Since that climate is one of extreme polarization, the question of how political museums should get is becoming increasingly urgent. And they carry extra weight in a place like Charlottesville, where right-wing demonstrators last year rallied around a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and attacked counter-protesters, killing one, Heather Heyer. “The 21st-century museum is a place for dialogue, and it can be perhaps a place where, mediated through art, some of the tensions around that dialogue might fall away more easily,” says Matthew McLendon, the director of UVA’s Fralin Museum...