As our lives become increasingly shaped by the glut of garbage and information, The Gatherers brings into focus current artistic practices grappling with global waste and excess. Featuring fourteen international artists—many showing for the first time in a US museum—the exhibition includes sculptural installation, assemblage, painting, video, and performance. While artists have rummaged for centuries, the exhibition underscores how retooling detritus has new meaning for a generation contending with the impacts of recent world orders, such as the ongoing fallouts and failures of globalization and neoliberalism. Artists in The Gatherers render politics as spatialized in the built environment, drawing attention to how histories reverberate into the future.
