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CAA 2026 takes place during the semiquincentennial, the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While various commissions, historical associations, and museums have planned commemorative events to mark the occasion, the anniversary has become particularly politicized by President Trump. Trump has formed both a 1776 Commission that called for “patriotic education” and a White House “Task Force 250” to plan a “birthday party” for the United States. His executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” explicitly denigrated the Smithsonian American Art Museum and many others for presenting the kinds of revisionist histories that have long been transforming our profession. This panel will bring together museum curators and university scholars to consider how we can understand this current anniversary in relation to longer histories of commemoration, artistic canon formation, and nationalism in the United States. In this informal roundtable, panelists will discuss how they are marking the semiquincentennial at their own institutions, and how their scholarship or curatorial work interrogates the relationship between visual culture and national identity. Topics will include special exhibitions that call attention to overlooked chapters of American art history; the intersections of national identity with racial, gender, and other identities; and the history of monuments and other forms of national commemoration. This panel explores how scholars and curators are continuing to do the work of art history in this highly politicized moment, and how that work can help us understand our current period within the longer course of American history.