- Ray Camp
Opening Reception, Saturday, April 4, 1pm - 4pm
Limited free seating is available on a roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the April 4th opening. Reservations are required and can be made on this by calling +1 845-758-7598 or emailing Mary Rozell at mrozell@bard.edu.
Artists: Abigail Raphael Collins, Sophie Kovel, Julia Weist
Borrowing its title from a term used in covert intelligence operations—referring to an innocent party falsely incriminated to shield state agents—False Sponsor brings together artistic practices that examine the US government’s strategies of representing itself to the American public, particularly cultural patronage programs. Abigail Raphael Collins, Sophie Kovel, and Julia Weist present and restage the US government’s sponsorship of propaganda and the official documentation that tracks the state’s relationship with the arts. Featuring artworks alongside historical and contemporary documents, the exhibition seeks to reveal the often hidden tactics employed to control perceptions of the American enterprise.
Focusing on the operations of appropriation, infiltration, and cooperation—which necessitate both loyalty to and critique of the systems the artists intervene in—False Sponsor proposes that the artists serve as double agents. Their participation in these systems reveals that, behind the veneer of benefaction, the state’s continued dependence upon the arts to support its ideologies enacts the operation of the false sponsor.
Kovel’s work, which opens the exhibition, directly grapples with this facade. The piece restages an idyllic Niagara Falls printed wallpaper that Jacqueline Kennedy installed in the White House in 1961. The work not only questions Kennedy’s understanding of the White House as a symbol of American values and national identity but also highlights how images of the frontier influence understandings of the United States as a nation. In the next room, Collins presents declassified documents as collages, stacks of paper, and film to examine the intentions behind the long-standing collaborations between the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, and entertainment industry. Alongside this, Weist’s work, layering archival documents, relates the New York City Government’s historical relationship to art.
In the exhibition, the artists’ investigations respond to the notion, espoused by the current federal administration in its August 2025 letter to the Smithsonian Institution, that art affirms the democratic ideals of “unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.” False Sponsor prompts viewers to question the rhetoric of nationalism, exceptionalism, and Americanism that results from governmental participation in the arts—both today and throughout the nation’s history.
This exhibition is supported by The Jenni Crain Foundation, an initiative dedicated to preserving the legacy of the esteemed artist and curator.
