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.