Bridging the Divide

If you happen to be in Washington, D.C., this summer, you should go to Arlington National Cemetery. It’s not a field trip that I’d ordinarily suggest, but until November 11 there’s an exhibition in the old McKim, Mead & White ceremonial gateway, known as the Hemicycle, now home of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial. The exhibition, Faces of the Fallen, consists of portraits painted by 200-plus artists of the more than 1,300 servicemen and women who died in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to November 11, 2004.

Conceived by Annette Polan, a D.C.-based artist, the exhibition succeeds at something that hasn’t really been done since we embarked on our post-9/11 military adventures: it begins to acknowledge the human tragedy. As of late April there have been 1,573 deaths of American military personnel, more than half the number of people who died on 9/11. This doesn’t count the deaths of coalition members or civilians. Conservative estimates currently put Iraqi civilian deaths directly caused by military action at more than 22,000, the equivalent of seven 9/11s. (In fall 2004 a Johns Hopkins University study estimated that the invasion had directly or indirectly caused at least 100,000 civilian deaths.)

The “fallen” here are only the Americans. But given the highly polarized politics of the moment, this exhibition is significant in its attempt to ignore the red/blue divide in an effort to reengage our humanity. Although Polan specifically tried to avoid taking a pro- or antiwar stance—the event’s roster of “honorary chairs” includes both Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and John McCain (R-AZ)—she believes that the message of the exhibit is clear: “It makes such an obvious statement. You walk in and see row after row after row of these beautiful young men and women—some of them not so young—and they’re all dead.”

Part of what’s extraordinary about this exhibit involves its setting. Arlington’s gateway, dedicated in 1932 and largely ignored for more than 60 years, was transformed into the first national me-morial to women who served in the military. A de-sign competition for the facility was won by New York architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, who performed a sleight of hand, gracefully inserting a modern museum behind the neoclassical structure. Sheltered by the massive granite-and-concrete wall is a sunlit space with white marble walls, concrete floors, and steel detailing. Fittingly the memorial has a glass ceiling; it’s formed by glass panels inscribed with quotes by and about military women.

The president of the foundation that built the memorial is Brigadier General Wilma L. Vaught USAF (Ret.). One of the most decorated women in the history of the U.S. military, Vaught has made the Women’s Memorial into a surprising counterpoint to Arlington and a place where a more nuanced story of our nation’s battles is told. One ongoing exhibition is about the role of African-American women in the Korean War.

Faces of the Fallen may seem official, given its proximity to our national cemetery, but it actually began as one woman’s gut response to the death toll in Iraq. In spring 2004 Polan, still shaken by the death of her own mother, noticed a Washington Post feature showing photographs of soldiers who’d died in Iraq. “I thought, Maybe I can give something to these families who are being overlooked,” the artist says. She began calling her extensive network of fellow artists and former and current students—she teaches art at the Corcoran College of Art—and they all volunteered to paint portraits.

“Initially I didn’t have a venue,” Polan says. “And they just trusted me.” After realizing that the fixtures required to support 1,300 portraits would cost over $60,000, she formed a nonprofit to raise the money. “Once I got this board together, the woman who became my cochair said we would have to contact each and every family member personally and tell them we’re doing this so that they won’t pick up a newspaper someday and read about it. It’s a very personal thing that we’re doing. So then came the dilemma of how to contact all these families because it’s a carefully guarded secret. You can’t just pick up the phone and start calling them.”

She contacted General Vaught. Polan didn’t know her, but both are members of an organization called the International Women’s Forum. Polan believed that Vaught could help her navigate the bureaucracy. “She not only agreed to help me contact the Department of Defense, but she said, ‘I have this beautiful memorial. Why don’t you consider it for your exhibition?’”

So within this extraordinarily lovely space, sheltered from hateful politics by the umbrella of a unique private foundation, this exhibition stands in defiance of policies that—citing privacy—forbid the media from photographing caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base and have even banned families from photographing the burials of their own loved ones. This exhibition gives a powerful collective voice to the soldiers who died in this war. Some of the faces are painted so simply that they could be illustrations in a children’s book, others are rendered with the practiced brushstrokes of professional portrait painters, and yet others look like they might have sprung from a tormented Expressionist like Oskar Kokoschka.

They’re all arranged in tiers, each painting mounted at the top of a galvanized steel pole. (The exhibition design was done pro bono by D.C. firm CORE Architecture + Design.) It’s an extraordinarily simple setup, but the end result is overwhelming. It isn’t so much that you, the visitor, are looking at the faces of the dead. It’s more like they, arranged like members of a chorus, are looking at you. You enter the building and follow the line of portraits. Because the building curves, you can’t see where the exhibition ends, or even if it ends.

On a cool, rainy spring afternoon, I walk from the Women’s Memorial, across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, to the Lincoln Memorial. Then I drift along the National Mall from war memorial to war memorial to war memorial. I notice that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s main effect on Washington—as powerful as it is, as much as we in the design world believe it forever changed the way memorials are conceived—is to establish the Mall as the place to build war memorials. Located across the Mall is the Korean War Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1995, which rejects Maya Lin’s minimalism and features larger-than-life statues of soldiers trudging in their rain ponchos. The newest addition, the National World War II Memorial, dedicated in 2004, occupies a spot in the center of the Mall, just west of Washington’s obelisk.

The World War II memorial is disturbing, not just because it interrupts the magnificent but understated sweep of the Mall, but because this grand commemoration of our defeat of Fascism seems to embrace the architectural tics characteristic of the regimes we defeated. There is something about the 50-plus monolithic pillars, each representing a state or territory, that reminds me of the stone piers that surrounded the stadium where Hitler presided over the 1936 games. The interior archways that symbolize the two theaters of engagement contain giant bronze eagles that I assume are there to symbolize bombast.

As I walk back to Union Station, two thoughts occur to me. One is that that the Faces of the Fallen approximates the power of the shrines that sprang up in New York City in the days following 9/11. Polan has managed to create a more organized, manageable version of those spontaneous outpourings of emotion. She has not only built a bridge between opposing political viewpoints but she’s created a middle ground between minimalist and representational approaches to commemoration.

The other thought is: How many more war me-morials can the National Mall hold? Someday it will be so full of shrines to dead soldiers that there will no longer be a place to rally against war.