Refugee Boat, 1992

a handmade boat the size of a freestanding bathtub made of styrofoam blocks and covered in places with tar pitch has two short oars on its sides, and a tarp in the center. it sits in a glass case behind a glass wall, surrounded on three sides by large glass panels with photos of the blue open sea, context that is important to make clear that the boat contained two refugees from cuba who were picked up in it in 1992 by us coast guard. the boat was on display at the smithsonian until july 2025. the smithsonian acquired it when they first showed it, in 1994.

From an early draft of the report on Washington, DC museums I recently did for ARTnews:

While the National Museum of the American Latino is in development, a dense exhibition tracing the Latino history of America is being presented in the Molina Family Latino Gallery on the ground floor of the National Museum of American History. The largest object in the show is a tiny boat the size of a cold plunge, made of pitch-covered styrofoam scraps. In July 1992 the US Coast Guard rescued two Cuban men in this boat on the open sea. In Summer 1994 tens of thousands of Cubans fled for the U.S. on homemade balsa wood rafts, and “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Traveling” opened at the Hirshhorn Museum. In September, as politicians debated the fate of 20,000 Cuban balseros intercepted at sea and detained at Guantanamo, this boat went on view at the Anacostia Community Museum in a show titled, “Black Mosaic: Community, Race and Ethnicity among Black Immigrants in Washington, DC.” It then entered the Smithsonian’s collection. The current administration is also demanding the cancellation of the National Museum of the American Latino.

a stack of deep black posters of a photograph of the open sea with no horizon sit on the floor of a gallery. this is an untitled work by felix gonzalez-torres in the collection of the walker art center in minneapolis
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1991, offset print on paper, endless copies, collection: Walker Art Center

[I checked, and Gonzalez-Torres’s paper stack, “Untitled” (1991) with an image of the open sea that looked uncannily similar to the installation of this raft at the Smithsonian, was not included in the Hirshhorn’s 1994 exhibition. It was on view in 1994 at the Walker, though, and in Felix’s 1995 Guggenheim retrospective. It has never been exhibited in Washington, D.C.]

Now Hyperallergic reports that on July 20th, a couple of weeks after I filed my piece, and barely a week after the Regents meeting where Chancellor Lonnie Bunch acceded to JD Vance’s demands for an improper ideology review of the Smithsonian’s shows, and four months before it was scheduled for reinstallation, the Molina gallery was closed.

Hispanic conservatives in 2023 had already used fundraising threats to force the Latino Museum to change the 2025 exhibit from a history of Latino civil rights to a celebration of salsa music. With nine months to install it, I expect it’ll be one helluva show.