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CCA Wattis Institute Presents *Americana: 50 States, 50 Months, 50 Exhibitions*

Posted on Wednesday, August 22, 2007, by Brenda Tucker

The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents Americana: 50 States, 50 Months, 50 Exhibitions, a long-term presentation consisting of 50 displays, each approximately one month long, coorganized by Wattis Institute director Jens Hoffmann and CCA's Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice.

Each month's display will examine one of the 50 American states, in alphabetical order by state name. Americana will be on view from September 5, 2007, to May 31, 2012, in the Mary Augustine Gallery on the San Francisco campus of California College of the Arts. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Americana will focus on overlooked and little-known aspects of each state through artworks, historical artifacts, curiosities, and other elements. All presentations will take place in the same exhibition space, which is configured in the shape of the continental United States. "The aim is to distance oneself from any idealization of what the country is and to treat it as a complex web of coexistences, contradictions, and conflicts," says Hoffmann.

Americana examines the states as they are today, looking at how America's social and political imperatives condition the production, presentation, and interpretation of art and exhibition making. The brisk pace of the 50 displays reflects the varied and constantly changing fabric of this relatively young country and its multilayered, shifting national identity.

The title is a reference to an exhibition of the same name that was curated by the artist collaborative Group Material at the 1985 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Group Material also focused on art and elements of mass culture that they understood as overlooked, forgotten, and outside the mainstream in order to investigate critically how museums and exhibitions assist in the formation of American identity.

Founding support for CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts programs has been provided by Phyllis C. Wattis and Judy and Bill Timken. Generous support provided by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Ann Hatch and Paul Discoe, and the CCA Curator's Forum.

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