Challenging the notion that socially or politically charged content cannot coexist with Beauty and Form, these twelve artists skillfully employ imagination, observation and humor to produce works that engage the viewer with thought and feeling. Informed by a particularly American experience and diverse cultural backgrounds, the artists (conceptually) tow a line between their local environments and a global existence. Lines between form and content do not exist or are blurred purposefully to insist on an art that both interrogates and gives pleasure.
Though message and medium varies, these artists make clear that beauty does not have to exist in a vacuum, nor in the eye of the beholder, that a work of art can be conscious of the larger world. Villalongo puts to rest hackneyed strictures that “good” art communicates as a self-contained dialogue of “formal” qualities and the idea that the purest expression of art lies inside some mysterious universal ideal. American Beauty makes clear that truth and beauty are indeed the natural order.
