical narratives, asserting the importance of free expression in federally funded arts institutions.