Image: Paul Ramírez Jonas, The Commons, 2011. Cork, pushpins, paper, wood, and metal armature. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of The John & Melissa Ceriale Family Foundation and Leo Koenig. © Paul Ramírez Jonas. Photo: Brooklyn Museum
‘Common Sense’, the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition setting Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets beside contemporary art, enters its final month and closes on 8 November 2026. Installed in the Beaux-Arts Court on the museum’s third floor, the show has been on view since 1 May as part of ‘Drawing America: US@250’, a season of installations, programmes and partnerships marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
At its centre are two of Paine’s texts, ‘Common Sense’ (1776) and ‘The American Crisis’ (1776–83). The museum presents Paine, a statesman, abolitionist and philosopher, as the writer who made the case for independence at the start of the American Revolution, and argues that his words widened the colonists’ sense of what their future country could be. The exhibition draws a parallel with the present: in a period of deep division, it suggests, contemporary art can supply the kind of hope and momentum Paine’s writing once did, in pursuit of his call ‘to begin the world over again’.
Nine contemporary works respond to the texts in three groups. Paul Ramírez Jonas, Charles Gaines and Jason Kao Hwang focus on community and music as supports for democratic life; Ramírez Jonas is represented by ‘The Commons’ (2011), a work in cork, pushpins, paper, wood and metal. A second group revisits American history in its conflicts and advances, with Joyce Kozloff’s collage ‘Sing-Along American History: War and Race’ (2004), Kara Walker’s pop-up book ‘Freedom, A Fable’ (1997), Hank Willis Thomas’s digital print ‘Once Upon a Time in America There Were No Slaves’ (2001/2006) and work by Öyvind Fahlström. Finally, new text-based commissions by Donald Moffett and Maynard Monrow borrow the tools of graphic design to state, in the museum’s words, that power lies with us.
The exhibition is organised by Catherine Morris, department chair and Sackler Senior Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Kimberli Gant, curator of modern and contemporary art. Before it closes, the museum hosts a day-long convening, ‘In Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness’, on 23 October. Visitors can continue the season in ‘Donald Moffett: IMPEACH’, which remains on view until 11 April 2027.
