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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In the early 1960s, Pop art challenged the gestures of Abstract Expressionism with an unflinching embrace of America’s exploding commercial and media culture. The sources of this new art were generally neither the artist’s imagination nor direct observation of the world, but rather images themselves—whether product packaging, print advertisements, newspaper photography, or comic books. Early in their careers, many of Pop’s protagonists worked as commercial artists; Andy Warhol was an illustrator and James Rosenquist a Billboard painter, while Ed Ruscha trained in graphic design. These commercial backgrounds yielded flat, boldly graphic, mechanical-looking, and impersonal surfaces that were sometimes marked by photographic and printing processes.

The works on view in this chapter present a range of attitudes toward consumer culture. Some feel upbeat and celebratory, such as Tom Wesselmann’s enormous sandwich or Wayne Thiebaud’s luscious cakes. Other works, however, seem to distort or critique the American dream by hinting at overindulgent materialism or the social turmoil of the 1960s. Marisol’s fractured figures present themselves as mutant mannequins, and in Warhol’s hands, plastic surgery and an endless display of Coca-Cola bottles offer a false promise of beauty and sustenance, a vision of branding and self-improvement run amok. Despite its bright colors and visual wallop, Pop art’s tone was often deadpan and chilly, closer to its banal sources than to traditional fine art. Fittingly, it incited a media sensation and charges of vulgarity, but the aftershocks of its revolutionary take on American culture can still be felt today.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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MARISOL (B. 1930), WOMEN AND DOG, 1963-64

Marisol, Women and Dog, 1964

In America Is Hard to See

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Marisol, Women and Dog, 1964

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Narrator: The four figures in this group of lifesize sculptures by Marisol are self-portraits of the artist. Attached to the wooden head of the woman with the green skirt and pink blouse is a black and white photograph of the artist. The two women with revolving faces are plaster casts of the artist’s face.

Marisol: They’re a casting of my face. It’s plaster. They always come out different. But this is myself as a child, the small one.

Narrator: In addition to the wood, plaster, and the black and white photograph, Marisol used found objects—such as the little girl’s pink bow or the handbag of the woman on the far left.  And, of course, it’s hard to miss the taxidermed dog’s head.  She particularly enjoys working with wood and continues to create sculpture made out of pieces she buys or finds on the street.

Marisol: There’s no end to gluing and cutting and sanding. [Laughs] 

Equal parts painting, collage, carving, and assemblage, Women and Dog was inspired by sources as diverse as its constituent materials. Marisol worked in New York during the emergence of Pop Art in the early 1960s and was one of few women associated with the movement. This sculpture reflects the fascination with everyday life that was fundamental to Pop, and yet its larger-than-life, totemic forms and the multi-faced profiles of the figures belie influences from Pre-Colombian and Native American folk art to analytic Cubism. The trio of females strolling with a child and a dog seem to suggest Marisol’s interest in social norms and conventions relating to women in society, but the composition is ambiguous. Elements of the women’s clothing are colorfully whimsical, yet they are literally “boxed in” by their garments, and their faces are marked by a deadpan impenetrability. The women, and perhaps the child too, are self-portraits—indeed, a photograph of the artist is applied directly onto the face of one of the figures—suggesting a fluid inhabitation of different female roles and identities.

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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

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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