Taryn Simon has opened “Father Country I Do Love You” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, taking over the institution’s central spiral rotunda with a 42-part account of an unnamed federal agent whose career intersected with major events of 20th-century American history.
The exhibition opened on 18 September 2026 and will remain on view through 14 March 2027. It is the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist to occupy the Guggenheim’s central rotunda. It is also the first occasion on which an artist has had the ambition or opportunity to fill the entire rotunda with new work.
Simon’s project spreads across all six floors of the rotunda. It includes more than 1,000 photographs, as well as video, sculpture and text works. The material is arranged in 42 multipart artworks, described as “chapters”, which document modern America through the life of one Federal Bureau of Investigation, or F.B.I., agent.
The agent’s identity is withheld. The individual chapters examine a career that placed him at the epicentre of historical events, while photographs and video installations address American history, truth and political violence. The exhibition places a single professional life within a larger national record, using documentary material alongside conceptual forms.
Simon, who was born in 1975 in New York, is known for work investigating histories, systems and events through documentary and conceptual practice. Her process in this project involves playing with the idea of national intelligence. The resulting installation considers how official knowledge is gathered, organised and preserved, while leaving the agent himself unnamed.
One interactive work asks visitors to release coloured balls that wind down the rotunda. The intervention brings movement into a building more commonly associated with painting and sculpture, and makes the museum’s spiralling architecture part of the exhibition’s structure.
The project has been nearly a decade in the making. It was organised by Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media, and initiated by Nancy Spector, former Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator.
The opening event on 18 September began at 7 p.m. By 8 p.m., a queue outside the Guggenheim stretched down the street and nearly around the corner. Guests included Gwyneth Paltrow, Laura Dern, Jodie Foster, Adrien Brody, Stephen Spielberg, Michael Stipe, Salman Rushdie, Miranda July, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
The scale of the commission gives the exhibition a particular place in the Guggenheim’s history. Simon has used the rotunda’s six floors to turn a vast archive of images and objects into a serial narrative, with the life of an intelligence agent serving as its route through questions of power, violence and the making of American history.
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