Exceptional Works: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

“Untitled” (Natural History), 1990

Framed black and white photographs Overall dimensions vary with installation Thirteen parts: 16 3/4 x 20 1/4 inches each

“Ask a few simple questions to define aesthetics: whose aesthetics? at what historical time? under what circumstances? for what purposes? and who is deciding quality, etc? Then you realize suddenly and very quickly that aesthetic choices are politics.”

—Felix Gonzalez-Torres, interview with Tim Rollins, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1993

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

"Untitled" (Natural History), 1990

Framed black and white photographs

Overall dimensions vary with installation Thirteen parts: 16 3/4 x 20 1/4 inches each

Edition of 3 Installation view, "Untitled" (Natural History), 1990, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres: America, The United States Pavilion, 52nd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2007

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) is one of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Untitled” (Natural History) (1990) comprises thirteen photographs, twelve of which are exhibited, each depicting a single word engraved on the memorial to Theodore Roosevelt that formerly stood outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Rather than focusing on the equestrian statue of the former president at the monument's center, the artist here isolates each of the heroic attributes that adorn the surrounding space.

An edition of “Untitled” (Natural History) is on view in Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, an exhibition focused on the artist’s deep engagement with portraiture and the construction of identity, as well as how history is told and inherited, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, through July 6, 2025.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Natural History), 1990 (detail)

“HISTORIAN. SCIENTIST. STATESMAN. RANCHMAN. These terms are etched in stone as part of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial in New York City. Completed in 1935, the memorial is located along the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History. In 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio approved the removal of the memorial’s original central statue because it ‘explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.’ The words describing the former president, carved on the museum’s façade, remain. In 1990, between these two moments, Felix Gonzalez-Torres made “Untitled” (Natural History), a series of thirteen photographs. Twelve show terms from the memorial site.”

—Excerpt from the wall label for “Untitled” (Natural History) (1990), written by Josh T Franco and Charlotte Ickes, co-curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, 2024.

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, 2024. Photo by Mark Gulezian. Here, the artist's "Untitled" (Natural History) has been placed in dialogue with the painted portrait of Roosevelt, on loan from the American Museum of Natural History’s collection, posing the question of how the memorial’s language informs the collective memory of this president.

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, 2024. Photo by Mark Gulezian. The elements of "Untitled" (Natural History) seen here depict the words HISTORIAN, RANCHMAN, STATESMAN, and SCIENTIST.

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, 2024. Photo by Mark Gulezian. Here, the artist's “Untitled" (Portrait of Dad) (1991) is installed to the left of a copy of the painted portrait of Roosevelt. Another element of "Untitled" (Natural History) where the word PATRIOT is depicted is included on the wall opposite the Roosevelt portrait.

The bronze equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt by James Earle Fraser as it formerly stood outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

[“Untitled” (Natural History)] documents the inventory of idealized (male) attributes inscribed in tribute to Theodore Roosevelt … author, statesman, scholar, humanitarian, historian, patriot, ranchman, conservationist, explorer, naturalist, scientist, and soldier…. They represent Gonzalez-Torres’s abiding interest in inventing a new kind of public art, one that would remain mutable and open to interpretation. In our culture, monuments are most often fixed entities, monolithic and static in theme, denoting for society what its history and values are supposed to be.”

—Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: America, 2007

Installation vew, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 2011

Installation view, to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer. Artistic Practices around 1990, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok), Vienna, Austria, 2015

These photographs first appeared in the influential anthology of critical writings Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (1990), edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. They were first exhibited in the artist’s groundbreaking 1991 exhibition Every Week There is Something Different at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

The work featured here is one of two complete editions of "Untitled" (Natural History). During his lifetime Gonzalez-Torres determined that one edition would be broken up. Individual framed photographs from that edition are in the collections of Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. The other complete edition is in a private collection.

Installation view, Every Week There is Something Different, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, 1991

Created a year after "Untitled" (Natural History), David Hammons’s installation Public Enemy also engaged the Roosevelt Memorial outside the American Museum of Natural History in an address to received cultural heritage. Presented as part of the group exhibition Dislocations at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991, Public Enemy features photographs of the monument as the centerpiece of an intricate, whole-room installation featuring fallen leaves, balloons, police barriers, and sandbags with real and toy guns propped on top, aimed at the images of the statue.

Underscoring the continued relevance of these works, in January 2022, the statue of Roosevelt, who appears flanked by an anonymous indigenous figure and an anonymous figure of African descent, was removed.

Scaffolding and tarp surrounding the remnants of the statue, January 2022.

“A statue of Theodore Roosevelt that stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for decades was removed, the result of years of debate over a monument that critics said glorified colonialism.”

—The Wall Street Journal, 2022

Installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016

“I’m a person who lives in this society and I’m a product of this society and this culture…. I hope that everything that I make is needed by my culture. I always think that when culture foregrounds something it is because it is needed. It could be an idea, an object, whatever. It could have been there for a long, long time but it is only when culture feels that it is ready that this object or idea becomes important.”

—Felix Gonzalez-Torres, interview with Tim Rollins, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1993

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