The first three words from the preamble of the United States Constitution—“We the People”—are among the most famous in the world. But these days, as the country approaches its 250th anniversary, plenty of politicians in power have tried to draw boundaries around who is counted in that “We.” There have been attempts to control who belongs in this country, who can access their Constitutional rights, and even whose stories deserve representation in the nation’s greatest museums.
It is a fraught moment, and one in which many might understandably divine a dissonance between the buoyant celebrations of the nation’s semiquincentennial and the dispiriting realities of the present. But it is also a fascinating one that led the editors of ARTnews and Art in America to reflect critically on US art history and its limits. Out of those reflections grew our newly published list of the 100 greatest artworks about America in all its meanings.
The list includes a vast array of artworks, from an 18th-century painting of a Founding Father to a 21st-century video essay on a distinctly American strain of anti-Black racism. There are acid critiques of settler colonialism alongside tributes to the majesty of the American landscape, sober revisitations of enslavement alongside hopeful pleas for liberation, bitter denouncements of intervention in wars abroad alongside quaint homages to homespun Americanness.
These 100 works evince no singular aesthetic or set of concerns. As a group, they function as a recognition of the multiplicity that is at the core of both American art history and the nation more broadly.
We started working on this list over a year ago and spent more than a month alone wrestling with how best to define its purview. We decided that this would not be a list of the best American artworks, which is both too challenging an exercise and too wide of a net to cast. Instead, we opted to collect works that are about America, often by dialoging with national identity and historical events associated with it.
This did not mean that to qualify for inclusion artists had to be born or based in the United States, which has a rich history of accepting immigrants. (Look at the Founding Fathers: Alexander Hamilton was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis; Francis Lewis was from Wales and did not arrive in the US until he was 21; George Taylor hailed from Ireland and came to the US as an indentured servant.) Alongside Native Americans and non-Indigenous painters and sculptors born in the US, the artists on this list are from Korea, Moldova, Iraq, Chile, Vietnam, Cuban, Hong Kong, Japan, Switzerland, and Mexico. Still others spent parts of their career abroad, considering the US with physical and mental distance.
What it did mean is that the works had to directly contend with America, Americanness, and American history. As such, they address everything from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to the American War in Vietnam, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Trail of Tears, from mass incarceration to the Great Depression. They belong to movements such as the Hudson River School, Pop art, the Harlem Renaissance, Conceptualism, Minimalism, and more.
The list was itself a group project. Each editor submitted recommendations for the list ahead of presenting their strongest cases, stating how and why each work was about America. We debated these picks in a range of in-person meetings as well as on Slack. Creating the list was a difficult endeavor, and ranking it an even harder one.
None of us would ever have been able to construct the list alone. None of this would have been possible were it not for debate, disagreement, and difference. Perhaps the Founding Fathers would be proud of that spirited approach.
For me, the making of the list recalled the words of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose 1994 sculpture “Untitled” (America), composed of strings of light bulbs, comes in at #55. Gonzalez-Torres, who was born in Cuba and who spent 17 years of his too-short career in the US, left his work open to many interpretations and, in some cases, many methods of presentation. Indeed, in keeping with Gonzalez-Torres’s emphasis on multiplicity, “Untitled” (America) can be displayed any which way its presenter so desires.
He once defined the United States similarly, as a place and a concept that refused a single reading. “The America that I now know is still a place of light, a place of opportunities, of risks, of justice, of racism, of injustice, of hunger and excess, of pleasure and growth,” he once said. “Democracy is a constant job, a collective dedication.”
