Off I-84 in Waterbury, Connecticut, a 50 ft neon cross interrupts the sky. This is Holyland USA, a theme park built in 1956 by John Baptist Greco. Mr. Greco, a lawyer and Roman Catholic, received a message directly from God: Get yourself some concrete and chicken wire and whatever else you can find lying around, and build a miniature replica of the Holy Land for the Americans who won’t be able to visit the real thing.

At its peak in the 70s, Holyland USA received 44,000 pilgrims a year who could walk the dusty trails of Jesus, take a peek into his tiny tomb, and see a photograph of him. But after Greco’s death in 1986, the 17 acre attraction fell into disrepair. The cement Sphinx is missing more than a nose. Bethlehem’s paint is peeling. All the Saints have been decapitated and someone has nabbed the snapshot of our Lord and Savior.

Institutions of art, like Holyland USA, tend to follow a similar storyline. A singular individual, divinely inspired or otherwise, takes it upon themselves to erect a monument to new possibilities. But somewhere along the line, the balancing act between infrastructural development and inspirational energy tilts toward the former. Crumbling buildings, retiring directors, swelling staff salaries– make it next to impossible to maintain the originating verve of alternative models.

Hankering for solutions to impending irrelevancy, museums and schools and alternative spaces apply whatever cosmetic fixes they can. A new high-tech building! A new corporate-friendly ethos! But like old horses, they should probably just be put out to pasture.

For Immediate Release

Repositories of history should find a way to survive outside the doomed arc of institutional development. To this end, The Bruce High Quality Foundation is pleased to present Happy Endings, an exhibition of portable museums opening at the W Hotel in Miami December 2nd, 2009.

Portable museums are discrete objects that contextualize bodies of information. Like their overblown counterparts, their infrastructural forms are themselves metaphors for their particular approach to history. For instance, a history of the development of empire might take the form of a beach ball. Travel-ready with their own educational and administrative departments, these portable museums tend not to expand their collections over time, but to collect new contexts for themselves. They are intentionally itinerant and stubbornly responsive to the conditions of whatever world happens to be around them.

For Happy Endings, The Bruce High Quality Foundation presents a group of portable museums directed toward a wide-range of themes: commercial comeuppance, memorial monumentalism, patterns of patronage, gustatory art history, corporate sculpture, arts & leisure, gender, power, materiality, future fascism, urban colonialism, ambulatory services, and the impossibility of doing anything in the first place.

Divinely inspired by the late social sculptor Bruce High Quality, Happy Endings draws on the rich fictional legacy of The Bruce High Quality Foundation itself to re-imagine the museum as a restless wanderer on the dark desert highway of history.

an exhibition at W Hotel, South Beach December 2009

Happy Endings