At a National Gallery of Art reception in September, museum director Kaywin Feldman thanked the donors of 15 modern and contemporary works by Haitian artists for their recent “patriotic gift to the nation’s museum.” She placed a slight but unmistakable emphasis on the word “patriotic,” which produced a palpable moment of electricity in the crowd. Any gift to the National Gallery is theoretically an act of patriotism. But this gift, by donors who have visited and loved Haiti for decades, came at a moment of profound disgrace in the United States’ relationship to a neighbor with whom it shares revolutionary origins, an African diaspora and centuries of inextricably intertwined history.