Take me to your Leader!
Latifa ALAJLAN
Eleanor ANTIN
Ida APPLEBROOG
Siah ARMAJANI
Thomas BARROW
Billy Al BENGSTON
Judy CHICAGO
Ali DIPP
Philip GUSTON
Mildred HOWARD
Mike KELLEY
Forrest KIRK
Matthew KIRK
Robert LONGO
Calvin MARCUS
Bruce NAUMAN
Ken PRICE
Penny SLINGER
Paul THEK
linda vallejo
Richard Saltoun Gallery and Franklin Parrasch Gallery are pleased to present Take me to your Leader!, a group exhibition focusing on the effects of authority and coercion and the correlating results of submission.
This exhibition explores perceptions of power—both real and imagined—emanating from societal, governmental, religious, and even extraterrestrial sources. The participating artists interrogate the dynamics of authority through a critical lens, examining the absence of empathy and the impulse to follow, conform to, or align with authoritarian forces.
Take me to your Leader! draws its title from a now-iconic phrase whose origins trace back to a 1953 New Yorker cartoon by Alex Graham. Two aliens have just landed their UFO in a field on Earth and address a lone horse exclaiming, “Kindly take us to your President!” A simple one- word modification—swapping “President” for “leader”—transformed the cartoon caption into a cultural touchstone. Since then, “Take me to your leader” has become near-ubiquitous shorthand for extraterrestrial contact, echoed in movies and media across the spectrum from the TV series Adventures of Superman and Doctor Who to the movie Contact, to countless song titles and memes, conveying both humorous and ominous undertones.
The artists in this exhibition observe the impact of authority from a variety of
perspectives and the way in which that impact contributes to actions and reactions that develop both individually and collectively as a consequence. The diverse range of works included formally examine and thematically focus upon conformity and consensus to either accept or reject structures of imposed power, be they exalted or feared, finding moments within events of unfettered alliance and immunity to empathy for critical enquiry.
Highlights include If You Can’t Join Them… (1970–77), a photocollage from the iconic series An Exorcism by British-born, LA-based artist Penny SLINGER (b. 1947). Often considered her magnum opus, An Exorcism is a surreal, erotic photo-collage sequence set in an empty Gothic mansion once owned by her then-partner, filmmaker Peter Whitehead. Slinger appears throughout the work, using her own body to explore sexuality, identity, and the unconscious. Her work has featured in major institutional exhibitions, including Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain and National Galleries Scotland (2024/25), and The Horror Show! at Somerset House (2022). She has also been included in landmark shows such as The Dark Monarch at Tate St. Ives and Angels of Anarchy at Manchester Art Gallery (both 2009), alongside Frida Kahlo and Meret Oppenheim.
Another highlight is the work The Eight Temptations (1972) by Eleanor ANTIN (b. 1935), a pioneering figure in feminist and conceptual art. In this playful but pointed series of eight photographs, Antin performs exaggerated gestures of refusing various snacks—pinching her nose, turning away—in a sharp commentary on dieting culture and the pressures placed on women’s bodies. Her work is held in major collections including MoMA, Tate, and the Whitney, and was recently featured in The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2024). Antin has had retrospectives at LACMA (1999) and the Art Institute of Chicago (2002), with a major new survey opening at MUDAM, Luxembourg, in September 2025. The Eight Temptations reflects her wider practice of using performance and humour to question how identity is shaped and controlled.
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