By the time another collector, John Stuart Kennedy, bought and donated the painting to the Met in 1897, the work had been reframed in a less ornate style, clearly depicted in museum photos from 1899 and 1912. By 1918 it had acquired the plain frame it currently inhabits, believed to be its third. Less than a year ago Dr. Barratt, while studying an 1864 album of Brady’s Art Exhibition photographs in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, noticed an image of the Leutze painting in a dramatic gilded frame dominated by a 12-foot-wide American-eagle crest at the top.

During the summer solstice of 1986, a small group of friends met up on San Francisco’s Baker Beach and burned an eight-foot-tall effigy of a man. The ritual was dubbed Burning Man two years later, and moved to a dried-up lake bed in the Black Rock Desert in 1990. Eight thousand people attended in 1996, and within four years, that number had swelled to 25,000.

With globalization, Taiwanese farmers are forced to compete with cheap agricultural goods from China and Southeast Asia. And although Taiwan has a strong organic and local food movement, it’s easy to imagine why farmers might feel fearful of the trend toward globalization. Exhibitions at the Southern Branch serve at least two important functions: to educate viewers about other cultures, and to reveal that cultural purity is a myth.

In Taiwan, a robust East Asian democracy that last January elected its first female president, cultural equity is serious business—and it offers a strong model for the U.S. to consider. Since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan with imperial treasures in tow as the Communist Party took over Mainland China, cultural stewardship has been a first-order concern for the Taiwanese government. The National Palace Museum, Taipei, is recognized globally as the leading research institution for Chinese art, and the cultural objects housed in it have lent legitimacy to the Taipei government’s claims that it is the true steward of Chinese culture.