Gold-fringed walls and piñata corncobs transform the Grand Salon of SAAM's Renwick Gallery and highlight the role of maize in North American visual culture.
If there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests – a country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob law and statute law; where speech is not free; where the post office is violated, mail bags opened, and letters tampered with; where public debts and private debts outside of the state are repudiated; where liberty is attacked in the primary institution of social life; where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his own hand; where suffrage is not free or equal – that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but barbarous; and no advantage of soil, climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs. From the series Great Ideas.
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Herbert Bayer, If there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests--a country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob law and statute law; where speech is not free; where the post office is violated, mail bags opened, and letters tampered with; where public debts and private debts outside of the state are repudiated; where liberty is attacked in the primary institution of social life; where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his own hand; where suffrage is not free or equal--that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but barbarous; and no advantage of soil, climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs. From the series Great Ideas., 1951, paper and photomechanical reproduction on paperboard, sheet: 233⁄4 x 191⁄8 in. (60.3 x 48.5 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984.124.20
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If there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests – a country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob law and statute law; where speech is not free; where the post office is violated, mail bags opened, and letters tampered with; where public debts and private debts outside of the state are repudiated; where liberty is attacked in the primary institution of social life; where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his own hand; where suffrage is not free or equal – that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but barbarous; and no advantage of soil, climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs. From the series Great Ideas.
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Herbert Bayer, If there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests--a country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob law and statute law; where speech is not free; where the post office is violated, mail bags opened, and letters tampered with; where public debts and private debts outside of the state are repudiated; where liberty is attacked in the primary institution of social life; where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his own hand; where suffrage is not free or equal--that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but barbarous; and no advantage of soil, climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs. From the series Great Ideas., 1951, paper and photomechanical reproduction on paperboard, sheet: 233⁄4 x 191⁄8 in. (60.3 x 48.5 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984.124.20
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