America Starts Here

America Starts Here presents ten years of work by the art-making team Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, whose work together embodies a way of approaching art that joins minimal and conceptual impulses with a broader interest in audience, social process, labor, and history. Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler met as students... See more 

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Originally conceived for an exhibition in Philadelphia, America Starts Here displays Ericson and Ziegler’s interest in American history and use of mapping as a method of approaching their work. The title is a direct quotation of a tourist slogan used by the state of Pennsylvania during the 1980s, recalling the... See more 

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This affordable, unlimited edition of welcome mats was produced in response to the imminent displacement of Real Art Ways (a Hartford, Connecticut alternative arts space) by the Oak Leaf Development Corporation, a real estate concern. The leaf-shaped mats are labeled with the scientific name of the white oak... See more 

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Feed and Seed (Heisey Farm) is part of a series of seven collaborations with farmers in which the artists provided ten percent of the farmers’ annual seed cost in exchange for the empty seed bags that had been subsidized. The bags are framed under Plexiglas sandblasted with the type of crop and the number of acres... See more 

This model house documents a project for Places with a Past, an exhibition of site-specific, public art curated for the 1991 Spoleto Festival to foster works addressing the history of its host city, Charleston, South Carolina. For their contribution to Places with a Past, Ericson and Ziegler arranged for a private... See more 

In 1991, Philip Morris Companies, Inc. sponsored a high-profile nationwide tour of an original copy of the Bill of Rights celebrating the bicentennial of its ratification. In response, Ericson and Ziegler imagined an alternative approach to a tour for the document. The artists sandblasted the entire United States... See more 

The names of over four hundred of pie recipes found in old cookbooks from different regions of the United States have been inscribed on jars containing a liquid scent. Master perfumer Felix Buccalato was commissioned by the artists to create a scent based on his interpretation of the smell of old books and records... See more 

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Hundreds of bars of white deodorant soap are stacked in an antique wooden box next to soil from the geographic center of the United States. Ericson and Ziegler viewed the geographic center of the nation—a red-pole marker in a wide prairie sixty miles north of Rapid City, South Dakota—as a symbol for the country as a... See more 

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For Sonsbeek 93, an international exhibition held in Arnhem, the Netherlands, Ericson and Ziegler replaced the normal place settings in a local restaurant that served traditional Dutch fare. Akzo Chemicals, based in Arnhem, is one of the leading chemical companies in the world and provides the economic foundation for... See more 

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Ericson and Ziegler solicited new parents to interpret and describe the pre-linguistic sounds of their young children. These three hundred sixty-four jars are filled with baby food made from peas, carrots, and potatoes and sandblasted with those phonetic sounds. The jars are arranged to form a color-shifted American... See more 

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To create From the Making of a House, Ericson and Ziegler asked a neighbor to save all of the off-cuts from a homebuilding project near their studio in Milanville, Pennsylvania. The presentation of the wood is reminiscent of many post-minimal sculptures from the 1970s. This piece was the last work completed by... See more 

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