America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

A mural faces the gallery windows and the Hudson River.
A mural faces the gallery windows and the Hudson River.

Running People at 2,616,216 (1978–79) by Jonathan Borofsky installed on the West Ambulatory, 5th floor, the inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See (May 1–September 27, 2015). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photograph © Nic Lehoux

Drawn entirely from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, America Is Hard to See takes the inauguration of the Museum’s new building as an opportunity to reexamine the history of art in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Comprising more than six hundred works, the exhibition elaborates the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown appear alongside beloved icons in a conscious effort to unsettle assumptions about the American art canon.

The title, America Is Hard to See, comes from a poem by Robert Frost and a political documentary by Emile de Antonio. Metaphorically, the title seeks to celebrate the ever-changing perspectives of artists and their capacity to develop visual forms that respond to the culture of the United States. It also underscores the difficulty of neatly defining the country’s ethos and inhabitants, a challenge that lies at the heart of the Museum’s commitment to and continually evolving understanding of American art.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition’s narrative is divided into twenty- three thematic “chapters” installed throughout the building. These sections revisit and revise established tropes while forging new categories and even expanding the definition of who counts as an American artist. Indeed, each chapter takes its name not from a movement or style but from the title of a work that evokes the section’s animating impulse. Works of art across all mediums are displayed together, acknowledging the ways in which artists have engaged various modes of production and broken the boundaries between them.

America Is Hard to See reflects the Whitney’s distinct record of acquisitions and exhibitions, which constitutes a kind of collective memory—one that represents a range of individual, sometimes conflicting, attitudes toward what American art might be or mean or do at any given moment. By simultaneously mining and questioning our past, we do not arrive at a comprehensive survey or tidy summation, but rather at a critical new beginning: the first of many stories still to tell.

America Is Hard to See is organized by a team of Whitney curators, led by Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, including Carter E. Foster, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing; Dana Miller, Curator of the Permanent Collection; and Scott Rothkopf, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs; with Jane Panetta, Assistant Curator; Catherine Taft, Assistant Curator; and Mia Curran, Curatorial Assistant.

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Threat and Sanctuary

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Although long considered the most important modern art form, painting fell out of fashion in the contemporary art world of the late 1960s. Regarded by many as outmoded, even dying, the medium was challenged, on the one hand, by the forceful presence and novel processes of Minimal and Post-Minimal sculpture and, on the other, by Conceptual art’s emphasis on language and photography. Yet it was precisely painting’s diminished status that made it ripe for reinvention—a space to play not only with paint itself but also with critical taboos like figuration and bad taste.

The paintings on view in this chapter represent a variety of experimental approaches to the medium from the late 1960s through the 1970s. Some, such as Robert Reed’s and Jack Whitten’s canvases, involve almost sculptural processes, such as pouring, smearing, and layering, while Elizabeth Murray’s painting toys with eccentric graphic forms and jarring high-key colors. Having abandoned his Abstract Expressionist style for cartoonish symbols in the late 1960s, Philip Guston paved the way for younger artists reengaging the figure within psychologically charged tableaus. Several of them appeared under the mantle of New Image Painting, a provocative 1978 Whitney exhibition that included the work of Neil Jenney and Susan Rothenberg. These artists rejected both abstraction and the smoothly rendered images of Pop in order to pursue oblique imagined narratives—whether comic or foreboding—within loosely painted fields. The freedom they espoused in their handwork, symbolism, and humor revivified a medium that some left for dead and continues to inspire younger generations of painters today.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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CHUCK CLOSE (B. 1940), PHIL, 1969

Chuck Close, Phil, 1969

In America Is Hard to See

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Chuck Close, Phil, 1969

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Narrator: Chuck Close has used the photograph this painting is based on many times over the years. It is of the artist’s friend, Philip Glass. But the painting, from 1969, was his first portrait of Glass, who later became one of America’s best-known composers. 

Philip Glass: My reaction to the picture? I never really think of me as the picture, in fact it’s always just been an image, I don’t feel attached to it at all. Though other people might say, there’s Phil, but I never say that. I don’t think, when Monet was doing haystacks, the haystacks thought, hey I’m the haystack, it’s just another haystack [LAUGHS].I don’t think it was a portrait in the sense that when Rembrandt did a portrait or when Van Gogh did a portrait those portraits were partly to reveal some character of the person, the portraits were about the person. If these are portraits at all and I don’t think they are they’re not about revealing the portrait of the person they’re about revealing the artist.

Narrator: To hear Glass describe sitting for the photograph that Close used to make the painting, please tap the button to continue. 

Chuck Close made his inaugural series of works–eight large-scale, black and white paintings of faces—between 1968 and 1970. In this and other early “heads” (as the artist calls them), Close sets each frontally-depicted face against a neutral ground.

Phil is a portrait of Close’s long-time friend, composer Philip Glass. Despite his intimate relationship with the subject of the painting, Close created this work in a calculated, systematic manner. The artist took an 8 × 10-inch photograph of the sitter, overlaid it with a penciled grid, and then painted a vastly enlarged blowup of each square onto the canvas using airbrushes to create a photographic finish. As a result of this drastic enlargement, we see Glass at an uncomfortably close distance from which every mole, hair, and wrinkle is visible. With its cool, almost clinical detachment from its subject, the work functions more like a giant mug shot than a portrait.

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Audio guides

People gathered for a talk in the gallery.
People gathered for a talk in the gallery.

Carol Mancusi-Ungaro addresses Jay DeFeo's The Rose (c. 1958–1966)

99 Objects

Listen to selections from the in-gallery programs series named in honor of the Whitney’s new address, 99 Gansevoort Street. Artists, writers, Whitney curators and educators, and an interdisciplinary group of scholars focus on individual works of art from the Museum’s collection on view in America Is Hard to See.

View guide
A mural faces the gallery windows and the Hudson River.
A mural faces the gallery windows and the Hudson River.

Running People at 2,616,216 (1978–79) by Jonathan Borofsky installed on the West Ambulatory, 5th floor, the inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See (May 1–September 27, 2015). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photograph © Nic Lehoux

America Is Hard to See

Hear directly from artists and curators on selected works from the exhibition.

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Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

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In the News

“2015 was the Year of the Whitney…the cross-disciplinary approach taken by America Is Hard to See and Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, is becoming the model for a new generation of curators.”
—Hyperallergic

“2015 belonged to the Whitney…both my museum—and my show—of the year.”
—Adrian Searle in The Guardian

"Best of 2015: Our Top 20 NYC Art Shows"
—Hyperallergic

"The museum’s inaugural show in its new building, America Is Hard to See, tells a different story of modern and contemporary American art than the lily-white version we’re used to"
—The New Yorker

Interview: Curator Scott Rothkopf speaks about America Is Hard to See on Slate's Culture Gabfest
—Slate

"New Whitney Museum Signifies a Changing New York Art Scene"
—The New York Times

"With its abundantly sumptuous holdings, the museum tells us how we got where we are, offering a teeming lineage of the art of this country"
—Hyperallergic

"The Whitney Opens With a Winner"
—Artnews

"Review: New Whitney Museum’s First Show, America Is Hard to See"
—The New York Times

"Curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art discuss their largest exhibition to date at their new downtown location, designed by architect Renzo Piano"
—The Wall Street Journal

"The exhibition will include plenty of crowd-pleasers—Hopper, O’Keeffe, Calder’s “Circus”—but, with the Whitney’s brilliant chief curator, Donna De Salvo, at the helm, expect major twists in the conventional art-historical plot."
—The New Yorker

"The Whitney Museum, Soon to Open Its New Home, Searches for American Identity"
—The New York Times

"One of this year's most anticipated art world events"
—Huffington Post

On the Hour

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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