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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The Circus

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The decade after the First World War brought the United States new material prosperity and unparalleled social freedom, fueling a massive appetite for entertainment that grew unabated throughout the mid-twentieth century. Cinemas and theaters opened at a rapid pace, tabloid newspapers exploded in circulation, and celebrity photographs and gossip columns became the common currency of a booming spectacle culture. “The celebrities in New York,” writer David Cort quipped in 1925, “outnumber the nonentities about 100,000 to one.”

Largely inspired by these mass amusements and their audiences, the works on view in this chapter play with the entwinement of voyeurism and exhibitionism, seeing and being seen. Nearly all are set in dim interiors or under the cloak of night, rendered in lurid colors or the high contrast lent by spotlights, signs, and the flashbulb’s glare. Some present striking portraits of great performers such as John Coltrane, Paul Robeson, and Jessica Tandy, while others depict ordinary people strutting and posing or caught unawares by one another and by us. Classes, races, and genders mix within an atmosphere of physical pleasure or menace. Photographs by Lisette Model and Weegee capture the underbelly of mainstream culture, presenting a world at once seductive and discomfiting. Alexander Calder combined live spectacle with sculpture in Calder’s Circus, a motley crew of daredevils, animal acts, and scantily clad dancers that the artist would personally bring to life to the delight of his rapt observers.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS (1904-1957), SCENE: “THE LAST JUMP,” 1924

Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), _Scene: "The Last Jump". Cabaret on a Saturday Night_, from the series, Negro Drawings, 1924. Brush and ink, ink wash, and graphite pencil on paper. Sheet: 14 3/8 × 11 7/16 in. (36.5 × 29.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Drawing Committee 2014.21 © artist or artist’s estate

Mexican-born Miguel Covarrubias arrived in New York in 1924 and quickly became an important figure of the Jazz Age. He made hundreds of sketches of the Harlem nightclub scene, which formed the basis of caricatures that he published in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. This one originally appeared in a Vanity Fair spread titled “Enter, The New Negro,” an introduction to the sophisticated world uptown for the magazine’s primarily white readership.

There are aspects of Covarrubias’s imagery that are troubling to contemporary eyes. The facial features share some qualities with the stereotyped racist imagery that had pervaded popular culture since the nineteenth century. Covarrubias deeply admired the cultural flowering he found in Harlem and did not intend his images to be derogatory; but in exaggerating his figures for humorous effect he inevitably drew on the limiting visual vocabulary of his day. Even at the time, however, some African American scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois, were critical of Covarrubias’s work, convinced that images of black people ought to be explicitly ennobling. At the same time, writers such as Langston Hughes and Alain Locke saw in Covarrubias’s work a great love for Harlem’s vitality.

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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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