Shimon Attie - Starstruck: An American Tale

Starstruck: An American Tale maps the artist Shimon Attie’s newest project, a cut through the layers of America past and present at the site of the historic steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The monograph documents Attie’s multi-year project filming community members and the resulting exhibition at the Lehigh University Art Galleries.

Starstruck: An American Tale maps the artist Shimon Attie’s newest project, a cut through the layers of America past and present at the site of the historic steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The monograph documents Attie’s multi-year project of excavating stories of the city by filming community members, clothed in contemporary and historical dress, transiting iconic local buildings and topography – and the resulting exhibition at the Lehigh University Art Galleries, anchored by a two-channel video and a modified scaled facsimile of Bethlehem’s 90-foot tall lighted sculptural representation of the biblical Star of Bethlehem, a civic project from the 1930s that overlooks the city to this day. The book is published together with the Lehigh University Art Galleries.

From the city’s founding by Moravian Christian utopian settlers in 1741, through to its industrial heyday in the late 19th to 20th centuries as a capital of the American steel industry, to the collapse of its steel mill and manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent post-industrial reincarnation with a new casino and gambling, Bethlehem is a microcosm of America’s hopes and dreams, failures and realities. Starstruck: An American Tale probes this uneasy, distinctly American blend of utopian aspirations, industrial capitalism, and the dream of “making it big”, which have defined life in Bethlehem and other communities across the United States since the country’s founding.

William Crow is Director of the Lehigh University Art Galleries and Professor of Practice in the university’s Department of Art, Architecture and Design. He has spoken internationally and been published on topics related to museums, education and digital media, and is a peer reviewer for the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Museum Assessment Program. He has held faculty appointments at New York University, Johns Hopkins University and the New School for Social Research, and was the inaugural Educator in Charge of Teaching and Learning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nicholas Sawicki is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art, Architecture and Design at Lehigh University. He writes on art of the 20th century, with a focus on overlooked histories and documents of modernism, on which he has spoken and published broadly. He is a past recipient of fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Social Sciences Research Council and the Leonard A Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has held previous faculty appointments at Grinnell College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Hannah Klemm is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. She curates the museum’s long-running contemporary art exhibition programmes “Currents” and “New Media Series”, and was co-curator of the exhibitions Storm of Progress: German Art Since 1800; Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis; and Oliver Lee Jackson. Klemm’s research centres on underground artistic movements, collaborative practices, and new media and technology in art. She is the past recipient of fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Ed Simon is a staff writer at The Millions, a contributing writer for Belt Magazine and a contributing editor for the History News Network, focusing on religion, literature, politics and geography. He is the author of several books, including An Alternative History of Pittsburgh from Belt Publishing and, most recently, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, a work of illustrated non-fiction released by Abrams. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Aeon, Jacobin, Salon,The New Republic and The New York Times, among numerous other publications. Currently he is working on a book about apocalypticism for MIT Press and a contribution to Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series entitled Relic.