At the Guggenheim, Taryn Simon Mounts a Rare America 250th Anniversary Show Worth Celebrating
ARTnews reviews Taryn Simon’s Guggenheim Museum exhibition Father Country I Do Love You as a major project created for the United States’ 250th anniversary, filling the New York museum’s rotunda with work about surveillance, violence, deception, and foreign intervention. Opening to the public on Friday, the show is presented as a single new body of work: a 42-part installation built from more than 1,000 photographs and extensive text. Simon began the project in 2017 after finding an agent’s name in 1990s FBI files, then interviewed the agent repeatedly over nearly a decade while keeping his identity concealed; the exhibition was conceived by Nancy Spector and realized by Nat Trotman. The installation traces the agent’s life from a birth in Exeter, New Hampshire, and links his activities to U.S. operations in countries including China and Saudi Arabia, while also drawing in disparate figures and entities such as a Beverly Hills beauty business run by a January 6 insurrectionist and witnesses to the 1998 Nairobi bombing.
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This story was covered in Museums Under Pressure, Markets Keep Climbing