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Art and Sculpture at the REACH

On the Grounds

Peace Corps Gallery

Mokha Laget

Watershed III, 2022–2023
oil on 7 canvas panels totaling 88 x 424
On loan from the artist

Watershed III is Mokha Laget’s largest wall piece, with seven shaped canvases painted in bright colors and rhythmically arranged in configurations that seem as if they could continue forever. Evoking architecture, the ambiguous shapes create an illusory environment where objects appear to jump forward or recede. Laget is fascinated by the lively geometric choreography of these visual maneuvers, with their enigmatic light sources and puzzling planes or volumes. She explores the psychology of perception and our relationship with truth, especially the liminal space between seeing and knowing, questioning and believing.

The artist’s choice of the term “watershed” refers in part to the flow of water in a particular place, both above and below ground; its catchment has the power to connect places and people and to nourish life. Indeed, the Kennedy Center is located within the Chesapeake Bay watershed on the edge of the Potomac River, dedicated to cultural flow and nourishment.

Laget continues to carve out a legacy far beyond her early brush with the Washington Color School and internalized art historical references, to give new life to the shaped canvas idiom. 


Mokha Laget, born in Algeria, was first trained in old master painting techniques in southern France. After moving to Washington, DC in 1979, she studied at the Corcoran College of Art and Design (BFA 82) during a prominent influence of the Washington Color School on American art. It was then that Washington artists took the lead nationally, as Morris Louis, Ken Noland, Gene Davis, Tom Downing, Sam Gilliam, and others blew through the angst of Abstract Expressionism to create a more optimistic, forward-looking direction for abstract painting, reflecting the youthful optimism of the new Kennedy administration. Laget absorbed this new, more open direction for her art.

Laget served as studio assistant, and later estate assistant, for the celebrated Color School painter Gene Davis, becoming even more intimately connected to this dynamic abstract movement, while exploring her own directions.

Laget also earned a degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in simultaneous French/English interpreting. She has spent much time in the last two decades translating for American and international organizations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, expanding her global understanding of art and life with every experience. Even within this hugely broadened viewpoint, the qualities of color and light inspired by her youth in North Africa persist as signature elements of her art.

Laget’s expansive exploration of abstraction has led to major gallery representations, museum and private acquisitions, and numerous exhibitions worldwide, including a large 2022 exhibition at the Katzen Arts Center at American University.

Currently, Laget lives off-grid in the New Mexico mountains.

Frederick J. Brown: Music Is My Muse

Frederick James Brown (1945–2012) was born in Greensboro, Georgia and raised on Chicago’s South Side. For much of his career, he lived in New York City, where his SoHo loft studio was a central gathering place for artists, musicians, writers, dancers, and performance artists. He collaborated with jazz musicians Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, the Revolutionary Ensemble, and the Chicago Arts Ensemble, as well as poet Felipe Luciano and multimedia artists Anthony Ramos, Megan Brown, and Virginia Jaramillo. His own art was inspired by his African American and Native American ancestry, as well as art historical traditions, the urban fabric, and spirituality.

Brown began his portraits of jazz and blues musicians in 1980, completing over 200 portraits, many of which were acquired for public and private collections throughout the world. He recontextualized the history of jazz and blues traditions by including primarily Black American figures in the canon of Western art history. Brown recognized that while their music blared through radios and speakers, and while their performances brought audiences to their feet, images of these musicians were missing from the museums and cultural sites that honor cultural contributions. His portraits bring together abstraction and expressionism to evoke intense emotional fields, using brilliant color and gestural strokes to construct the figure, in a detour from usual concerns for likeness. He focused his brush on the moment of performance, improvising in paint the effect of the music itself.


“I was in Copenhagen in 1969, before I went to Paris. I saw a flyer for a blues festival so I went that night and saw a great show: Clifton Chenier, Magic Sam, Earl Hooker, a few others. I went backstage—I had my press pass, I used to work for the Chicago Tribune—and I met Magic Sam. He said, you’re from Chicago? Hey man, you ought to write a book about us. I said, I’m not a writer. He said, you went to college? I said, yeah, I just graduated. He said, well, I got to the 7th grade and I wrote 40, 50 songs; you oughta be able to write a book! He said, we’re dying like flies. We paid a lot of dues, people ripped us off—our music inspired the world but when we die, no one’s gonna remember us. . . I told Magic Sam that night, well, I’m not a writer but I’m gonna do something. I felt chosen as a medium to paint subjects who would be overlooked in western art.”

—Frederick J. Brown

Inside the REACH

On Loan from Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

Also on Display

Declaration-of-Independence2.jpg

The Declaration of Independence

Engraving on vellum by William J. Stone, 1823
Lent by David M. Rubenstein

Located outside the Justice Forum on Level A

Representatives from the thirteen American colonies met in July 1776 in Philadelphia to vote on whether to declare independence from Great Britain; eventually the vote was unanimous. The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, was approved on July 4 and was published to the world on July 5.

The fifty-six signers of the Declaration did not know if the colonies would survive as an independent confederation. Had the American experiment failed, Britain would surely have seized the signers’ property, exiled their families, and executed these patriots. Nonetheless, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “no hand trembled on affixing its signature to that paper.” And John Hancock made his signature so large that no one could doubt his commitment.

The Declaration of Independence went beyond just separating the colonies from Britain. It asserted certain natural rights as the foundation of government and created a moral standard for the new nation, and a creed for our country: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words have inspired Americans and freedom-seekers around the world to work toward greater justice and equality of opportunity.

The original Declaration document was mostly ignored for the next four decades, as the new Americans went about the serious work of forging a nation. But John Quincy Adams—an exceptional diplomat, committed to civic eloquence—was eager to enshrine it for later generations.

While Secretary of State in 1820, Adams ordered an exact facsimile of the then-fading hand-written Declaration from printer William J. Stone of Washington D.C. Stone worked for three years to engrave the large copper plate and make two hundred copies; fewer than fifty of these survive today.

This copy from the Stone Declaration is inscribed at lower left by John Quincy Adams to Thomas Emory of the Maryland Executive Council.


Native Americans and the Declaration of Independence

“He [King George III] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rules of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” —Grievance 27, Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence uplifts liberating democratic ideals while dehumanizing Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages.” This racist positioning of Native peoples as “savages” led to seizing lands, removing entire tribes through Trails of Tears, outlawing cultural practices, and excluding participation in U.S. civic society.

By 1776, numerous Native nations had engaged with competing colonial powers for nearly two centuries. Native Americans defended their homelands through trade, diplomacy, or war. To indigenous peoples, the frontier was the line of defense for their lands and livelihoods. In the American Revolution some tribes allied with the Americans while others sided with the British with desperate intent to maintain their own Native sovereignties. Both the Americans and the British abandoned their respective Native allies at the war’s end. In the era that followed, Native Americans lost more land, lives, and freedoms to United States westward expansion. It was not until the late 20th century that policies restored self-determination to tribes, signaling that the Declaration of Independence’s ideals are still in process for Native Americans.

Native Americans, despite the inequalities suffered over time, remain overwhelmingly patriotic in defending and caretaking this country. They demonstrate the highest rates of U.S. military service of any ethnic group. The Declaration’s most powerful philosophies align with millennia-old Native American concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality. The long road to form a more perfect union with respect and rights restoration continues with tenacity and hope across over 570 tribes in the contemporary United States.

Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, Piscataway Historian

David M. Rubenstein
Cornerstone of the REACH