{"id":1845000,"date":"2026-03-23T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1845000"},"modified":"2026-03-23T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T06:00:00","slug":"american-art-history-from-a-to-z","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1845000","title":{"rendered":"American Art History from A to Z"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tWhen Art in America<\/em> was founded in 1913, it was an important year for American art. The inaugural Armory Show introduced the European avant-garde to the United States, galvanizing generations of artists while shocking audiences with paintings like Marcel Duchamp\u2019s Nude Descending a Staircase <\/em>(1912). By 1917, Duchamp even-more-famously caused a stir with his porcelain urinal Fountain<\/em>, a work that changed art forever and helped make New York an artistic center.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAmerican art\u2019s enduring paradoxes were already on display. That iconic readymade\u2014now an emblem of the anything-goes American avant-garde\u2014had been created by a foreigner who would soon establish tighter ties with New York, blurring the boundaries of what constituted \u201cAmerican\u201d art. And the first Armory Show took place in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, a building with connections to American militarism that has since hosted everything from a homeless shelter to a Victoria\u2019s Secret fashion show. Something undeniably new and electric was developing, but it was also linked to violence and supported, in part, by weapons profiteering.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAs the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we look back on the history of American art. Anniversaries are not always celebrations\u2014they can commemorate love, loss, and everything in between\u2014but they do offer moments for reflection. Rather than presenting a single master narrative about this country of many cultures and contradictions, we invited esteemed contributors to write the history of American art through some of the terms that helped define it, arranged here from A to Z.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAt a moment when the Trump administration has proposed such absurd commemorative gestures as a national sculpture garden of selectively chosen \u201cAmerican heroes\u201d or an \u201cArc de Trump,\u201d we felt it was worth exploring other aspects of the story. (And there are many more still: We devoted \u201cH\u201d to the Hudson River School, but it could just as easily have been the Harlem Renaissance; \u201cS\u201d is for Sovereignty, but the Shakers would have worked well too.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe entries that follow aim to capture American art in its complexity, though certainly not its entirety, and range from utopian experiments and formal innovations to protests and refusals. Zadie Smith put the stakes of projects like this one best when she wrote that \u201chistorical nostalgia should not be the sole preserve of the right. The left can also make use of it. We can remind ourselves that a more just society is possible, if only because a few of the necessary conditions have at various moments actually existed on this earth, and in the not-so-distant past.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tTo be a student of history means to learn from the good and the bad. With American museums, public schools, and universities under unprecedented scrutiny, we continue to fight for that nuance all we can. \u2014Emily Watlington\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
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A \u2013 Abstract Expressionism<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Licensed by SCALA, Itay\/Art Resource, New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tSomehow the label Abstract Expressionism won out over \u201caction painting,\u201d \u201cAmerican-type painting,\u201d \u201cthe New York School,\u201d and who knows what others, probably because of the name\u2019s reassuring suggestion that it referred to a movement, an \u201cism\u201d like those of the early 20th century\u2014Futurism, Cubism, and so on. But it wasn\u2019t. 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, \u201cIf Picasso drips, I drip.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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. \u201cThere is no style of painting now,\u201d insisted de Kooning. But a certain fear haunted him and his contemporaries: that they might find a style and become its prisoners\u2014that their art would become academic, an easily reproducible trope. Hence the many changes of direction by de Kooning and Pollock, Philip Guston\u2019s abandonment of abstraction, Jack Tworkov\u2019s search for a clearer geometric structure, even Rothko\u2019s shift from radiant chroma to murky browns and grays. They all sought what Rothko called \u201cunknown adventures in an unknown space,\u201d and all felt more or less anxious, experiencing a \u201cperpetual irritability,\u201d as de Kooning described it, as soon as they found themselves in \u201ca situation of comfort.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThat anxiety, that discomfort, is the glory of the Abstract Expressionists, and it\u2019s what makes their art feel so distant from us today. A succeeding generation, led by the Pop artists, among others, found it more realistic\u2014more honest\u2014to 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<\/em> 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\u2019t we use a little of the Abstract Expressionists\u2019 midcentury irritability again? Wouldn\u2019t we benefit from that determination to go through the unknown in search of the new? \u2014Barry Schwabsky<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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B \u2013 Black Mountain College<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Josef Breitenbach\/Courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tBlack 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 \u201cgalaxy of talent,\u201d to cite former student Ray Johnson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tExperimentation\u2014and its close relative, interdisciplinarity\u2014were key themes of this conversation. Seemingly everyone who attended Black Mountain College shared a desire to experiment, but they didn\u2019t necessarily agree on what that meant. In particular, competing approaches to experimentation were advanced by three of the college\u2019s most notable faculty members in its heyday: artist Josef Albers, composer John Cage, and architect-designer R. Buckminster Fuller. The models they explored\u2014the 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 \u201ccomprehensive, anticipatory design science\u201d in the service of a utopia of efficiently managed resources (Fuller)\u2014were represented in projects as varied as geometric abstraction, serial and mass production, dome architecture, chance-based musical composition, and explorations of monochromatic painting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThese types of \u201ctesting\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBlack Mountain\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u2014Eva D\u00edaz<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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C \u2013 Conceptual Art<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Licensed by SCALA, Italy\/Art Resource, New York\/\u2000Museum of Modern Art\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tSol LeWitt\u2019s groundbreaking text \u201cParagraphs on Conceptual Art\u201d 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\u2019s essay \u201cSpecific Objects\u201d 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\u2019s celebrated dinners were the intellectual crucible in which this new art of ideas was being forged.<\/p>\n
\n\tSeth Siegelaub\u2019s \u201cJanuary 1969\u201d 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\u2019s dialogue with the Art-Language group in England and Australia then refined that development into an exclusive focus on language and denotation. Simultaneously, LeWitt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tAccording to this vision, Conceptual art is distinguished by the artist\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThis multimedia profusion of trenchant social critique in contemporary art is Conceptual art\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u2014Adrian Piper<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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D \u2013 Dia Art Foundation<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Bill Jacobson Studio, New York\/Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tOver 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tFlush with money from Philippa\u2019s family fortune, Dia\u2014with a name alluding to the Greek word for \u201cthrough\u201d\u2014pledged career-changing support to artists like Donald Judd (whose move to Marfa, Texas, was seeded by Dia), Walter De Maria (who, with the foundation\u2019s help, created his 1977 masterwork The Lightning Field <\/em>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\u2019s epic Dream House<\/em> (1979\u201385) sound installation in the former New York Mercantile Exchange and the Fred Sandback Museum (1981\u201396) in a former bank in Massachusetts. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter an oil glut gutted the economy in the early 1980s, however, Dia seemed to be done\u2014overleveraged 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 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\u2014as with Cameron Rowland\u2019s Depreciation<\/em> (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.\u00a0\u2014Andy Battaglia<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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E \u2013 Emancipation<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, D.C.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tWhile the term \u201cemancipation\u201d can refer to several means by which enslaved people obtained their freedom, in US history it is emphatically associated with President Abraham Lincoln\u2019s Emancipation Proclamation. In the watershed document, which took effect on January 1, 1863, Lincoln fulfilled the pledge of his earlier, preliminary proclamation that \u201call 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 \u2026\u201d The document also formally allowed previously enslaved and other Black recruits to join the Union\u2019s military, providing critical power to the Civil War effort. It was an imperfect and incomplete act\u2014slavery 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the immediate aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation, several artists tried to distill the occasion into something to see<\/em>. William Tolman Carlton relied on the drama of anticipation on the eve of freedom (Watch Meeting\u2014Dec. 31st, 1862\u2014Waiting for the Hour<\/em>, 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\u2014The Past and the Future<\/em>, 1863). Sculptors John Quincy Adams Ward (The Freedman<\/em>, 1863) and later Edmonia Lewis (Forever Free<\/em>, 1867) turned to the heroic forms of seminude male figures breaking the chains that bound them. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut 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 <\/em>(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\u2019s Weekly<\/em> 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.\u00a0\u2014Cambra Sklarz<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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F \u2013 Fluxus<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Minoru Hirata\/\u00a9Yoko Ono\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tMore 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\u2019s phrase, \u201ca pain in art\u2019s ass.\u201d But it is also fitting, analogous to the limitless possibilities for interpreting the open-ended, text-based instructions for performance known as \u201cevent scores\u201d at the heart of Fluxus activities.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen 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\u2019s 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 \u201cFluxus.\u201d By 1962, the group had begun putting on concerts and circulating publications and editions around the globe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFluxus artists also unsettled the premise of art\u2019s 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 \u201cpublic, heroic, and national in inclination,\u201d another \u201cantinationalistic in sentiment and tone and practiced by artists who are not easily used as national flag-bearers.\u201d Fluxus affiliates fell firmly in the latter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tArt historian Hannah Higgins has described how artists harnessed this transnationalism as both subject and material, charting their own forms of \u201cFluxus geography.\u201d Emblematic is Shiomi\u2019s Spatial Poem No. 1 <\/em>(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\u2019s transnational reach and a score\u2019s ability to unfold widely and endlessly, generating interpretations that reflect a diversity of perspectives and practices.\u00a0Accordingly, Spatial Poem No. 1 <\/em>offers a model for understanding essential characteristics of Fluxus\u2019s composition and outputs, \u201cpresent[ing] a fantastic panorama of human attitudes,\u201d as Shiomi put it. \u2014Alison Burstein<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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G \u2013 Gilded Age<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Licensed by Art Resource, New York\/\u2000Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe exuberant and fractious era, which was given its moniker by Mark Twain\u2019s 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAlso during this time, more Americans saw more art\u2014both imported from abroad and domestic-made\u2014than 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.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cOne good thing about 19th-century American painting,\u201d John Updike once remarked, \u201cis that there is a lot of it.\u201d\u00a0From Winslow Homer\u2019s seascapes to Thomas Eakins\u2019s portraits of neurasthenic figures undone by rapid change, to the domestic spaces of Mary Cassatt and the silky silks of John Singer Sargent\u2019s tour de force canvases, the years after the Civil War saw a rush of artmaking, with many artists steamboating to Paris, the world\u2019s cultural capital, for their education and to burnish their credentials. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhere some artists delved into the era\u2019s resplendence, others revealed how the Gilded Age was also the broken age. Robert Henri\u2019s Ashcan painters conveyed both the energy of rapid industrialization\u2014towering buildings, busy streets, crowded restaurants\u2014and its terrible costs. Jacob Riis\u2019s photographs of poor urban families were a visual rebuke to Carnegie\u2019s blast furnaces. Frederic Remington\u2019s Moonlight, Wolf<\/em> (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?\u00a0\u2014Natalie Dykstra<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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H \u2013 Hudson River School<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThere was never a \u201cschool\u201d per se in the Hudson River Valley, but the area\u2019s natural beauty\u2014and investment potential\u2014did draw a number of painters to the region just north of New York City. Foremost among them was Thomas Cole (1801\u20131848), 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 \u201can almost inseparable connection between the beautiful and the good.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tLike 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\u2019 rights in the face of increasing industrialization. Albert Bierstadt (1830\u20131902), another artist affiliated with the movement, arrived from Germany. And the list goes on. That such artists\u2019 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 \u201cravages of the axe\u201d in his series The Course of Empire <\/em>(1833\u201336), a set of five allegorical paintings that track the expansion and dissolution of an imagined empire.<\/p>\n
\n\tCole\u2019s only official student was Frederic Edwin Church (1826\u20131900), who shared his teacher\u2019s 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\u2014a sign that the Hudson River was but one point of departure for artists in landscape painting\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u2014Kelly Presutti<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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I \u2013 Institutional Critique<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Kelly & Massa Photography\/Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and Nagel Draxler Gallery, Berlin\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tInstitutional\u00a0critique\u00a0is 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\u2019s Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York in the 1980s.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tInstitutional\u00a0critique\u00a0is sometimes characterized as art about museums. However, careful consideration of the art and artists associated with institutional\u00a0critique 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\u00a0critique\u00a0rejects 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThis recognition has led some artists associated with institutional\u00a0critique to develop a\u00a0critique\u00a0of artistic practice itself and to reject studio-based art making. Similarly, these artists\u00a0reject 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\u00a0critique\u00a0can be defined less by its subject matter than by the methodology of reflexive\u00a0critique, often rooted in rigorous research and realized through critical interventions in specific sites and situations. This methodology of reflexive and site-specific\u00a0critique\u00a0has been criticized as contradictory, complicit, and readily co-opted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tArtists associated with institutional\u00a0critique\u00a0reject 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\u00a0critique\u00a0demands 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.\u00a0\u2014Andrea Fraser<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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J \u2013 Jazz<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Jim McCrary\/Redferns via Getty\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tNo articulation of American modernismcould be sustained without jazz. Born from the Black experience and long considered America\u2019s 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 \u201cimmaterial innovation\u201d of Black folks. It is immeasurable and uncontained, nonlinear and elliptical.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tLike the contagion called Jes Grew that spreads across the land in Ishmael Reed\u2019s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo<\/em>, 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\u2019s Bend.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThere is no mistaking jazz as a modernism deeply rooted in the red earth of the South\u2014the backyard of America. With its triangulation of native sons\u2014Jack Whitten, Sun Ra, and Thornton Dial\u2014the 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\u2019s films, Glenn Ligon\u2019s syncopated neons, and the quietude of Sam Gilliam\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u2014Valerie Cassel Oliver\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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K \u2013 Kitsch<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Elon Goat Token ($EGT)\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tBecause Americans had no such word in the 1920s, we took \u201ckitsch\u201d from German. Kitsch is complex, but surely designates something embarrassing. <\/em>From there the precise aesthetics fork: Is the thing sweetly sentimental? (Nineteenth-century illustrated postcards.) Does it have a distinct connotation of the \u201cersatz\u201d (another great German word for \u201cfake\u201d)?\u00a0 Or is this kitsch ugly and unrefined? In all these possible definitions, kitsch is definitively lower class.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThat much was explicit in Clement Greenberg\u2019s classic 1939 essay \u201cAvant-Garde and Kitsch.\u201d Mentioning popular tunes (\u201cTin Pan Alley\u201d), greeting card poems (\u201cEddie Guest\u201d), and battle paintings (misattributed to Russian realist painter Ilya Repin), Greenberg contrasted these popular forms with the \u201cdifficult\u201d art of avant-garde modernism (such as poetry by T.S. Eliot or Picasso\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tGreenberg 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 \u201ca superior consciousness of history\u201d and participates in the \u201cadvanced intellectual conscience\u201d of revolutionary thought in European societies. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tKitsch calls up \u201cvicarious experience and faked sensations\u201d generated by a form of capitalism that welcomes and cultivates \u201cinsensibility.\u201d This contrasts with what Greenberg was grappling with: European and American modernism at Stieglitz\u2019s Gallery 291 and An American Place. Greenberg\u2019s critique of kitsch certainly took hold, generating postmodern artists who style their works as self-aware and hence avant-garde kitsch<\/em> (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 \u201cmetal sculptors\u201d Kevin and Michelle Stone, welded to an awkwardly engineered \u201cgoat\u201d 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\u2019 priapic powers (as Bacchic demigods and satyrs) did not need fossil fuel and mechanical hydraulics to get it up.\u00a0\u2014Caroline A. Jones<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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L \u2013 Land Art<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Michael Lundgren\/Courtesy Postcommodity and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis\/\u00a9Postcommodity \t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAmerican Land art can be definedexpansively\u2014Indigenous cultures have built effigy mounds on the North American continent for millennia\u2014or narrowly, as the movement led by a small group of New York\u2013based artists beginning in the late 1960s. In the catalog for their 2012 survey \u201cEnds of the Earth: Land Art to 1974,\u201d curators Miwon Kwon and Philipp Kaiser characterized the latter approach to Land art as \u201cpermanent monumental sculptures in remote, inhospitable locations that ostensibly escape the art system and demand reverential pilgrimages to experience them in situ.\u201d Just over a decade ago, \u201cEnds of the Earth\u201d disrupted this narrative to reveal Land art as a global, media-dependent practice. Magazine spreads featured the dynamited trenches of Michael Heizer\u2019s Double Negative<\/em> (1969), the bulldozed rocks of Robert Smithson\u2019s Spiral Jetty<\/em> (1970), and the grid of steel poles comprising Walter De Maria\u2019s The<\/em>Lightning Field<\/em> (1977), as well as the concrete pipes of Nancy Holt\u2019s Sun Tunnels<\/em> (1974\u201377).<\/p>\n
\n\tThese projects evoked infrastructure\u2014jetties, culverts, the electrical grid\u2014and 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 (Din\u00e9) has said, \u201c[T]hose guys from the 1960s \u2026 tried to destroy the land and to colonize different places that they felt were theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tStarting in the late 1970s, Land art became a catalyst for many other forms. It could be ephemeral, as in Ana Mendieta\u2019s \u201cearth-body works,\u201d which realized brief siluetas<\/em> in mud and smoke. It could be urban, becoming landscape architecture in Mary Miss\u2019s Greenwood Pond: Double Site<\/em> (1989\u201396, demolished in 2025) or Holt\u2019s Dark Star Park<\/em> (1979\u201384). It could be rehabilitative, as in sites reclaimed by Harriet Feigenbaum, Robert Morris, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.<\/p>\n
\n\tMore recently, Land art has taken the form of ceremonial events rooted in social practice and community-building. Postcommodity\u2019s Repellent Fence<\/em> (2015) was a row of 26 helium balloons, 10 feet in diameter, that crossed the US\u2013Mexico border in a symbolic act of undoing or \u201csuturing\u201d this geopolitical divide. In Las Vegas, Fawn Douglas (Southern Paiute) and Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) conducted Transformance<\/em> (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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn critic Lucy Lippard\u2019s words, \u201cIf someone does something kind of marvelous and it\u2019s in the land, call it Land art.\u201d Whatever forms it takes, Land art is an expression of human relationships to the Earth we all inhabit.\u00a0\u2014Kirsten Swenson<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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M \u2013 MoMA<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Licensed by SCALA, Italy\/Art Resource, New York \/\u00a9Museum of Modern Art, New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\t\u201cYou can be a museum, or you can bemodern, but you can\u2019t be both.\u201d According to the recollection of John B. Hightower, former longtime director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this was Gertrude Stein\u2019s response when Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tFounded 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 mus\u00e9es de passage<\/em> such as the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris, display its acquisitions for five years, then deaccession them\u2014by 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut not for long. The value of the museum\u2019s 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\u2014along with the other arts, fashion, and taste aligned with it\u2014was 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<\/em> museum of modern art per se.<\/p>\n
\n\tFrom the 1930s through the 1960s, a clear sense of modern art\u2019s 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBy 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.\u00a0\u2014Terry Smith<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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N \u2013 New\u00a0Topographics<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York\/\u00a9Stephen Shore\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIt wasn\u2019t the \u201cpurple mountain majesties\u201dextolled in the lyrics to \u201cAmerica the Beautiful\u201d that inspired the mostly monochromatic images in the 1975 exhibition \u201cNew Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.\u201d Nor was it Ansel Adams\u2019s images, so widely reproduced in magazines, coffee-table books, calendars, and on posters at that time\u2014except, perhaps, as something to bounce off. In the years leading up to America\u2019s bicentennial, the artists in that sparsely visited yet influential George Eastman House show in Rochester, New York\u2014<\/em>Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.\u2014<\/em>were less than idealistic in their interests and representations of the American scene. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tCurator William Jenkins praised work in \u201cNew Topographics\u201dfor its \u201cstylistic anonymity.\u201d But of equal import was the mash-up of photographic genres that \u201cNew Topographic\u201dartists built their vision and idiosyncratic projects around. Their mix of documentary, conceptual, and evidentiary photographic approaches\u2014<\/em>all with an emphasis on formal precision and print craftsmanship\u2014<\/em>worked together to direct attention toward the uneasy realities coexisting in America\u2019s cultural landscapes rather than focusing on ennobling beauties in \u201cnatural\u201d ones.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe picture-makers\u2019 crystalline and seemingly neutral images\u2014<\/em>of industrial parks, urban\/suburban\/ex-urban developments, and prosaic streetscapes\u2014<\/em>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 \u201cNew Topographics\u201dparticipants, 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\u2019 just-the-facts pictures shared interrogative strategies with contemporary practitioners of \u201cNew Journalism\u201d 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cNew Topographics\u201d photographers were as indebted to Ed Ruscha\u2019s mockumentary tiny photo books about mundane sites as they were to Walker Evans\u2019 earlier, pointedly trenchant American views. Now, 50 years later, it\u2019s worth underscoring how profound the group\u2019s big ambitions and its modestly scaled \u201cMadein America\u201d images were in inspiring the next generations of photography\u2014from 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\u2014in the decades that soon followed.\u00a0\u2014Marvin Heiferman<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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O \u2013 Orientalism<\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn his book Orientalism<\/em> (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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe book\u2019s powerful choice of cover art was Jean-L\u00e9on G\u00e9r\u00f4me\u2019s The Snake Charmer<\/em> (1879), which forever linked the French artist\u2019s legacy to exoticized representations of the Orient and subjected him to rigorous postcolonial critique. G\u00e9r\u00f4me was prominently criticized for his mass-produced images, notably by the French writer \u00c9mile Zola. But stateside, G\u00e9r\u00f4me 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. G\u00e9r\u00f4me\u2019s 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, G\u00e9r\u00f4me\u2019s Slave Market<\/em> (1866) was used by the German far-right party Alternative f\u00fcr 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: \u201cSo that Europe Won\u2019t Become Eurabia!\u201d Slave Market<\/em>, like The Snake Charmer,<\/em> is one of the most recognizable and racist examples of the imaginary East.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cPart of the strategy of an Orientalist painter like G\u00e9r\u00f4me,\u201d Linda Nochlin wrote in a 1983 essay for this magazine, \u201cis to make his viewers forget that there was any bringing into being <\/em>at all, to convince them that works like these were simply reflections<\/em>, scientific in their exactitude, of a preexisting Oriental reality.\u201d Elsewhere, Griselda Pollock adds that \u201cif slavery and colonialism are the historical conditions for Orientalist representation, they were ideologically displaced by the mythic structures of representational Orientalism.\u201d 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.\u00a0\u2014Sara Raza<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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P \u2013 Photorealism<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Audrey Flack Foundation\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe name makes it sound so simple. \u201cPhoto\u201d: the technology that documents things more precisely than the human hand could. \u201cRealism\u201d: 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\u2014a little facile, not intellectual enough for the late, grim Clement Greenberg years.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut 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\u2019 efforts? How could such restrained, even robotic technique inspire work as distinct as Robert Bechtle\u2019s \u201961 Pontiac<\/em> (1968\u201369) and Audrey Flack\u2019s 1977 Marilyn (Vanitas)<\/em>, one a deadpan family portrait and the other a gaudy memorial to an actual death?<\/p>\n
\n\tRestrained doesn\u2019t mean unfeeling. On the surface, it\u2019s bizarre that so many of the key Photorealists (Flack, Bechtle, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Malcolm Morley) started off as Abstract Expressionists. What\u2019s 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 \u201cFuck\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tRecent 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\u2019s 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\u2019s enough to make even the iciest Photorealist portraits look sunny\u2014at least these<\/em> camera-derived images are of the people, by the people, for the people.\u00a0\u2014Jackson Arn<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Q \u2013 Quilting<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn Alice Walker\u2019s short story \u201cEverydayUse\u201d (1973), a stylish young woman with newly adopted Black Power sympathies\u2014she used to be Dee, and now goes by Wangero\u2014visits her mama back home. She wants the family\u2019s quilts, which were hand-stitched from used clothing. Growing up, she had found them hopelessly old-fashioned. Now she\u2019s 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. \u201cMaggie can\u2019t appreciate these quilts!\u201d cries Wangero. \u201cShe\u2019d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use \u2026 But they\u2019re priceless!<\/em>\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWalker\u2019s story was published in the \u201970s, when the concept of a \u201cgeneration gap\u201d 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 \u201cAbstract Design in American Quilts.\u201d 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 The<\/em>New York Times<\/em>, was floored, writing that \u201cthe anonymous quilt\u2010makers 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThat sentiment has often been repeated (without much variation) in the years since, notably in response to \u201cThe Quilts of Gee\u2019s Bend,\u201d 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 \u201cAn Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles.\u201d Co-curated by Emelie Gevalt and Austin Losada, the show aims to trace \u201can intricately woven web of environmental resources, craft and scientific knowledge, global movement, and creative collaboration.\u201d In other words, it treats quilts not as art, but as material culture, in all its many dimensions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWalker would probably have approved. When she has Wangero disdaining the idea that her sister Maggie might put the old quilts on her family\u2019s beds rather than hanging them up on the wall, Mama replies like this: \u201cGod knows I been saving \u2019em for long enough with nobody using \u2019em. I hope she will!\u201d\u00a0\u2014Glenn Adamson<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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R \u2013 Richardsonian Romanesque<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Keystone View Company\/FPG\/Archive Photos via Getty\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tVery 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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\u2014impossibly thick Diocletian arches, squat columns with palmette capitals supporting seemingly unbearable weight\u2014becomes 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\u2014combine the fantasy of form with the acknowledged heft of structure. In short, Richardson\u2019s was a medievalism devised not by princes nor clerics but by generals.\u00a0\u2014Kate Wagner<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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S \u2013 Sovereignty<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery, New York\/\u00a9Cannupa Hanska Luger\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe term \u201csovereignty\u201d 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 \u201cappropriated\u201d 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, \u201csovereignty\u201d describes the right of a tribal nation to govern itself; therefore\u2014 in theory\u2014any 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 \u201ctroubled. But it has also been rearticulated to mean altogether different things by Indigenous peoples.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tWhy might sovereignty matter in the landscape of American art and art history? \u201cVisual sovereignty,\u201d 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\u2014art forms weaponized by settler artists to render Native peoples absent, vanishing, or primitive in perpetuity, and their lands destined to be conquered. \u201cDancing sovereignty,\u201d coined by Tsimshian dancer and scholar Mique\u2019l Dangeli, describes Indigenous Northwest Coast dance practices as a method of self-determination, as intrinsically political and cultural simultaneously. As the late K\u0101naka Maoli scholar and activist Haunani- Kay Trask declared in 1985, \u201cCultural people have to become political\u201d; that is, artistic cultural production is inseparable from one\u2019s political identity. Sovereignty empowers Indigenous artists to create as an act of resistance, whether they are producing protest art like Cannupa Hanska Luger\u2019s collaborative Mirror Shield Project<\/em> 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. \u2014Isabella Shey Robbins<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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T \u2013 Trailer Parks<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Akasha Leilani Rabut\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn 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. <\/p>\n
\n\tIt was during this time that trailer parks emerged as symbols of poor white people, with the terms \u201cwhite trash\u201d and \u201ctrailer trash\u201d becoming nearly synonymous. The scorn and fear concentrated on the roughly 21 million people who currently live in trailers in the US\u2014because they are financially or physically close to, if not part of, communities of color\u2014may 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. <\/p>\n
\n\tThese \u201chalfway\u201d homes essentially realized the capitalist\u2019s dream of factory-produced housing; the modernist architect\u2019s dream of the \u201call plastics\u201d house (as virtually every surface in a mobile home is made of polymersoaked engineered woods); and everyone\u2019s 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\u2019s photorealist paintings stand as delicate exceptions, even if they, too, verge on documentary. <\/p>\n
\n\tPrefabricated 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. \u2014Nicholas and Michael Shapiro<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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U \u2013 Underground Film<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAmerica is, and apparently always has been, full of shit. Once you grasp that, you gotta search out a place to start plotting\u2014 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 \u201cunderground\u201d is an insubordinate state of mind that changes location and definition with each generation\u2014and within each generation, too. It\u2019s more like a code word for shared subversive sensibilities instead of a description of a codified community. <\/p>\n
\n\tThere are numerous undergrounds\u2014the radical press, political dissidents, sexual nonconformists, computer hackers, freejazzers, and punk rockers, to name but a few\u2014 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\u2019s de facto figurehead, declared in a 1962 manifesto, \u201cWe don\u2019t want rosy films, we want them the color of blood.\u201d His poetic threat echoes what so many other underground movements demand: immediate societal, artistic, and personal change. <\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
\n\tWhat 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\u2014and with it a fresh group of enthused malcontents will emerge to eff things up yet again. \u2014Andrew Lampert<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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V \u2013 Vietnam Protest Art<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAmerica\u2019s longest military involvement before Afghanistan inspired artists to march, organize, donate, stage happenings, and make posters\u2014but only rarely to paint. <\/p>\n
\n\tExceptions include art world outsider Judith Bernstein, whose scrawled charcoal drawing Vietnam Garden<\/em> (1967) consisted of flagsprouting penises, and two expats returned from Paris: Nancy Spero painted spare, post Ab-Ex gouaches like
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