Devan Shimoyama in FUTURES at the Smithsonian Institution: Arts and Industries Building, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, VA

For its 175th anniversary, the Smithsonian is looking forward.

What do you think of when you think of the future? FUTURES is the first building-wide exploration of the future on the National Mall. Designed by the award-winning Rockwell Group, FUTURES spans 32,000 square feet inside the Arts + Industries Building. Now on view until July 6, 2022, FUTURES is your guide to a vast array of interactives, artworks, technologies, and ideas that are glimpses into humanity’s next chapter. You are, after all, only the latest in a long line of future makers.

Within the exhibition’s Futures that Unite hall, Devan Shimoyama (b. 1989, Philadelphia) will create a moment of reflection in response to the tumult and tragedy brought on by racial violence and the COVID-19 pandemic. His shimmering, soaring “The Grove,” will be an imagined future monument to the year 2020, inviting visitors to enter a meditative forest-like space, take a moment to forgive, breathe, pause and heal. Using “DIY” utility poles, dangling shoes and silk flowers, “The Grove” references community traditions of spontaneous memorials and will be adorned with thousands of Swarovski crystals to offer a sense of light, magic and the divine in witness to lives lost.

Shimoyama’s mixed-media practice frequently imbues a sense of community, solidarity, commemoration and identity at the intersection of Blackness and queerness. “The Grove” will represent both a singular, internal mourning for collective trauma and the healing power of empathy and hope.

Smell a molecule. Clean your clothes in a wetland. Meditate with an AI robot. Travel through space and time. Watch water being harvested from air. Become an emoji. The FUTURES is yours to decide, debate, delight. We invite you to dream big, and imagine not just one future, but many possible futures on the horizon—playful, sustainable, inclusive. In moments of great change, we dare to be hopeful. How will you create the future you want to live in? 

– Courtesy of the Smithsonian