NEW YORK, NY.- The National Academy of Design is presenting Whose America?, an exhibition that examines the United States’ relationship to the history of ‘America’ in all of its pluralities. Drawing upon its varied and eclectic roster of National Academicians, those with vastly different experiences of diaspora from throughout the Americas, Whose America? deconstructs the many regional, political and social influences that have shaped the United States’ cultural landscape today. As the inaugural exhibition of the National Academy’s year-long bicentennial celebration, Whose America? draws on the Academy’s history as one of the founding arts institutions in the United States and reflects the institution's commitment to looking critically at its own past.

Organized around a series of fundamental yet seldom asked questions— who is America?, who does it belong to? and who writes its history? — the exhibition brings together a wide and multidisciplinary range of works that mount a collective challenge to the idea that ‘America’ has ever truly been synonymous with the United States. In place of such a totalizing perspective, Whose America? draws upon the pluralistic wellspring of experience by artists hailing from countries throughout North America, Central and South America and the Caribbean, all of which are underpinned by Indigenous people’s historic ties to the land that precede the founding of this country. The exhibition features work by dozens of artists from countries including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Among the many themes and ideas that the exhibition addresses, chief among them is the history of the term ‘America’ being used to simplify and reduce a vast part of the world into a single, nationalistic sentiment. Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America (1987) draws attention to this complicated legacy of ‘America’ being used to refer only to the United States, which claims the identity of the entire American continent as its own. In the original video work that this photograph references— originally commissioned by the Public Art Fund and made for an electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square — Jaar presents different versions of the United States’ flag and its map while each time challenging the implied and commonplace assumption of equivalence between the two. Related to Jaar’s effort to complicate or dislodge cartographic representations of United States as being one and the same as ‘America,’ Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Unhinged (Map) (2018) upends and entirely repositions the United States map amidst the Caribbean and Central America. In place of its typical geographic prominence, Quick-to-See Smith has rendered it as being in motion and without stability.

Exploring the history of ‘America’ as being inseparable from that of empire and colonialism is at the heart of several works in Whose America?. In Nari Ward’s Empire (2023), a decorative glass cabinet painted with black ink is filled with spheres of various sizes coated in the same ink and covered in a white, barnacle-like material. The huddled cluster of warped globes sit behind the glass of the cabinet, itself a nod to the history of ‘cabinets of curiosities,’ a historical museum practice that placed foreign objects in vitrines, preserving and categorizing them as ‘exotic’ or ‘primitive.’ Here, Ward directly references the legacies and histories of slave labor in the U.S., and its ensuing impact on global trade and preservation.

The question of self-representation — or who decides how a people and a place should be portrayed — is considered in Rafael Ferrer’s Empire's Mirror (2012). Consisting of nearly 100 slate blackboards arranged across five wooden shelves, the work expresses a kaleidoscopic vision of Puerto Rican history and identity, from the regionally specific to the nationally oriented. Reflecting on the unique relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, with the former still existing as a colony, Ferrer attempts to retake control over how his native country can be seen today.

Just as the historical idea of ‘America’ is critiqued, so too is the destructive and extractive relationship to the land itself that is implied by said usage revisited and reimagined in Whose America?. Kay WalkingStick’s Salmon River Valley and the Sawtooth Range (2023) presents a vision of the landscape untouched by colonial conquest and instead imprinted with a pattern derived from the Indigenous peoples who have stewarded the depicted lands. In Requiem for a Border Crossing #1 (2016-2020) Guadalupe Maravilla reimagines the fraught space of borders and the often dangerous act of crossing them as being defined by ancestral meaning rather than contemporary tragedy. Though each are singular works, they express one of the enduring insights running throughout Whose America?, namely that by confronting history and its legacies, the future can remain open to justice and equity.

Whose America? features work by National Academicians including Dawoud Bey, J. Yolande Daniels, Teresita Fernández, Rafel Ferrer, Charles Gaines, Carmen Herrera, Alfredo Jaar, Roberto Juarez, Joyce Kozloff, Glenn Ligon, Maya Lin, Faith Ringgold, Shahzia Sikander, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), Kay WalkingStick (Citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and Anglo) and Nari Ward. In dialogue with these Academy members are works by Alexandra Bell, Lizania Cruz, Myriam Dion, Anna Bella Geiger, An-My Lê, Coral Saucedo Lomelí, Guadalupe Maravilla, Sandra Monterroso, Asicaz Monzón, Nadia Myre (Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation), Claudia Peña Salinas, Ronny Quevedo, Edra Soto, Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, Nico Williams (Anishinaabe), Martin Wong and Horacio Zabala.

Whose America? is curated by Natalia Viera Salgado, Associate Curator and Gee Wesley, Guest Curator.