ITHACA, NY.- The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University presents iCON: Consuming the American Image, on view from March 19 to June 12, 2011.

This exhibition, curated by the Cornell History of Art Majors’ Society, explores how the the status of an icon is suspended between an object of cultural consumption and a subject of social destabilization. “An icon’s meaning is never predetermined, but is devised by the values of the culture in which it operates,” said Kristen Ross ’11, one of the student curators and the group’s president. “An icon is symbolic of not one, but many meanings, whose often contradictory natures serve to broaden its cultural value.”

The works exhibited in iCON: Consuming the American Image seek to expose the multiple and often contradictory meanings of the visual signs that inform and shape our individual and collective identities. In presenting works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Lauren Greenfield, Emma Amos, and others alongside one another, iCON aims to reveal how artists and museums create, distinguish, and define the icon in art—their conscious formation and display of icons endows these authorities with symbolic status, creating a collective representation of national imagery.

The History of Art Majors’ Society is made up of fifteen Cornell undergraduates, who have been working on curating the exhibition since August 2010.

The student curators will lead a free tour of the exhibition as part of the Museum’s Art for Lunch series on Thursday, March 31 at 12:00 noon.

Artist Audrey Flack, whose lithograph Macarena appears in the exhibition, will give a free lecture on Thursday, April 7 at 5:15 p.m.