Kathryn Andrews (American, b. 1973) examines how image producers—such as artists, corporations, Hollywood studios, and politicians who mirror and shape social values at large—employ visual cues and material packaging to elicit desire. In doing so, she often calls attention to our power, or lack of power, to resist such forces and the complicated act of looking itself. Her sculptures, installations, and performances sample the aesthetics of pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism as readymades, and reinscribes them into new narratives about gender, class, and race.

Kathryn Andrews: Run for President, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, features the sculptures that have made her one of the crucial new voices of her generation. For this exhibition, Andrews situates her sculptures against a conceptual and, at times, pictorial backdrop of presidential elections that functions as a rich allegory. The linear narrative explores candidates, campaigns, sitting in office, and the end of presidency, charting the rise and fall of the president—a metaphorical double for the figure of the artist as well as the viewer. Revealing cultural connections that are both humorous and critical, while questioning the consequences of seeing anything as fixed, Andrews demonstrates how meanings are always contingent and in flux.

This exhibition is organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, former Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. It is is presented in the Bergman Family Gallery on the museum’s second floor.