Curated by Charles Esche, Kerstin Niemann, and Stephanie Smith
Timed to coincide with the next US presidential election—and aiming to provide an antidote to the media’s narrow focus on the candidates rather than on the culture that produced them—“Heartland” presents an array of visual culture concerned with fourteen states “roughly in the middle of the country,” mostly along the Mississippi River. Accompanied by an extensive music program at the Muziekcentrum Eindhoven, the exhibition features approximately thirty works of extant and commissioned art either from or about the region and promises to invalidate patronizing cultural clichés that, as the organizers put it in a paean to anti-elitism even Bush would love, “emanate mostly from the big urban centers of New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.”
