Contributors—including novelist Dave Eggers, scholar Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and journalist Rebecca Solnit—explore the region through topics ranging from art to music to urban farming to political history. An illustrated section introduces all of the artists involved in both iterations of Heartland, including established figures like Kerry James Marshall and exuberant newcomers like Whoop Dee Doo. An appendix surveys the lively state of independent and artist-run cultural initiatives from New Orleans to Detroit.

With essays by: John Corbett and Frank Veenstra, Joshua Decter, Dave Eggers, Charles Esche, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Andria Lisle, Hesse McGraw, Kerstin Niemann, Stephanie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Strauss, Dan S. Wang, and Matt Weiland.

The publication will be published in conjunction with the opening of Heartland at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, 1st of October 2009.

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, the book will be available this autumn at the Smart Museum Shop.
To order, the public may call 773.702.0528 or e-mail smart-books@uchicago.edu.

The Heartland research project started out in 2007 at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. In collaboration with the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips in Eindhoven as well as the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago the three co-curators Charles Esche, Kerstin Niemann and Stephanie Smith began to look upon the Heartland and its contemporary culture. The premise of this project was to rid ourselves from some of the clichéd images of the rural areas as well as big cities of the United States, both in their positive and negative variants.

Heartland is a term that has been stretched and adapted in so many ways on both sides of the ocean, for example ‘fly over states’, the ‘great plaines’ and ‘the forgotten land’. From the perspective of a US citizen, the word ‘Heartland’ usually refers to the Midwest, an area which includes the north-central states of the United States of America, specifically Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. As for the exhibition Heartland, the word serves as a working title and is a synonym for a piece of land that is located in the heart of the country.

Looking upon the Heartland from a European as well as a US–American perspective, the co-curators decided to research, assemble and make information and knowledge available, following a central question: what is happening within this huge geographic area that is so little represented as a cultural center or a place of knowledge exchange in the world of art?
Instead of relying solely upon established networks of artists, musicians and cultural institutions, we were eager to explore the visual culture and music of the Heartland region through research travels in this area. To create an organizing principle that resonates with the literary history of the Unites States, we have chosen to follow the course of the Mississippi River with detours to some of its tributaries. In 2007 and 2008 we traveled several times in the Heartland region, meeting up with artists, institutions and experiencing both land and people. These journeys took us from Minneapolis to New Orleans, from north to south, Union and Confederacy and through open rural lands, Native American reservations, industrial towns, continental metropolises and small towns.

By the summer of 2008 we had accomplished altogether four research travels. Each trip back to the US made it possible to question upon practices of structures, to rethink our concept for the exhibition and to share our ideas and thoughts to insiders that were helpful in contributing new aspects to our findings. The hospitality of the people we met, the building up of relationships with artists and art institutions made it possible to realize Heartland, a large-scale exhibition project of art and music, from October 2008 until February 2009 at the Van Abbemuseum and the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips.

Please take a read at some of our findings about our traveling experiences and look at the contributions of people from within the Heartland and those affiliated with it. With this blog we will keep you posted on our latest travels as well as our new ideas how to shape and conceptualize Heartland as an exhibition in an institution in the Heartland itself.

The research and the travels continue and Heartland will be reconceived at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago in October 2009.
If you want to contribute or have questions, please feel free to contact us.

Heartland is an interdisciplinary project which reflects on the visual culture, art and music of the heart of the United States. The Heartland project consists of a group exhibition in the Van Abbemuseum together with a musical programme in the Muziekcentrum. It will also include ancillary events, such as debates, lectures, a photo exhibition, publications, and an artists in residence programme. The Heartland project is an ambitious collaboration between the Van Abbemuseum and the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips in Eindhoven, and with the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago as an American partner. Heartland will take place in Eindhoven from 4 October, 2008 until 25 January, 2009. The exhibition will be reconceived for a presentation at the Smart Museum of Art in 2009.
 

Heartland in Eindhoven, The Netherlands
October 4, 2008 – January 25, 2009

For information on the programme in Eindhoven, please visit: www.heartlandeindhoven.nl.
Please also visit the website of the Van Abbemuseum; for general information on the Heartland poject, and for information on the exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum.
 

Heartland in Chicago, USA
October 1, 2009 – January 9, 2010

The vast middle of the United States is an unexpectedly fertile region for many artists working today. On the periphery of the global contemporary art world, artists in the American Heartland are building alternative communities and creating new works inflected with a utopian impulse to transform the world around them. This exhibition presents select works by regional artists and outside artists-in-residence with a focus on some of the inventive ways in which groups of artists are responding to the terrain and legacies of Detroit and Kansas City. The Smart Museum’s presentation of Heartland is organized in response to an earlier, larger presentation of the exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. Rooted in a transatlantic dialogue between curators at both institutions, the project mixes inside and outside perspectives on the American heartland. Infectious, earnest, and socially engaged, the work on view challenges preconceived ideas of place and offers an idiosyncratic look at the geographic center –and yet cultural periphery– of the United States.

Artists and artist groups: Carnal Torpor, Cody Critcheloe and SSION, Design 99, Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, Scott Hocking, Greely Myatt, the New Kinematographic Union, Marjetica Potrč, Alec Soth, Deb Sokolow, and Whoop Dee Doo, among others.

Curators: Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Kerstin Niemann, Research Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, and Stephanie Smith, Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art.

For more information, please visit the website of the Smart Museum of Art.

Last night, over a dinner with several CODA students, Charles, John Weeden, and Hamlett Dobbins, Hamlett told us about a documentary that I definitely must see, about entertainer/actor/performance artist Andy Kaufman’s wrestling career. While I was aware of his foray into professional wrestling (I’m even old enough to remember it before seeing Man on the Moon), I did not realize that Memphis played such an important role.

Kaufman came to Memphis, and went out of his way to belittle the citizens of Bluff City, as well as the entire South. It was all part of his act as the ‘bad guy’ to the local ‘good guy’, former art student, turned professional wrestler, who also happened to secretly ‘get’ Kaufman’s act: Jerry Lawler.

This gives you a taste of Kaufman’s critique.

Hopefully I haven’t made any similar faux pas (intentional or not).

If I have, Mr. Lawler and the good citizens of Memphis, please don’t hurt me.