We Are This Land: Meditations on the Great American Experiment

About the Exhibition

How can we learn from the past to better envision brighter futures for all? 

With time comes perspective. The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and thereby the founding of the United States of America on July 4, 1776. These kinds of historical junctures offer timely opportunities for both reflection and imagining possible futures. Such is the case now, when questions around the role of history and the future of the US are at the forefront of many people’s minds. How can we look to and learn from artists in moments like these? 

We Are This Land: Meditations on the Great American Experiment is a large-scale group exhibition that occupies nearly all the main galleries at the MSU Broad Art Museum. The exhibition is organized around five key guiding topics: Civic Lessons, History Lessons, The Living Room, The Map Room, and The Land and Its Peoples. Together, this approach creates a forum for open dialogue and engagement while providing critical perspectives on the place this nation occupies within larger timelines of history and the world writ large. This is introduced with the main title of the exhibition, We Are This Land. This title centers the idea that “we,” together, compose the very notion of this place and that must be done in careful consideration of the land we all occupy and help steward. The title is also a direct quote from a poem by former US National Poet Laureate and Indigenous activist Joy Harjo, titled Bless this Land (2019)—an important influence for the exhibition.  

Guided by the American democratic ideals of participation and experimentation, We Are This Land offers many different prompts to visitors to consider their own role in these conversations as well. Programmatic offerings reaffirm the museum as an inclusive public space, inviting audiences to participate and contribute their voices and perspectives. Looking to the past, and being in the present, what new ways of imagining the future emerge? 

We Are This Land: Meditations on the Great American Experiment is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and curated by Steven L. Bridges, senior curator and director of curatorial affairs, with Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez and Rachel Winter, assistant curators, and Morgan Braswell and Nat Swartz, curatorial research assistants.