None of These Three Artists Are American. That Is the Point.
This is not an ordinary Fourth of July. On July 4, 2026, the United States marks its Semiquincentennial, 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. It is the reason the National Gallery of Art has built its 2026 programming around 115 works on paper reflecting on the American experience. It is the reason the Smithsonian, the Met, and Crystal Bridges have all opened exhibitions this year asking the same underlying question in different galleries: what does this country's story actually look like, told through its art. A milestone this size does not come around twice in a lifetime. It comes around once.
Xan Padrón was born in Ourense, in Spain's Galicia region. Javier Guadalupe was born in Quito, Ecuador. Jean-Daniel Lorieux was born in Paris, in 1937, and did his military service photographing a war in Algeria before he ever picked up a fashion camera.
None of them are American. All three have spent their careers looking at what America means, what it produces, and who it makes famous, from the outside in.
That outsider's clarity is exactly what makes their work worth showing for a 250th anniversary. A milestone this large tends to produce art that flatters rather than examines: flags, fireworks, red-white-and-blue on a canvas. Padrón, Guadalupe, and Lorieux offer something else. A collective portrait built from strangers. A single textile figure standing in for a nation's nerve. A photograph of the exact machine, fashion, magazines, New York, that turns a face into a household name. Three ways of asking what "American" actually looks like, made by three people who arrived at the question from elsewhere, at the exact moment the country is asking it of itself.
Xan Padrón's We the People: A Nation Built From Strangers
Padrón's Time Lapse series works like this. He picks one location, a subway platform, a street corner, a stretch of sidewalk, and stays there long enough to photograph a wide cross-section of the people who pass through it. Then he stacks the individual frames into a single image, each person occupying their own moment, all of them sharing one frame. Padrón has described the effect as sheet music: each person is a note, and the composite is the song the location produces when enough people move through it.
We the People (2025) takes that method and gives it the most loaded title in the American political vocabulary. The opening three words of the Constitution's preamble, printed on paper, soaked, wrinkled, and frayed by hand before being face-mounted to aluminum. The work measures 42 by 76 inches. Made the year before the country's 250th anniversary, the surface itself carries the argument: this is not a pristine, souvenir-shop version of national identity. It has been worked over. Handled. Aged on purpose.
The title does not describe a government. It describes a crowd, the same crowd Padrón has spent over a decade photographing on New York sidewalks and subway platforms, none of whom knew, when they walked past his camera, that they were being folded into a single image of the nation their footsteps happened to be crossing.
Padrón's method has already found an audience beyond the gallery wall. The Time Lapse series has been exhibited at the United Nations Headquarters and the Pfizer Building in New York, at Sala Valente in Spain, and at art fairs including Photo LA and Art on Paper NYC. In 2023, his work appeared in the Bryant Park subway station as part of the MTA's Arts & Design program, putting his composite crowds back into the exact kind of public space that produced them.
We the People is not a photograph of a person. It is a photograph of a population, assembled one stranger at a time.
Javier Guadalupe's Brave Nation: Courage, Woven Rather Than Painted
Guadalupe does not paint. He builds.
His practice, rooted in Kinetic art, constructs three-dimensional wall works from European textile fabrics: cashmere, cotton, satin, wool polyester, layered and shaped until the surface reads as sculpture rather than cloth. The technique gives his work a built-in sense of movement. Fabric catches light differently than paint does, and Guadalupe uses that difference deliberately, letting folds and seams do the work that brushstrokes do in a conventional canvas.
Brave Nation (2024) measures 51 1/8 by 25 5/8 inches, a textile structure that takes an abstract virtue, courage, and gives it physical form. Guadalupe is best known for his Other Masters series, in which he reconstructs the visual language of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and van Gogh in fabric, a project explicitly about carrying older artistic legacies forward into a new material. Brave Nation works on the same principle applied to a different kind of inheritance: not an artist's legacy, but a civic one. Bravery as the load-bearing material of a national identity, quite literally woven rather than asserted.
Guadalupe's Ecuadorian upbringing and years of international travel show up in the density of pattern and color across his surfaces. His work is held in galleries across the United States and France. What he brings to a word like "brave" is texture: an idea most art renders as symbol, he renders as something you could, in theory, reach out and touch.
Jean-Daniel Lorieux's Karen Mulder: The Machine That Makes an Icon
Lorieux's career began in a different kind of frame entirely. Born in Paris in 1937, he did his military service in Algeria as a photographer and filmmaker attached to the spahis, work that put him in front of the war's aftermath before he ever photographed a fashion campaign. He joined Studio Harcourt in 1964, then went freelance, building a four-decade career shooting for Vogue and L'Officiel and producing advertising campaigns for Dior, Céline, Lanvin, Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne. He is spoken of in the same breath as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, a contemporary working the same territory of high fashion and high glamour.
His subjects tell you what kind of career this was. Nelson Mandela. Jacques Chirac, whom Lorieux photographed as the official campaign photographer for his 1988 legislative run. Mick Jagger, Sharon Stone, Brooke Shields, Claudia Schiffer. Lorieux was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters and received the Legion of Honor.
Karen Mulder (1995) sits inside that body of work. Mulder, a Dutch model who became one of the defining faces of 1990s fashion, was a Victoria's Secret Angel from 1997 to 2000, appeared on the covers of British and Spanish Vogue, and was photographed for two Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues. Lorieux's photograph is a limited-edition fine art print, 26 1/2 by 18 1/2 inches, hand-signed by the artist.
What makes this photograph relevant to a conversation about American identity is not its subject's nationality. It is the machine the photograph documents. New York's fashion industry, the magazine covers, the advertising campaigns, the celebrity apparatus, has spent a century converting faces from everywhere into names known everywhere. Mulder is Dutch. Lorieux is French. The industry that made her image ubiquitous is one of America's most successful and most imitated cultural exports. This photograph is a document of exactly how that export gets made, one sitting at a time.
Why This Trio Belongs in a Collector's 250th Anniversary
For collectors and interior designers building a program around the Semiquincentennial, or simply looking for work that rewards a second look beyond the holiday itself, these three pieces offer something a flag print, or a museum's official commemorative print run, cannot: range of medium and a genuine argument, at collector scale rather than institutional scale.
A photographic composite of anonymous New Yorkers. A hand-built textile sculpture standing in for a national trait. A limited-edition fashion photograph documenting the industry that manufactures American cultural export. Hung together, in a residence, a hospitality lobby, or a design showroom staging a 250th anniversary collection, the three pieces read as a conversation about what makes a nation: its people, its character, and the images it produces of itself for the rest of the world to consume.
None of it requires red, white, or blue. All of it is, in its own way, about what turning 250 actually means.
All three works are available now through Carousel Fine Art's galleries in Buckhead and Lenox Square, Atlanta; Miami; West Palm Beach; and Chicago.
See the Works
Venue: Carousel Fine Art, Atlanta (Buckhead Village and Lenox Square), Miami, West Palm Beach, and Chicago Availability: We the People (Xan Padrón, 2025), Brave Nation (Javier Guadalupe, 2024), and Karen Mulder (Jean-Daniel Lorieux, 1995) are available for acquisition Inquiries: carouselartgroup.com
Contact the gallery directly for pricing, availability, and private viewings.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Semiquincentennial and why does it matter for the Fourth of July in 2026? The Semiquincentennial is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, marked on July 4, 2026. The milestone has driven a year of national programming, including the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission's America250 initiative, and major exhibitions from institutions including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Crystal Bridges, each examining American identity and history through art.
What is Xan Padrón's We the People about? We the People (2025) is part of Xan Padrón's Time Lapse series, in which he photographs many individuals passing through a single urban location and stacks the images into one composite portrait. The work is printed on archival canvas, then soaked, wrinkled, and frayed by hand before being face-mounted to aluminum, and measures 42 by 76 inches. Its title, drawn from the opening words of the U.S. Constitution's preamble, reframes a crowd of strangers as a portrait of collective national identity.
Who is Xan Padrón? Xan Padrón is a Galician photographer, born in Ourense, Spain in 1969, based in New York City. He is best known for his Time Lapse series, exhibited at the United Nations Headquarters, the Pfizer Building in New York, Sala Valente in Spain, and as part of the MTA's Arts & Design program at the Bryant Park subway station in 2023.
What is Javier Guadalupe's Brave Nation? Brave Nation (2024) is a textile structure by Ecuadorian-born artist Javier Guadalupe, built from cashmere, cotton, satin, and wool polyester and measuring 51 1/8 by 25 5/8 inches. Guadalupe's practice, rooted in Kinetic art, constructs three-dimensional wall works from European textile fabrics rather than paint, giving his surfaces a built-in sense of movement and texture.
Who is Javier Guadalupe? Javier Guadalupe was born in Quito, Ecuador in 1986. He is known for his three-dimensional, fabric-based Kinetic art and for his Other Masters series, which reinterprets works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Vincent van Gogh in textile form. His work is represented in galleries across the United States and France.
Who took the photograph of Karen Mulder at Carousel Fine Art? The photograph was taken by Jean-Daniel Lorieux, a French fashion photographer born in Paris in 1937. Lorieux built a four-decade career shooting for Vogue and L'Officiel and producing advertising campaigns for Dior, Céline, Lanvin, Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne. He also photographed Nelson Mandela, Jacques Chirac, Mick Jagger, and Sharon Stone, among others, and holds the Legion of Honor.
Who is Karen Mulder? Karen Mulder is a Dutch former fashion model who rose to prominence in the 1990s. She served as a Victoria's Secret Angel from 1997 to 2000, appeared on the covers of British and Spanish Vogue, and was featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in 1997 and 1998. Jean-Daniel Lorieux photographed her in 1995, during the height of her career.
Are these works available to purchase? Yes. We the People by Xan Padrón, Brave Nation by Javier Guadalupe, and Karen Mulder by Jean-Daniel Lorieux are all available for acquisition through Carousel Fine Art. Contact the gallery at carouselartgroup.com for pricing and availability.
Where can I see these works in person? All three works are available through Carousel Fine Art's galleries in Buckhead Village and Lenox Square in Atlanta, Miami, West Palm Beach, and Chicago