Nina Katchadourian: Monument to the Unelected | October 17 – December 8

A suburban house with more than fifty lawn signs for past presidential candidates in the yard.
Nina Katchadourian, Monument to the Unelected, 2020; installed at a private residence, Scottsdale, AZ. Photo by Charles Darr, courtesy of the artist.

Nina Katchadourian: Monument to the Unelected

This fall, di Rosa will host Nina Katchadourian’s Monument to the Unelected. An ongoing project conceived in 2008, Monument to the Unelected consists of a series of lawn signs advertising the presidential campaign of every major party candidate who ran and lost. Rather than presenting a historical archive, the signs are designed and commercially produced using contemporary methods, pulling the past into the present political moment. Appearing at those times when the country is preoccupied with the “fork in the road” moment of a major national election, the Monument to the Unelected presents a view of the country’s collective political road not taken.

Originally commissioned in 2008 by the Scottsdale Museum of Art, Monument to the Unelected has appeared at numerous institutions, private residences, and other spaces across the country during each subsequent presidential election cycle.

About the Artist

Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Accent Elimination, a six-channel video, was included in the 2015 Venice Biennale as part of the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. There are three monographic publications of Katchadourian’s work: Opener 11: Nina Katchadourian — All Forms of Attraction (The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2006); Sorted Books (Chronicle Books, 2013); and Curiouser (University of Texas Press, 2017).

She has had solo exhibitions at museums including The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Blanton Museum, Austin, TX; the Brigham Young Museum of Art, Provo, UT; the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Katchadourian has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Her work is in public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Brooklyn, NY, and is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace Gallery.