American Tableaux

June 20 - September 7, 2003 Miami Art Museum Miami, Florida
October 10, 2003 - January 4, 2004 Delaware Art Museum Wilmington, Delaware
February 8 - April 25, 2004 University of Iowa Museum of Art Iowa City, Iowa
September 8 - December 5, 2004 Winnipeg Art Gallery Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
January 13 - March 27, 2005 Plains Art Museum Fargo, North Dakota

American Tableaux explores the rich narrative tradition in American art through a presentation of more than 80 paintings, sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs from the Walker's permanent collection, including works from the early 20th century to the present. The exhibition celebrates the variety of stories told by individual voices, communities, and cultures within our borders and examines the malleability of the term "American" and the myth of a single, coherent American society. A common thread runs between the parallel traditions of art and literature and the strategies employed by artists and writers to tell their stories. The short story, editorial, and diary are comparable literary vehicles of expression also open to artists in the construction of visual narratives.

The exhibition is organized into several groups of works, each a collection of short takes on an aspect of the American experience. George Segal's melancholy environmental sculpture The Diner (1964-1966) and Edward Ruscha's 23-foot-long accordion-fold photo book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) anchor a grouping that explores roadside and street-level realities. Kara Walker's antebellum silhouette figures The Means to an End . . . A Shadow Drama in Five Acts (1995) and Robert Rauschenberg's screenprints created from collages of newspaper clippings, Currents (1970), investigate some of the political and social issues that animate our daily experience. . . .

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