America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Indecipherable Asian lettering and graffiti has overtaken the industrial edifice crouched beneath an acrid sky in Ed Ruscha’s painting The Old Tool & Die Building from his series Course of Empire. This title owes to Thomas Cole’s mid-nineteenth century cycle of allegorical canvases chronicling the rise of a triumphant civilization and its decline into war and desolation. In Ruscha’s ominous 2004 retelling, an American factory has fallen into the hands of new owners and been defaced by vandals, serving as an emblem of a changed world order.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen American society and politics increasingly fractured and the country’s once dominant stature challenged around the globe. Artists have registered these changes, whether responding to the tragedy of September 11, 2001; wars in the Middle East; the financial calamity of 2008; or the ravages of climate change as evidenced by Hurricane Katrina. Dystopian imagined landscapes abound in this chapter where Ruscha’s canvas joins Mark Bradford’s tempestuous panorama and Carroll Dunham’s post-apocalyptic wilderness, while other works contain more specific responses to real world events.

Yet amid this anxiety and skepticism, hopeful glimmers emerge. The country’s first black president shares a tender moment with his wife in Elizabeth Peyton’s painting Barack and Michelle, and Glenn Ligon’s neon relief summons a country that is, in his words, at once a “shining beacon” and a “dark star.” Ligon rotated each of the black-painted letters in the word “AMERICA” to face the wall so that it simultaneously addresses us and turns away. His splintering icon poetically captures the ambivalent sense of identification and alienation that the country so often inspires. A sense of gleaming promise is shadowed by doubt.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.