{"id":1959511,"date":"2026-05-28T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1959511"},"modified":"2026-05-28T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T06:00:00","slug":"the-100-best-artworks-about-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1959511","title":{"rendered":"The 100 Best Artworks About America"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tWhat, exactly, defines America? It\u2019s a question that\u2019s been asked for more than two centuries, and it\u2019s one not likely to be conclusively answered anytime soon. But, with the 250th anniversary of the nation\u2019s founding fast approaching, we took the occasion to hash out a response to that query, using art as a guide.<\/p>\n
\n\tTogether, the editors of ARTnews<\/em> and Art in America<\/em> have constructed a list of the 100 best artworks about America. This is not a list of the best artworks by<\/em> Americans, to be clear. (More here on why we didn\u2019t go that route.) Instead, it\u2019s a list of the best artworks responding to American identity and all the issues that attend it.<\/p>\n
\n\tSpanning the years preceding the founding of the United States in 1776 to our tense present, this list features paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, videos, films, and even a digital artwork that contend with a spread of issues. These works bear witness to centuries of American history and change, and they point the way forward for artists in the years to come.<\/p>\n
\n\tBelow, a look at the 100 greatest works about America, as selected by the editors of ARTnews<\/em> and Art in America<\/em>.<\/p>\n
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rafa esparza, bust: indestructible columns<\/em>, 2019<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 rafa esparza, courtesy Performance Space New York, Ballroom Marfa, and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Natalia Mantini.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn September 2019, Los Angeles\u2013based artist rafa esparza traveled to Washington, D.C. to stage \u201ca First Amendment demonstration,\u201d according to a National Park Service ranger; had it been an \u201cart event,\u201d it would have required greater scrutiny from the federal government in order to go forward. That demonstration-cum-performance, titled bust: indestructible columns<\/em>, took place on the Ellipse, a park between the White House and the National Mall, and involved esparza chiseling himself out of an Ionic column made of concrete. The work took two hours to complete; esparza, who had donned a black suit for the occasion, left it exhausted. Inspired by the White House\u2019s own Ionic columns, esparza\u2019s pillar served as an apt metaphor for the state of democracy as it stood in 2019, during the first Trump administration\u2014how easily it is to chip away at tenets and rights that were hard-won. It\u2019s a metaphor that has become even more salient during the second Trump administration. \u2014Maximil\u00edano Dur\u00f3n<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Bureau of Inverse Technology, BIT Plane,<\/em> 1997\u201398<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 Bureau of Inverse Technology. Photo: Courtesy Video Data Bank.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tYour laptop needs a thumbprint; your phone, a face. Those glasses may be watching you. And whether or not you choose to share your location, there is a machine with an eye in the sky and a body in Silicon Valley. This is the reality of surveillance, as foretold by BIT Plane<\/em>, a 1997\u201398 project by the artist-activist collective Bureau of Inverse Technology (incorporated 1991). The work involved flying a radio-controlled, video-enabled tiny aircraft over territory in Northern California linked to tech companies\u2014places that maintain a level of secrecy inversely proportional to the privacy they accord most Americans. By BIT Plane<\/em>\u2019s logic, the Information Age is better understood as an information invasion, with civilian casualties numbering in the billions. This system thrives on incuriosity; the least we must do is return its gaze. \u2014Tessa Solomon<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Bruce Nauman, American Violence<\/em>, 1981\u201382<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 2026 Bruce Nauman\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz\/Courtesy Glenstone.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn his trademark combination of edgy text and neon\u2014a medium associated with crass advertising and Las Vegas\u2013style glitz\u2014Bruce Nauman here stirs sexual advances and crass taunts into a glowing stew of profound discomfort. If an artwork joining brutality, American identity, and the rough outline of a swastika was timely under then\u2013US president Ronald Reagan, it is tragically only more so under Donald Trump, whose administration has openly embraced white nationalist policies and rhetoric. Perhaps one shouldn\u2019t be too pious about the artist\u2019s commentary, which really implicates all of us Americans. After all, critic Peter Schjeldahl tartly described Nauman\u2019s work as the \u201cabruptly decisive act of a person consumed by doubt.\u201d \u2014Brian Boucher<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, <\/em>1995<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 Nam June Paik Estate. Photo: Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum. \t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn 1974, Nam June Paik coined the term \u201celectronic superhighway,\u201d imagining a new \u201celectronic telecommunication network that operates in strong transmission ranges, as well as with continental satellites, wave guides, bundled coaxial cable, and later also via laser beam fiber optics.\u201d Keeping up with even newer technologies, his video art of the 1990s addressed the ceaseless stream of information, images, and ideologies circulating through globe-crossing digital networks, examining how the emergent internet era was reshaping the world both physically and psychically. To this end, the 51\u2013channel video installation Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii<\/em> engages three different types of vehicle: the internet, the US interstate highway system, and cable television. Each state is outlined in neon and filled with the artist\u2019s interpretation, drawn from the media and his personal experience, of its distinct culture. Arkansas, for example, includes Paik\u2019s recordings of his collaborator cellist Charlotte Moorman alongside images of then-President Bill Clinton, both of whom were born in the state. \u2014T.S.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Charles Willson Peale, Yarrow Mamout<\/em>, 1819<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe United States of America has reached its 250th year in signature style: struggling to reconcile its foundational ideas with lived reality. Visual art inevitably becomes a flashpoint in this conversation, reflecting the complex intersections of class, identity, and politics that have propelled America into the wilds of its own making. Little seemingly unfolds as its founders intended, as attested by this portrait of Yarrow Mamout, born Mamadou Yarrow, a Fulani Muslim from Guinea who gained his freedom in 1796 after 44 years of enslavement. A deft businessman, he became a property owner in Washington, D.C.; Charles Wilson Peale painted his portrait in 1819, when he was 83 years old. In it, Mamout wears a kufi, headwear with strong symbolic ties to Islam and the African diaspora. As former National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet stated when this painting visited her Smithsonian-run museum from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the work \u201creminds us that Muslims have been a part of the fabric of this nation since the beginning.\u201d \u2014T.S.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Maria Martinez and Julian Martinez, Jar, ca. 1939<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn the early years of the 20th century, San Ildefonso Pueblo potter Maria Poveka Montoya Martinez (Tewa) and her husband, potter and easel painter Julian Martinez (Tewa), gained widespread recognition for their innovative black-on-black, matte-on-polished pottery. The idea for the technique initially came from the director of the Museum of New Mexico, Edgar Lee Hewett, who asked Maria\u2014already known for the polychrome work she was making with Julian\u2014to create pots based on pottery fragments found at a local archaeological site. In doing so, the Martinezes developed a new style of pottery that became renowned beyond the pueblo for its artistry and craftsmanship. Though known as \u201cMaria pottery,\u201d the couple\u2019s output was a collaborative effort, with Maria making the hand-coiled pots and Julian painting the designs, which often reinterpreted traditional motifs. Maria also worked with her daughter-in-law, son, and grandson, while her great-granddaughter Barbara Gonzalez continues the family tradition today. \u2014Anne Doran<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky<\/em>, ca. 1816<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis portrait of Benjamin Franklin\u2014scientist, inventor, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States\u2014depicts him conducting his famous 1752 experiment, involving a metal key, a kite, and a lightning storm, in which he demonstrated that lightning is a form of electricity. Painted by the renowned American expatriate Benjamin West, who had met Franklin in London, the work shows a windblown Franklin at the moment when a spark jumps from the key tied to the wet kite string to his raised knuckle. Although Franklin was indisputably interested in the properties of electricity, it is possible that the actual experiment was conducted by another. Be that as it may, in this allegorical work painted after Franklin\u2019s death, he is presented as a godlike hero of scientific endeavor. West is said to have planned a trilogy of paintings, including a larger version of this work, a self-portrait, and a third canvas, as a tribute to Americans who achieved international acclaim. \u2014A.D.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen<\/em>, ca. 1967\u201372<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 Martha Rosler, courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York. Collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tOne of America\u2019s most uncompromising political artists, Martha Rosler has worked for more than 50 years across media to expose societal inequities and the abuse of power. She generally relies on available data and images to expose what she has called \u201croles and procedures that have become naturalized or normalized.\u201d This is not to say that Rosler does not transform her material; in many cases she reframes or interrupts information usually taken for granted or passively consumed, as in the series of photomontages \u201cHouse Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.\u201d This work in the series juxtapose news photographs of the Vietnam War with images of upscale interiors clipped from the pages of the magazine House Beautiful.<\/em> Made at the beginning of the second-wave feminist movement during the late 1960s and early \u201970s, they underscore the human cost of war while also suggesting that these quiet, middle-class homes are battlefields of a different kind. \u2014A.D.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field<\/em>, 1977<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 Estate of Walter De Maria, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photo: John Cliett.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tWalter De Maria went cosmic in a highly calculated way when he found the tract of land in New Mexico that would become The Lightning Field<\/em>. The work measures one mile wide by one kilometer deep, and its main feature is a series of 400 stainless-steel poles, all standing a little more than 20 feet tall (each is a different length, to account for gradations in the ground) so that they could support a hypothetical plane of glass laid perfectly level over top. The purpose of such exactingness is a mystery, as the famously tight-lipped De Maria said little more about it than \u201cthe invisible is real.\u201d But the experience of being there\u2014overnight, as is required\u2014is clear in its capacity to transport and turn the Earth into an otherworldly realm. \u2014Andy Battaglia<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, Pelvis with Distance<\/em>, 1943<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork \u00a9 2026 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Courtesy Newfields.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tKnown partly for her imposing landscapes of the American Southwest, O\u2019Keeffe is an artist deeply identified with her country. Never trained in Europe as so many aspiring US artists were, she looked for inspiration to sources such as the skyscrapers of New York and the sere landscapes of New Mexico, where she first traveled in 1929, painting the region\u2019s badlands, adobe structures, mountains, and wide-open skies. The white pelvis bone of an animal, outlined against the blue sky, looms gigantic over a distant landscape in a seeming reversal of scale. The piece combines her lasting interests in the dual subjects of animal bones and the awesome territory of the American West, and suggests a dreamy take on the eternal beauty of the desert. \u2014B.B.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Robert S. Duncanson, Uncle Tom and Little Eva<\/em>, 1853<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Detroit Institute of Arts.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tBecause Robert S. Duncanson was a third-generation freed person of color, art historians still debate whether his Edenic landscapes contain hidden messages about enslavement and racism. In this painting, at least, Duncanson brings an abolitionist sentiment to the fore, setting a narrative from Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s novel Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> (1852) against the backdrop of a Louisiana lake at dusk. Stowe\u2019s enslaved protagonist is here seen beside Eva, a little girl whom he saves from drowning. The painting emphasizes harmony, something not likely to be found in the Antebellum South for an enslaved man like Tom. But Duncanson certainly knew as much, and his choice to rely upon the trappings of Romanticism suggests an effort to find some much-needed serenity during a time of turmoil for Americans like himself. \u2014Alex Greenberger<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Harry Gamboa Jr., Decoy Gang War Victim<\/em>, 1974<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 1974 Harry Gamboa Jr., courtesy the artist. \n\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tSpurred by the Chicano civil rights movement and inspired by the punk rock scene, artists Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herr\u00f3n, and Patssi Valdez formed the collective Asco in East Los Angeles in 1972. Its Spanish name, meaning \u201cdisgust\u201d or \u201cnausea,\u201d tells of the participants\u2019 feelings about the country they lived in. Here, Gronk poses as a victim of gang violence, the street blocked with flares, in a public performance intended to call attention to deadly cycles of conflict in the streets. The artists were also concerned about media attention feeding such cycles, and one local TV station actually ran the photo as if it were genuine. Fake news, avant la lettre? \u2014B.B<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Martin Wong, El Caribe, <\/em>1988<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 The Martin Wong Foundation, courtesy P\u00b7P\u00b7O\u00b7W, New York.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn the paintings of its steadfast documentarian, Martin Wong, Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side\u2014or Loisaida, to its historic Puerto Rican community\u2014feels less like the melting pot it was at the time than a pressure cooker. It was here that Wong\u2014an openly gay Chinese American from Portland\u2014found himself drawn to the local Puerto Rican bikers. El Caribe<\/em> is not exactly a self-portrait, but a depiction of Wong\u2019s alter ego: an idealized and beautiful Puerto Rican man, according to the auction house Phillips. Wong was one of the many immigrants living on the LES so marginalized they often went uncounted in the state census. But rather than despair, he embraced the social porosity that allows individuals typically divided by language and geography to forge together a sense of belonging. Class and skin color may be America\u2019s unspoken conditions of citizenship, but Wong reveled in his rebuke; anyone but the gang could eat his dust. \u2014T.S.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Charles Sheeler, River Rouge Plant<\/em>, 1932<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Digital image \u00a9 Whitney Museum of American Art\/Licensed by Scala\/Art Resource, New York.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tBy painting a new factory near the budding city of Detroit with all the grandeur of an old-world cathedral, Charles Sheeler tapped an American vein that would come to flow ever more intensely during the industrial boom of the 20th century. And not just any old factory, but a manufacturing complex for the Ford Motor Company that ushered in both assembly-line labor and new kinds of leisure offered as part of life on the open road. Sheeler\u2019s painting is a paragon of the mechanistic movement known as Precisionism, and there\u2019s a soulful sort of beauty in it too. \u2014A.B.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour<\/em>, 2019<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 Isaac Julien, courtesy Jessica Silverman Gallery. Photo: Henrik Kam.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\t\u201cPoets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers\u2014and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements,\u201d Frederick Douglass said in 1861, during a period when he was the most photographed person in the US. In Lessons of the Hour<\/em>, Isaac Julien pays homage to Douglass\u2019s canny ability to circulate his own image by bombarding viewers with a cascade of moving pictures set across 10 screens, some of which feature reenactments of the abolitionist giving his famed lectures. This elegant video installation shows that photography was integral in showing the humanity of Black people in the years before, during, and after the Civil War via a flood of images, just as Douglass so desired. Butthe work also tests its own thesis with its ending, in which Julien re-presents surveillance footage of Black Lives Matter protests held in 2015 following the police killing of Freddie Gray, suggesting that such visibility has its downside, too. \u2014A.G.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson<\/em>, 1893<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Hampton University Museum.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAfrican American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh and studied at Philadelphia\u2019s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins. Although Tanner saw some success as an artist in Philadelphia, he faced persistent racism in the United States, and in 1891 he sailed for Europe; he would spend the rest of his life in France, with only brief return visits to the United States. It was during one such sojourn that Tanner created his most famous work, The Banjo Lesson<\/em>. Executed in a style that mingles French Impressionism with American Realism, the painting depicts an elderly Black man teaching a young boy the titular instrument. During the same visit, Tanner also completed a second painting featuring Black subjects, The Thankful Poor<\/em> (1894). Tender portrayals of ordinary people doing ordinary things, both works refuted the prevailing stereotypical imagery of the time. Tanner never returned to African American subject matter after returning to France; instead, he became renowned for his paintings of biblical themes. \u2014A.D.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America<\/em>, 1987<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 2026 Alfredo Jaar\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York. Photo: Jane Dickson\/Public Art Fund.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAmerica, as artists and writers have often argued, is a concept that encompasses the totality of North and South America\u2014which means that America\u2019s promise does not exist only, or even centrally, in the United States. Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, who has been based in New York since 1982, tackled the misconception directly in Times Square in the spring of 1987. His 45-second animation A Logo For America<\/em> appeared on a monumental video screen for two weeks amid other scheduled advertisements. The animation showed three images: a map of the continental US overlaid with the words \u201cTHIS IS NOT AMERICA,\u201d an American flag overlaid with the words \u201cTHIS IS NOT AMERICA\u2019S FLAG,\u201d and then a map of the western hemisphere overlaid with the word \u201cAMERICA.\u201d Jaar leveraged the language and venue of US capitalism\u2014advertising and Times Square, respectively\u2014to destabilize the country\u2019s jingoism. Few artworks are as simple, direct, and effective. \u2014Daniel Cassady<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Joe Overstreet, Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace<\/em>, 1968<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 2026 Joe Overstreet\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery, New York.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace<\/em> sounds a bombastic note that may seem surprising, given that Joe Overstreet began painting it the day after Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s assassination. One could easily see Overstreet\u2019s blasts of color as parallels for gunfire, his bullseye-like forms as metaphors for the targets placed on the backs of Black Americans by white supremacists. But that would be a dour reading of a work whose title derives its first two words from the Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park, located not far from Overstreet\u2019s New York studio. Eschewing the confines of the rectangular canvas for a more liberated format, the painting met the violence of Overstreet\u2019s tense moment with raucous abstraction, suggesting optimism in the face of oppression. \u2014A.G.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Rupert Garc\u00eda, \u00a1Cesen Deportaci\u00f3n!<\/em>, 1973<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 Rupert Garcia. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis poster by Rupert Garcia, with its the menacing shadow of flesh-tearing barbed wire on a blood red background, emerged from the Chicano movement. In the top right the words \u201c\u00a1Cesen Deportaci\u00f3n! (\u201cEnd Deportation!\u201d) are printed in a shocking yellow. Designed for public circulation, the work treats art as a means of communication and political action. Garc\u00eda draws on graphic traditions associated with protest, creating an image meant to be seen in streets, community spaces, and demonstrations. The poster reflects ongoing debates about immigration, labor, and national identity, placing these issues within a broader history of activism in the United States. \u2014D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Carleton Watkins, Piwyac, the Vernal Fall, Yosemite, 300 feet<\/em>, 1861<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy National Gallery of Art.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tJust over half a century before Ansel Adams made his definitive images of the Yosemite Valley, Carleton Watkins set the standard for photographic landscapes of the American West. Part of a series about Yosemite, this view of Vernal Fall was one of the first photographs of the Californian valley seen in the East. (Not until 1890 was Yosemite officially made a national park.) A New York Times<\/em> review of the photographs, from when they were shown at New York\u2019s Goupil Gallery in 1862, characterized the series as \u201cindescribably unique and beautiful.\u201d\u00a0California Senator John Conness is said to have used this photograph to convince President Abraham Lincoln to protect Yosemite. In 1864, Lincoln signed a law granting the area to \u201cto \u201cbe held for public use, resort, and recreation\u2026inalienable for all time\u201d; the act was a precursor to the National Parks system established a decade later. \u2014Harrison Jacobs<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Marisol, The Family<\/em>, 1962<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Digital Image \u00a9 The Museum of Modern Art\/Licensed by SCALA \/ Art Resource, New York. Artwork copyright \u00a9 2026 Estate of Marisol\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tBy 1962, the year Marisol created The Family<\/em>, the first fractures in the American nuclear family had appeared. A broader sociopolitical upheaval\u2014spanning race, gender, and aesthetics\u2014was already prying open the image of the traditional domestic unit, revealing the spiritually strangled lives of women at its center. The Family<\/em> gives form to that tension. Its five figures are awkwardly assembled from rigid materials such as wood blocks and plaster casts, their faces fixed in unsmiling stares. An outsized infant sits on the mother\u2019s lap; the father is conspicuously smaller than the mother. Marisol based the sculpture on a photograph of a family dressed in worn clothes and shoes, details that suggest financial strain. Yet the work reads less as a judgement of their station than an indictment of the conditions that have seized them\u2014despite which, they retain their dignity. \u2014T.S.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Tiffany Studios, Hartwell Memorial Window<\/em>, 1917<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago. \t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tTiffany glass provides a useful lens through which to understand the recalibration of the American aesthetic in the late 19th century, with Hartwell Memorial Window<\/em> exemplifying the role technical innovation played in this shift. Before Tiffany and his peer, John La Farge, stained glass consisted largely of panes painted with enamel and fired, its illusion of depth confined to the surface. By introducing color directly into molten glass, Tiffany developed a milky, opalescent effect that reads like layered brushwork. This innovation was as social as it was formal, helping relocate stained glass from ecclesiastical settings into private homes and redistributing the aura of the divine into scenes of industry and nature. In Tiffany\u2019s glass, American landscapes gained a quasi-devotional status\u2014echoed in Tiffany windows commemorating the Civil War at the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C. Yet this democratization of subject matter was tempered by exclusivity: Accessible only to the wealthy, Tiffany glass came to signify both the height of taste and a particular vision of what merited reverence. \u2014T.S.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Danh Vo, We The People<\/em>, 2010\u201316<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 Danh Vo, courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. \u201cDanh Vo: We The People\u201d was presented by the Public Art Fund at Brooklyn Bridge Park & City Hall Park, New York, May 17\u2013December 5, 2014. Photo: James Ewing\/Public Art Fund, New York.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tTitled for the first words in the preamble to the US Constitution, this Danh Vo piece replicates to scale Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Auguste Bartholdi\u2019s Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the US that celebrated the 1876 centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Fabricated in the same materials and with the same technique as the original, it is displayed in about 250 pieces, never to be assembled but rather spread across some 15 nations, seemingly reversing the flow of immigrants to Ellis Island (in the shadow of Lady Liberty). The copper on the original statue is just a couple of millimeters thick, Vo discovered, suggesting a vulnerability that easily lends itself to metaphors about the fragility of democracy. \u2014B.B.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Cameron Rowland, Depreciation<\/em>, 2018<\/h2>\n
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\n\tCameron Rowland is best-known for a practice that exposes how the infrastructures of contemporary life have been organized for the continued oppression of Black people. For Depreciation<\/em>, Rowland turned their attention to the broken promise of \u201c40 acres and a mule,\u201d for which formerly enslaved people would be given land as reparations after slavery. Andrew Johnson rescinded the policy in 1866, with the land\u2019s ownership reverting to enslavers, creating the system of sharecropping that organized much of Black life in the decades after the Civil War. As a response this history, Rowland purchased, via a nonprofit company, a one-acre plot of land on South Carolina\u2019s Edisto Island that was once part of the Maxcy Plantation at fair market value; it was subsequently appraised at $0 to make it \u201clegally unusable.\u201d In doing so, Rowland questions the very notion of reparations via land ownership. Now stewarded by the Dia Art Foundation, the plot, known at 8060 Maxie Road, is also the only of its sites that is not visitable. \u2014M.D.<\/em><\/p>\n
Cameron Rowland declined ARTnews\u2019s image request for this work.<\/em> View this artwork on the Dia Art Foundation\u2019s website.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Dara Birnbaum, Technology\/Transformation: Wonder Woman<\/em>, 1978\u201379<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Artwork copyright \u00a9 Estate of Dara Birnbaum, courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, and Marian Goodman Gallery.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tWhen Dara Birnbaum pirated clips of the CBS series Wonder Woman<\/em> and recut them for this video art classic, she did more than remix a version of womanhood made palatable for a mainstream audience\u2014she also remade a version of
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