But Tell Me, Is It a Civilized Country? A exhibition featuring the artwork of Max Guy

Multimedia artist Max Guy’s first solo exhibition, But Tell Me, Is It a Civilized Country?, runs December 3 through February 5 at the Renaissance Society in Chicago’s Hyde Park. The show explores various iterations and adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz. (The title references the Munchkins’ query about Dorothy’s native Kansas.)

“I often take literature or movies as a jumping-off point,” Guy says during a walk-through of the Arts Club preview in October. “I think I was really interested in, frankly, why Motown would produce a Black-excellence version of The Wizard of Oz, which led me to exploring the entire kind of canon of literature.” That canon consists of 14 novels by Baum and several more by other writers authorized by Baum’s publisher after his death in 1919, as well as countless adaptations in other forms, including the aforementioned movies, which Guy is editing together into a two-channel video installation.

A New York City native, Guy, 33, arrived here in 2014 to pursue an MFA at Northwestern. “I like to say that it was just my excuse to move to Chicago. For a long time, all of the emerging artists whose work I liked, they were coming out of Chicago.” His art spans such disciplines as video, sculpture, and collage, and it has been exhibited at Expo Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Malmö Art Museum in Sweden.