The Heartland exhibtion has been opened on the 4th of October. The last two weeks of installing and working intensively together with the artists, most of which could come to share with us the pleasureable moment of the opening, were fantastic. The opening was a great day in which we were able to show the public eye what we, as curators, organizers, museum staff, artists, musicians, cultural institutions and others involved in the process have accomplished in the last two years of intensive research and collaboration. We would like to say Thank You to all the people that we have met throughout our research travels so far - your hospitality and insights about the Heartland as well as your engagement and participation in the process was inspiring and made it possible to realize this large-scale interdisciplinary exhibition project.
All of you who did not yet have a chance to visit the exhibition, come and visit us at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven to experience Heartland yourself, as Regine Debatty did from blogging about her visit in the museum: we make money not art.
Hard to believe, but only a couple of more days and the political future of the United States and therefore the next US president will be elected. This elected person is not only going to be the president of the United States, but also the person upfront dealing with the affects of the economical crisis.
The day after, if you want to discuss the election with us, you should come to our election brunch on the 5th of November in the museum.
wish I could actually see the show in person before I open my mouth, but oh well… I’ll just yup a bit and hope I am not too far off…
Looking at the lineup of the artists I can hardly believe that you are actually making a show about US Heartland! Majority of the artists are from major metro areas (Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and such.) Some are at this point New Yorkers
Notable exception is Alec Soth who is an A-list artist urbanite but actively traveled outside of the metro-art bubble. He is a good representative of the “earnestness” of the heartland art/culture. This, by the way, is a feature that makes a great deal of mid-western art production rather unpalatable to most of NYC/LA art crowd. He actually uses words like “beautiful” and “sweet” in his artist talk and his photographs are amazingly “protestant” (a bit sloppy but I can’t come up with a better wording right now.)
I apologize if I am off base, since I haven’t seen the actual show, but after reading a couple of press releases and going to your website it seems that you are simply reinforcing the hegemony of the metro art sensibility! In some ways there is nothing wrong with that: I would rather go to Chicago or Minneapolis to check out art then to central Illinois or most places in Michigan. However the whole red/blue dialog does not happen in the urban areas of midwest or mid-south! And this is not a way to get at the psyche of the Heartland! Artists flock to urban centers to escape their churchy republican neighbors and get closer to opportunities to be in shows such as the one you have put together.
American visual culture is extremely rich because it is so heterogeneous but you are filtering it through a New York gallery lens! I very much respect the work of all of the curators involved in this project, but I would call upon you to question artworld structures and prejudices as well as public perceptions of the Heartland.