Before you enter the museum itself, you’ll be given the opportunity to vote “yes” or “no” in response to Steve Lambert’s Capitalism Works For Me! True/False (2011), an electric sign positioned at the entry.
Also outside will be Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ The Social Mirror (1983), where you’ll see yourself reflected in a 20-cubic-yard New York City Sanitation Department truck clad in hand-tempered glass mirrors made during the artist’s six-year residency in the department of sanitation. It will be on display for the month of October.
At the gallery entrance visitors have the opportunity to spin a large “wheel of fortune”—divided like a pie-chart to show the numbers of people in the lower income brackets in relation to the small sliver at the top of the heap. The wheel not only demonstrates income disparity in the United States, but symbolically determines how much of the exhibition you would be permitted to see, if access were based on your station in life.
Classless Society is organized by Skidmore College professors Janet Casey and Mehmet Odekon, Rachel Seligman, the Tang’s assistant director and John Weber, director of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. The exhibition is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Friends of the Tang.
Casey has been fascinated by the persistence of the belief that American society is functionally classless, that anyone can move up the societal rungs to achieve the American Dream.
“That’s why immigrants come here,” says Casey, “because they think there is a lot of mobility among the classes. But there is not.”
Coming on the heels of the Great Recession—after which, says Odekon, “class divisions became sharper and sharper”—the topic continued to gain relevance as faculty and curators explored issues and artworks for the show.
“Some will find it controversial—hopefully.” Weber said. “The system is not working for a lot of people and that’s very hard for a lot of Americans to think about, regardless of income.”
In addition to the exhibit which will be on display until March 9, 2014,the following events are free and open to the public:
October 16-18, at 7 and 9 p.m. - American Collisions, a performance by Skidmore theater students based on and set in the Classless Society exhibition; reservations are required, call the Bernhard Theater box Office at (518) 580-5439 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
October 19, from 5:30-8 p.m.-Fall Exhibitions Reception, celebrating Classless Society and other Tang exhibits
November 13 at noon: A curator’s tour of Classless Society.
The Tang Museum, located on the Skidmore College campus in Saratoga Springs is open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday–Sunday, with extended hours through 9 p.m. on Thursdays. For more information call (518) 580-8080 or visit www.skidmore.edu/tang.
