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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Get Rid of Yourself

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The two alternating programs on view in this chapter respond to the shifting cultural and political climate of America’s recent past. Program A presents works that cleverly engage forms of popular entertainment, advertising, music, dance, and technology. Works by artists such as Alex Bag, Tony Oursler, and Ryan Trecartin reflect a post-MTV era of lo-fi visual effects and disjointed editing, while those by Loretta Fahrenholz, Luis Gispert, and Jacolby Satterwhite use slick techniques to picture a remixed, science-fiction inflected future.

Program B is organized around politically driven works, which deal with themes including mass media’s role in shaping social and cultural consciousness; the politics of race, gender, and sexual identity; and the potential perils of global capitalism. Get Rid of Yourself, a video by the artist collective Bernadette Corporation, takes the anarchist protests at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, as an opportunity to examine decentralized, anonymous political resistance and its rhetoric. The protesters’ call to “get rid of yourself” speaks to the futility of individual action and the general feeling of instability at the beginning of the new millennium (something that was heightened when the artists were editing the video in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks). Videos by artists like Tala Madani and Richard Serra confront us with their candor, while works by Kevin Jerome Everson, Sharon Hayes, and Wu Tsang address history and memory from more personal perspectives.

These two programs alternate and cycle through each day. Program A is screened first on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and Program B is screened first on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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SHARON HAYES (B. 1970), SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY (SLA) SCREEDS #13, 16, 20 & 29, 2003

A woman with short hair staring directly at the camera.
A woman with short hair staring directly at the camera.

Sharon Hayes (b. 1970), still from Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, 2003. Four screen video projection, color, sound. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery

In the video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, we see Sharon Hayes’s face looking straight ahead, closely framed against a white backdrop. Hayes recites four of the audiotaped messages recorded by heiress Patty Hearst to her parents and broadcast in the media after her kidnapping in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing revolutionary group. On occasion Hayes’s memory falters, and off-screen participants correct or prompt her with lines from the original transcript before the monologue resumes. The tone of Hearst’s communiqués shifted over the months between the first and the last, as she began collaborating with the SLA, but Hayes’s voice remains affectless, imparting no position on what remains a contested episode in American history.

The SLA Screeds is one of a number of Hayes’s performances, videos, and video installations that take social or political documents from the past as their point of departure. She also has “respoken” addresses by Ronald Reagan and appeared with protest signs from various eras in locations around New York and other international centers. This citing of the past in the present not only draws renewed attention to old sources but also highlights the mechanisms of a text’s transmission, reception, and interpretation over time, and often testifies to stasis as much as change when her sources take on contemporary reverberations and relevance. Equally important, Hayes’s work underscores the performative dimension of public activism and political speech, demonstrating how much of what a message means is determined by how, when, and where it is conveyed.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 170. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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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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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

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