VIP FIELD TRIP PROGRAM - TOUR OF "BUT TELL ME, IS IT A CIVILIZED COUNTRY?"

For his first museum solo exhibition, Chicago-based artist Max Guy debuts a colorful, multifaceted theatrical installation centered on the story of The Wizard of Oz—and its Motown-produced retelling in The Wiz, featuring an all-star Black cast. Dorothy’s journey through a fraught, alien land offers an allegory in negotiating otherness, even as the narrative’s multiple iterations constitute a lens through which to consider the racial politics of storytelling and world-building. Populated by props, costumes, a new film, and other objects, the installation brings together multiple threads in Guy’s practice, which spans a wide range of mediums, performance, set design, and more. At the same time, the exhibition advances a recurring theme in his work: exploring and sustaining the position of an outsider within different spaces and social contexts, inspired by the artist’s lived experiences and refracted here through the prism of “America’s greatest homegrown fairytale.”