LOS ANGELES—Painter Eric Fischl is hoping to involve artists and participatory audiences across the country in a new vision of American identity that will move past what he calls the “national nervous breakdown’’ that followed the attacks of 9/11. His means? The “America Now+Here” exhibition, which incorporates art, music, theater, and poetry in a multimedia show to be mounted in four mobile museum units (think upscale semi-trailers) that can be set up in parking lots, fairgrounds, and public squares of all sizes.

Estimated to cost $6.4 million for a 21-month tour ($4 million of which still needs to be raised), the project is scheduled to launch in spring 2010 at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Among the 140 participants are visual artists Bruce Nauman, Catherine Opie, and Mark Bradford; playwrights Edward Albee and Jon Robin Baitz; musicians Rosanne Cash and Melissa Etheridge; and poets Suheir Hammad and Luis Rodriguez, plus California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes. “America Now+Here” is sponsored by the Ann Arbor, Michigan–based nonprofit Artrain, which organizes traveling exhibitions in the cars of a modified railroad train.

Read more at the Los Angeles Times.