America Starts Here ─ Kate Ericson And Mel Ziegler

During their decade-long collaboration (1985-1995), Kate Ericson and Mel Zieglerproduced some of the most influential conceptual art projects of the time. Among their witty andstimulating installations and outdoor projects was Camouflaged History, a house painted in a U.S.Army-designed camouflage pattern using 72 commercial paint colors included in themunicipally-approved "authentic colors" of historic Charleston, South Carolina. The commercial nameof each paint, commemorating an aspect of the city's history, is also painted on the house,revealing and illuminating the lingering Civil War-era past of the region. Like the Earthworkpioneers, Ericson and Ziegler took the whole country as their working space; but rather than imposea conspicuous work of art upon a site or situation, they devised projects that altered sites subtly,creating a patchwork of poetic narratives and histories to be excavated. The windows rescued fromthe old National Licorice factory in Philadelphia in the title piece America Starts Here--whichtakes its name from the slogan used to promote Pennsylvania tourism during the 1980s--are hungaccording to the location of the original windows in the factory; the cracks in the glass echo thefamous cracks in two of Philadelphia's tourist attractions, the Liberty Bell and Marcel Duchamp'sThe Large Glass.Kate Ericson's death from cancer in 1995 at age 39 made the body of Ericson andZiegler's collaborative work finite. America Starts Here offers a generous selection of Ericson andZiegler's work, with much of it reproduced in color, and provides a critical analysis of theartists' still under-appreciated position in the history of twentieth-century art. It accompaniesthe first retrospective exhibition of Ericson and Ziegler's work.Copublished with The Frances YoungTang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College and List Visual Arts Center at MIT.

Bill Arning is Curator at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT.