Description:
Throughout the vast interior of the United States, contemporary artists are responding to the world around them and reshaping it in unexpected ways. Published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name that first appeared last year in the Netherlands and will open in fall 2009 at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, Heartland offers an idiosyncratic look at innovative forms of cultural production taking place across the region.
This engaging book is part critical reader, part catalogue. Contributors--including novelist Dave Eggers, scholar Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and journalist Rebecca Solnit--explore the region through topics ranging from art to music to urban farming to political history. An illustrated section introduces over twenty artists featured in Heartland, including both established figures like Kerry James Marshall and exuberant newcomers like the group Whoop Dee Doo. An appendix surveys the lively state of independent and artist-run cultural initiatives from New Orleans to Detroit.
Produced by the Van Abbemuseum and the Smart Museum of Art, Heartland challenges expectations of place and illuminates a diverse assembly of artists who are redefining the cultural terrain of the American heartland.
Brief description: Stephanie Smith is deputy director and chief curator at the Smart Museum of Art, an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago, and a founding member of its Open Practice Committee. She is an editor of Afterall Journal, to which she is also a regular contributor. She is the author of Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art and Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art.
Review Quotes: "[The catalog] is as rich and expansive as a Midwestern breakfast buffet. Profiles of almost 30 artists and collectives . . . accompany essays about the region by Dave Eggers, Rebecca Solnit and other writers and historians."-- "TimeOut Chicago"