Washington DC’s Outdoor Sculpture Biennial Opens with a Timely Theme

For the 2025 Foggy Bottom Biennial, fourteen artists wrestle with identity, place, ancestry, and political allegiance in answering the call for Homeland | Hostland, the brainchild of curator Fabiola R. Delgado. In fiber, wood, metal, and car paint, the artists respond to the threat of home in a political climate with mass deportations, racial profiling, and a rapidly changing climate, challenging the home’s permanence, borders, and materiality.

Works installed across Washington DC’s historic district Foggy Bottom beckon audiences, asking: How did we come to be here in this city, or this country, and who came before us to make it happen? And how do we belong here, coming from disparate borders, cultures, and distinct conceptions of home? Jean Jinho Kim’s Magic Boots represent the home her mother forged, her favorite boots she brought from Seoul. Annie Broderick’s Marianne honors her grandmother, who directed a rest home for soldiers with the American Red Cross during World War II. “She was quite literally a host,” Broderick said of her grandmother’s work. Broderick’s work, a Ferrari red metal rendering of a draped piece of fabric, imagines her grandmother placing cloth, curative and warm, over the bodies of the wounded soldiers. The work titled Marianne also references Marianne Brandt, the artist explains, she was a Bauhaus-trained industrial designer who made functional, yet beautiful, household items. Each artist demands the viewer to consider that home is much more than the place of birth or where we lay our heads, but it is something we owe each other to lay claim to.

“There are many places I consider home, and many times Jamaica feels like home. My home is also here,” says Peter Maye, who is Jamaican, the Director of Arts in Foggy Bottom, as he introduces the ninth edition of the public art biennial during its press preview.

This year’s biennial pins the viewer inside the art to consider how they contribute to making this ground their home. Home is a radical political statement. It’s not obtained by walking in and building on land, but through border migration and violence, and fierce cultural preservation. Brandon Hill, whose snake plants in primary colors represent the forced migration of African ancestors from West Africa to the Americas, pointed to the home in which his exhibit was housed and said, “If there was a Rembrant in that building, you wouldn’t know it.” Public art defines the culture of a place, and if the public artist is talking about their home, the viewer must see the artist and not only that, consider their own claim to this place called home. If the art was inside, the artist and viewer wouldn’t have this conversation.

“It’s fine art’s fatal flaw.” Hill continued.

Miguel Braceli, a Venezuelan-Spanish artist, Libertad o Muerte consists of flags installed across more than five blocks and considers borders, geography, and the ongoing migration of humans in search of dignity. His flags stand as a symbol attesting to his loyalty to the earth rather than to a specific nation-state. Exhibited in the nation’s capital, they question who can lay claim to a land and if the so-called United States can, why can’t its inhabitants?

Exhibiting public art doesn’t come without a risk. We paused at a flag pole stuck in a slab of concrete; R. Delgado and Braceli installed the concrete, pole, and flag on the Saturday before the opening, took pictures on Sunday, and by Monday morning, only the pole remained. “Maybe it was a silly student on a challenge, maybe it was a homeless person who wanted to wear it as a blanket,” R. Delgado mused. If it had been installed inside, they would probably not have been so bold as to take it. She explained that the act of removal illustrated important points in the exhibit, namely, how easy it is to steal freedom and remove liberty from people. The flag’s absence sparks debate on the complexities between public space, private property, and public movement on private property; Braceli, poses the question of ownership and claim to a land. If the flag was taken by someone experiencing homelessness, this exhibit may have gifted shelter to this neighbor.

In today’s political climate, it can feel impossible to grasp our present, much less look forward to our future. The IceBox Collective plays with reason and the absurd, noting that the times we live in is quite absurd, in many ways indescribable. “Art, specifically the Nomadic House, is an attempt to provide shelter.” Edgar Endress, IceBox Collective member, told the group. Their piece features Benito Juarez, the first indigenous president of Mexico, riding on a neon pink rhinoceros. Drawing from Eugené Ionesco’s rhinoceros, created by the playwright in Nazi Europe and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt riding on horseback, flanked by Native and African figures, at the West Building of the American Museum of Natural History, Casa de Benito asks the viewer to take comfort in their lack of language. The lack of precedence as many of our neighbors’ homes become more unstable. It also asks us to reach back to the past and inquire about the European response to rising fascism during World War II and imagine how they would interpret today’s times. Ionesco’s use of the rhinoceros to represent fascism points to the very nature of the pachyderm.

“The rhinoceros is a large, powerful and dangerous animal and almost completely blind,” Endress continued.

The Foggy Bottom Biennial, year after year, invites DC residents to pause, as Neha Misra said, as she strung sari fabric onto myrtle trees. While we come from many different places, we can pause and remember that home is hard fought, not tied to place and time, but to the effort in which we came here and stewarded the land.

“Home is where I am,” R. Delgado told me. “It’s not just one place.”

Homeland | Hostland is open through October 25, 2025, across the Foggy Bottom District in Washington DC. 

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Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback was located outside of the National Gallery of Art; it is not. 

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