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Alfredo Jaar On America, the Concentration of Power and the Art of Staying Awake

The Chilean-born artist, whose 'A Logo for America' returned to New York this fall, doubts that art can change the world but believes it can shift how we see it.

It was a very different America and a very different world when Alfredo Jaar first showed his iconic A Logo for America. It was 1987. Jaar had moved to New York just five years earlier and, as part of the Public Art Fund’s Messages to the Public series, was invited to present this powerful statement on the Spectacolor electronic billboard in Times Square, where it ran from April 19 to May 2. The work hinged on a deceptively simple yet revealing linguistic correction that would become a historic statement: the United States is not synonymous with America.

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The sequence was precise. It opened with a map of the United States overlaid with the phrase “This Is Not America.” The U.S. flag then appeared with “This Is Not America’s Flag.” Finally, the word “AMERICA” expanded across the screen, its “R” transformed into the landmass of North, Central and South America.

The animation lasted only about 38 seconds and was deliberately inserted among commercials—the pervasive visual language of mass communication through which the United States built its glamorized global mythology as a land of freedom, possibility and affluence. Since then, the mythology of the “American Dream” has steadily faded, giving way to a broader reckoning with the neocolonial dynamics behind American military interventions—from Asia in the postwar period to South America and, later, the Middle East—often justified through the rhetoric of a “peace mission.” The social and environmental costs of the extractive, capital- and tech-driven model of progress that the country has promoted as the path to global development have also become increasingly visible.

In September, Jaar opened an exhibition at Galerie Lelong New York that presented that iconic work alongside others from the series and their translations into different media. The show arrived more than a year into the second Trump administration, amid its consequences within and beyond the country. When we spoke after the opening, Jaar acknowledged that the work did not begin as the overtly anti-imperialist statement it is often read as today. He described its origin as essentially a “semiotic exercise.”

“I had just arrived in New York from Chile, and for me, as a Chilean and South American, I was American. Soy un americano. I am an American. And this is nothing spectacular, new, strange or weird. Argentinians feel the same way, Brazilians feel the same way. Somos todos americanos,” Jaar told Observer. “That was something that bothered me in the daily use—the erroneous, wrong, mistaken use of that word in everyday language at the time. That’s how the work was born.”

The political charge accumulated with history and the unfolding of American politics. “It started to have a life of its own,........

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