Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening in the Midwest, or down South, or in Texas, that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live in one place at a time. And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.¹ 

Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in 1928 into a poor working-class Carpatho-Rusyn family. The Warhola family had recently immigrated to Pittsburgh, then an industrial Goliath in steel production, and settled in the Ruska Dolina, a neighborhood of compatriots anchored by Saint John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church and adjacent to steel mills and the Monongahela River. His father, Andrej Warhola, a laborer, died in 1942, when Andy was thirteen years old, leaving his mother, Julia, to support the family with the assistance of his two older brothers. Julia herself was not only a hardworking, pious caregiver but also a self-taught artist who made flowers from old tin cans and crepe paper, which she sold door to door, and produced hundreds of drawings, mostly of cats and angels. Warhol, a sickly child, spent copious amounts of time with Julia, who nurtured his physical health and spiritual well-being as well as his artistic side. This would get them through the Great Depression and World War II, and in 1945 Warhol entered Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he would earn a degree in pictorial design. The young graduate made a swift relocation to New York City in 1949.

—Edwidge Danticat

Perhaps America doesn’t exist, or it shouldn’t. The conditions of possibility for the assemblage of the United States are rooted and routed in settler-conquistador violence. This means that without the exploitation and dispossession of Indigenous lands, slavery and indentured servitude, war, and the surveillance of gender, the United States wouldn’t exist. The title of this exhibition, Fantasy America, is fitting for the moment we are in: a moment that is not necessarily new but one in which people have more access to the language that would allow them to recognize that the concept we have come to understand and accept as “America” might actually be a creation myth.

For someone like Andy Warhol—born a US citizen to immigrant parents in 1928—the promise of Americanity (the feeling of being included in America) was high. The artist was raised during the Great Depression, a time when futuristic envisioning and hope were necessary tools of survival. During these times America and Americanity were taking on a new meaning because of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (also known as the Snyder Act), which granted US citizenship to all Indigenous people born in the United States.