Exhibition Artists and Work

We the People will create a diorama of the American populace using strategically chosen examples of figurative painting, sculpture, and photography. Works from American artists of older generations―including Romare Bearden, George Segal, Margaret Bourke-White, Alice Neel, Duane Hanson, Alex Katz, and Robert Rauschenberg—will be installed in cacophonous dialogue with works by a younger generation of artists—Tina Barney, Fred Wilson, Elizabeth Peyton, Barkley L. Hendricks, Shirin Neshat, Nicole Eisenman, and Danny McDonald. This exhibition includes new works made for the show by artists Nate Lowman, Julio Cesar Morales, Richard Phillips and Swoon.

Each artwork has been chosen to suggest a sociological typology, an electoral demographic, or an actual person that makes up our famous American melting pot. Taking inspiration from the crowded, riotous album cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, artworks will be installed in a shoulder-to-shoulder exchange. This hypothetical portrait of America not only provides numerous possible commentaries on the issue of identity, but also questions the very nature of political art itself, as artists and artworks will be included that are not traditionally associated with political discourse.

We the People TV

Politicians and American television networks collect and utilize demographic information in a similar way. Mainstream media and national candidates use their demographic assessments of the American populace as a means to tailor their messages, woo certain groups, and project idealized representations or subjects. In both spheres, viewers and voters are imaginary populations. But even as a demographically engineered construction, these viewer-voters have power if TV ratings and votes are now equal in American identity politics.