As we put to bed this issue about the 250th anniversary of the United States, I am feeling deeply uncertain. About the fate of the country itself, in the midst of ICE killings and protests in Minneapolis, I am certainly uncertain. But I am also uncertain about something at once much more specific and highly symbolic: the fate of the murals in the Cohen Building, slated for sale or possible demolition by the Trump administration. As I write this, artists like Joyce Kozloff and Martha Rosler have just called on the Jewish Museum in New York to support them in saving these artworks by artists such as Ben Shahn and Philip Guston.

The Cohen Building murals were commissioned by this country in the 1930s as part of the New Deal’s numerous art programs, which, as art historian John P.…