How Do You Define American?
What does it mean to be American? An Exploration of Identity in Art
Artists use symbols like the American flag and depictions of the United States to explore what it means to be ‘American’.
How do you define American?
Is it a set of ideals? Are your actions what make you an American? These artists explore the meaning behind building an American Identity.
Glenn Ligon
“Runaways is broadly about how an individual’s identity is inextricable from the way one is positioned in the culture, from the ways people see you, from historical and political contexts.” — Glenn Ligon (from MoMaLearning Runaways)
Born in the Bronx, New York in 1960 Glenn Ligon explores race, language, desire, sexuality and identity through his work. Double America 2 is a metaphor based on the symbolism of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. It highlights the division that marks modern America. With its flickering lights juxtaposing two sides, the work speaks to inequality and separation.
Synecdoche (For Byron Kim) states Nov 3, 2020, election day, a pivotal moment for voters to define what America stands for.
Nam June Paik
Considered the ‘father of video art’ Nam June Paik was a Korean American artists reimagining symbols through the use of monitors. In his Video Flag the screens switch between a series of images showing starts and stripes, media clips and presidents. Itself a symbol of America, the televisions make us look closely at how the media depicts, and how we define being American.
Nam also used the map of the states to pose a similar observation with his Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii.
Barbara Kruger
“It’s creating commentary about living another day. How the world could be and isn’t.” — Barbara Kruger
Born in New Jersey in 1945, Barbara Kruger deals with politics, gender equity, mass media and advertising in her works. Her photographic prints and use of typography blend and contrast symbols with questions of what the world could be, while poignantly highlighting what it is not.
“It’s tragic and sad that there is still resonance on these issues.”
Alfredo Jaar
“Language is not innocent, language is always a reflection of the geopolitical reality.” — Alfredo Jaar
Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar arrived in New York City to find that the United States was commonly referred to in every day language as ‘America’. His work A Logo for America, first appearing in Times Square in 1987 questions this understanding by stating ‘This is not America’ over an outline of the United States. The word AMERICA then appears and the R transforms into the American continents stirring questions about American nationalism and its symbols.
“It started as a very modest gesture trying to correct a language, but now the meaning of what America is, is at stake.”
Still relevant today, A Logo for America was remounted in Piccadilly Circus in 2014 as controversial policies and moves to build a wall at the southern border of the United States brought again questions of how we define nationhood.
David Hammons
“Outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol.” — David Hammons
Born in Illinois in 1943, David Hammons used symbols like the American flag to question the history that these symbols represent. In 1990, he created African-American Flag combining the colors of the Pan-African flag (adopted by the group Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)) with the US flag, giving the symbol a new connotation.
Marilyn Artus
“Jim Crow Laws in the South impeded many African Americans from voting until the 1960s and Native Americans did not have full voting rights in all 50 states until 1970. Asian-American women could not vote until 1952.”
Marilyn Artus undertook a cross-country project to create her depiction of the US flag celebrating 100 years since the 19th Amendment was ratified guaranteeing women the right to vote. Her work centres on an exploration of the female experience as an American. She notes that even after the Amendment it has still been a challenge for women and people of colour to vote in the United States.
So what does it mean to be American? Who gets to claim this identity? What does it look like?
