CHICAGO, IL.- The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society is presenting Love Bless America, an exhibition of new works by French artist and filmmaker Pierre Bismuth, on view September 26, 2026–January 8, 2027.
The exhibition, featuring a new film project and a series of digital images created with the 250th anniversary of the United States in mind, entwines the notion of divine love with America’s enduring tradition of spiritual “folk” music, specifically gospel. The project was partly inspired by the Love/Music research initiative at the Neubauer Collegium, which is focused on the “problem” of the relationship between love and music.
Bismuth has a longstanding interest in improvised music, and for Love Bless America he invited Chicago-based contrabassist Joshua Abrams and pianist Sharon Udoh to compose a 21st century spiritual based on a lyrical prompt he wrote for the project. He also partnered with the Chicago-based creative studio Bob., founded by film directors Robert Heishman and Robert Salazar, to capture and edit footage of the musicians' creative collaboration. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a long-form meditative film, sourced from four camera angles, tracing the magic and workaday practice of “inspiration” in real time. Commingling religious musical traditions in an open-ended, multi-layered reflection on love, music and the divine, Bismuth engages with the spiritual not as a doctrinal framework but as a condition inherent in artistic practice itself – a secular “belief” of sorts.
In addition to this new film, Bismuth will present a slide show of flag-like geometric designs emblazoned with excerpts from the hymn he wrote for the project. Each design conflates easily recognizable national flags, including those from China, Greenland, Iran, Israel, and the United States – which could use a little more of love’s blessing at present.
Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.
Pierre Bismuth (b. 1963) works in collage, installation, painting, sculpture and video. His artistic practice is strongly rooted in the canonical conceptual art tradition, filtered through the paradigm of 1980s appropriation art and the improbable rebirth, in the 1990s, of conceptual art as a glamorous lifestyle option. In the adjoining world of arthouse cinema, he is well known for having co-authored the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) as well as his directorial debut, Where Is Rocky II (2016). Bismuth’s work has been the focus of recent monographic exhibitions at West Den Haag and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (both 2022), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2021), Kunstmuseum Sankt Gallen (2017), and Kunsthalle Wien (2015). He is represented by Jan Mot in Brussels and Christine König in Vienna.
Joshua Abrams (b. 1973) is a composer, bassist and improviser. His early formative musical experiences include performing in a chamber group conducted by Earle Brown and busking on the streets of Philadelphia as an original member of The Roots. He has been a key figure in Chicago’s creative music communities since moving here in the early 1990s. In 2010, Abrams founded the Natural Information Society, a group that creates long-form psychedelic environments that join the hypnotic qualities of the guembri, a Gnawan lute, to a wide range of contemporary musics and methodologies including jazz, minimalism and experimental rock.
Sharon Udoh (b. 1981) is a Nigerian American pianist, improviser and hymnologist whose initial music training was shaped in large part by her membership in the Pentecostal Church. Udoh left her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, in 2022 and relocated to Chicago, where she immersed herself in the city’s prodigious experimental music scenes. Her ongoing solo project American-African Hymnal draws from her deep relationship to hymnal literature in the United States.
