But 60 years ago, these same department stores, particularly the new branches installed in fledging suburban shopping malls, were the way to the future. Post-World War II prosperity meant returning vets and their wives could ditch the turmoil of overcrowded cities, the frugal values of the Depression, and the frilly heirlooms of the Victorian Era. They would build their dream homes in the suburbs and fill them with shiny new appliances and furnishings made of cutting-edge materials, like acrylic and fiberglass, developed for the war. There, housewives would throw away their Rosie the Riveter coveralls and reclaim their “femininity” with new dresses, fashion accessories, and beauty products.

Often, the mall’s anchors, the big chain department stores, are the first to go. It seems that the 2008 recession and dominance of the Internet—where you can buy anything and everything with a few clicks—have taken their toll on brick-and-mortar behemoths like JCPenney, Sears, and even Macy’s. As the Computer Age thrusts us into the future, would-be mall rats are spending all their time on Facebook, and the breath-taking range of products, once so meticulously displayed for our delight, is being crammed into our PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

Search the phrase, “dead malls,”

The once-vibrant shopping mall has one foot in the grave these days. About 20 percent of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls were failing in 2008, and by 2012, only 1,513 remained in operation. Current numbers predict more than 200 existing big malls will collapse in the next 10 years. Search the phrase, “dead malls,” and you’ll find photo after photo of tiled walkways littered with debris, untended planters near the darkened rest areas for bored dads, and empty indoor storefronts—the discolored shadows of their missing lighted signs lingering like ghosts.

From Retail Palace to Zombie Mall: How Efficiency Killed the Department Store

In the end, it should always be about the work. And when obstacles, like lack of recognition and poor research, prevent a fair, holistic appreciation of design work, we have a problem. Yet gender-equality requires people who are willing to keep talking about these issues in the press, online, or in the classroom, across all mediums, for a long time. Furthermore, this isn’t a women-only issue. The wage and gender disparity won’t cease without the voices and the efforts of men. This calls for a uniform change of attitude, that it isn’t a matter of “singling out” women or forcing them into tokenism, but a matter of correcting a systematic imbalance. In a 1993 issue of PRINT Magazine, Paula Scher said it well, “Change doesn’t come in one great thump. It comes one by one by one by one, and it looks kind of funny. And then it doesn’t.”

The WD+RU Project team believes that certain projects like these serve as “an educational platform; establishing a space for our future role models and interesting new design discourses. The resource is also about engagement with contemporary issues. WoGD forms a virtual community of women designers who are working internationally; a platform for bringing designers together in knowledge exchange.” Additionally, conferences or discussion panels aimed at this specific topic would be an additional step on the path to better understanding why we need to talk about women in design. Recently, the Design Culture Salon held a seminar in London asking the question, “What are the gender politics of contemporary design practice?” The panel was made up of only women, though not intentionally, and brought together both educators and designers of diverse disciplines and age groups. To inspire change for women in graphic design, an ongoing conversation is imperative, and it’s necessary to maintain the question of the problem as one that’s highly visible. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville states, “People forget how the change comes about. Critical mass is necessary. I have always thought about feminism as making new ways of working and thinking about people all along the spectrum from male to female — and that is happening.”

How do we begin to rectify this imbalance in history, the lack of exposure, source material, and recognition? Teal Triggs and Sian Cook urge us, “We can no longer afford to be complacent as a profession, nor in our roles as design educators.” The surge of online design activity has provided many grass-roots projects, like Women’s Design + Research Unit (WD+RU), Graphic BirdWatching, Women of Graphic Design and Hall of Femmes as key tools for seeking out designers that may not otherwise be reported upon or featured on the stages of design conferences.

Great progress has been made for women in the workplace in the past 40 years. The Glass Ceiling, a term used to describe an invisible barrier that prevents someone (usually women and minorities) from achieving further success, seems to have almost no place in design, according to some in the field. To quote Sonya Dyakova in “Beyond the Glass Ceiling” by Astrid Stavro, “If there is [a glass ceiling], I’m not going to acknowledge it. The fear of such a ceiling is stifling. I think one must ignore all that nonsense.”

The repercussions of constant, even mild, discordance can cause female designers like Victoria Rushton, a type designer at Font Bureau in Boston, Massachusetts, to feel there is extra work that must be done in order to prove their ability and their value as a colleague. “It’s just this little extra hurdle, you know?” she explains. “I know I have to make good work for clients and myself, but on top of that I feel the stubborn need to prove that I belong in this industry at all.”

As discussed earlier, the US design profession is not predominantly male— just over half of the profession is female— yet with celebrity designers so often male, the representation is primarily male. In “Type Persons Who Happen to be Female” Susanne Dechant explains that despite many typographic achievements, women remained underrepresented at type conferences. “TypoBerlin (2009: 5% female presenters) or Atypl (2009: 12%), as well as in various type foundries (Linotype 2005: 12.3%; Myfonts.com 2008: 14%). Today an equal number of women and men are studying type design—so we can expect or at least hope for a levelling of the playing field.”

How does this apply to practitioners in the field—both new and seasoned designers? Is it still important to talk about “women of graphic design” as a topic? Horne speculates that despite the work of revolutionary gender activists, there are still indications that issues for women in design need to be discussed. She names a few: oversights in the organization of jury panels, lack of female representation in anthologies and survey publications and a propagation of blogs reinforcing strict ideas of gender. Despite notions that the issue of sex is obsolete in graphic design, only a small fraction of active female designers receive public acclamation. Margaret Calvert, a designer who defined the British network of roadways with her typeface design in the 1960s, never received wide recognition for this development. Presently, all road signs in Great Britain include her designs, an important contribution to the cultural landscape of England, but attempting to research this work and topic results in articles surrounding her partner, Jock Kinneir. Recently, after the passing of her studio partner, she has finally begun receiving more recognition for her work. Calvert’s experience is just an example of the oversight many designers encounter.

Denise Gonzales Crisp, Chair of Graphic Design at the College of Design, North Carolina State University, shared “[Look at] salary discrepancy between males and females in education. Almost every institution I’ve looked at, the women earned on average anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 less in the same positions [held by men]. So that inequality we experience generally out in the world is also reflected in education. “Right now, my classroom is probably filled with 80% women. And yet when I go out into the world, or when you hear from business owners or from creative directors, it’s not the same percentage. What is that, why is that? We can only guess.”

Should it matter to the structure of design education if the majority of design students are female? Is it a matter of fairness that emerging designers require encouragement, and part of that is seeing their sex represented in the professional field and in the teaching of design? Brockett Horne, a designer and the Chair of Graphic Design at Maryland Institute College of Art, believes young female designers could greatly benefit from a change in the exposure and representation of women in graphic design. “I know from the classroom that student designers are thirsty for diverse insights on design methodologies, outcomes, and advice on how to create a strong life and work balance,” Horne explains. “I’d like to see females become more confident in publishing their process, ideas, and experiences. I see this as a continuity of tradition that we have inherited from the artists and designers who fought hard for us to sit at the table. “Problems still perpetuate if the media only represents those with the highest profiles, if conference organisers don’t do their research to discover new and relevant voices, if education doesn’t look at a range of role models, if teachers ignore discussions on gender and representation; then, we are not taking our responsibility as designers, as a profession, as educators, and our duty to the public, seriously enough.” So talking about issues for women in design is not only important for students, but the educators that advise them.

In the US, some 70% of design students are female, yet their education is scattered with gaps. Teal Triggs and Sian Cook, of the Women’s Design + Research Unit in the UK, explain, “For far too long, history has either marginalised or excluded many women from being entered into the design history books and as a result, the design canon. Whilst acknowledging that over the last decade such gender concerns have begun to be readdressed by historians, educators and the design profession at large, much more can still be done.” “Not enough women designers are given the recognition that they deserve,” says graphic designer Antonio Carusone. “Take for example Jacqueline S. Casey. She is primarily responsible for bringing the International Typographic Style to the US, and her work is just as brilliant as Muller-Brockmann’s, Crouwel’s, Ruder’s…. But for some reason, her name is left out most of the time.” He believes that revealing only part of our history fails to fully inform our designers. “It’s important that these women get the recognition, because they were and are part of the history that’s shaping graphic design. Everyone needs to learn about them and their work, especially young designers. If not, then there’s just this big gap that doesn’t tell the entire story of graphic design.”

Lucinda Hitchcock is a professor in Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as a member of the Design Office in Providence, Rhode Island. “For me, it has to do with the imbalance of genders in the educational environment and in the framework of the design history that is being taught,” Hitchcock explains. Careful to point out it may not be the same situation in all design schools, Hitchcock adds, “Why does design history still teach about male designers 80% more than women designers? Why do we have 80 % women in the student body (in our [RISD] department) and 80% men in the faculty?”

Design history has long overlooked women in our narrative, despite continuously having a large group of women active in the field of graphic design over the past century.

Why is it important to talk about the women of graphic design, specifically? What are the issues women still face in the design field? To better understand these questions, I sought out different voices from within the spectrum of graphic design.

Forty or fifty years ago, the workforce was overwhelmingly a man’s world. In the design field, many women may have been assistants or “office girls” and so few held the top titles, such as art director or creative director. In a basic sense, women’s careers have rarely followed the same path of men’s, since there has historically been immense pressure placed on women to be solely homemakers and nurture families (see: Beyond The Glass Ceiling: an open discussion, Astrid Stavro, Elephant #6) with more sinister pressures of socially-accepted sexism and segregation discouraging, or even disqualifying, the career ambitions of capable women. There is a line of forgotten women in our history. I argue that sexism is somewhat less obvious in our workplace today, far subtler than it might have been in the 1950s and 60s, but perhaps we still accept some mores of old, underlying currents that flow through our design culture, much like that lecture in 2011. Starting at the So

It’s the spring of 2011 and I am sitting in History of Graphic Design, a lecture course at my design school. We are learning about the many designers and movements essential to the narrative of graphic design. Designer’s names are listed on a page, hundreds of them. It’s so subtle; I almost miss it. Later on, I would count the names — three hundred and twenty-three independent designers listed — twenty-two women. In the history of graphic design, my classmates and I were learning about just twenty-two women. That was only 6% of the overall canon. Surely this was a mistake. The National Education Association reports of 2011 estimated that 54% of all US designers in the profession are women. In the UK it is lower, although the Design Council research found that 70% of design students in the UK are women, but 60% of the industry is male. I was curious to explore the reductive process by which these female majorities dwindle.

It is often discussed, academically and informally, that the presence of female designers missing from the history of graphic design is a sore oversight of the profession. And while we can claim more progressive (and equal) laws and beliefs in present day society, the disparity between male and female representation in design lingers on. But why is retrospective accreditation important? And if it is getting better, do we need to keep talking about it? Tori Hinn, of Women of Graphic Design, talks through some of the issues facing women in the past, and regrettably, in our industry today.

Women in Graphic Design (and why we need to talk about them)

Although originally conceived for Manchester, I believe that Park+Jog may be adapted to any city worldwide and serve as an example for how Cycle Space could lay the ideological foundation to change our cities for the better. Combining new transportation methods that encourage the principles of a healthy life style with traditional roads can raise land values, attract investment and activate the urban environment. The social revolution that Bazalgette offered London in the 19th Century, Cycle Space might just bring to London and our world’s cities in the 21st.

What is striking about these parks is the positive impact they can have on their surrounding neighbourhoods, particularly when one considers the alternative. With roads, be it a dual carriageway or a street, comes heavy traffic, noise and pollution, at the expense of those who live and work around it. In the case of a High Street we forego certain types of shops, cafés and restaurants that engender a street life. At the scale of the dual-carriageway the A40 that tears through west London illustrates beautifully how dramatic the blight on homes can be, as this Mid-20th Century residential avenue has been transformed into a slum wrapped around a congested commuter road. These zones lack the 'density' of the city centre and the space of the suburb. And, each successive wave of Greenfield development adds to the expanse of this grey space. Active transportation routes and linear parks, on the other hand, regenerate their surroundings, bringing activity and value to blighted sections of the city. They also radically alter the political situation for the suburb and its inevitable commute. Of course, the creation of these green networks need not be at the expense of the motorist. On the 10th July London’s Transport Commissioner Peter Hendy launched a study for London that envisaged burying sections of the North and South Circular ring roads, and stretches of road close to the Thames. The initiative would create linear parks overhead, much as the Big Dig did for Boston.

The day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral at St.Paul’s Cathedral gave me an indication. For security reasons, much of the Square Mile was closed to vehicular traffic; the streets were preserved for the pedestrian and the cyclist. What I remember about that day was the sense of calm, how quiet it was, and how generous the streets actually felt. For a brief moment the public realm was uniquely different. Imagine: whilst it may not be possible to ban the car outright, it ought to be possible to keep HGVs and delivery vans out during the day, when their impact on the physical environment and the safety of pedestrians and cyclists is most evident. Save this picture! Bike Hanger, a proposal for Seoul. Image courtesy of MANIFESTO Architecture P.C. Save this picture! The bicycle park near Amsterdam's Central Station. Image © Flickr User CC jthornett. Used under Creative Commons Imagine that the Boris Bike docking stations outside railway stations and in key public spaces might incorporate general cycle parking. Thus the Cycle City would bring with it a new building type – the multistory cycle park. Fietsenstalling, a multistorey cycle park outside Amsterdam’s Centraal rail station, with its Escher-like pattern of steel decks that suspend over the canal, is a dramatic model. Its very presence is didactic. It is persuasive. And imagine if – instead of London’s Cycle Superhighways, currently only blue-painted tracks on the side of the road – London’s cities and villages were linked by a series of segregated active transportation routes?What might these be like? A scheme our firm designed in response to a competition in 1998 could serve as a good model. At the time, “Park + Jog” was treated as a curiosity; we still describe it as a “ utopian scheme.” But nowadays, it seems less and less fanciful.

But it’s the work of Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, that stands out to me - not just for its contribution to public health but also for its potential parallels to Cycle Space. For much of its history London had been associated with poor living conditions and disease. By the late 1850s the scale of the city was making things worse: London’s sewage was deposited into the River Thames, out of which the city’s drinking water was being collected. Bazalgette’s solution was to construct a series of sewers that would run parallel to the Thames, both north and south of the river, collecting the sewage and ensuring the drinking water that was drawn from the river was clean. Save this picture! Courtesy of SewerHistory.org Save this picture! Courtesy of SewerHistory.org This monumental feat of engineering offers us the best precedent for the impact the bicycle might have on London or any city for that matter. Cycling offers us, for the first time in more than a century and a half, the chance to build an infrastructure that will bring with it significant public health improvements. In our auto-centric world, we have unprecedented levels of health problems - obesity, diabetes, etc - all associated with our sedentary lifestyles. Cycling should mean a fitter population and a longer life expectancy, which would take pressure off the National Health Service and bring huge economic benefits. It would of course also reduce energy consumption.

Take London in 1667, a year after the Great Fire of 1666. An Act of Parliament was passed that introduced building inspectors to ensure that buildings be built from brick and not timber (a law which predated the fire, but that hadn’t been enforced). Of course, the fire and resulting devastation meant that much of London had to be rebuilt, and that these buildings would be brick. In the Twentieth Century, Corbusian Modernism eventually had a monumental impact on London’s streets and skyline. Again the catalyst was in part a disaster - the havoc wreaked by the Luftwaffe and the need for rapid reconstruction - and the solution was political. The dilapidated terraced houses with their back yards and privies were associated with poverty and poor living conditions. Modernity, and the mass production of homes demonstrated optimism, and a commitment to those who had survived the war. It was a tangible dimension of the newly established Welfare State. Of course, the tabula rasa model wasn’t necessary. It was ideological. But it brought with it flats with fitted kitchens, bathrooms and toilets. This prompted the gradual gentrification of the remaining streets. Indoor toilets were fitted, and bedrooms and sculleries were converted into bathrooms and kitchens in the surviving 19th century housing stock.

Recently I took four weeks out of the office to cycle from Chicago to New York and to visit cities along the way. My 1,300 mile trip was part of a group expedition called P2P that went from Portland, Oregon to Portland Place in London (read more about it on portlandtoportland.org). The objective was to report back to the UK and London in particular on American city-cycling culture and the political initiatives that are emerging in the US. Save this picture! A P2P cyclist in New York City. Image © Grant Smith, via ING Media What impressed us was the speed of progress. When we were in Chicago at the end of June, the city launched its own bike share scheme. New York already has one. The docking stations bring tangible cycle infrastructure to the city streets. In-carriage and separated cycle routes have begun to proliferate. Disused railway lines are being harnessed as leisure trails, and in some cases these were working well for commuters too. Indianapolis had recently completed their “Cultural Trail,” an active transportation loop linking the five central city districts. Towards the end of my trip, it occurred to me that this explosion in cycling, ought to be put into an historic context, in order to enable the politicians and the public to recognize the scale of the opportunity, the change it might bring to our cities and our lives.

The 2010 launch of the “Boris Bike” - London’s cycle hire scheme, named after mayor Boris Johnson – was the clearest indication to date that cycling was no longer just for a minority of fanatics but a healthy, efficient and sustainable mode of transport that city planners wanted in their armoury. There are now more than 8,000 Boris Bikes and 550+ docking stations in Central London. And the trend’s not anomalous to London: Wikipedia reports that there are 535 cycle-share schemes in 49 countries, employing more than half a million bikes worldwide. However, the real question is: will cycling actually change the city? Will it result in new urban forms or, as the title of Australian academic Dr Steven Fleming’s new book predicts, a “Cycle Space”? Like Fleming, I believe so. I believe that cycling might just be the catalyst for a 21st Century urban renaissance.

It is believed to have been destroyed, but researchers continue to search the photographic record and are studying military iconography and the coinage of the mid-19th century, as well as the styles of carvers, to better reproduce the original design. After its conservation the painting is likely to be installed first, attached to steel beams embedded in a grand room of the new galleries, which are to be named after the late collector Peter Jay Sharp, whose foundation is a major contributor. Then the frame will be placed around the canvas, attached to the wall separately.Gilding such an enormous frame will require more than 12,500 3.5-inch square sheets of gold leaves, 1/250,000th of an inch thick, at a cost of more than $12,000.The Met would not estimate the cost of the total refurbishment, as research and planning are still under way. But some experts said the project could not be accomplished for less than $500,000. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It’s an experiment,” Dr. Barratt said of the frame-restoration process. “How close can we get to the original from the photograph, and what is our responsibility to the original when we aren’t sure about the level of detail?”

The painting created another stir when it was presented at the April 1864 Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Fair in Aid of the United States Sanitary Commission, a benefit for Union soldiers. The image was widely distributed in Europe, and in America it has adorned postcards, postage stamps and coffee mugs. Currier and Ives issued an altered unauthorized version, Professor Fischer said.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.On a ribbon under the eagle, barely discernible even at high magnification, were the words of Henry Lee, Washington’s 1799 eulogist: “First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”“It took my breath away,” Dr. Barratt said.The frame “is a tour de force, absolutely the most creative and involved surround for a painting that I have ever seen,” Mr. Wilner, the frame expert, said.

Through the centuries the painting has been criticized aesthetically and for historical shortcomings. (The design of the fluttering American flag, for example, was not yet in use.) “You can add one inaccuracy to another, but Leutze understood the air of desperation, the small scale of the event and the very large meaning,” Professor Fischer said. “He got all of that right.”Leutze, a German who arrived in America at the age of 9, returned to Europe 16 years later to further his artistic career and painted canvases celebrating democracy and the love of liberty. After he created the Washington painting in Düsseldorf, he rolled it up and presented it to the public in New York on Oct. 29, 1851. It was an immediate sensation, and within four months some 50,000 people had paid to see the painting before it was bought for $10,000 by a collector, Marshall O. Roberts.

The painting, with its life-size figures, “is one of the most frequently reproduced images in American culture,” said David Hackett Fischer, Warren professor of history at Brandeis University and author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Washington’s Crossing.” Leutze’s highly romanticized rendition captures a desperate effort, a turning point in American history, when on Christmas night in 1776 George Washington crossed the Delaware River with 2,500 troops in a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story [{"headline":"Louder","summary":"Stay on WB_wombat_top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics. ","product-code":"MS","product-title":"Louder"},{"headline":"New York Today","summary":"Each morning, get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more.","product-code":"UR","product-title":"New York Today","sample-url":"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/pages\/nyregion\/newyorktoday\/index.html?pgtype=subscriptionspage&version=news&contentId=UR&eventName=sample&module=newsletter-sign-up"},{"headline":"Watching","summary":"Get recommendations on the best TV shows and films to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.","product-code":"WG","product-title":"Watching","sample-url":"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/newsletters\/sample\/watching?pgtype=subscriptionspage&version=new&contentId=WG&eventName=sample&module=newsletter-sign-up"}] Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. You are already subscribed to this email. View all New York Times newsletters. See Sample Manage Email Preferences Not you? Privacy Policy Opt out or contact us anytime “The crossing was a pivot point in a crucial campaign that rescued the revolution from failure,” Professor Fischer said, adding that it burnished not only Washington’s reputation as a leader, but also brought foreign support for the rebels’ cause.

Meanwhile, in Long Island City, Queens, a master woodcarver, Félix Terán, has completed a two-foot-long test carving of the frame’s elaborate eagle crest from blowups of the Brady photograph. Working in the 11,000-foot studio space of Eli Wilner & Company, a former eggroll factory, Mr. Terán created the mockup to test the depth of sculptural relief and the placement of the frame’s embellishments.“It’s a challenge to carve, since there isn’t a whole lot of detail in the blowup,” said Mr. Terán, who was born into a family of woodcarvers in a town of woodcarvers, San Antonia de Ibarra, in Ecuador.Nevertheless the image of the frame has now been digitized, and Eli Wilner — a Manhattan antique-frame dealer whose artisans have made replicas for the Met, the Smithsonian and the White House — expects to be able to discern details “within an eighth of an inch,” he said.

Mr. Terán, who was born into a family of woodcarvers in a town of woodcarvers, San Antonia de Ibarra, in Ecuador.

The scale of the painting’s conservation and reframing, which is to begin later this year, “is unprecedented in the history of the museum, to my knowledge,” Dr. Barratt said. “But it is still very much a research project.” Photo The master woodcarver Félix Terán in his studio in Long Island City with the two-foot-long test carving of the frame’s elaborate eagle crest. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times She explained that conservators are refining a plan to remove layers of varnish for the painting’s first surface-cleaning in decades. Currently the image is yellowish; at places in the blue sky clots of dirt and debris suggest a nonexistent flock of birds. And the prophetic morning star above Washington is barely visible.

“It’s like the boat that was built in the basement,” said Carrie Rebora Barratt, curator of the restoration project, who is manager of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at the museum. “But this is the centerpiece of the American collections.”

Since the canvas cannot be removed through the doorway of its home on the second floor of the museum’s American Wing, its years-long refurbishment will be carried out within the gallery. And an entire new suite of galleries for American paintings and sculpture — scheduled to open in 2010 as the finale of the American Wing renovations — must be built around “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The challenge is reminiscent of the construction of the Hayden Planetarium around the 15.5-ton Willamette Meteorite in 1935, a feat repeated in 2000 when the $210 million Rose Center for Earth and Space was built around that same artifact.

That is because the heroic and stupendously popular 1851 “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” familiar to generations of schoolchildren, is one of the largest paintings in the museum, measuring 21 feet wide and 12 feet high.It is heavy too, and will be getting heavier, because curators are currently assessing the best way to carve an elaborate new 3,000-pound basswood frame that would replicate the original, missing for more than a century. After years of detective work, an image of the frame was recently discovered in a 143-year-old Mathew Brady photograph.Since the canvas cannot be removed through the doorway of its home on the second floor of the museum’s American Wing, its years-long refurbishment will be carried out within the gallery. And an entire new suite of galleries for American paintings and sculpture — scheduled to open in 2010 as the finale of the American Wing renovations — must be built around “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

One of the most complex restoration and reframing projects in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has collided with a 9-foot-3-inch-high doorway. The doorway won.

What Surrounds a Legend? A 3,000-Pound Gilt Frame

The U.S. has lagged behind when it comes to the issue of cultural access. But in 2016, Americans for the Arts, the largest U.S. think-tank and advocacy group for arts and cultural research, released its “Statement on Cultural Equity.” By recognizing that all Americans deserve “fair and equitable access to cultural resources and support,” Americans in the Arts is echoing what Taiwan has long known—that cultural equity is the bedrock of a stable and flourishing democracy.  

The right to cultural equity is broadly acknowledged within the international community. The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts for all people “the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” And the U.N. International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights asserts the right of all people “to take part in cultural life,” as well as the responsibility of governments to “achieve the full realization of this right [through]…the conservation, the development, and the diffusion of science and culture.”

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.

Museum officials drew on international models—such as the relationship between the Musée de Louvre in Paris and Le Louvre Lens in Pas-de-Calais, 200 kilometers to the north—to develop integrated programming that would drive some of the National Palace Museum, Taipei’s 6 million annual visitors to the Southern Branch. Taiwanese legislator Weng Chong-Jun has stated that these visitors won’t only benefit Jiayi’s economy through the tourist sector, they will also boost the region’s historic tea industry.

Drawing nearly 1.5 million visitors in 2016, its first year, the Southern Branch doesn’t just promote globalization in the abstract, it also positions Jiayi to reap its benefits. By investing over NT$10.9 billion (U.S. $350 million) to create a world-class tourist destination in this southern municipality, the Taiwanese government intentionally placed cultural industries at the center of Jiayi’s 21st-century economic development plan.

While the National Palace Museum’s two branches share many works, each has a slightly different angle on Chinese cultural heritage. Unlike the older National Palace Museum, Taipei, which showcases objects from the imperial collections of past Chinese dynasties, the Southern Branch is forward-looking, laying the groundwork for a narrative of pan-Asian identity. Driving this shift is Taiwan’s underlying geopolitical strategy to decrease its dependence on Mainland China and increase its ties with the rest of Asia.

To that end, museum officials transferred some of the institution’s most popular attractions to the Southern Branch and offered free admission to residents of three southern counties for the first three months after its opening. Curators ensured that prized antiquities—such as the crowd-pleasing Jadeite Cabbage, a piece of jade carved into the form of the green vegetable—would make their rounds at the Southern Branch and attract local visitors. The inclusion of a permanent exhibition about tea culture across Asia offered an additional point of entry to residents of these counties, where tea cultivation is a major sector of the local economy.

By creating a new southern branch of the National Palace museum, the government would correct cultural policies that privileged the more developed, metropolitan North, where Taipei is located, over the more rural, agricultural South. With the opening of its Southern Branch in early 2016, a poor Jiayi farmer can access Taiwan’s cultural resources as easily as a wealthy Taipei banker.

At the beginning of the new millennium, Taiwan’s highest legislative body, the Legislative Yuan, announced an ambitious project to provide all citizens with equal access to national cultural heritage. Proposed in 2001 by former museum director Tu Cheng-sheng, the project had an explicit mission to address “the cultural equity between Northern and Southern Taiwan.”

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.

But the question of who has, and who doesn’t have, cultural access has garnered relatively little attention. Between 2005 and 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts distributed $38,937.71 per 10,000 residents in grants to New York County, while Arkansas’s Faulkner County received $88.31 per 10,000. While a New York or Washington D.C. resident can choose from dozens of free museums and cultural institutions where they can interact with art from across the globe, residents of rural America might be hard-pressed to reach a single one.

The fraught United States presidential election cycle of 2016 has revealed a country divided along geographical and ideological lines. It has also bolstered a narrative of haves and have-nots, pitting the so-called coastal elites against “heartland” America.

The U.S. Should Learn from Taiwan’s Commitment to Providing Museum Access to Rural Poor