When Art in America 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’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). By 1917, Duchamp even-more-famously caused a stir with his porcelain urinal Fountain, a work that changed art forever and helped make New York an artistic center.
American art’s enduring paradoxes were already on display. That iconic readymade—now an emblem of the anything-goes American avant-garde—had been created by a foreigner who would soon establish tighter ties with New York, blurring the boundaries of what constituted “American” 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’s Secret fashion show. Something undeniably new and electric was developing, but it was also linked to violence and supported, in part, by weapons profiteering.
As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we look back on the history of American art. Anniversaries are not always celebrations—they can commemorate love, loss, and everything in between—but 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.
At a moment when the Trump administration has proposed such absurd commemorative gestures as a national sculpture garden of selectively chosen “American heroes” or an “Arc de Trump,” we felt it was worth exploring other aspects of the story. (And there are many more still: We devoted “H” to the Hudson River School, but it could just as easily have been the Harlem Renaissance; “S” is for Sovereignty, but the Shakers would have worked well too.)
The 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 “historical 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.”
To 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. —Emily Watlington
