The Bruce High Quality Foundation's history painting, Hoovervilles, references the shanty/tent towns that appeared across the states during the Great Depression in the 1930s. In the picture, two giant homeless figures burn the Twin Towers to keep warm at the end of Wall Street. 

Luis Jiménez's 1968 Tank-Spirit of Chicago depicts an army tank with "sprawled black and brown bodies fused to its surface, its cannon thrust between the legs of a female victim and its treads suggesting the teeth of a skull." This visceral sculpture is a commentary on "the confrontation between Vietnam war protesters (including the Youth International Party and Black Panthers) during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which was suppressed with great violence by the police." –Jiménez, Luis, Lippard, Lucy R., Anaya, Rudolfo A., "Man on Fire: Luis Jiménez", The Albuquerque Museum, 1994, p.11 (text appears in Luis Jiménez, Recycling the Ordinary into the Extraordinary, essay by Shifra M. Goldman, image reproduced p. 79).   

Jonathan Seliger's Caprice, 2011, is a model of an NYPD car door, both 15% smaller than the original and missing the shield part of the logo. He has said, "In a way shrinking the scale even slightly made it anti-heroic; the piece was intended to touch on strife in society, the necessity for order and the impending threat of chaos, civil unrest and the dissolution and mistrust of authority, shifting polarities, the constancy of Law."

His Disappearing Fabric, 2006, was made around the wake of Hurricane Katrina. At more than seven feet wide, the oversized dry-cleaning hanger is draped in an American flag imprinted with a note about donations made to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. The inspiration behind the piece was multi-fold: the actual damage and disintegration of garments over time and dialogue with Jasper John's works from the late 50-60s. Seliger said he "was reflecting on the fraying of any sense of common ground on what it meant and means to be an American, the differences between a post-war (i.e. WW2) or pre-Vietnam war generation and into the 2000s. At the time that I made the piece, it seemed like we were at a critical juncture, but as we can all see the situation has only continued to slide in a far more dangerous direction..." Disappearing Fabric also hints at the complexities of fraught nationalism, and the divide between activism, charitable donations, and positive change. 

John Alexander is known for his social critique of corrupt politicians and hypocritical authority figures, often masked or anthropomorphized into a hybrid animal form. Here, Alexander beautifully renders portentous crows in monotype and pastel. Kent Dorn's Fugitive is a post-apocalyptic everyman: encrusted, world-weary, and without mooring. Signs by Ed Ruscha and Gary Simmons show a rusty "Dead End" and a burning "Hollywood." Those symbols of progress, a seemingly endless road west, or the mythical path to stardom, are no longer infinite, shiny, or new.