"Americana...engaged critically with notions of what American culture is and how curatorial practices have supported a monolithic notion of American art. Group Material decided to make a model of our own biennial, a salon des refuses, of what was significantly absent, excluded through curatorial business-as-usual from the Whitney Museum. . ."
"Americana took issue with the exclusivity and white-washed picture of American art proposed and supported by dominant cultural institutions such as the Whitney, and in a non-didactic manner opened curatorial practice to scrutiny. Americana included work by overtly socially engaged artists many of whom were women and artists of color, and popular "commercial artists" as well as store-bought objects from so-called low culture. One goal was to schematize some problematic relations with the art industry. Another was to link choices people might make when shopping with the decisions curators make when shopping on a grander scale for the museum's collection. The boundaries between "high" and "low" culture were symbolically dislodged in Americana. The exhibition aimed to be a catalyst for thinking about the function of cultural representation and icons and hierarchies of cultural production."
from: http://www.thephotographyinstitute.org/www/journals/1998/community_as_context.html
Posted by delpesco at July 23, 2004 03:58 PM