American Art History from A to Z

Somehow the label Abstract Expressionism won out over “action painting,” “American-type painting,” “the New York School,” and who knows what others, probably because of the name’s reassuring suggestion that it referred to a movement, an “ism” like those of the early 20th century—Futurism, Cubism, and so on. But it wasn’t. Could, say, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman ever have fit in the same box? What united them and all their colleagues (Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the rest) was simply the feeling that, for the first time in the United States, artists were working at a center of creative energy rather than following from a distance; they no longer had to declare, as Arshile Gorky once had, “If Picasso drips, I drip.”

The so-called Abstract Expressionists were a group of people, but what they had in common was not Abstract Expressionism but a shared feeling of being at a point of possibility that they themselves were creating. “There is no style of painting now,” insisted de Kooning. But a certain fear haunted him and his contemporaries: that they might find a style and become its prisoners—that their art would become academic, an easily reproducible trope. Hence the many changes of direction by de Kooning and Pollock, Philip Guston’s abandonment of abstraction, Jack Tworkov’s search for a clearer geometric structure, even Rothko’s shift from radiant chroma to murky browns and grays. They all sought what Rothko called “unknown adventures in an unknown space,” and all felt more or less anxious, experiencing a “perpetual irritability,” as de Kooning described it, as soon as they found themselves in “a situation of comfort.”

That anxiety, that discomfort, is the glory of the Abstract Expressionists, and it’s what makes their art feel so distant from us today. A succeeding generation, led by the Pop artists, among others, found it more realistic—more honest—to situate art not in an unknown space but in the space we all inhabit most of the time, that of consumer culture and its multitude of products. Art could be a product about all the other products, and just as reproducible. That Pop idea in turn became academic; but no one got very anxious about it. Too bad. Couldn’t we use a little of the Abstract Expressionists’ midcentury irritability again? Wouldn’t we benefit from that determination to go through the unknown in search of the new? —Barry Schwabsky

Black Mountain College endures in the small but exceptional canon of profoundly unconventional places in America, sites in the cultural imagination where radical artistic innovation and vanguard social communitarianism fostered alternative visions of what creative, progressive, democratic culture can be. If the college, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, from 1933 to 1957, was a “galaxy of talent,” to cite former student Ray Johnson’s semi-ironic description, it was also characterized by both bitter dispute and moments of evanescent harmony. The rigorous artistic practices and influential teaching methods that emerged at Black Mountain made it a home for crucial transatlantic dialogue between European modernist aesthetics and pedagogy and their postwar American counterparts.

Experimentation—and its close relative, interdisciplinarity—were key themes of this conversation. Seemingly everyone who attended Black Mountain College shared a desire to experiment, but they didn’t necessarily agree on what that meant. In particular, competing approaches to experimentation were advanced by three of the college’s most notable faculty members in its heyday: artist Josef Albers, composer John Cage, and architect-designer R. Buckminster Fuller. The models they explored—the creation of new forms of visual experience using methods of laboratory-like study imported from the Bauhaus (Albers); the organization of aleatory processes and acceptance of indeterminacy inspired by the Dadaists (Cage); and “comprehensive, anticipatory design science” in the service of a utopia of efficiently managed resources (Fuller)—were represented in projects as varied as geometric abstraction, serial and mass production, dome architecture, chance-based musical composition, and explorations of monochromatic painting. 

These types of “testing” were fostered by other Black Mountain luminaries such as Anni Albers and Merce Cunningham, as well as students including Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Kenneth Snelson, and Cy Twombly. What drew such disparate figures together was a shared sense of countercultural ambition and an allegiance to avant-gardism, cultural improvement, and political progressiveness. 

Black Mountain’s reputation for experimentation made it a touchstone in contemporary art and culture whose influence remains vital today. As does the importance of its aspirations in the fraught history of 20th and 21st-century art. After all, artists may not experiment so intensively if they perceive their current state of affairs as satisfactory. —Eva Díaz

Sol LeWitt’s groundbreaking text “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” is generally acknowledged to have launched Conceptual art as an identifiable movement. But that text was the culmination of many crosscurrents within New York avant-garde art in the mid-to-late 1960s. It was provoked partly in counterpoint to Donald Judd’s essay “Specific Objects” and by the environment of ongoing dialectic among New York Minimalists, such as LeWitt, Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris; as well as by the transmutations of that dialectic among their colleagues, including Mel Bochner, Lee Lozano, Gene Beery, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, and Dorothea Rockburne (and myself). LeWitt’s celebrated dinners were the intellectual crucible in which this new art of ideas was being forged.

Seth Siegelaub’s “January 1969” show built on this foundation by showcasing the work of four of those colleagues whose embrace of conceptual abstraction aimed to distance them entirely from material form: Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, and Doug Huebler. In the early 1970s, Kosuth’s dialogue with the Art-Language group in England and Australia then refined that development into an exclusive focus on language and denotation. Simultaneously, LeWitt’s dialogues with California Conceptualists like John Baldessari, Charles Gaines, and David and Eleanor Antin; and with European artists such as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, and Bernd and Hilla Becher established an inclusive vision of Conceptual art that reached across the American continent and across the Atlantic.

According to this vision, Conceptual art is distinguished by the artist’s central preoccupation with the concepts and ideas that inspire and inform the work, rather than with the exploration of its materials. This preoccupation itself determines the most suitable material form in which its concepts are realized. Its physical form can and often does include language, whether written, spoken, or performed, as a particularly effective means of expressing or denoting concepts. Conceptual art in this view valorizes clarity and simplicity of form as a conduit for depth and power of conceptual content.

This view subordinates the choice of form and materials in a work to the realization of its conceptual content as clearly and effectively as possible. The priority of a work’s conceptual content over its material form necessitates greater attention to the quality and significance of that conceptual content, and greater receptivity to the variety of material forms available in which to realize it. Extending the limits of conceptual content to include political and social critique means extending the limits of material form to include the multiplicity of new genres and media that most effectively communicates that content. 

This multimedia profusion of trenchant social critique in contemporary art is Conceptual art’s legacy to Neoconceptualists of the late 1970s, such as Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Louise Lawler; and to their progeny in the 1980s, including Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Sherrie Levine, and Ross Bleckner. It continues to ramify to this day. —Adrian Piper

Over the past half century, the Dia Art Foundation has grown from a mysterious Lower Manhattan clique that moved big money into Minimalism to a venerable institution with global allure. In 1972, a German gallerist who made his way into the SoHo scene (Heiner Friedrich) traveled to Texas and convened a meeting of minds when he connected with an heiress from a family of oil-rich art collectors (Philippa de Menil) and an art historian who had been mentored by Philippa’s illustrious mother, Dominique de Menil (Helen Winkler Fosdick). Together, the three principals founded Dia in 1974 and went to work to foster a kind of American artistic patronage in the mold of the Medicis in 15th-century Florence.

Flush with money from Philippa’s family fortune, Dia—with a name alluding to the Greek word for “through”—pledged career-changing support to artists like Donald Judd (whose move to Marfa, Texas, was seeded by Dia), Walter De Maria (who, with the foundation’s help, created his 1977 masterwork The Lightning Field in the desert of New Mexico), and Dan Flavin (who converted a former firehouse and church acquired by Dia to a sanctuary for his fluorescent-light sculptures in 1983). These were places for pilgrimage, to be visited and revisited like European chapels adorned with frescoes by Giotto or stained glass by Henri Matisse. Other artists realized works of similarly grand scale, like La Monte Young’s epic Dream House (1979–85) sound installation in the former New York Mercantile Exchange and the Fred Sandback Museum (1981–96) in a former bank in Massachusetts.  

After an oil glut gutted the economy in the early 1980s, however, Dia seemed to be done—overleveraged to a degree that left artists high and dry. But following a leadership change and a period of financial restabilization, Dia firmed up its commitments to maintaining certain early projects and, in 1987, opened the four-story Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea, at the time a postindustrial neighborhood still several years away from becoming New York’s premier gallery district. Then, in 2003, the foundation opened an even bigger space befitting the artists it supported: Dia Beacon, in a massive former factory in upstate New York.

In its destination museum and its recently renovated exhibition space in Chelsea, Dia has devoted the past decade or so to expanding its purview to women and artists of color who worked alongside the white male artists the foundation originally funded but who had initially been overlooked. Recent acquisitions and long-term exhibitions have featured Ann Truitt, Sam Gilliam, Charlotte Posenenske, Senga Nengudi, and Steve McQueen. The foundation is also offering that same support to a new generation working in Minimalist-ish modes toward decidedly different ends—as with Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018), a one-acre piece of land on a former plantation site in South Carolina that the artist purchased and loaned to Dia to steward into the future. —Andy Battaglia

While the term “emancipation” can refer to several means by which enslaved people obtained their freedom, in US history it is emphatically associated with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In the watershed document, which took effect on January 1, 1863, Lincoln fulfilled the pledge of his earlier, preliminary proclamation that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free …” The document also formally allowed previously enslaved and other Black recruits to join the Union’s military, providing critical power to the Civil War effort. It was an imperfect and incomplete act—slavery would not be abolished in the United States until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. But the Emancipation Proclamation nevertheless shifted perceptions about the ongoing war and brought immense joy to countless communities as 1862 became 1863.

In the immediate aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation, several artists tried to distill the occasion into something to see. William Tolman Carlton relied on the drama of anticipation on the eve of freedom (Watch Meeting—Dec. 31st, 1862—Waiting for the Hour, 1863). Thomas Nast idealized life after emancipation with a narrative of slavery that ends with a scene of a liberated family in a state of domestic bliss (The Emancipation of the Negroes, January 1863—The Past and the Future, 1863). Sculptors John Quincy Adams Ward (The Freedman, 1863) and later Edmonia Lewis (Forever Free, 1867) turned to the heroic forms of seminude male figures breaking the chains that bound them.  

But perhaps it is a scene by Civil War artist Alfred Waud that best suggests some of the harsher realities of emancipation. His work Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Proclamation (1863) avoids the tendency to aggrandize the occasion in favor of a grittier depiction. Translated from photograph to drawing to magazine illustration, this view shows a shabby mule-drawn wagon overflowing with newly free people who have traveled to Union territory for the promise of liberation. The picture prompts the question: After emancipation, what comes next? Published in Harper’s Weekly on January 31, 1863, along with commentary by Waud, the illustration exemplifies the way audiences saw and consumed so much news of the Civil War. Symbolically, it represents the long, difficult path to emancipation, and foreshadows the ongoing journey toward true freedom that would stretch well beyond the Civil War and into the present. —Cambra Sklarz

More than 60 years after its emergence,there is no consensus on how to define Fluxus; participants and commentators continue to propose an ever-growing array of accounts. This multiplicity can be disorienting, evidence that Fluxus is, to borrow artist Ben Vautier’s phrase, “a pain in art’s ass.” But it is also fitting, analogous to the limitless possibilities for interpreting the open-ended, text-based instructions for performance known as “event scores” at the heart of Fluxus activities.

When describing Fluxus in the context of American art history, questions of who took part and where are essential. Fluxus grew out of experiments in the late 1950s and early 1960s that artists from around the world staged to stretch art’s boundaries, disciplines, and forms. Key figures in this proto-Fluxus period include Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, and La Monte Young. As many of these artists traveled and worked between cities, hubs of experimentation emerged in parallel in the US, Germany, and Japan. After learning about practices by these and other like-minded artists, Lithuanian-American graphic designer George Maciunas, then living in New York, conceived a way to present their work together within a collective framework, which he coined “Fluxus.” By 1962, the group had begun putting on concerts and circulating publications and editions around the globe. 

Fluxus artists also unsettled the premise of art’s national affiliations. According to Fluxus associate Ken Friedman, these artists responded to a midcentury cultural landscape that was separated into two modes of art making: one “public, heroic, and national in inclination,” another “antinationalistic in sentiment and tone and practiced by artists who are not easily used as national flag-bearers.” Fluxus affiliates fell firmly in the latter. 

Art historian Hannah Higgins has described how artists harnessed this transnationalism as both subject and material, charting their own forms of “Fluxus geography.” Emblematic is Shiomi’s Spatial Poem No. 1 (1965), one of a series of scores mailed to an international list of Fluxus contacts. On a map, Shiomi pinned flags with descriptions of how the recipients realized the score at their respective sites of enactment. The work makes concrete the relationship between Fluxus’s transnational reach and a score’s ability to unfold widely and endlessly, generating interpretations that reflect a diversity of perspectives and practices. Accordingly, Spatial Poem No. 1 offers a model for understanding essential characteristics of Fluxus’s composition and outputs, “present[ing] a fantastic panorama of human attitudes,” as Shiomi put it. —Alison Burstein

The exuberant and fractious era, which was given its moniker by Mark Twain’s 1873 eponymous novel, is often characterized by the glittery facades of growing wealth and privilege. But facades they were, obscuring vast divides between the haves and have-nots, business and labor, urban and rural populations. Whizzy technological innovations and a rush of immigrants powered social and economic changes, even as Jim Crow laws codified racist segregation and violence.  

Also during this time, more Americans saw more art—both imported from abroad and domestic-made—than at any time since the founding of the Republic. The reasons were many: Robber-baron collectors, like Henry Clay Frick and J.P. Morgan, had boundless fortunes to spend; large, comprehensive art museums opened their doors for the first time; a rising middle class,eager for leisure and art education, spurred an increase in travel, art schools, clubs, and galleries. To be cosmopolitan in a country rapidly rising in economic and political power required a fluency in fine art; and as Darwinism displaced old-time religion, beauty itself came to be a spiritual pursuit and balm.

“One good thing about 19th-century American painting,” John Updike once remarked, “is that there is a lot of it.” From Winslow Homer’s seascapes to Thomas Eakins’s portraits of neurasthenic figures undone by rapid change, to the domestic spaces of Mary Cassatt and the silky silks of John Singer Sargent’s tour de force canvases, the years after the Civil War saw a rush of artmaking, with many artists steamboating to Paris, the world’s cultural capital, for their education and to burnish their credentials.  

Where some artists delved into the era’s resplendence, others revealed how the Gilded Age was also the broken age. Robert Henri’s Ashcan painters conveyed both the energy of rapid industrialization—towering buildings, busy streets, crowded restaurants—and its terrible costs. Jacob Riis’s photographs of poor urban families were a visual rebuke to Carnegie’s blast furnaces. Frederic Remington’s Moonlight, Wolf (ca. 1909) pictures a predator standing in a barren landscape, alone, its eyes glistening with the light of the night stars, which seems to pose a question near the end of an era: What, then, has progress wrought? —Natalie Dykstra

There was never a “school” per se in the Hudson River Valley, but the area’s natural beauty—and investment potential—did draw a number of painters to the region just north of New York City. Foremost among them was Thomas Cole (1801–1848), who created a defining vision for the American landscape based in sweeping, elevated perspectives. Cole relished the wide-open possibilities of the valley views, endowing the landscape with a moral quality. For Cole, there was “an almost inseparable connection between the beautiful and the good.” 

Like many things that are great about America, the Hudson River School was largely the product of immigrants. Cole himself came from England, where he had fought for workers’ rights in the face of increasing industrialization. Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), another artist affiliated with the movement, arrived from Germany. And the list goes on. That such artists’ perspectives eventually became associated with the expansionist policies of Manifest Destiny is one of the cruel ironies of American history. Cole warned against such greed and the increasing “ravages of the axe” in his series The Course of Empire (1833–36), a set of five allegorical paintings that track the expansion and dissolution of an imagined empire.

Cole’s only official student was Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), who shared his teacher’s affinity for soaring vistas. After making his name with a grand tableau of Niagara Falls in 1857, Church traveled extensively in South America in search of ever-more striking sights—a sign that the Hudson River was but one point of departure for artists in landscape painting’s thrall. Church did, however, return to the Hudson and transformed a 250-acre property into a sublime estate known as Olana, which can be visited today. It’s a testament to the legacy of the Hudson River School, which established America as a land of unending possibility grown out of its vast and sprawling environs. —Kelly Presutti

Institutional critique is an approach to art making that emerged with conceptual art in the late 1960s. While the term itself was first used in the 1970s, it was, arguably, developed and put into wider circulation by artists and critics affiliated with the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York in the 1980s. 

Institutional critique is sometimes characterized as art about museums. However, careful consideration of the art and artists associated with institutional critique reveals a broader scope: art that critically engages the institution, or field, of art as a whole, including the role of art and artists within it. In this sense, institutional critique rejects the historical avant-garde opposition between radical artist and bourgeois art institution, recognizing that artists themselves are a fundamental, constitutive, and often conservative institution in the field of art. 

This recognition has led some artists associated with institutional critique to develop a critique of artistic practice itself and to reject studio-based art making. Similarly, these artists reject the avant-garde aim to dismantle or escape institutions of art, recognizing that avant-garde art itself is defined by those institutions whose boundaries it endeavors to escape. With this understanding, institutional critique can be defined less by its subject matter than by the methodology of reflexive critique, often rooted in rigorous research and realized through critical interventions in specific sites and situations. This methodology of reflexive and site-specific critique has been criticized as contradictory, complicit, and readily co-opted. 

Artists associated with institutional critique reject such criticism as figments of a mythology of artistic radicality that is itself deeply institutionalized. They recognize the failure of avant-garde art to realize its radical aims and examine the contradictory character of the anti-institutional ideology espoused by so many artists, who spend their lives pursuing institutional recognition. Institutional critique demands that artists reflect honestly on their own investments in the field of art and the compromises and capitulation required to function within it. It challenges artists to recognize those investments and the various interests they serve. It calls on artists to consider what kind of institutions they deal with, and what kind of institutions they are striving to function within. —Andrea Fraser

No articulation of American modernismcould be sustained without jazz. Born from the Black experience and long considered America’s original art form, jazz continues to inform the musical styles that came before and after, as all are subsumed within its ever-expanding orb. From spirituals and blues to funk and soul, jazz absorbs, digests, and regurgitates modalities of rhythm, bending notes that explode with jubilation, meander with deep curiosity, or slump in deep sorrow. Jazz is the articulation of what Arthur Jafa has described as the “immaterial innovation” of Black folks. It is immeasurable and uncontained, nonlinear and elliptical. 

Like the contagion called Jes Grew that spreads across the land in Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, jazz is a bewitching virus that overtakes not only bodies but whole cultures, infusing them with distinct and unmistakable inferences of the Black experience. Jazz is America coming to terms with itself, loving the totality of its original sin. Jazz achieves a catharsis that allows it to break free from the constraints of European convention, to explore the edges of line and form. When jazz materializes in the paintings of Stuart Davis, Archibald Motley, Jackson Pollock, and Romare Bearden, viewers feel the echoes of sound, the call-and-response of musicians who disentangle notes from a crowded page, assigning each a signature. Ensembles fracture and then piece together melodies like the quilts of Gee’s Bend. 

There is no mistaking jazz as a modernism deeply rooted in the red earth of the South—the backyard of America. With its triangulation of native sons—Jack Whitten, Sun Ra, and Thornton Dial—the state of Alabama alone holds one of the many keys that unlock a power that is stronger than itself: ancestral, ancient, and ever-evolving. Jazz lives in the surrealism of Ted Joans, who extolls it as a new religion. More contemporarily, jazz embedded in the work of artists like Jennie C. Jones, Torkwase Dyson, and Jason Moran serves to echo spatial notation in space or on the page. Jazz resonates in the frenetic visual phrasing of Arthur Jafa’s films, Glenn Ligon’s syncopated neons, and the quietude of Sam Gilliam’s drapes. And sound and image are inextricably linked in the photography of Roy DeCarava, who early on saw jazz echoing the past and trumpeting the future. —Valerie Cassel Oliver 

Because Americans had no such word in the 1920s, we took “kitsch” from German. Kitsch is complex, but surely designates something embarrassing. From there the precise aesthetics fork: Is the thing sweetly sentimental? (Nineteenth-century illustrated postcards.) Does it have a distinct connotation of the “ersatz” (another great German word for “fake”)?  Or is this kitsch ugly and unrefined? In all these possible definitions, kitsch is definitively lower class. 

That much was explicit in Clement Greenberg’s classic 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Mentioning popular tunes (“Tin Pan Alley”), greeting card poems (“Eddie Guest”), and battle paintings (misattributed to Russian realist painter Ilya Repin), Greenberg contrasted these popular forms with the “difficult” art of avant-garde modernism (such as poetry by T.S. Eliot or Picasso’s Cubism). Although found in the same temporal frame, the kitsch objects come from an earlier time: They are the degraded and cheapened echoes of abandoned high art. 

Greenberg was then a Trotskyite, putting his finger on what Walter Benjamin was also analyzing as the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. A melody might begin in courtly European society, but once you get the player piano and the wax cylinder, the centuries-old derivative music is no longer innovative. Theodor Adorno would join this criticism: Kitsch objects lose any capacity to push culture forward, aesthetically speaking. In contrast, avant-garde art (per Greenberg) both has “a superior consciousness of history” and participates in the “advanced intellectual conscience” of revolutionary thought in European societies.  

Kitsch calls up “vicarious experience and faked sensations” generated by a form of capitalism that welcomes and cultivates “insensibility.” This contrasts with what Greenberg was grappling with: European and American modernism at Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 and An American Place. Greenberg’s critique of kitsch certainly took hold, generating postmodern artists who style their works as self-aware and hence avant-garde kitsch (e.g., Jeff Koons), as well as NFT producers who parade their defiance of an artworld elite in offering collectible tokens (e.g., Beeple). The statue of Elon Musk commissioned for the crypto coin Elon Goat Token ($EGT) is a veritable chimera of kitsch: a decently representational portrait bust by self-described “metal sculptors” Kevin and Michelle Stone, welded to an awkwardly engineered “goat” body in turn attached to a rocket, all of it bolted to a semi-trailer. More could be said about this unique Greatest Of All Time sculpture, but it is enough to observe that we are no longer receiving degraded echoes of the kind of art objects Greenberg mourned. We are in total ignorance of art, innocent of centuries of artists and collectors who jointly cherished a well-worked-out Greek morphology of human-animal meldings, where pagan man-goats’ priapic powers (as Bacchic demigods and satyrs) did not need fossil fuel and mechanical hydraulics to get it up. —Caroline A. Jones

American Land art can be definedexpansively—Indigenous cultures have built effigy mounds on the North American continent for millennia—or narrowly, as the movement led by a small group of New York–based artists beginning in the late 1960s. In the catalog for their 2012 survey “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974,” curators Miwon Kwon and Philipp Kaiser characterized the latter approach to Land art as “permanent monumental sculptures in remote, inhospitable locations that ostensibly escape the art system and demand reverential pilgrimages to experience them in situ.” Just over a decade ago, “Ends of the Earth” disrupted this narrative to reveal Land art as a global, media-dependent practice. Magazine spreads featured the dynamited trenches of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), the bulldozed rocks of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), and the grid of steel poles comprising Walter De Maria’s TheLightning Field (1977), as well as the concrete pipes of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1974–77).

These projects evoked infrastructure—jetties, culverts, the electrical grid—and were made with earth-moving equipment, explosives, and industrial materials. But in recent years, this era of Land art has come into focus as colonialist and ecocidal. As artist Raven Chacon (Diné) has said, “[T]hose guys from the 1960s … tried to destroy the land and to colonize different places that they felt were theirs.”

Starting in the late 1970s, Land art became a catalyst for many other forms. It could be ephemeral, as in Ana Mendieta’s “earth-body works,” which realized brief siluetas in mud and smoke. It could be urban, becoming landscape architecture in Mary Miss’s Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989–96, demolished in 2025) or Holt’s Dark Star Park (1979–84). It could be rehabilitative, as in sites reclaimed by Harriet Feigenbaum, Robert Morris, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

More recently, Land art has taken the form of ceremonial events rooted in social practice and community-building. Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence (2015) was a row of 26 helium balloons, 10 feet in diameter, that crossed the US–Mexico border in a symbolic act of undoing or “suturing” this geopolitical divide. In Las Vegas, Fawn Douglas (Southern Paiute) and Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) conducted Transformance (2021), a procession to a long-closed public park that was ceremonially reopened in an act of rematriation, symbolically returning land to Indigenous women for care and embodied connection to the Earth. 

In critic Lucy Lippard’s words, “If someone does something kind of marvelous and it’s in the land, call it Land art.” Whatever forms it takes, Land art is an expression of human relationships to the Earth we all inhabit. —Kirsten Swenson

“You can be a museum, or you can bemodern, but you can’t be both.” According to the recollection of John B. Hightower, former longtime director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this was Gertrude Stein’s response when Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s first director, outlined plans for the new institution. Stein identified what turned out to be an enabling contradiction in the early years, one that has come to unsettle the institution in recent decades.

Founded in 1929 by donors Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, MoMA received official endorsement by the City of New York on the condition that it focus on public education and, like European musées de passage such as the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris, display its acquisitions for five years, then deaccession them—by sale, gift, or exchange, or by transferring them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By obliging itself to prioritize remaining modern, it functioned much like contemporary art spaces do today. 

But not for long. The value of the museum’s holdings grew so quickly and became so identified with the institution in the minds of visitors, that, in 1953, these arrangements ceased. Perhaps the major factor, however, was that MoMA became the place where modern art—along with the other arts, fashion, and taste aligned with it—was explored in the most depth, articulated by its practitioners and interpreters, and defined for increasingly interested publics. It became not only the leading museum of its kind in the world, but the museum of modern art per se.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, a clear sense of modern art’s historic mission was projected. Major shows traced the evolution of key art movements, notably abstract art, Cubism, and Surrealism; of modern masters, above all Picasso; of modern architecture, especially the International Style; and of design, including Machine Design. American painting in its triumphal phase was enthusiastically embraced. Compelling exhibitions, major publications, well-wrought arguments, aided not least by the coherence of its in-house design, all had a major impact on visitors, readers, artists, and other similar institutions worldwide. In a phrase, modern art became MoMA modernism.  

By the 1970s, however, the overlooking of artists of diverse genders, races, and nationalities had come to seem like what it was: systemic exclusion. Protests erupted, and alternative spaces, such as the New Museum, were founded to fill these gaps. Meanwhile, MoMA focused on growing its collections and expanding its footprint, with major renovations in 1984, 2004, and 2019. Outsourcing the most happening art to its PS1 location in Queens, the Midtown museum remained committed to the idea that contemporary art is, fundamentally, an updating of the complex dynamics of modern art, so MoMA needed to show only the recent and current art that fit this bill. The seemingly endless variety of mediums within which contemporary artists work, the multiplicitous character of art being made now all over the world, and its immersion in contemporary concerns rather than modernizing narratives, tells a different story. Meanwhile, MoMA remains a museum of modern art, as its medium-specific departments, and curatorial structure, attests. —Terry Smith

It wasn’t the “purple mountain majesties”extolled in the lyrics to “America the Beautiful” that inspired the mostly monochromatic images in the 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Nor was it Ansel Adams’s images, so widely reproduced in magazines,
coffee-table books, calendars, and on posters at that time—except, perhaps, as something to bounce off. In the years leading up to America’s bicentennial, the artists in that sparsely visited yet influential George Eastman House show in Rochester, New York—Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.—were less than idealistic in their interests and representations of the American scene.  

Curator William Jenkins praised work in “New Topographics”for its “stylistic anonymity.” But of equal import was the mash-up of photographic genres that “New Topographic”artists built their vision and idiosyncratic projects around. Their mix of documentary, conceptual, and evidentiary photographic approaches—all with an emphasis on formal precision and print craftsmanship—worked together to direct attention toward the uneasy realities coexisting in America’s cultural landscapes rather than focusing on ennobling beauties in “natural” ones.

The picture-makers’ crystalline and seemingly neutral images—of industrial parks, urban/suburban/ex-urban developments, and prosaic streetscapes—harkened back to century-old photographic surveys of the American West conducted by Carlton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and Eadweard Muybridge. The sensibility and terrain covered by “New Topographics”participants, however, were equally shaped by modern national challenges such as ending the war in Vietnam and mounting responses to contain rampant development and environmental disasters. In a sense, New Topographers’ just-the-facts pictures shared interrogative strategies with contemporary practitioners of “New Journalism” such as Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, all of them exploring the literal and figurative lay of the land through decidedly unsentimental critical lenses.  

“New Topographics” photographers were as indebted to Ed Ruscha’s mockumentary tiny photo books about mundane sites as they were to Walker Evans’ earlier, pointedly trenchant American views. Now, 50 years later, it’s worth underscoring how profound the group’s big ambitions and its modestly scaled “Madein America” images were in inspiring the next generations of photography—from the so-called Instagram aesthetic to the more spectacularly scaled, colorized, priced, and globally marketed works of European artists like Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff—in the decades that soon followed. —Marvin Heiferman

In his book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said defined the titular term as an institutionalized program of assumed Western superiority over the East. He describes the roots of these assumptions as stemming from three main areas: European colonization; the East as the ultimate source of Western civilization and language; and problematic representations of the East in Western imagination. 

The book’s powerful choice of cover art was Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer (1879), which forever linked the French artist’s legacy to exoticized representations of the Orient and subjected him to rigorous postcolonial critique. Gérôme was prominently criticized for his mass-produced images, notably by the French writer Émile Zola. But stateside, Gérôme was well received by several notable American art patrons, including Sterling and Francine Clark, the founders of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. His work was also acquired by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others. Gérôme’s racialized images soon became something of a blueprint for mid-20th to early 21st-century films, news, games, memes, and other forms of mass media. In 2019, Gérôme’s Slave Market (1866) was used by the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) for anti-immigrant and Islamophobic posters. The painting features an imaginary slave market and centers on a nude, pale-skinned enslaved woman undergoing an assessment by a group of men, one of whom is crudely examining her teeth with his finger. Atop this image, AfD ran the slogan: “So that Europe Won’t Become Eurabia!” Slave Market, like The Snake Charmer, is one of the most recognizable and racist examples of the imaginary East.

“Part of the strategy of an Orientalist painter like Gérôme,” Linda Nochlin wrote in a 1983 essay for this magazine, “is to make his viewers forget that there was any bringing into being at all, to convince them that works like these were simply reflections, scientific in their exactitude, of a preexisting Oriental reality.” Elsewhere, Griselda Pollock adds that “if slavery and colonialism are the historical conditions for Orientalist representation, they were ideologically displaced by the mythic structures of representational Orientalism.” Which means that, in order to dismantle the field of Orientalism for the 21st century, one must disrupt the supremacist optical system atop of which it sits. —Sara Raza

The name makes it sound so simple. “Photo”: the technology that documents things more precisely than the human hand could. “Realism”: the style that avoids overt stylishness and aims straight at the material world. Together: a kind of image that starts in a camera and then gets converted, without much flourish, into a painting. No surprise, then, that when the first Photorealists emerged in the late 1960s, too many critics wrote them off as lightweights—a little facile, not intellectual enough for the late, grim Clement Greenberg years.

But if these paintings were as straightforward as the early reviews made them seem, what about glare? What about blur, lens distortion, and other camera effects that the Photorealists went to absurd lengths to copy, resulting in art that was paradoxically realer than human vision but not always very realistic? How to explain the sublime weirdness of the best Photorealists’ efforts? How could such restrained, even robotic technique inspire work as distinct as Robert Bechtle’s ’61 Pontiac (1968–69) and Audrey Flack’s 1977 Marilyn (Vanitas), one a deadpan family portrait and the other a gaudy memorial to an actual death?

Restrained doesn’t mean unfeeling. On the surface, it’s bizarre that so many of the key Photorealists (Flack, Bechtle, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Malcolm Morley) started off as Abstract Expressionists. What’s hard to deny, though, is how expressive their art remained, even after they renounced the total freedom of the brush. In his huge grisaille portraits, Close hints at some small, sharp emotion, maybe loneliness, and lets it spread through the images like a whisper through a cathedral. For her “Fuck” series (begun in 1969), Betty Tompkins used an airbrush to convert vintage porn stills into gigantic paintings, and the textureless cool of her style still brings out the heat of her subject. The less she does with paint, the more you feel.

Recent exhibitions have argued for Photorealism as a kind of identity politics, deeply inscribed in the work of Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, and others celebrating the humanity of the disenfranchised. I wonder if there’s a further reason why this decades-old movement seems so lively. In the 2020s, the vast majority of images are taken by cameras, sent off to other machines, and at no point shared with human beings. It’s enough to make even the iciest Photorealist portraits look sunny—at least these camera-derived images are of the people, by the people, for the people. —Jackson Arn

In Alice Walker’s short story “EverydayUse” (1973), a stylish young woman with newly adopted Black Power sympathies—she used to be Dee, and now goes by Wangero—visits her mama back home. She wants the family’s quilts, which were hand-stitched from used clothing. Growing up, she had found them hopelessly old-fashioned. Now she’s able to see their beauty, the way they embody her heritage. Mama has to disappoint her, though. The heirlooms are already promised to her sister. “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” cries Wangero. “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use … But they’re priceless!” 

Walker’s story was published in the ’70s, when the concept of a “generation gap” was very much in the air. But it was also topical in another way. Two years earlier, the Whitney Museum of American Art, needing an exhibition on short notice, had a surprise blockbuster with “Abstract Design in American Quilts.” The show took the art world by storm. Here were textiles with the compositional intelligence of hard-edge abstraction. Even Hilton Kramer, the famously conservative critic at TheNew York Times, was floored, writing that “the anonymous quilt‐makers of the American provinces created a remarkable succession of visual masterpieces that anticipated many of the forms that were later prized for their originality and courage.”

That sentiment has often been repeated (without much variation) in the years since, notably in response to “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” which also came to the Whitney, in 2002. Yet the comparison to painting is doubly problematic: It implies that quilts are somehow elevated by the comparison, while also sweeping aside the real conditions and motivations of their production. Recently, the American Folk Art Museum reopened its newly renovated building with “An Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles.” Co-curated by Emelie Gevalt and Austin Losada, the show aims to trace “an intricately woven web of environmental resources, craft and scientific knowledge, global movement, and creative collaboration.” In other words, it treats quilts not as art, but as material culture, in all its many dimensions. 

Walker would probably have approved. When she has Wangero disdaining the idea that her sister Maggie might put the old quilts on her family’s beds rather than hanging them up on the wall, Mama replies like this: “God knows I been saving ’em for long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” —Glenn Adamson

Very few architectural styles are named for a single practitioner, but Richardsonian Romanesque is just as much Henry Hobson Richardson as it is Romanesque. While the rest of his fellow 19th-century eclecticists, especially those in Europe, were obsessed with combining various spindly Gothic articulations ranging in origin from France to Byzantium, Richardson narrowly avoided this fate in pursuit of something decidedly rawer and less defined. Still, these European influences can be seen in his early work, such as the Trinity Church in Boston, whose ground floor and mezzanine long for Venice, while its third story is an almost parodic little Neuschwanstein. But after thankfully abandoning this juvenile Ruskinian tendency to hodgepodge, Richardson found a new vision for eclectic architecture by dipping into an earlier architectural canon, substituting the towering light of the High Gothic for the brooding shadow of the Romanesque. 

The result is a style that is distinctly American in its amalgamation of European precedents. At a time when, during the Gilded Age, the United States was being settled rapidly, Richardson and his followers created work of decisive solidity, fanatically stereotomic and heavy. This chunkiness and the sense of (immigrant) labor involved is a large part of what makes Richardsonian still so visually compelling. Over the decades, it expanded from east to west, beginning in Boston in the 1970s and appearing in Osage County, Oklahoma, during the early 20th-century oil boom. Walls of rough-hewn, artificially rusticated stone are punctured, sometimes seemingly by knifepoint, with large single-pane windows newly made possible by 19th-century manufacturing. The stone, often brownstone or granite, and the overscale of the stonework itself, is the defining characteristic of the Richardsonian look. Roofs range from the gingerbread to the crenellated. The ornament—impossibly thick Diocletian arches, squat columns with palmette capitals supporting seemingly unbearable weight—becomes an integral part of the massing itself. Under such a heavy hand, the worst churches in the style look like fortresses, its worse houses like firmaments. But at its best, it can do what no other style could, at least prior to Brutalism—combine the fantasy of form with the acknowledged heft of structure. In short, Richardson’s was a medievalism devised not by princes nor clerics but by generals. —Kate Wagner

The term “sovereignty” has been defined several ways. As a Western legal term, it refers to the right to govern oneself or others. But the use and value of this word is more complex within Native communities and in Native Studies, where the term has been “appropriated” to assert tribal nationhood and to convey the distinct political status of Native people in settler colonial countries like the US and Canada. In an Indigenous political context, “sovereignty” describes the right of a tribal nation to govern itself; therefore— in theory—any tribal nation is a sovereign nation. An English term like sovereignty can be limiting. But it can also be useful for understanding the inherent entanglement of political, cultural, and spiritual practices of Indigenous communities. This is especially pertinent given that Indigenous knowledge, art forms, and spirituality have historically been surveilled and made illegal by the settler state. Lenape scholar Joanne Barker says sovereignty is “troubled. But it has also been rearticulated to mean altogether different things by Indigenous peoples.”

Why might sovereignty matter in the landscape of American art and art history? “Visual sovereignty,” according to both Tuscarora art historian Jolene Rickard and scholar Michelle Raheja, describes how Native artists reclaim and dictate their representation using photography and film—art forms weaponized by settler artists to render Native peoples absent, vanishing, or primitive in perpetuity, and their lands destined to be conquered. “Dancing sovereignty,” coined by Tsimshian dancer and scholar Mique’l Dangeli, describes Indigenous Northwest Coast dance practices as a method of self-determination, as intrinsically political and cultural simultaneously. As the late Kānaka Maoli scholar and activist Haunani- Kay Trask declared in 1985, “Cultural people have to become political”; that is, artistic cultural production is inseparable from one’s political identity. Sovereignty empowers Indigenous artists to create as an act of resistance, whether they are producing protest art like Cannupa Hanska Luger’s collaborative Mirror Shield Project or reclaiming once suppressed customary practices like totem pole carving on the Pacific Northwest Coast. This argument is particularly potent in moments of political turmoil. When every decision one makes, including creating and showing art, is political, sovereignty on Indigenous land becomes all the more important, as all art made in America is done on Indigenous land. —Isabella Shey Robbins

In the late 20th century, post-agrarian communities began to upend conventions of rural life and social status. Where and how one lived became an increasingly significant factor in calculating social stock as rural living was increasingly decoupled from the institution of farming and family standing.

It was during this time that trailer parks emerged as symbols of poor white people, with the terms “white trash” and “trailer trash” becoming nearly synonymous. The scorn and fear concentrated on the roughly 21 million people who currently live in trailers in the US—because they are financially or physically close to, if not part of, communities of color—may help explain why the trailer park is likely the least artistically represented home in this country. Clusters of vinyl- and aluminum-clad mobile homes not far from the dump, behind the strip mall, or crowded together near highway exits just beyond the right side of town are largely blank spots on the artistic map.

These “halfway” homes essentially realized the capitalist’s dream of factory-produced housing; the modernist architect’s dream of the “all plastics” house (as virtually every surface in a mobile home is made of polymersoaked engineered woods); and everyone’s dream of a low-cost dwelling. The man camps, the immigrant mobile home cooperatives, the ad hoc retirement communities, the lower-income snow bunnies, the hunting communities, the endlessly sprawling sunbelt parks with hyperactive HOAs, the farm and factory workers, and the transitional homes are hardly the subject of idyllic landscape paintings. Most representations of trailer parks are documentary photographs by the likes of Ansel Adams and Andreas Gursky, or backdrops for surreal, romanticizing films. These depictions, sometimes with the motion blur of gawking from the highway, dabble in the othering eye of early anthropology or spectacles of poverty where desperation outweighs dignity. John Salt’s photorealist paintings stand as delicate exceptions, even if they, too, verge on documentary.

Prefabricated homes are quintessentially American in a deep way, predating trailer parks and their attendant scorn. They were a key tool for rapid colonization across the globe and landed on this continent nearly two centuries before US independence was declared. While the British soldiers, sailors, fishermen, and, later, gold miners who hauled the home across the ocean soon realized theirs were missing multiple walls and retreated as winter set in, westward expansion from the prairies to Hawaii nevertheless advanced one prefab house at a time. In a cruel twist of history, today the invisibility of trailer parks is also part of the attempted erasure of a violent past and present, as the members of Native Nations living on tribal lands are the most likely group in America to live in mobile homes. —Nicholas and Michael Shapiro

America is, and apparently always has been, full of shit. Once you grasp that, you gotta search out a place to start plotting— perhaps a bunker, maybe a war room. For rabble-rousing urban dwellers, this has long involved congregating in cafes, cabarets, barrooms, bookshops, record stores, nightclubs, and movie theaters. What transpires in these charged spaces oozes out into cities, suburbs, and, with time, the whole world. The “underground” is an insubordinate state of mind that changes location and definition with each generation—and within each generation, too. It’s more like a code word for shared subversive sensibilities instead of a description of a codified community.

There are numerous undergrounds—the radical press, political dissidents, sexual nonconformists, computer hackers, freejazzers, and punk rockers, to name but a few— and they are all attitudinally interconnected on an ur-level, at least in terms of their fervent belief in disobedience. Each underground disregards and dismantles status quo normalcy with alternative ideologies, piercing satire, and, at times, even open hostility. Jonas Mekas, underground cinema’s de facto figurehead, declared in a 1962 manifesto, “We don’t want rosy films, we want them the color of blood.” His poetic threat echoes what so many other underground movements demand: immediate societal, artistic, and personal change.

It’s easy to associate the underground with bygone eras when shrouded cabals relied on mimeographs instead of Wi-Fi to spread sedition. It used to mean turning your back on whatever it is that makes people salute flags and start Christmas shopping in July. The sad truth is that vibrant undergrounds often mature into nonprofits that snail-mail end-ofyear solicitation letters explaining why their mission still matters.

What is the underground today? It hurts to say it, but MAGA folk, Turning Point USA members, and incels may be our most disruptive subterranean shit-stirrers now that New York City is run by a democratic socialist mayor and vegans have their own Starbucks drinks. Unfortunately, being a visionary can sometimes also result in behaving like a brainwashed reactionary. If you find this disheartening (as you should), rest assured that another tide change will inevitably occur—and with it a fresh group of enthused malcontents will emerge to eff things up yet again. —Andrew Lampert

America’s longest military involvement before Afghanistan inspired artists to march, organize, donate, stage happenings, and make posters—but only rarely to paint.

Exceptions include art world outsider Judith Bernstein, whose scrawled charcoal drawing Vietnam Garden (1967) consisted of flagsprouting penises, and two expats returned from Paris: Nancy Spero painted spare, post Ab-Ex gouaches like Gunship (1966) and Victims on Helicopter Blades (1968); and Peter Saul went whole hog, using electric Day-Glo colors to produce garish phantasmagorias, disinhibited yet studied. In them, amorphously outsized white American soldiers violated small, yellow, mainly female figures wearing rice hats and shaped like inflatable balloons.

Saul’s Vietnam (1966) has a puny blond Jesus extending an elongated helping hand to a helmet-wearing blob while a crucified Vietnamese woman labeled “commy” vomits on the head of another GI, his revolver shoved into the mouth of a second crucified “commy.” These martyrs were ubiquitous; Saul drafted one to use on his 1967 family Christmas card.

Sometimes likened to Guernica (albeit as tasteless as Picasso’s magnum opus is tasteful), Saul’s masterpiece was Saigon (1967), a widescreen horror show in which a peasant woman labeled “innocent virgin” is throttled and crucified alongside her parents. Her father is being sodomized by a spiky American bomb, a three-star general is represented as a monstrous disembodied tongue, and a Cokeswilling ghoul’s protoplasmic form includes a weaponized penis. Musical notes, perhaps signifying a martial band, contaminate a tropical landscape of electric blue palm trees and streams of hot pink blood.

Peace activists were not enthralled. According to the artist, his canvases freaked out the cofounder of the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, 26-year-old Joan Baez. Nor were critics enchanted. Reviewing Saul’s 1967 show at a 57th Street gallery for The New York Times, Hilton Kramer complained that the work failed to rise above “the popular clichés” and, indeed, fell beneath them, leaving the critic with “the unpleasant sensation of having glimpsed [the artist’s] own obsessions rather than our collective national psyche.”

Saul claims he lost interest in Vietnam as a subject in 1969, after Saigon was acquired by the Whitney Museum, but he didn’t stay away for long. The My Lai Massacre inspired one further painting, Pinkville (1970), in which a scowling, sunburned cephalopod GI wields three assault weapons to sodomize three bound Vietnamese peasants, crushing a fourth beneath his boot.

Saul’s garish violence means his work does not go down easy, which makes a strong contender for America’s most significant history painter since Thomas Hart Benton. The Whitney closed its doors but, at the request of its staff, exhibited Saul’s eyepopping neon Saigon in the museum lobby during May 1970’s New York Art Strike Against War, Racism, and Repression. —J. Hoberman

Is art a private luxury or a public good? During a transformative period in US history, the government paid artists—including thenunknowns Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko—a living wage to make art for the benefit of the taxpaying public. This unprecedented federal support for art sprang from a crisis: the Great Depression (1929–1939), the worst economic downturn in modern history. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered on his pledge of a New Deal for the American people through sweeping legislation and job-creating agencies like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed millions to carry out public works projects like building schools, paving roads, and planting trees.

The WPA funded Federal One—the umbrella term for the Federal Art, Theatre, Music, and Writers’ Projects—as part of New Deal efforts to provide citizens a more “abundant life,” in Roosevelt’s words, while giving jobs to out-of-work creatives. Between 1935 and 1943, the Federal Art Project (FAP) employed thousands of artists to create over 2,500 murals, 17,000 sculptures, 100,000 paintings, 240,000 prints, and millions of silkscreen posters, primarily for distribution to tax-supported buildings. While regionalist American scenes predominated, the FAP also supported children’s art, self-taught art, decorative and folk art, and modernist experiments such as Stuart Davis’s eyepopping mural Swing Landscape (1938). The FAP channeled art to underserved areas through community art centers (notably in Harlem and on Chicago’s South Side), traveling exhibitions, and public murals. It opened opportunities for women and artists of color—among them Berenice Abbott, Patrociño Barela, Eitaro Ishigaki, Augusta Savage, and Pablita Velarde— who advanced pluralistic visions of American history and identity.

Cultural democracy characterized the New Deal ambition to make art—long the purview of an educated urban elite—more widely accessible as a public good, similar to electricity or clean water. Systemic prejudices persisted, however, and the benefits of cultural democracy were unevenly distributed. Artists, taking their cue from the labor movement, formed the Artists’ Union to protest inequality, censorship, and budget cuts. At the same time, conservatives attacked Federal One as a wasteful “boondoggle,” and its funding was periodically slashed. The Federal Art Project, along with other culture initiatives, was phased out as the country shifted to a war economy. Ninety years later, it remains a model, however flawed, for the principle that art by the people, for the people, is vital to a healthy democracy. —John P. Murphy

Prussian-born painter John Gast’s allegorical American Progress (1872) shows Columbia, a white-skinned female embodiment of the United States, floating over the transforming North American landscape as she leads recent immigrants from Europe. Columbia appears to be chasing away the brown-skinned Indigenous peoples to make way for the telegraph wire, the steamboat, and the sunshine. An image of this painting was recently shared on social media by the US Department of Homeland Security with the caption, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

When it comes to the topic of American art history, the most critical question is: Who is American and who is not? Who is classified as a citizen, with equal rights and protections under the law, and who is not a citizen, and therefore vulnerable, expendable, and/or seen as a threat to the ideas of who we think we are? The ever-shifting national identity of the United States is complex, nuanced, fragmented, and often contradictory in attempting to define “Americans” as a singular people.

Xenophobia, or the fear and/or hatred of strangers and foreigners, can be rooted in such things as ignorance, social or economic insecurity, and/or a general sense of lacking control. History, as represented in the arts is too often propaganda created to define, identify, and police who belongs and who does not within the American imagination. The Department of Homeland Security’s post reveals the long-standing power of not only early American propaganda but of an entrenched and violent fear of the first peoples of this land.

One could argue that the 1776 toppling of the equestrian sculpture of King George III in New York City was the first public expression of American nationalism. The 4,000-pound solid lead statue was overturned and dissected in an iconoclastic gesture by a crowd of riled colonists after the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. This celebrated moment in Revolutionary history can also be read as a public act of violence inspired by a newborn American xenophobia: The British became the foreign enemy against whom we define ourselves. But that definition begins to narrow as we acknowledge that the crowd of passionate revolutionaries declared themselves a new and free people at the expense of others’ freedom, claiming stolen land while upholding the institution of slavery. —TK Smith

I write from Washington, D.C., where I regularly bike through the National Mall, billed by the National Park Service as “America’s Front Yard.” I often imagine installing art from notable yards across the country that I have visited: messianic signs on found sheet metal from Joe Minter’s African Village in America (Birmingham, Alabama); fantastic concrete Garden of Eden–inspired elements from S.P. Dinsmoor’s home (Lucas, Kansas); David Driskell’s bottle tree (Hyattsville, Maryland); the life-size mariachi guitarrista made of used cans and other recycled bits from everyday operations at Tio’s Tacos (Riverside, California); Bernard Langlais’s giant wooden upper body of Richard Nixon, both hands raised high while making peace signs (Cushing, Maine); Donald Judd’s furniture built especially for his garden (Marfa, Texas); and the playground equipment that my own grandfather Hipolito Hernandez salvaged, altered with a rasquache sensibility and replanted in the West Texas dirt where I first learned to look.

Yards are core to a certain kind of Americanness. In his 1991 book Artists and the American Yard: Lawn Gnomes, Pink Flamingos and Bathtub Grottos, curator Bruce W. Pepich asserts that “the decoration and maintenance of one’s yard or property is the major personal aesthetic statement most Americans make in public.” I agree—and contend that we should not limit our understanding of “yard” to a patch of grass in front of a single-family home or private property. Let us think expansively about where we make our public-facing aesthetic statements: painted window screens of urban row homes; plant-bearing apartment balconies and windowsills; rural fences laden with rabbit pelts and skillfully wrought barbed wire; graffitied commercial roll-down gates; a square of sidewalk carefully tended by an unhoused American; and so on. Very few of us are responsible for art collections of the kinds that fill museums and galleries, but no matter where we live—or how transiently—every American has a hand in some kind of yard at some point in our lives. What art fills yours? —Josh T Franco

They have been called the most important 26 seconds in the history of film: 486 gamechanging frames shot on November 22, 1963, by an ordinary citizen named Abraham Zapruder. They show the Kennedys—among the first people in history to be photographed every day, inhabiting the White House just as cameras became convenient and compact. It also helped that they were the first hot first couple.

For a time, photography and film had seemed to promise transparency, connecting citizens to power. Cameras felt hopeful— democratic, even. But they missed a lot. For example, though President Kennedy wore glasses often, he almost never let anyone take his picture with them on.

That November day, Mr. Zapruder showed up to record a motorcade with his handheld 8mm camera, hoping to catch Jack and Jackie riding in a convertible under the midday Dallas sun. In his clip, Jackie wears her pink pillbox hat and matching skirt suit, an outfit that was about to become iconic—the moment it got drenched in her husband’s brains and blood. She thought quickly and climbed onto the convertible’s trunk.

Zapruder caught it all on film, and got rich doing it—the American dream? After a bidding war, Life magazine bought the rights for $150,000 (almost $1,580,000 in today’s money). And we’re still replaying the clip for clues.

My first white-collar job was at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, working as an audiovisual archivist during the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I spent hours with reporters, academics, filmmakers, and ordinary citizens researching—and reliving—those 26 seconds. The famous citizen-cameraman rags-to-riches story had made it seem as if anyone had equal access to the truth; but in its wake, there were soon too many truths—or rather, too many controversies and conspiracies.

From the outset, most Americans distrusted the tale positing Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman. After all, other movie cameras are visible within Zapruder’s 486 frames— why did their perspectives never emerge? A figure known as the “Umbrella Man” looms ominously—why is he dressed for rain on such a sunny day?

Early viewers were quick to notice that frame 313—where the bullet hits Kennedy’s head—had been withheld by Zapruder. That frame wasn’t released till 1975. Four more frames, damaged by a Life lab tech, were withheld until 1967. By then it was too late: The American public’s faith in both the government and in images had plummeted. At the start of the 1960s, over 70 percent of Americans reported to pollsters that they trusted the federal government; by 1975, that number had fallen to just 36 percent. (The war in Vietnam didn’t help.)

Today, that figure hovers at just 17 percent: more pictures, more paranoia. We currently have more tools for doing our own research than ever before, with body cams, iPhones, and security cameras capturing the killings of George Floyd, Renee Good, Philando Castile, and so many others. We hoped cameras might capture the truth and thus unite instead of divide us. We were so naive. —Emily Watlington