Curator’s Statement: A [New] American Dream

Six years ago I stood in front of a row of empty barracks at Fort Chaffee in northwest Arkansas, one of four bases where Vietnamese refugees first landed in America after Saigon fell. Seventeen members of my family lived in one of those barracks, where they took English classes, learned how to navigate American culture, and waited for churches and civic organizations to sponsor them into communities across the country. This is where they began their journey to becoming Americans. 

The Army Reserve soldier who was guiding me asked about them, and I told him the children had become lawyers and doctors and engineers and pharmacists.

He replied, "Your family seized the American Dream."

Seized.

I chose to take it as a compliment, even as I felt unsettled by the connotation that my family had taken something that belonged to someone else. My uncles had been military officers in Vietnam, fighting alongside the American military for what they believed was democracy and the American Dream. They came to this country as allies. Here they worked as auto mechanics. My aunt was a cashier at a convenience store. They took the chances this country offered. They achieved the American Dream.

The word “seized” told me something true about the country we've become. We like to say the American Dream is as American as apple pie, but a pie is finite. And if that's what the Dream is, every success story is a piece taken from your plate. Every new arrival is a thief. Every neighbor with a different face is a threat to what is yours.

Maybe the American Dream isn't a pie, though. Maybe it's a poem.

Walt Whitman believed the United States themselves were the greatest poem, and that the power of poetry and of democracy both came from making a unified whole out of disparate parts. From holding contradictions. From containing multitudes.

What kind of poem are we writing right now? What kind of poem do we want to write next?

I dream of a country where we all flourish. Not a country where we accumulate and hoard wealth. Not a country where we measure each other by what we earn or by a social hierarchy rigged to keep a few on top. I dream of a country where we each become our highest and best selves. Where we live with dignity. Where we belong to each other.

That is what James Truslow Adams meant in 1931 when he coined the phrase American Dream. He described it as a dream of a social order in which each person could attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. He was talking about flourishing. That is the real American Dream, and somewhere along the way it got warped.

This exhibition won't give you the answers. Every gathering in this project will put you in the room with others who care about what comes next. We'll figure it out together, in conversations sparked by cabaret, storytelling, screenprinting, panel discussions, poetry, and more. Because none of this works unless we're in relationship with each other, and relationships begin with conversation. And art is how we create the space for those conversations.

No one seizes a dream. We build it together, or it collapses. The American Dream isn't over. That choice gets made in rooms like this one.

What do you dream for America for the next two hundred and fifty years?