Activities

KCWC has been invited to a private view of a new exhibit Larger Apples & Better Cotton where UK-based American women artists reflect on the US. We will have a talk with the curator of the exhibit, Mary Poelzbauer and the organiser, Amy Robson, followed by a guided tour of the works in the exhibit.

Nine American artists, women with more than 150 combined years living in the UK, reflect on the current state of America. Their photographs, collages, paintings, prints and cryptoart form a dialogue around the artists’ individual experience of considering their home country from abroad.

The exhibition’s title originates from a prescient passage in John Cheever’s short story Expelled:
“Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.”

– John Cheever, first published in The New Republic in 1930

Not these people. The artists featured are anything but indifferent to their home country, and the exhibition forefronts each of their unique personal responses, inspired by the Cheever quote. Larger Apples & Better Cotton explores tensions between pride and shame, abundance and waste, opportunity and disappointment.