Enfilade

Next fall at the VMFA:

Making America: Myth, Memory, and Identity
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 12 September 2015 — 3 January 2016
Other venues to be announced

Making America will be the first full-scale multimedia investigation of America’s most enduring cultural phenomenon—the Colonial Revival. Featuring approximately 200 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts, architectural and landscape designs, costumes, and popular culture ephemera—dating from the late 18th century to the present day—VMFA’s landmark exhibition expands the chronological and geographic boundaries of the regionally diverse, multicultural revival. More than just a style or movement, this ongoing hybrid impulse draws from the historical past to understand the present through the creative use of iconic forms and motifs. Making America will explore how and why this desire to revisit—and reinterpret—the past has shaped America’s visual landscapes, ideologies, and collective memories in times of celebration and crisis.

Making America, which will travel nationally, is organized by the curatorial team of University of Virginia Commonwealth Professor Dr. Richard Guy Wilson; Dr. Sylvia Yount, VMFA Chief Curator and Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art; and her museum colleagues Dr. Susan J. Rawles, Assistant Curator of American Decorative Art, and Christopher Oliver, Assistant Curator of American Art, all of whom will contribute to the accompanying scholarly catalogue.