I Have Seen the Future: Official Guide

Twenty-five years apart, in the very heart of the American Century, two World’s Fairs were held in Flushing Meadows. On the precipice of World War and at the height of the Cold War, the world came to New York City, and New York City showed itself to the world. The World’s Fairs are a testament to a time and a place when America looked both within and without, from a city that dares to call itself the Capital of the World. Through a sensibility that emphasizes intersectionality, interconnectedness, and correlation, “I Have Seen the Future: Official Guide” takes the opportunity to look back at how visions of utopia and America’s place in the world—especially from men like Robert Moses and Robert McNamara—have defined our reality in the 21st century.

The book is a companion piece to a show of the same name at Field Projects in Chelsea. Named for the slogan on pins that were available at General Motors’ “Futurama” in both 1939 and 1964, “I Have Seen the Future” is a multifaceted, immersive exhibit of components meant to evoke the experience of visiting the World’s Fair—with the hindsight of 2022. “I Have Seen the Future: Official Guide”, is a collaboration between visual artist Johannah Herr and writer Cara Marsh Sheffler. The book expands upon the themes tackled in the show through text and subverted advertisements. It emphasizes a worldview that hinges on interdependency—a concept all too foreign to the country that gave the world the cowboy, the pioneer, the action hero. With an eye on continuity, the book asks how the Space Race was not just a proxy for the Cold War, but for WWII, and a conflict that arguably is ongoing; it examines utopia as a violence that enforces segregation in myriad ways that define wealth and income distribution in America; it looks at how state surveillance harassed and even assassinated civil rights leaders to protect social order.

Peruse the pavilions of the tomorrow that was yesterday, and take a moment to read a word form its (many) sponsors. Through “I Have Seen the Future: Official Guide, we invite you to behold the future we were told to hope for.

Banana Republican Recipe Book

“Banana Republican Recipe Book” is a collaboration with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler and a corollary to the 2020 catalogue, “Domestic Terrorism: War Rugs From America.” In that catalogue, we aimed to portray American decline as what it invariably is: a consumer experience. As a continuation of the War Rugs from America series, I created “War Rug X (Banana Republics/US Intervention in Latin America)” as part of a larger exhibition of works conceptually centered on the violent legacy of American intervention—corporate and military—in Central America and the Caribbean. This work was featured in a solo exhibition “Above the Fruited Plain (America! America!)” at the New Art Dealers Alliance on Governors Island in summer 2021 with the support of Geary Contemporary Gallery. The rug was paired with a work on paper, “The Chemical Composition Of a Coup”; a subversive tropical wallpaper; and the book “Banana Republican Recipe Book.”

“Banana Republican Recipe Book” subverts the format of a 1970’s Chiquita Banana recipe book to detail the violence history of US intervention in Central America and the Caribbean and comes with a fold-out poster version of “The Chemical Composition Of a Coup”. We lit upon the medium of a recipe book to convey our curatorial content because United Fruit released these books regularly from the 1940s to the 1970s. Light romps packed with nutritional information and cultural appropriation, they were part of a larger corporate propaganda campaign that enlisted doctors to tell patients to feed their children bananas and found its way into home economic classrooms across the country for decades. As Americans, we literally consumed that propaganda and, in the process, bought into a larger narrative about America as a good actor and benevolent, all-knowing protector during the Cold War. 

This narrative is as toxic as the numerous pesticides used to protect the Cavendish banana monoculture. The notion of monoculture itself is shortsighted, weak, and doomed to fail, taking down so many lives, ecosystems, and communities with it. While we hope you enjoy this book and maybe even find a little levity in the absurdities of late-stage empire, as hostesses in this space, we also hope you can consider what a banana could cost—versus what it should. And, next time something seems a little too cheap to be true, please take a closer look, and a longer view.  

Domestic Terrorism: War Rugs from America - 2020 Supersaver Doorbusters Catalog!

In 2020, the violence of American Exceptionalism became domestic on many levels: literal, intimate, national, and—like a rug that really ties the room together—centered in our homes and hearths.

Manifest Destiny, as it turns out, was an ad campaign; “Domestic Terrorism” lets you bring a little slice of it home to your very own coffee table!