The first thing visitors meet in “About America: Liberty, Legacy, and Loyalty at 250” is George Washington, wiped almost blank.
“What It Is, What It Has Been (George Washington)” sits alone on a floating wall at the entrance to the Norman Shannon and Emmy Lou P. Illges Gallery at Columbus State University. Its creator, Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo, began the piece with a 3D print modeled on Jean-Antoine Houdon’s 1786 portrait of Washington. Leyva Novo then covered his bust with 200 layers of white acrylic paint. A stop-motion video set into the pedestal shows each coat going on, until the founding father’s face is gone.
Curator Cynthia Nourse Thompson, a professor of art at Kennesaw State University’s Robert S. Geer Family College of the Arts, put it there on purpose.
“I felt that this work provided a strong foundation and starting point for critiquing the construction of American history, national iconography, and structures of power,” Thompson explained.
That sets the tone for “About America,” which opened Oct. 6 and runs through Nov. 28 in Columbus, Georgia. Thompson describes it as “one of the few, if not the only, exhibitions responding to the semiquincentennial,” the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Thompson began thinking about that milestone in 2021. Two years later, “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility” at the Guggenheim in New York sharpened the idea. Thompson was particularly drawn to John Edmonds’ photo series, “Hoods, ” which featured images of people in hoodies, turned away from the camera. That experience reaffirmed her desire to show “works that might often seem simplistic visually but are not conceptually.”
The result gathers 18 artists, from Ansel Adams and Jasper Johns to Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker and Sheila Pree Bright. Together, the pieces pose questions such as: Who is an American and who decides who and what is American? Much of the room is black, white and gray, “a restrained color palette,” as Thompson’s catalog essay terms it.
Experiencing ‘About America’
Stephanie Syjuco’s “I Am An…” is a cotton curtain 9 feet tall and 24 feet wide, hung on a ceiling track near a corner and angled out from the walls so people can walk around it. Thompson left it partly drawn, so the word that finishes the sentence, “American,” is partly hidden. Behind and around it hang works chosen to be in conversation with “I Am An…”, including Robert Longo’s “Study of SCOTUS/Split,” a charcoal-and-ink drawing of the Supreme Court cut down the middle. Longo’s drawings sit behind glass, allowing visitors to catch their own reflections in the work.
Nearby, Hank Willis Thomas’ “Abstract Pledge II” looks at first like an abstract painting with a sliver of flag in one corner. But it holds a hidden image, revealed only with a camera flash: a multiethnic group of boys pledging to the flag. “Viewers have been intrigued by this work, and its process of revealing the imagery themselves …,” Thompson said
Fred Wilson’s “Melt / Spurt” spreads across about 15 feet of the gallery floor: a pale pool of layered glass with a single black teardrop resting near one end. “I feel viewers automatically associate grief or sorrow with this form,” Thompson explained, “and therefore experience the work through a somber lens.”
Read More:
• ‘Reel Portraits’ from Michael Kalish heads to Atlanta Art Fair
• ‘The Art of Paper’ exhibition opens at Kennesaw State University
Bethany Collins’ “America: A Hymnal” is a book of 100 songs set to the tune of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” each with different lyrics written from the 1700s to the 1900s in support of causes such as abolition, temperance — even secession. Collins used a laser to burn away the songs’ common musical notes, so only their differences remain.
Thompson ends the show with Victoria Dugger’s “Freak Flag I,” made of gouache, barbed wire and glitter, hung beside “Love (It Is All Over My Face),” a print with glazing and hand-cut rice paper by Choctaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson. Thompson placed Dugger’s piece there as “the culmination of the exhibition’s narrative,” ending “on a celebratory note.”
Her report from the room: “I have seen viewers smile.”
Make a day of it
Most visitors can see the show in under an hour. The Illges Gallery is free and open Tuesday through Saturday in the Corn Center for the Visual Arts. Thompson is planning several curatorial talks in the gallery. Dates will be posted on the gallery’s website.
Round out your visit to Columbus by going upstairs to the Bo Bartlett Center gallery space where “Southbound: A Survey of New and Previous Works by Y. Malik Jalal” and “The Bennett Prize: Rising Voices 4” are on view. Thompson also suggested visitors check out the Do Good Fund, which lent several works to “About America,” and the Columbus Museum, where 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow Coulter Fussell, who grew up in Columbus, has a solo show, “Proving Ground.”
“About America” is on view at Columbus State University through Nov. 28.
