A painted installation for the Whitney Museum’s exhibition space
in the lobby of Philip Morris (renamed Altria during the course of the
exhibition). The viewer steps through a gold frame bearing the Whitney
logo into a painting of the museum’s collection as represented in
its 2001 catalog “American Visionaries.” The room consists
of twenty 4ft x 10ft plywood panels onto which all the images in the catalog
were painted freehand in oils. The copies are twice the size of the catalog
images. They are arranged alphabetically as in the catalog and are numbered
to correspond to the battered reconstituted catalog which is displayed
on the bench in the center of the room. The seven most recent purchases
of the museum since the publication of the catalog were displayed behind
the walls and were visible through small shadowboxed openings in the walls.
The recent acquisitions were of works by Hirsch Perlman, Luis Gispert,
Paul Pfeiffer, Paul McCarthy, Robert Lazzarini, Jim Shaw and Jim Campbell.
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