Blum & Poe presents Build Therefore Your Own World, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant. The title is excerpted from a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay. Durant continues his excavation of marginalized American histories, unearthing counter storylines to the historical canon. In this exhibition he proposes a hybridized cross-pollination between the iconic nineteenth century transcendentalists like Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott, with African writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Lucy Terry Prince, along with abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. Further developing his theses from a recent three-month long public art project in Concord, MA entitled The Meeting House, Durant transforms relics from this politically loaded site of American history into a prescient presentation of culturally charged artworks. Sam Durant "Build Therefore Your Own World" will be on view until February 18, 2017 @ Blum and Poe Gallery in Los Angeles.