Exhibits & Events

“Presidentialism trains us to want the president to take care of democracy for us instead of remembering that democracy, properly defined, is our job.”

— Dana Nelson

Join us at Public Trust for Presidents (1983–2023) by Daniel Faust, an installation on view from April 24 through July 31, 2026 exploring the visual mythology of American political leadership through photographs of presidential wax figures. Organized by Milena Kalinovska and Lorenzo Balbi in close collaboration with the artist and coinciding with the U.S. Semiquincentennial, the project features a large-scale photographic tableau drawn from three of Faust’s long-term projects—Presidents, Wax, and Founding Father—reflecting four decades of research in wax museums across the United States and Europe. Presidents (1983–2023) will premier at Public Trust, and then travel nationally and internationally.

Cults of Personality, a public conversation and reception featuring Daniel Faust in conversation with scholars Milena Kalinovska and Ksenia Nouril, will take place on April 24, 2026 from 5-7pm.

Daniel Faust’s works unfold over extended durations. Presidents, spanning 1983 to 2023, is a large-scale photographic work drawn from Faust's four-decade exploration of wax. The series brings together sixty photographs of wax effigies of United States presidents, arranged in a single extended grid involving symmetry and incongruity. Created through Faust’s sustained observations of wax museums across the United States and Europe, the work examines how these institutions stage and preserve popular images of political power. Photographed with direct flash and the vantage point of an ordinary visitor, the images move between documentation and interpretation, presenting familiar national figures in an atmosphere that is at once ceremonial and strangely theatrical. Throughout, there is an element of comedy, along with a sense of tragedy—somber, sad, exquisite, and awful.

Founding Father, from 2022, stages a disquieting encounter between monumentality and estrangement. The wax figure of George Washington, rendered at a commanding scale, both asserts and destabilizes the authority it embodies. His gaze extends outward, seemingly directed toward the viewer, yet remains curiously vacant—caught between presence and simulation. Below, the modest framed portrait reiterates the same figure, but at a diminished scale and with a different orientation, introducing a subtle disjunction: looking out, yet elsewhere. This doubling produces a spatial and psychological tension—between image and replica, history and display, reverence and artifice. Faust amplifies these shifts through proportion and staging, positioning Founding Father as both an anchor and a disturbance within the exhibition. The work oscillates between the theatrical and the uncanny, where the founding image of power becomes at once imposing and fragile, familiar and estranged.

Wax, another durational work, first began in 1981 and continues through 2026. It currently consists of 2,700 images across 395 locations, and is presented at Public Trust as a prototype or model of a larger version, which will be twenty 96 x 60 in (243.4 x 152.5 cm) photographs, with an overall dimension of 8 x 100 feet (2.44 x 30.5 meters). Wax sculpture occupies a distinctive place in the cultural history of representation. Life-size wax figures of notable individuals have been used since the Middle Ages, appearing in funerary rituals and later becoming popular attractions in nineteenth-century museums. Their uncannily lifelike surfaces promise proximity to figures otherwise inaccessible, even as their artificiality invites unease. Faust treats wax museums as informal public archives—sites where collective imagination, historical memory, and spectacle converge. Within this context, the presidential figure becomes a particularly concentrated symbol of American identity, appearing variously as founder, statesman, hero, or media personality.

In Presidents, these figures—from George Washington to Donald Trump—appear frozen in staged gestures: astride horses, mid-speech, offering handshakes, or gazing into the distance. Seen together, the photographs form a collective portrait that is neither celebratory nor satirical but quietly analytical. Faust’s matter-of-fact approach allows the viewer to encounter the wax figures as cultural artifacts, revealing how political identity in the modern West often unfolds as performance—where national memory, mythology, and spectacle converge in the enduring image of the president.Daniel Faust: Presidents, 1983-2023 is presented with support from the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. A 70 page publication with contributions from curators and scholars Bige Orer, Daniel Sherer, Carlos Basualdo and Jacqueline Burckhardt, will be available at the opening at Public Trust on April 24, 2026.