The first thing you notice when you enter the American Dream Experience, a new exhibition at the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest, is a large golden “Tree of Generations” whose “leaves” are digital photos of museum visitors. Those will update frequently as museum-goers, whom the museum will begin to welcome when it opens on Saturday, use booths nearby to talk about their families’ stories. That sort of interaction is baked into the museum’s mission, executive director Rachel Goslins said at a press preview this week: “We approach the American dream as a dialogue and not a monologue.”
But tech is really the star at the Milken Center, which uses top-notch digital magic to present a nuanced, unapologetically pro-capitalist view of the American Dream, a concept that has shifted over the last century to individual, not collective, well-being, but it’s a notion that still colors many aspects of life in the US. A floor below the tree, the center shows an innovative 18-minute, “270-degree” film called America: Built on Dreams that features Ben’s Chili Bowl owner Virginia Ali and Washington Spirit owner Michele Kang alongside others who are pursuing the Dream in their own ways (be sure to look up to see the ceiling fans at Ben’s or a kid leaping overhead).
The museum’s permanent exhibits will explore what the Milken Center calls its “four pillars”: “Health and Medical Research, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Education and the Educator, and Access to Capital and Financial Empowerment.” The latter concept is complex for a museum whose namesake had a colorful history in high finance that included a stint as Wall Street’s “junk bond king” in the ’80s, a trial on charges of insider trading, prison time, then a second act that includes significant investments in cancer research and, in 2020, a Presidential pardon.
Inside the galleries, you can chat with holograms of Serena Williams and Sanjay Gupta about their takes on the American Dream in English, Spanish, French, or Mandarin, among other languages. A multimedia “financing cube” sculpture, based on a concept of Milken’s, spins impressively near a window overlooking the Treasury Department, making a case that, as Goslins said, access to capital is a “pillar” that’s “in many ways the first among equals because without that, you can’t build dreams, businesses, lives, families.”
There are “spotlight galleries” that will rotate exhibits—right now, there’s a showing of former President George W. Bush’s paintings of immigrants—and, of course, events in the impressively renovated former bank buildings that make up the center.
Those buildings are a story in themselves. Over 12 years, the center purchased and renovated five structures that were once home to Riggs Bank and the American Security and Trust Company at a cost of around half a billion dollars, Goslins said. The center placed the buildings on pylons while it dug out the basement where visitors will see that film, restored a “laylight,” a type of skylight comprising 190 colored and frosted glass panes, and hired craftspeople to zhuzh up the plaster ornamentation overhead in the former bank lobbies. It is a stunning place to visit.
Admission is free, though a 25-minute immersive “holodeck” experience upstairs is a $15 add-on. Asked how the center would draw visitors in a city full of museums, Goslins noted heavy tourist foot traffic near its location and the fact that the White House has over the years become increasingly difficult to visit for many people. (In fact, the People’s House, which includes a replica of the White House, opened last year on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue from the Milken Center, and officials there recently told me it had a quarter-million visitors in its first year.)
Goslins said that when she discussed the vitality of the American Dream over the past year with people, she heard a lot of pessimism—until she asked about their families’ stories of how they ended up in the US, what made their story an American one. Then, she said, their faces lit up. “I think when people come to DC,” she said, “this is what they want to talk to their kids about.”
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
