AUSTIN, TX.- The Austin Museum of Art presents America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, on view through May 6, 2007. America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler presents ten years of collaborative work by two artists who helped rethink the nature of public art and conceptual practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ericson and Ziegler devised public art projects and site-specific installations that altered sites subtly, using poetic language and their idiosyncratic wit to illuminate mainstream American contexts and highlight individual community issues. America Starts Here offers new ways to think about a community’s relationship with public space, questioning how public space is defined, who owns it, and how it is used. The exhibition includes sculptures and installations, as well as models and video documents of site-specific works.

America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler was jointly organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. This exhibition has been generously sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency, Peter Norton Family Foundation, The Judith Rothschild Foundation (given in recognition of Kate Ericson), and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. The Austin presentation is supported by Mr. and Mrs. I. H. Kempner, III.