While the great women's rights advocates Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (pictured) surely would be proud that the U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday to establish a National Women's History Museum in Washington, some, including our art critic, Christopher Knight, worry that the prime federal real estate where it would be built, the National Mall in Washington, is in bad condition and in danger of being overrun by haphazard development.
The bipartisan bill passed on a voice vote; if Senate approval follows, backers of the private, nonprofit museum, aimed at illuminating the social, cultural and historical roles played by American women, would have three years to buy a parcel alongside the mall from the government, and five years to begin construction.
According to the museum's website, it would cost $250 million to $350 million in privately raised funds to build the facility and pay for its first two years of operation. The organization's assets totaled $533,000 at the end of 2008, according to its most recent available federal tax return.
"For the first time in our nation's history, it appears Women will finally have a front row seat on our National Mall," Joan Bradley Wages, the museum's president, said in a statement -- the capital W in "Women" being her own.
--Aftermath: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington remains closed today after a security guard was fatally shot in the entranceway Wednesday by a gunman with neo-Nazi ties.
--Congress and the arts: A House subcommittee has advanced a bill
that sets the budgets for the NEA and NEH at $170 million each for
fiscal 2010, up from the current appropriation of $155 million each.
--Celebrity purchase: Brad Pitt buys a Neo Rauch painting at Art Basel, with a little help from Eli Broad.
"Help!" I imagine Abe Lincoln pleading to Ken Salazar, the Obama administration's new Interior secretary, shown above at a 200th birthday celebration held the other day at the Lincoln Memorial on Washington's National Mall. As has been widely reported, the Mall is a mess -- which isn't surprising, given that maintenance alone has been deferred to the tune of at least $350 million.
No wonder the Jefferson Memorial is apparently sinking into the Tidal Basin; Washington is swampland, remember, and vast swaths of the Mall are landfill. Congress' federal jobs-stimulus package had $200 million for Mall repairs such as this. It didn't come close to the immediate need, never mind addressing desperately needed upgrades to a place that gets 25 million annual visitors. (Bathrooms, anyone?) But it was foolishly sliced out anyhow to placate pecksniffianopponents of the bill, who caricatured the item as the World's Most Expensive Lawn Care.
Cartoons apparently play better on the political chat shows than acknowledging the ensemble of parks, monuments, memorials and museums for what it actually is: the greatest work of civic art the United States has produced. And art, not just the environment, requires conservation.
Perhaps because he hails from the environmentally conscious West (Colorado), Secretary Salazar appears to understand that. The Washington Post reported Sunday that his agenda "lists preservation of the Mall as a top priority." That's good news. And it's a critical first step toward tackling the broken planning process that prevents a full rethinking of where Mall design should be headed for the 21st century.
-- Christopher Knight
Photo: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, left, and Lincoln impersonator Chestor Damron. Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press
