A zebra leg, a copy of Mein Kampf, slave shackles—discrete objects laden with meaning and chosen for their obvious aura—are precisely the kind of curiosities one might find in collections housed at institutions such as The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Griot Museum of Black History, or the Mütter Museum. Contextualized alongside other anonymously created or found works, some humorous, some horrific, Blame It On Vegas – Collecting Meta Modern functions as a Wunderkammer, a collection that inspires infinite interpretations. The title is both a response to Robert Venturi’s controversial book Learning from Las Vegas and a rejection of postmodernism in favor of a new romanticism or what has come to be known as metamodernism. This slightly nebulous curatorial approach is, in a sense, a “metagesture,” where objects and ideas are abstracted and obscured. Oscillating between modernist vocabularies and postmodern strategies, but relying on neither, there is a rigor and a sense of purpose that unites this collection, though the precise meaning may not be, or may never be, fully realized.

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About ten years ago American Legacy featured an artist named Whitfield Lovell in an article titled “Whispers from the Walls.” The Bronx-born Lovell, whose three-dimensional tableaux—life-size charcoal portraits on pine board, punctuated with everyday (and not so everyday) objects found in flea markets and antique malls, tel the life stories of ancestors, family, and once anonymous individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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