America Is Hard to See
May 1–Sept 27, 2015
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.
Sponsored by
Music, Pink and Blue
3
Please note: Floor 8 is no longer on view.
Synesthesia is a neurological syndrome in which a person’s senses are transposed: colors may be experienced as sounds or sounds as physical feelings. This condition became a powerful metaphor for many artists working in the early twentieth century. They were fascinated, as Georgia O’Keeffe put it, with “the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye.”
An analogy between music and visual art proved especially useful in explaining the significance of abstract art to those that still greeted it with skepticism. Instrumental music had always expressed feeling without any explicit content; painting and sculpture, surely, could do the same. Even representational imagery might express sensations other than sight, such as a landscape alive with sound or a body moved by it. Increasingly, visual artists declared an affinity with music, while composers and choreographers began taking cues from the visual arts.
Below is a selection of works from this chapter.
ALFRED STIEGLITZ (1864–1946), SONGS OF THE SKY B3, 1923
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), Songs of the Sky B3, 1923. Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 × 3 1/2in. (11.4 × 8.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Promised gift of Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla and Celso Gonzalez-Falla to Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and The Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Arts Foundation P.2014.105. © 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In 1922 Alfred Stieglitz—the influential photographer who played a seminal role in defining and promoting modern art in the early twentieth century—began to document the sky at his family estate on Lake George in New York. He eventually produced more than two hundred images, including Songs of the Sky B3, for the series, which came to be called Equivalent. The small size of these prints, made with a handheld Graflex camera, contrasts with their expansive subject. Light, the very substance of photography, is foregrounded here, expressing the tension between the transitory and the eternal that underlies photographic practice.
This series was a departure for Stieglitz, who spent much of his career advocating for “straight photography” through the numerous institutions he developed. These included the magazine Camera Work and a succession of important galleries in which he championed the work of fellow photographers such as Edward Steichen and Paul Strand along with the paintings of European and American modernists—including his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, whose painterly abstractions of nature may have influenced the Equivalent series.
In this early print from the series, wisps of woolen white-and-gray clouds frame a slice of piercing light against a darkened sky. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the soft, curving shapes of the dissipating clouds, which, disconnected from everyday experience, are meant to suggest an “equivalence” between one’s thoughts and nature. “Several people feel I have photographed God,” Stieglitz wrote to the poet Hart Crane in 1923. By connecting his inner life to the natural world, Stieglitz imbues a cross-section of the sky with spiritual depth through a rhythm of abstracted forms.
Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 369. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.
Events
View all-
Sun,
May 1
Anniversary Curatorial Address: The Whitney’s Inaugural Year and Beyond
1–2 pm
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Sat,
Oct 17
Learning Series Course: Art in the United States and Abroad, 1950–1975
5:30–7 pm
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Sat,
Oct 10
Learning Series Course: Art in the United States and Abroad, 1950–1975
5:30–7 pm
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Sun,
Sept 27
Open Studio
10:30 am–3 pm
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Sun,
Sept 27
Open Studio
10:30 am–3 pm
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Sat,
Sept 26
Poetry Parade for Site and Sight
6:30 pm
Audio guides
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.
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.
View guide
Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection
View 646 works
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