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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Course of Empire

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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.

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GLENN LIGON (B. 1960), RÜCKENFIGUR, 2009

Glenn Ligon, Rückenfigur, 2009

In America Is Hard to See

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Glenn Ligon, Rückenfigur, 2009

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Narrator: The painted neon sculptures depicting the word “America” in this gallery were inspired by the opening of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Glenn Ligon spoke to us about it on the occasion of his retrospective at the Whitney in 2011. 

Glenn Ligon: The first neons that I did were at the moment when our economy was booming, but we were in a war in Afghanistan. Well, we're still in a war with Afghanistan, but since then Barack Obama, the first black President of the United States, was elected. 

Narrator: Ligon began to think of America in terms of dichotomies, contrasts, and light and dark. Neon, sometimes painted black to seal in the light, became his new medium. In this work, Rückenfigur, it takes a moment to realize that Ligon hasn’t spelled AMERICA backward. Each individual letter is flipped to face the wall. But because the “A”, the “M,” and the “I” are symmetrical, they still seem to face out towards us.

Scott Rothkopf is the Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs at the Whitney. 

Scott Rothkpof: And that's one of the really interesting things about this piece, I think, this idea of America, this country, this word facing away from us but at the same time addressing us. There's a sense of vulnerability in this piece—you see the back of this sign in a way, these wires that dangle down. You see the fragile connections between these letters, which I think suggests the sense of America, this country, as a confederacy that's both united and sometimes divided. And I think that all of those things, in a way, function metaphorically for where this country is at this moment.

Adam Weinberg: This work’s title, Rückenfigur, is a German term that describes a figure in a painting who is seen from the back contemplating a grand landscape. In many ways, Glenn Ligon puts us in that position—through his work we are confronted with the vast and contradictory landscape that is America today.

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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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