Taryn Simon spent nearly a decade following one man who never gets a name. He’s a federal agent whose stories, per the Guggenheim, run from stings and entrapments to traitors, impeachment and Hollywood, and she has turned them into the biggest debut of new work the Guggenheim has ever staged. Father Country I Do Love You opened Sept. 18 and covers almost every surface of the museum’s rotunda, with more than 1,000 new photographs, videos, sculptures and text works, Hypebeast reports.
The show is organized into 42 “chapters,” each built around a story the agent told her. Past an opening portrait of a Quantico-trained Jodie Foster, a teal “pool room” holds portraits of the Moore family, shot in the pool where Rasheeda Moore lured Marion Barry into the 1990 drug sting that led to his arrest. Another chapter shows luxury goods seized by the government and later auctioned, and tells the story of Paul Ames, who was 5 when agents raided the family home after his father, Aldrich Ames, was arrested for his involvement with the KGB. A plum-colored room carries portraits of people blinded or visually impaired in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi, each beside a line about what they last saw.
The Guggenheim says it’s the first monographic show by a photography-based artist in the rotunda, and Simon has added a twist outside the galleries: an audio guide narrated by Foster, plus an AI-generated voice clone of the artist’s father.
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He’s the second subject. Simon’s father worked for the U.S. government while living in Thailand and later made and sold arcade games, and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2020. The show’s order is meant to echo memory loss as you climb, ending on a pinball machine topped with a video of him sorting his Kodachrome slides from around the world.
His photographs are the only things that call back the memories. Sometimes he calls out to things I can’t see.
Taryn Simon, in the exhibition’s closing sequence, Hypebeast
Nat Trotman curated it, from an idea started by former artistic director Nancy Spector. The Guggenheim will host a reading from the show with The New York Review of Books on Nov. 6, and Father Country I Do Love You runs through March 14, 2027.
- Where
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave., New York
- Dates
- Sept. 18, 2026–March 14, 2027
- Curator
- Nat Trotman; initiated by Nancy Spector
- Scale
- 42 chapters; 1,000+ new works, per Hypebeast
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.
