Heidi Whitman

Wayfinding at the Addison Gallery of American Art

Wayfinding: Contemporary Artists, Critical Dialogues, and the Sidney R. Knafel Map Collection at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA 2020-2021

“Heidi Whitman’s ‘New World’ seethes, all but alive on the walls…. There’s no work in the show more visceral than Whitman’s, an explosive bout of reckoning that envelops and engulfs.”

Murray Whyte, Boston Globe, January 18, 2021

“While most maps claim to be accurate and objective, they are colored by the agendas and assumptions of their creators and users. With this project, Heidi Whitman, whose drawings, paper constructions, and paintings often deal with mapping interior states of mind rather than the exterior world, considers the hidden motives of cartography. Reflecting the human desire to chart the unknown, contain chaos, control nature, and better understand the world, the Knafel maps also tell a more specific story of European conquest and empire building. Exposing ugly and unpleasant truths that are often masked in jewellike colors, decorative patterning, and fanciful marginalia, Whitman’s New World is a three-part narrative that imagines the fear, greed, and violence that lie behind the ‘discovery’ of the New World.

“Conjuring the terror and anxiety that European mariners and, to a far greater and more horrific extent, enslaved peoples must have felt navigating unknown waters and the uncertainty of fate, the journey begins with a transatlantic crossing, the tumultuous ocean rendered in pieced canvas covered in a maelstrom of agitated lines. Knotted ropes suspended from the ceiling and extending out into the gallery obscure the view, adding to the sense of menace, while strips of coiled plastic hovering above suggest howling winds or twisting currents. Part two, a pyramidal accumulation of densely layered bits of canvas, paper, gauze, cheesecloth, foil, Styrofoam, and netting, takes on the conquest of the Americas. Oozing glittering gold, oily black, and blood red, this monstrous, murderous, gluttonous mound, gorged with plunder and human victims, seems to be on the verge of collapse. Connecting past to present, the third and final wall presents modern America out of balance and spiraling out of control. Hunks of coal, nuggets of gold, city grids, and urban skylines spew from this spinning ball of confusion alongside flocks of birds attempting to fly free of the polluting toxicity of avarice, waste, and corruption.”

© 2020 Addison Gallery of American Art

Addison Gallery Curatorial Video Walk-Through with Artists’ Statements