The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001–2013 is a retrospective of over fifty works by The Bruce High Quality Foundation, a Brooklyn-based artist group whose production includes subversive and often humorous installation art, live performance, film, and social sculpture. Taking its name from the fictional artist Bruce High Quality, who supposedly perished on September 11, 2001, the Foundation views 9/11 as a seminal moment in contemporary history; the ensuing wars and economic and cultural shifts are recurring concerns. Through its writings, original works of art, and free, unaccredited art school (The Bruce High Quality Foundation University), it attempts to democratize relationships between artist and public. The Foundation’s work often combines past, present, and future, blending fact and fiction in an attempt to encourage and reframe cultural discourse and, in its own words, to “invest the experience of public space with wonder, to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair, and to impregnate the institutions of art with the joy of man’s desiring.”

The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001–2013 is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.