BACHMAN GALLERY
1040 RIDGE ROAD, MUNSTER, IN

My America - South Shore Arts 83rd Annual Salon Show

June 19 - August 15, 2025

Evening of Artist Micro Talks: Thursday July 16, 7-8pm

Awards Presentation: Sunday, August 2, 1-3pm

With My America, South Shore Arts inaugurates its first themed Salon Show by inviting artists to articulate what, after 250 years of experimentation, successes, tragedies, and upheaval, America means to them.

The possessive in the exhibition's title is significant. It acknowledges that identity is situated, that belonging can be fraught, and that citizenship is as much felt as it is codified. To define My America one must reveal something of oneself: one's inheritances, allegiances, disappointments, and hopes. In this sense, the exhibition becomes less a survey of national sentiment than a portrait of plural selves.

 This juried exhibition brings together more than sixty works spanning a wide range of media, reflecting the diversity of artistic voices that make up our contemporary cultural landscape. Selected by jurors Elsa Munoz and William Blake, the exhibition embraces the salon tradition of multiplicity and dialogue, presenting artworks that engage its theme from vastly different perspectives. Some artists offer sweeping political statements that confront the nation's past, present, and future, while others turn inward, creating intimate vignettes of family, community, memory, and everyday life. Together, these works reveal that there is no singular vision of America, only a constellation of experiences, a democratic sprawl. The exhibition suggests that a nation, like a work of art, is never singular in meaning; it is assembled and reassembled by those who claim it.

 In gathering these varied responses under one roof, South Shore Arts offers the community a space where commemoration gives way to conversation, where differing visions coexist in productive tension, and where the question of America remains, deliberately and meaningfully, unanswered.