News and Highlights

Freedom of Information Recent works on paper by James Wechsler
December 15, 2006 through March
16, 2007
Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library
Victor Building
Room 2100
750 9th St., NW
Washington, DC
More information

As an artist and art historian I rely a great deal on archival material. The works in this series developed out of my research on modernism and the international Left during my postdoctoral fellowship at SAAM in 2005-2006.

Each piece is based on an actual document from the FBI's Cold War era files on artists, performers, writers, civil rights activists, and the politically radical organizations they were affiliated with. Since their sources were so heavily redacted, the resulting works confound the conventional notions of portraiture - concealing rather than revealing identity - and history painting - frustrating instead of furthering our attempts to interpret the past.

Beyond their explicit commentary on censorship and the culture of surveillance, by concentrating on what has been blocked from view, the paintings evoke deeper psychological and existential questions about perception, collective memory, and the construction of meaning from fragmentary, self-negating, and otherwise indecipherable information.

Image above right:
James Wechsler
Freedom of Information: Alice Neel, 2.45, 2006
Acrylic and ink on paper
39" x 28 ½