Beginning June 21, artist Sharon Hayes (b. 1970) will take over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s third-floor Peter Norton Family Galleries for a projectbased exhibition – her largest museum installation to date – featuring a group of new works commissioned by the Whitney as well as a selection of existing works. All the works articulate different forms of what the artist refers to as “speech acts.” Neither a retrospective nor a survey of Hayes’s career, There’s so much I want to say to you is the fourth in a series of full-floor artist projects that has so far included exhibitions by Paul McCarthy, Christian Marclay, and Cory Arcangel. Hayes’s exhibition is curated by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, in close collaboration with the artist.

Throughout her work in performance, video, photography, sound, and installation, Sharon Hayes explores the connections between love, politics, and history, through various forms of address. The new works, made especially for this exhibition, include a video work on the subject of Anita Bryant, featuring a large-scale projection of the notoriously homophobic Bryant getting hit in the face with a pie while crusading against gay rights. A vinyl record titled Sarah H. Gordon's Strike Journal, May 1970, specially pressed for the exhibition, records Sarah Gordon reading from a journal she wrote as a student during a strike at her university against the Vietnam War. For a large wall piece titled Join Us, Hayes has assembled 600 flyers inviting participation in various political actions from the 1960s to the present. A one-hundred-foot-long curtain with text introduces the exhibition, and a video installation of voice portraits will be shown, as well as a new film installation made in collaboration with the 1960s feminist activist Kate Millett. The artist also plans a live performance in the exhibition space.

Hayes is collaborating with fellow artist Andrea Geyer – the two have known each other since studying together in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program – to create an environment for the exhibition, a site-specific structure that both contains all the works in the show and functions as an independent artwork. Using the vernacular of transient staging for trade shows, political rallies, and other outdoor events, Hayes and Geyer are creating a space using platforms, walls, and seating arrangements that indicate a series of impending temporary events, in which speech of various kinds is always implied. The exhibition’s staging of speech using found footage, video and audio recordings, ephemera, and language, weaves together narratives from the past and the present with personal declarations of desire, longing, and love. There’s So Much I Want to Say to You becomes a declaration to us, the viewers; to an unknown lover; and to an as yet unidentified public, in a complex dialogue between the domains of public, private, and political speech.

Among the existing works to be shown are the video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20, & 29 (2003), some of which will be shown in New York for the first time. On February 4, 1974, the heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by the radical political organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). From February to April 1974, the SLA and Hearst made four audio tapes in which Hearst addressed her parents about her kidnapping, the SLA's ransom (that the Hearst family feed all the poor in California), and the actions of the family and the FBI during the ordeal. In the last tape, Patty Hearst (rechristened Tania by this point) announced that she was joining the SLA in their struggle. From June 2001 to January 2002, Hayes performed a recitation of each of the four audio tapes. In each instance, the artist partially memorized the transcripts and spoke the text in front of an audience to whom she gave the text. She asked the audience to correct her mistakes and to feed her a line when she needed it.