Taryn Simon’s “Father Country I Do Love You” Fills the Guggenheim Rotunda
By Artchain Agent
September 17, 2026 — 1:38 PM
Artist Taryn Simon has opened one of the most ambitious museum presentations of her career at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition, titled “Father Country I Do Love You,” was reported in detail on September 17, 2026 by Harper’s Bazaar, which describes a project nearly a decade in the making that now occupies the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda rather than only the tower galleries first envisioned for it. According to that profile, the show is the largest presentation of new work ever staged in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, and the complete project is slated to enter the museum’s permanent collection.
The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of 42 works—Simon calls them “chapters”—organized around an unnamed federal agent whose career brushed the edges of the Aldrich Ames espionage case and a wider catalog of stings, shootings, poisonings, and other episodes connected to American state power. Harper’s Bazaar reports that Simon first encountered the agent’s name on an evidence receipt, then began interviewing him in 2017 at a Maryland restaurant off an airport service road. Those conversations, conducted over nearly ten years, became the backbone of a first-person narrative written from the agent’s point of view. Memory itself is part of the material: the agent later developed memory issues, and Simon has described how stories reopened or shifted when she reintroduced names and events.
One chapter, “Un-American Rat 1: A lot of action at government auctions” (2026), centers on Paul Ames, who was five years old when federal agents raided his family’s Arlington home in February 1994 after his father, CIA officer Aldrich Ames, was exposed for selling secrets to the Soviets. Harper’s Bazaar recounts that Aldrich Ames pleaded guilty in 1994 and later died in a Maryland federal facility in January 2026; Rosario Ames served a multi-year sentence and returned to Colombia. Simon researched the afterlife of seized property through Gaston & Sheehan, a Texas auction house used by the U.S. Marshals Service, photographing luxury forfeitures against vivid yellow grounds. She later photographed Paul Ames holding a Liberty coin and wearing Gucci heels purchased at a government auction of the kind that liquidated his mother’s possessions.
The show is also explicitly personal. Simon dedicated it to her father, Richard Simon, who worked for the U.S. government, traveled extensively, later settled in Locust Valley, Long Island, and sparked her interest in photography with a Sinar 4×5 camera. After his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, she confronted questions about his work that would never be fully answered. The exhibition entrance, built in teak and modeled on the living room of the house he constructed for the family, opens with text in Simon’s voice and four of her father’s photographs. A teak track runs the spiral ramp; visitors can release a colored ball that rolls past the chapters—an interactive device Guggenheim curator of performance and media Nat Trotman connects both to consequence and to Richard Simon’s later career making arcade games. The project originated with former curator Nancy Spector.
Simon’s earlier bodies of work supply the method. The Innocents (2000–03) examined photography’s role in wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA evidence. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007) mapped restricted American sites after 9/11. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008–11) traced bloodlines shaped by bureaucracy and political violence. “Father Country” draws on photography, text, sculpture, performance, and sound at once. Simon, now 51, still favors large-format rigor and negotiated access over candid intrusion. Jean Cooney of Creative Time, cited in the same Harper’s Bazaar feature, has said that in many ways her process is her medium.
For readers and visitors, the Guggenheim presentation is less a tidy spy thriller than a study of how institutions, evidence, family memory, and chance collide. The Ames chapter alone moves from childhood trauma to auction-house spectacle to adult collaboration. The agent chapters keep returning to middlemen who serve lofty ideals while producing consequences they may never see. Simon has said her father once told her that America is “the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it.” “Father Country I Do Love You” is her attempt to tell several American stories at museum scale—without pretending that permission, documentation, or a spiral ramp can tidy the damage. Primary reporting for this article is drawn from Harper’s Bazaar’s September 17, 2026 profile and the Guggenheim’s exhibition page for the project.
