Washington Post: Art on the Mall! They put art on the Mall!

Washington Post / by Philip Kennicott / Published August 19, 2023

A curated outdoor exhibition reminds us what the National Mall could be

Since it was redesigned, rebuilt and repurposed by the McMillan Plan of 1902, the Mall has been a national forum, full of symbolism, fraught with meaning and history, and mostly barren of amenities. “Beyond Granite,” a month-long art installation intended to challenge the usual ways we tell stories on the Mall, has had a happy side effect: It offers a vision of the Mall as a much more agreeable, livable and urban space. With six installations that are smaller and more accessible than the permanent memorials and monuments, it reconfigures the Mall to human scale, a place less about grand and abstract ideas and more about the pure pleasure of being there.