Taryn Simon Fills the Guggenheim Rotunda With a 42-Part Reckoning for America 250

A Single New Body of Work

Taryn Simon has filled the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York with a 42-part installation titled Father Country I Do Love You, opening to the public on Friday. The exhibition is composed entirely of a single new body of work and stands as the museum's contribution to the 250th anniversary of the United States. Conceived by Nancy Spector and brought to fruition by Nat Trotman, it runs from September 18, 2026, through March 14, 2027.

A Decade of Interviews

The project began in 2017, when Simon came across an agent's name in FBI files from the '90s. She tracked him down, met him at a Mexican restaurant in Maryland, and interviewed him repeatedly over much of the past decade. Simon has concealed the agent's identity, in part to create the sense that he could be anybody. The installation narrates his life story, beginning with his birth in an undisclosed year at a hospital in Exeter, New Hampshire, and continuing through his involvement in US operations in countries including China and Saudi Arabia.

Mosaic, Not Biography

Simon's project is less a biography than a sprawling mosaic of more than 1,000 photographs presented alongside thousands more words of text, only some of which come from her interviews with the agent. Its tesserae include a Beverly Hills beauty business run by a January 6 insurrectionist, a YMCA summer camp in New Hampshire and the children who attend it, witnesses to a bombing in Nairobi, and the maker of garments known as MooreWraps. Absorbing it all in one visit is, by design, close to impossible.

The exhibition opens September 18, 2026, and runs through March 14, 2027, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Innocent Images, Otherwise

Simon often realizes her ideas by presenting images that seem innocent before revealing themselves to be otherwise. One grid shows people standing around bridges in sunny forests; a caption identifies a woman, Sakeena Majul, a Saudi immigrant, while adjacent wall text places the scene in Foxstone Park in Virginia, where Robert Hanssen, a double agent working for the FBI, once left secret messages intended for the KGB. The connections Simon draws are diffuse and the details typically hazy, seemingly by design, and their accuracy is not always easy to confirm.

Some Things Can't Be Proven

Alongside photographs of the Long Island site where a TWA plane exploded and crashed in 1996, Simon features the agent's words: "Some things can't be proven." The sentiment has coursed through her output since the early 2000s. The Innocents (2000–03) pictured wrongfully convicted men, often at sites where they were alleged to have committed crimes. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008–11) charted bloodlines and took its name from four Indian men declared dead as part of an inheritance plot even though they were still alive.

Fact, Fiction and the Archive

The Guggenheim project renders any conventional notion of truth obsolete by seeding fictions and falsehoods throughout. Simon photographed Jodie Foster, who played FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, for a work placed near the beginning; the agent claims to have witnessed Foster training for the role at an FBI fingerprinting lab. One subject is a public affairs officer at the Defense Logistics Agency who, according to Simon's wall text, repeatedly injured himself and threatened Simon and her crew during a four-hour photoshoot in 2021. In a two-channel video, the man says he doesn't remember doing that, though he doesn't exactly dispute the account either.

An Edgeless History

A psychiatrist who treats members of the intelligence community tells Simon that people come in with their story all tangled up inside of them. What makes the piece notable is the sense it creates that American history is edgeless, chaotic, incomplete and permanently subject to change, resisting the notion that the nation's past was ever set in stone or simply confined to the country's borders. Simon lets the nation continue to tie itself in knots as it processes 250 years.