Taryn Simon’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York will mark a number of firsts for the institution.
Opening September 18, the show will mark “the first time the Guggenheim has dedicated the entire rotunda to a new body of work and to a single artist working in photography and video,” according to a release.
The exhibition, which will be accompanied by an artist book published by the Guggenheim and Hatje Cantz, has been in the works for nearly a decade and was initiated by Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s former artistic director and chief curator.
At the Guggenheim, Simon will debut Father Country I Do Love You (2026), a new body of work that lends the exhibition its title and consists of 42 objects, a mix of photographs, texts, videos, and sculptures that she has now previously shown. The series centers on an “the real life of one unnamed federal agent” and his careers’ “labyrinth of sagas, in which Simon uncovers the ripple effects of her protagonist’s actions and inactions,” per a release.
The release continues, “Through duty, devotion, loss, and happenstance, the federal agent acted as a middleman, witnessing events great and small and collecting evidence for someone else to slot into the bigger picture. Everything he touched ricocheted to the outer boundaries of nations and lives he’d never know.”
Simon has dedicated Father Country I Do Love You to her late father “whose life shadows the entire project. Her father lived in Thailand and traveled to Russia, Iran, Israel, China, Afghanistan, Korea, and elsewhere while working for the U.S. government, before transitioning to a career manufacturing and selling arcade games. Simon never got his full story, and, upon his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, she realized she never would,” the release adds.
“I’ve given birth to two children. Neither gestated for ten years in my guts. I could never have known what this would look like when it comes out,” Simon told ARTnews in an email. “When my dad still had language before Alzheimer’s, he said, ‘America is the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it.’”
The Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, hosts the bulk of the institution’s temporary exhibitions, often a mix of thematic and single-artist shows. Living artists who have taken over the rotunda include Carol Bove (2026), Rashid Johnson (2025), Jenny Holzer (2024), and Alex Katz (2022). One of the rotunda’s most famous exhibitions was Maurizio Cattelan’s 2011 retrospective, for which he suspended all of his past works in the center of the rotunda, leaving the walls blank.
“Once again proving herself the consummate artistic storyteller of her generation, Simon has created a profound and personal body of work that rebounds between anxiety, survival, empathy, and play,” Nat Trotman, the exhibition’s curator, said in an email. “In Father Country I Do Love You, Simon shines a shaky spotlight on democracy, memory, and the invisible hands shaping the worlds we inhabit.”
