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Building America is a mural-like oil painting composed of nine canvases, each six-by-six-feet (spanning fifty-four feet in its entirety). It explores the transformation of the American landscape and presents figures and events from the social history of the United States with special emphasis on those that suggest our aspirations as a nation.

Presented as a multiple-horizoned landscape reminiscent of Egyptian, Assyro-Babylonian, and other ancient painting, low-relief sculpture, and scrolls, Building America is more or less chronological, moving from left to right. It begins with a lush New World landscape and gradually arrives at one, at the end, that has tract-homes and high-tension wires, with railroads, telegraph wires, and other developments in-between. In this landscape are figures, places, and events like Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, Martin Luther King, and the Trinity Test-Site--to name only a few.

It took the artist, Bruce Linn, over four and a half years to create, and was commissioned by Chris Iovenko.

Comments & Reviews Artist Statement & Project History
© 2001-2014 Bruce Linn