I Have Seen the Future: Official Guide

Twenty-five years apart, in the very heart of the American Century, two World’s Fairs were held in Flushing Meadows. On the precipice of World War and at the height of the Cold War, the world came to New York City, and New York City showed itself to the world. The World’s Fairs are a testament to a time and a place when America looked both within and without, from a city that dares to call itself the Capital of the World. Through a sensibility that emphasizes intersectionality, interconnectedness, and correlation, “I Have Seen the Future: Official Guide” takes the opportunity to look back at how visions of utopia and America’s place in the world—especially from men like Robert Moses and Robert McNamara—have defined our reality in the 21st century.

The book is a companion piece to a show of the same name at Field Projects and later expanded upon at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center (both NYC). Named for the slogan on pins that were available at General Motors’ “Futurama” in both 1939 and 1964, “I Have Seen the Future” is a multifaceted, immersive exhibit of components meant to evoke the experience of visiting the World’s Fair—with the hindsight of 2022. The book expands upon the themes tackled in the show through text and subverted advertisements. It emphasizes a worldview that hinges on interdependency—a concept all too foreign to the country that gave the world the cowboy, the pioneer, the action hero. With an eye on continuity, the book asks how the Space Race was not just a proxy for the Cold War, but for WWII, and a conflict that arguably is ongoing; it examines utopia as a violence that enforces segregation in myriad ways that define wealth and income distribution in America; it looks at how state surveillance harassed and even assassinated civil rights leaders to protect social order.

Peruse the pavilions of the tomorrow that was yesterday, and take a moment to read a word form its (many) sponsors. Through “I Have Seen the Future: Official Guide, we invite you to behold the future we were told to hope for.

White Flight!

The suburbs are a violent place—just not for the decent folks who live in them.

Across the land, the postwar American family migrated to a new and verdant frontier: the suburb. Join us and explore this outpost! Experience the postwar planned community in all its monolithic splendor!

White Flight! is an imaginary model community’s monthly home improvement magazine that considers who gets to populate the American dream and why. It was created to accompany the “White Flight Model Home” installation as part of my solo show I Have Seen the Future: The American Dream at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center.

White Flight!, takes a journey deep into the dark heart of the exhibition’s “American Home Pavilion” picking up where the I Have Seen the Future: Official Guide (see below) left off. It asks who was allowed into suburbia—and what mechanisms of exclusion kept others out. Through excerpted critical essays, appropriated imagery and subverted advertisements of the era, it demonstrates how suburban fences were not so much made of white pickets as they were zoning, redlining, discriminatory banking practices, and an idea of normative culture that actively excluded anyone of color.

Banana Republican Recipe Book

“Banana Republican Recipe Book” is part of a larger exhibition: “Above the Fruited Plain (America! America!)”, that conceptually centers on the violent legacy of American intervention—corporate and military—in Central America and the Caribbean.

“Banana Republican Recipe Book” subverts the format of a 1970’s Chiquita Banana recipe book to detail the violence history of US intervention in Central America and the Caribbean and comes with a fold-out poster version of a work on paper featured in the larger exhibition: “The Chemical Composition Of a Coup”. We lit upon the medium of a recipe book to convey our curatorial content because United Fruit released these books regularly from the 1940s to the 1970s. Light romps packed with nutritional information and cultural appropriation, they were part of a larger corporate propaganda campaign that enlisted doctors to tell patients to feed their children bananas and found its way into home economic classrooms across the country for decades. As Americans, we literally consumed that propaganda and, in the process, bought into a larger narrative about America as a good actor and benevolent, all-knowing protector during the Cold War. 

This narrative is as toxic as the numerous pesticides used to protect the Cavendish banana monoculture. The notion of monoculture itself is shortsighted, weak, and doomed to fail, taking down so many lives, ecosystems, and communities with it. While we hope you enjoy this book and maybe even find a little levity in the absurdities of late-stage empire, as hostesses in this space, we also hope you can consider what a banana could cost—versus what it should. And, next time something seems a little too cheap to be true, please take a closer look, and a longer view.  

Domestic Terrorism: War Rugs from America

“Domestic Terrorism” is an artist book that grew out of my solo show of the same name, at Elijah Wheat Showroom in 2020. The show is comprised of a series of machine-tufted rugs that use the material and visual narrative strategies found in Afghan war rugs to depict state-sanctioned violence in America. Our book expands upon the motifs that the rugs explore (e.g., police brutality, the inept handling of the pandemic, immigration detention, gun violence, income inequality, environmental degradation) all in the cheery, exuberant format of a 70s-style Sears catalogue.

We lighted upon the artistic medium of a Sears catalogue to portray American decline as what it unavoidably is: a consumer experience. “Domestic Terrorism” is a catalogue meant to advertise and enshrine the violence portrayed on the rugs—violence that, over the course of the pandemic invaded every facet of American life and even breached the Capitol itsef. As the format of a catalogue demands, this artist book is chock full of objects that can be purchased in America right now—anything from Confederate flag belly button rings to a Blue Lives Matter Christmas ornament. Collages of such objects are paired with thematically resonant text.

In 2020, the violence of American Exceptionalism became domestic on many levels: literal, intimate, national, and—like a rug that really ties the room together—centered in our homes and hearths. 

Manifest Destiny, as it turns out, was an ad campaign; “Domestic Terrorism” lets you bring a little slice of it home to your very own coffee table!