The 100 Best Artworks About America

In September 2019, Los Angeles–based artist rafa esparza traveled to Washington, D.C. to stage “a First Amendment demonstration,” according to a National Park Service ranger; had it been an “art event,” it would have required greater scrutiny from the federal government in order to go forward. That demonstration-cum-performance, titled bust: indestructible columns, 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’s own Ionic columns, esparza’s pillar served as an apt metaphor for the state of democracy as it stood in 2019, during the first Trump administration—how easily it is to chip away at tenets and rights that were hard-won. It’s a metaphor that has become even more salient during the second Trump administration. —Maximilíano Durón

Your 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, a 1997–98 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—places that maintain a level of secrecy inversely proportional to the privacy they accord most Americans. By BIT Plane’s 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. —Tessa Solomon

In his trademark combination of edgy text and neon—a medium associated with crass advertising and Las Vegas–style glitz—Bruce 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–US 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’t be too pious about the artist’s commentary, which really implicates all of us Americans. After all, critic Peter Schjeldahl tartly described Nauman’s work as the “abruptly decisive act of a person consumed by doubt.” —Brian Boucher

In 1974, Nam June Paik coined the term “electronic superhighway,” imagining a new “electronic 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.” 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–channel video installation Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii 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’s interpretation, drawn from the media and his personal experience, of its distinct culture. Arkansas, for example, includes Paik’s recordings of his collaborator cellist Charlotte Moorman alongside images of then-President Bill Clinton, both of whom were born in the state. —T.S.

The 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 “reminds us that Muslims have been a part of the fabric of this nation since the beginning.” —T.S.

In 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—already known for the polychrome work she was making with Julian—to 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 “Maria pottery,” the couple’s 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. —Anne Doran

This portrait of Benjamin Franklin—scientist, inventor, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States—depicts 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’s 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. —A.D.

One of America’s 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 “roles and procedures that have become naturalized or normalized.” 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 “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.” 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. Made at the beginning of the second-wave feminist movement during the late 1960s and early ’70s, they underscore the human cost of war while also suggesting that these quiet, middle-class homes are battlefields of a different kind. —A.D.

Walter 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. 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 “the invisible is real.” But the experience of being there—overnight, as is required—is clear in its capacity to transport and turn the Earth into an otherworldly realm. —Andy Battaglia

Known partly for her imposing landscapes of the American Southwest, O’Keeffe 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’s 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. —B.B.

Because 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’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) against the backdrop of a Louisiana lake at dusk. Stowe’s 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. —Alex Greenberger

Spurred by the Chicano civil rights movement and inspired by the punk rock scene, artists Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez formed the collective Asco in East Los Angeles in 1972. Its Spanish name, meaning “disgust” or “nausea,” tells of the participants’ 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? —B.B.

In the paintings of its steadfast documentarian, Martin Wong, Manhattan’s Lower East Side—or Loisaida, to its historic Puerto Rican community—feels less like the melting pot it was at the time than a pressure cooker. It was here that Wong—an openly gay Chinese American from Portland—found himself drawn to the local Puerto Rican bikers. El Caribe is not exactly a self-portrait, but a depiction of Wong’s 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’s unspoken conditions of citizenship, but Wong reveled in his rebuke; anyone but the gang could eat his dust. —T.S.

By 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’s painting is a paragon of the mechanistic movement known as Precisionism, and there’s a soulful sort of beauty in it too. —A.B.

“Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements,” Frederick Douglass said in 1861, during a period when he was the most photographed person in the US. In Lessons of the Hour, Isaac Julien pays homage to Douglass’s 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. But the 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. —A.G.

African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh and studied at Philadelphia’s 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. 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 (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. —A.D.

America, as artists and writers have often argued, is a concept that encompasses the totality of North and South America—which means that America’s 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 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 “THIS IS NOT AMERICA,” an American flag overlaid with the words “THIS IS NOT AMERICA’S FLAG,” and then a map of the western hemisphere overlaid with the word “AMERICA.” Jaar leveraged the language and venue of US capitalism—advertising and Times Square, respectively—to destabilize the country’s jingoism. Few artworks are as simple, direct, and effective. —Daniel Cassady

Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace sounds a bombastic note that may seem surprising, given that Joe Overstreet began painting it the day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. One could easily see Overstreet’s 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’s New York studio. Eschewing the confines of the rectangular canvas for a more liberated format, the painting met the violence of Overstreet’s tense moment with raucous abstraction, suggesting optimism in the face of oppression. —A.G.

This 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 “¡Cesen Deportación! (“End Deportation!”) are printed in a shocking yellow. Designed for public circulation, the work treats art as a means of communication and political action. García 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. —D.C.

Just 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 review of the photographs, from when they were shown at New York’s Goupil Gallery in 1862, characterized the series as “indescribably unique and beautiful.” California 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 “to “be held for public use, resort, and recreation…inalienable for all time”; the act was a precursor to the National Parks system established a decade later. —Harrison Jacobs

By 1962, the year Marisol created The Family, the first fractures in the American nuclear family had appeared. A broader sociopolitical upheaval—spanning race, gender, and aesthetics—was already prying open the image of the traditional domestic unit, revealing the spiritually strangled lives of women at its center. The Family 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’s 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—despite which, they retain their dignity. —T.S.

Tiffany glass provides a useful lens through which to understand the recalibration of the American aesthetic in the late 19th century, with Hartwell Memorial Window 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’s glass, American landscapes gained a quasi-devotional status—echoed 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. —T.S.

Titled for the first words in the preamble to the US Constitution, this Danh Vo piece replicates to scale Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s 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. —B.B.

Cameron 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, Rowland turned their attention to the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule,” for which formerly enslaved people would be given land as reparations after slavery. Andrew Johnson rescinded the policy in 1866, with the land’s 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’s Edisto Island that was once part of the Maxcy Plantation at fair market value; it was subsequently appraised at $0 to make it “legally unusable.” 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. —M.D.

Cameron Rowland declined ARTnews’s image request for this work. View this artwork on the Dia Art Foundation’s website.

When Dara Birnbaum pirated clips of the CBS series Wonder Woman and recut them for this video art classic, she did more than remix a version of womanhood made palatable for a mainstream audience—she also remade a version of American womanhood and cracked it wide open. It’s worth remembering that this Amazon superheroine’s outfit comes in shades of red, white, and blue, and that her skirt is covered in stars similar to the one that appear on the American flag. Not that you get a good look at any of this in Birnbaum’s video, of course. Her Wonder Woman footage loops and stutters before climaxing in a series of explosions that blow up all these images, decimating any shred of patriotic sentiment that was senselessly beamed through the airwaves to primetime audiences. —A.G.

A woman in a red, white, and blue outfit holding up a hand to a mirror.

Dara Birnbaum,Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79

Artwork copyright © Estate of Dara Birnbaum, courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, and Marian Goodman Gallery.

For over two decades, Pablo Delano has been building up an archive of the material life of Puerto Rico. There are books, photographs, and maps; old school cameras and typewriters; tourist souvenirs, toys, and commercial products like soap and a soda called Old Colony; furniture and sculptures—the list goes on. Over the years, he has organized these in massive, room-size installations that mimic museological displays about Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the world and a territory of the United States since 1898. Delano’s installation serves as a tongue-in-cheek critique of American imperialism, which has often hidden behind the national image of 13 colonies who fought for their own freedom as a way to deflect the colonial rule the US has imposed on various islands around the world. Eschewing the labels or explanatory texts of that an anthropological museum might use for a display of this kind, Delano keys into what visitors, especially American ones, already know about Puerto Rico and its colonial status in the US. This might go over the heads of some who may view it as just another immersive display of a tropical place, but for others, the piece will act as a pointed assessment of the US that feels all the more salient in 2026. —M.D.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, instantly killing an estimated 70,000–80,000 people and leaving a radioactive wound on both the land and the lives of its survivors. Among those shaped by its long aftermath was Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, a California-born, Hiroshima-raised artist and an incidental witness to this devastating arc of history, first marked by the loss of friends and family to the bombing (he had returned to the US in 1940) and later by his unlawful imprisonment by the US government at the Tule Lake, California, concentration camp alongside thousands of other Americans of Asian descent. He translated this layered experience into a prodigious, viscerally personal oeuvre, of which this work is exemplary. In it, symbols of Imperial Japan, Buddhism, and Western popular culture collide beneath a fiery sky, as though his mind exists simultaneously in America’s past and present—an apt visualization of the psychic aftershocks of war. —T.S.

Ernie Barnes, a professional football player turned painter, was intimately acquainted with human musculature. Across his oeuvre, figures are all elongated limbs and twisting bodies: arms bend and reach, hips tilt and swivel, and legs and shoulders lead the way. Born in Durham, North Carolina, during the Jim Crow era, Barnes depicted Black joy with the insight of someone familiar with pain. In his most famous painting, The Sugar Shack, good times surge as if the day itself needs exorcising. Before his death in 2009, Barnes spoke of his drive to depict how African Americans use dance to resolve physical and spiritual anguish—and to transmit that experience to the viewer. Goal achieved: the work appeared on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You and remains exemplary of what critics have termed “Black Romanticism.” —T.S.

You can hear the water roaring and see the rainbow glint in this magisterial scene by Frederic Edwin Church, a painter most associated with his work from elsewhere in New York, as a central figure of the Hudson River School. Niagara Falls was already established as a tourist destination and hot honeymoon spot, but Church turned up the dial by making a spectacle of unveiling his seven-foot-wide painting in a one-work exhibition (with an admission cost of 25 cents) described as a “blockbuster of its day.” —A.B.

Fearing the threat of antisemitism, sculptor Aaron J. Goodelman fled Russia for the US during the early 20th century. He quickly discovered his new home was no peaceful place either. Turning his eye toward lynching, a form of violence that targeted both Black people and Jewish people like himself, he made works such as Kultur, in which a knobbly stick of pear wood is outfitted with a metal clasp and chain. In using the German word for “culture” as a title, Goodelman also nodded to the Nazi regime in Germany, which invaded Poland that year and would soon implement laws targeting those two groups. The piece implies that antisemitism and anti-Black racism are born from the same impulse: fascism. If you follow Goodelman’s thinking, fascism can only be defeated through solidarity among marginalized communities—as timely a notion as any right now. —A.G.

Winfred Rembert described the seven years he spent on a chain gang as an experience defined by the demand that he “take on all these personalities,” as he wrote in his 2021 memoir. “I didn’t want to play any of the parts, but I had to be somebody.” While incarcerated, Rembert learned how to dye and stretch leather, the material that became his artistic medium for paintings such as this one, intended as a response to the dehumanization of imprisonment. The painting represents a cascade of Black and Brown men, their faces disappearing into the repeating black and white stripes of their uniforms. Disembodied and deprived of individuality, these men are subject to the same pressures as so many others behind bars across the US, whose penitentiaries hold more than a fifth of all the world’s prisoners, according to some estimates. —A.G.

When an 18-year-old Nellie Bear Two Gates returned to the Standing Rock Reservation after forcibly attending a Catholic boarding school for 11 years, she made a decision that would forever alter her: she stopped engaging with everything she was taught and instead returned to the ways of Dakhóta life. As part of that pivot, she took up Dakhóta beadwork, a craft she would master by the time she died in 1935. For this suitcase meant for her relative Ida Claymore, Gates adorned the valise’s surface in beaded pictures of Dakhóta wedding preparations. By remaking these images in beads, Gate immortalized Dakhóta rituals at risk of being lost. —A.G.

Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Arts present industry as a total environment. Workers, machines, and materials move together in coordinated rhythms, forming a system that appears both powerful and relentless. Painted during the height of Fordist production, the murals treat labor as the foundation of modern America while revealing the scale required to sustain it. Rivera draws attention to the physical demands placed on workers even as he celebrates their role in building industrial wealth. The work reflects a country defined by manufacturing and technological ambition, where progress depended on the integration of human effort into vast mechanical processes.— D.C.

By the late 1940s, Norman Lewis had almost fully shifted from social realism to Abstract Expressionism, a movement he helped define. Though he never gained the mainstream recognition of his white male counterparts, like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, it was not for lack of quality. Lewis’s paintings feature colorful strokes that suggest crowds, dances, and marches. Like the jazz that formed the musical backbone of Black cultural life, his process championed spontaneity and improvisation, riffing off what had just been laid down on the canvas. Twilight Sounds is a superlative example: its twisting vertical black lines punctuated with blocks of red, yellow, blue, and white. Look long enough and the painting resolves into a tableau of early evening street life; look a little longer and one gets the sense that Lewis found a way to distill the transcendent rapture of a jazz solo onto canvas. —H.J.

Before Paul Revere became a symbol of patriotism, he worked as a silversmith, and New England portraitist John Singleton Copley shows him that way—shirtsleeves rolled, tools within reach, holding a teapot he likely made himself. The painting captures a colonial world where identity formed through labor and craft rather than inherited status. Revere meets the viewer directly, confident and alert, a figure grounded in skill and commerce as much as politics. The portrait helps explain an early American mindset: authority earned through work; reputation built through making. The Revolution would later elevate men like Revere into myth, but Copley’s version keeps him rooted in the economy that shaped him.— D.C. 

David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Buffalos), a photograph showing a close-up shot of buffalos falling off a cliff, has been so widely reproduced that many may forget that it actually depicts part of a diorama at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The work has often been read as a symbol for the immense loss that Wojnarowicz witnessed during the AIDS crisis. (He would die of AIDS-related complications a few years later, in 1992, at 37.) But the buffalo and its near extinction as a way to disenfranchise Indigenous people is also an important, if under-told, part of American history: another moment in which state-sponsored violence sought to target a marginalized group. One of the US’s most politically active artists of this era, Wojnarowicz almost certainly had this in mind when making this iconic image. —M.D.

Money, flags, jubilation, more money—what could be more American! But 1939 was still a time marked by the Great Depression, so Florine Stettheimer’s seemingly triumphal painting is more complicated than that. While the work features portraits of powerful figures including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and tycoons Bernard Baruch, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan on the New York Stock Exchange, Salvation Army workers are present as well, sounding a note of caution. And that’s Stettheimer herself at bottom right, pushing flowers toward a gilded George Washington in an offering of some sort. —A.B.

Jazz is often called America’s first true original art form, a freeflowing artistic expression that blends musical modes, instrumentation, and rhythms from across cultures. While many photographers tried to capture jazz in its heyday, artist Roy DeCarava stands out for his intuitive grasp of the music’s electricity and his understanding of the tight relationship between the way a musician played and their personality. Coltrane No. 24, from DeCarava’s standout book the sound i saw, is typical of his approach, showing the jazz legend mid-solo, seemingly approaching musical transcendence. DeCarava said the link between jazz and photography was that both privileged improvisation and timing above all else. This photograph showed his mastery of both. —D.C.

Embedded with the Union Army during the Civil War, Winslow Homer brought the realities of the conflict to Americans through his field sketches of soldiers, encampments, and battlefields for Harper’s Weekly. After the war’s end, these drawings would provide subject matter for oil paintings such as Prisoners from the Front (1866), which depicts Confederate soldiers captured by a Union officer. Painted a year earlier, shortly after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, The Veteran in a New Field shows something quite different: the war’s immediate aftermath. In it, a farmer cutting wheat is identifiable as a veteran by his Union uniform jacket and canteen laid on the ground nearby. Though ostensibly a scene of bounty and renewal, the discarded coat, the farmer’s scythe, and a subtle stiffness in his posture hint at wounds of body and mind not easily healed. —A.D.

This image by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), taken aboard the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, looks down into the crowded lower decks where working-class passengers gathered. Considered the first modernist photograph, it organizes people into discrete, collage-like areas that echo the rigid divisions of class. Indelibly associated with a moment of peak immigration to the United States—1907 was the busiest year in Ellis Island’s history—the picture was in fact taken when the ship was bound for Europe. Nevertheless, America hovers as an idea in the background, while the photograph holds on the present reality of migration. Stieglitz recognized the photograph as a turning point in his work, where form and subject, geometry and social structure, become inseparable. The result feels precise and unsentimental, a view of modern life shaped by movement and fragmentation. —D.C.

This sculpture is sometimes called The Harp, but Augusta Savage always preferred the name Lift Every Voice and Sing, quoting a song of freedom by James Weldon Johnson that the NAACP later adopted as the “Black National Anthem.” Savage spent two years working on this sculpture, which debuted at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where viewers would have marveled beneath its 16-foot-tall image of a harp formed from the bodies of singing Black men and women. The original has been lost, and all that remains, now, are small replica versions of it. But even the shrunk-down versions of this sculpture cannot minimize its deafening call for Black liberation in this country—and beyond. —A.G.

In the 1990s, the California Department of Transportation began installing bright yellow signs along the freeways near the US-Mexico border. The image, of a father, mother, and child crossing the road, was shocking to the artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood who saw the sign as equating migrant families to animals who drivers should be sure not to hit. That experience moved Jimenez Underwood to begin reincorporating the image, altered so the mother is leading, into her works for the rest of her career. For Run, Jane, Run!, she blew the sign up to massive proportions in that same bright yellow as a way to ensure that this recent dark history—and the way this country treats migrants—can never be forgotten. It now belongs to the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. —M.D.

In a legendary performance first hosted by New York’s Whitney Museum, James Luna presented himself as a tourist attraction and invited people to snap a photo alongside him as he word outfits ranging from street clothes to war-dance regalia (the latter, a composite of various tribes, signifying “the Indians that everybody likes,” he once said), bringing into conflict his own rage and the rampant objectification of Native peoples. “America loves to say ‘her Indians,’” said Luna, who was of Luiseño, Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican heritage, during the performance. “America loves to see us dance for them. America likes our arts and crafts. America likes to name cars and trucks after our tribes. America doesn’t know me.” He described the performance, during which Americans cracked jokes and brought up possible family connections with various tribes, as one of “dual humiliation.” —B.B.

The genius of this piece is in its savage double-entendre that hinges on Ronald Reagan’s having been a former entertainer. “He kills me” is something one might well say of an actor: He cracks me up, he gets me every time. For artist Donald Moffett and his cohort in New York in the 1980s, however, the words were literal: Even as Moffett’s friends and fellow artists were dying of AIDS, the president and his administration not only failed to adequately address the disease but effectively vilified those who had it. The target image to the right of the Reagan photo says what many gay men might have been thinking at the time: I have a target on my back. Moffett reproduced the lithograph as a poster, and he and a friend pasted it up around New York as a reminder that the enemy wasn’t a virus—it was hatred and fear. —Sarah Douglas

Containers of condiments on a diner table (and a candle in eerie electric red) look like towers in an alien skyline through the lens of William Eggleston, a photographer with an ability to make everything appear a little more stately and a lot more strange. The hot sauce and peppers add extra zing, and the sense of scale is artfully tripped up by shadows cast as if for miles, a contrast to the sense of color with which Eggleston made his name. —A.B.

Last year, the Whitney Museum opened an exhibition of works from its permanent collection from over the years. The show, which is still on view as of this writing, is named “‘Untitled’ (America)” after this piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which hangs in one of the museum’s windows for the occasion. The ingredients of the painting eve are highly specific—it is made up of 12 individual parts/light strings, each comprising 42 light bulbs. But the artist indicated that it may be displayed in any way a curator or institution deems fit. In that way, it functions as a sort of metaphor for democracy. Gonzalez-Torres himself once said of America and its democracy, “America has always been an unattainable dream, a place to dream about. . . . 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. Democracy is a constant job, a collective dedication.” In October 2024, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery displayed the piece in several locations, including on the museum’s facade, as part of an exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’s work. In June 2025, a month before the show closed, President Trump announced he had fired the museum’s director, Kim Sajet, calling her “highly partisan” and a supporter of DEI. She refused to leave, and ultimately resigned. America is still the place Gonzalez Torres knew: terrible and hopeful, all at once. —S.D.

For a brief period in 2001, those who trawled the “Black Americana” section of eBay would’ve encountered a particularly unusual listing for something labeled “Keith Obadike’s Blackness.” The description of this “heirloom” noted that, because it had “been used primarily in the United States,” it might not function as desired outside the country. Twenty stipulations and warnings followed that seemed to contradict one another: one stated, “This Blackness may be used for creating black art,” followed by another that said this “heirloom” was not recommended for “making or selling ‘serious’ art.” After six days, eBay removed the listing, noting its “inappropriateness.” But before the listing was taken down, the artists screenshotted it, immortalizing the fact that 10 people had bid on “Keith Obadike’s Blackness,” with its final monetary worth resting at $152.50—as objective a statement as any about how, even as recently as 2001, Blackness was still viewed by some as a commodity to be bought and sold. —A.G.

Lavender Mist, a canvas by Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, builds its surface through layers of poured and dripped paint, creating a dense field of marks that records movement across the canvas. The work reflects a moment when American art embraced scale, gesture, and individual expression as defining qualities. Produced in the early Cold War years, it aligned with a broader cultural effort to position the United States as a center of artistic innovation. The painting carried the energy of a country asserting its identity through experimentation and ambition onto an international stage. —D.C.

The “right to bear arms,” as defined by the US Constitution’s Second Amendment, is so enshrined in the imagination of much of this country that any attempt at gun control leads to furious debate and often goes nowhere. That is part of what makes Raven Chacon’s composition Report so powerful. Chacon has said that with this piece, he wanted to compose a piece for an instrument where it isn’t possible for him to control the melody, pitch, or volume. “After the sound of the gunshot,” he has said, “you hear its echo in the land. It’s a way for the land to create a sound.” Here, Chacon thinks through how the Indigenous lands of the United States were taken over by the echoes of gunshots. Report repositions that violence as a form of refusal. —M.D. 

“The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor,” wrote Edmonia Lewis of leaving late 19th century Boston for Rome. Finding Europe more accepting of her African American and Mississauga Ojibwe ancestry, Lewis sustained herself as a professional sculptor known for Neoclassical marble renderings of subjects that were radical for their time: Native and Black Americans depicted without visual symbols of oppression, as in her famous sculpture Forever Free. The work portrays a Black man and woman liberated from enslavement in ecstatic poses, marking a sharp break from the tradition of rendering the newly freed as supplicants to their liberators. (By contrast, Thomas Ball’s Freedmen’s Memorial of 1875 features a Black man crouched at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, who holds the Emancipation Proclamation.) In a gesture both literal and monumental, Lewis instead envisioned selfhood as defined by one’s own spirit, rather than by a white savior. —T.S.

“I like to use maps because maps can tell stories,” Jaune Quick-to-See Smith once said about a motif that appears in her work often. In Memory Map, the artist, who was raised on the Flathead Reservation in Montana and later based in New Mexico, overlaid the United States with symbols of the people, creatures, and other kinds of beings who cherished the same land before it was cordoned off with borders and turned into something that would only continue to be divided and divided some more. —A.B.

Thornton Dial’s Refugees Trying to Get to the United States subverts the narrative its title implies. This tired, poor, huddled mass is not yearning to arrive from distant shores; they are already here—Americans estranged by the racial and economic stratification embedded in the nation’s founding. Here, Dial utilizes humble materials—wire, wood, plastic, and enamel—to evoke a struggling underclass, often understood as African Americans like himself. Thin and anguished, the figures balance on a tenuous raft of twigs, their bodies splattered with garish yellow paint that marks their otherness. There is no discernible horizon; they are forever adrift on muddy waters. —T.S.

Apartment House 1776 is one of what American composer John Cage dubbed his “Musicircuses.” Simply put, these are musical works in which large numbers of dancers, singers, and instrumentalists give simultaneous performances in one place and at one time—more three-ring circus than symphony. Commissioned to mark the bicentennial of the United States, Apartment House 1776 was premiered by six orchestras across the country in 1976. Any number of musicians can participate, but Cage stipulated that every performance include four singers (or recordings of singers), each representing a different religious or ethnic group inherent to the founding of the nation: Protestant, Sephardic, Native American, and African American. These singers select songs from their respective traditions and sing them without trying to synchronize them with those of the other singers. Their voices unfold alongside secular, military, and sacred compositions drawn from eighteenth century sources. The duration of the performance and whether or not to include a conductor are decisions left to the performers, producing a distinct soundscape of identities and beliefs—at times loosely guided, at other times given over to improvisation—with a defined beginning but an indeterminate end. Sound familiar? —T.S.

For much of its history, the United States’s relationship with its southern neighbor has been a fraught one, with multiple wars chipping away at Mexico’s land, foreign policies like the Monroe Doctrine that have sought to subject the nation, and ever-increasing security and violence at the border. How do Mexicans feel about all of this? One perspective is that of Frida Kahlo, who painted Self-portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States while in Detroit, accompanying her husband Diego Rivera as he painted his iconic Detroit Industry Murals (see #68). Kahlo portrays Mexico as a somewhat verdant landscape with centuries of culture, before European contact with the continent. Its ancient temples are ruled by the sun and the moon. The artist isn’t as kind to the US: its temples, the Ford Motor Company plant, whose chimneys emit a noxious fog that obscure its god, the American flag. Unlike the Mexican plants in the lower left, the US’s life sources are various technological advancements. —M.D.

Born in Hong Kong in 1950, Tseng Kwong Chi emigrated with his family to Vancouver in 1966. In 1978, after attending art school at the Académie Julian in Paris, he moved to New York, where he inhabited the city’s legendary art and club scenes of the late 1970s and ’80s. During this time, he traveled throughout America and the world for a series of black-and-white photographic self-portraits titled “East Meets West” (1979–89). Partly inspired by Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, the series saw the artist—wearing a style of suit made famous by Chairman Mao and sometimes a “visitor” badge—posing in front of such iconic landmarks as the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and Checkpoint Charlie. Describing his feelings about Nixon’s trip, Tseng said, “A real exchange was supposed to take place between the East and the West, however, the relations remained official and superficial.” In 1983, Tseng created three color pictures related to the “East Meets West” works, each titled East Meets West Manifesto, and all showing him positioned between the flags of China and the US, distilling his experience as someone split between the two. —B.B.

Like many of his Pop art peers, including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist had a background in commercial art and design, in his case as a billboard painter—a job that laid the foundation for the scale and legibility that mark his canvases. Rosenquist also stood out from his cohort for arranging found imagery into collage-like compositions, rather than presenting a single image as Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein did. Arguably his most ambitious painting, F-111 is among the first works by an American artist to protest the Vietnam War. Designed to wrap around the walls of Castelli Gallery, where it was first shown, the 86-foot-long, multipanel work is dominated by a rendering of the titular fighter-bomber, then the most technologically advanced weapon of its day. Folded into the composition are other news and advertising images, including a little girl under a hair dryer, a tangle of spaghetti, and a mushroom cloud. Rosenquist himself described the painting—newly resonant in the present moment—as questioning “the collusion between the Vietnam War, income taxes, consumerism, and advertising.”—A.D. 

Few artists have taken on the complexities of Chicanx and Mexican American identity as head-on and as forcefully as Laura Aguilar. In the center panel of Three Eagles Flying, we see a bare-chested artist whose face is covered by the Mexican flag’s eagle and who wears the US flag as a shirt; a weighty rope binds her hands, wraps around her hips, and courses up to her neck, as if to strangle her. In the work, Aguilar visualizes the adage ni de aquí, ni de allá (neither from here, nor from there), often repeated as a way to describe how Chicanx people often feel as though they do not belong either in Mexico, where their family comes from, or in the US, where they were born and/or raised. That cultural isolation, common in many diasporic identities, can feel like it has one in a chokehold—laying claim to both body and mind. —M.D.

While David Hammons has, among the general public, become synonymous with his African American Flag, in which he replaced the colors of the American flag with those of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African flag, his early body prints were arguably a more impactful intervention. In this series, he would grease his body with oil or margarine and then press himself against a sheet of paper and dust the surface with pigment. For America the Beautiful, he used lithography to add an American flag draped around his figure. Made as the civil rights movement turned decisively toward Black Power, America the Beautiful captured the paradoxical social position of being Black in America: both seen and unseen, a body rendered political just by its very proximity to the flag. Hammons’s face is smudged into a blank expression, his hand rising to touch it as if testing to make sure he’s still there. —H.J.

Before Siah Armajani built this bridge in Minneapolis, Interstate Highway 94 was a 16-lane gulf that could not be traversed by foot, no matter how hard one might try. His 375-foot-long Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge changed that. Relying upon a vernacular style seen throughout America’s bridges, Armajani constructed two arcing forms—one white, the other blue—that meet in the middle, creating what the Iranian American artist described as a yellow “handshake.” More than simply functioning as a usable pathway, the piece is also a celebration of crossing borders and finding common ground. Its steel girders are affixed with quotations from a poem by John Ashbery that Armajani commissioned. One line reads: “It is fair to be crossing. To have crossed.” —A.G.

It’s easy to imagine Humphrey Bogart as the fedora-adorned man in Hopper’s iconic painting, sitting with his back to the viewer, lost in silence and dripping with ennui. But there’s also something too dramatic about that—too labored and contrived for a scene so elegantly simple and still. That there are countless ways to interpret Nighthawks accounts for its long-abiding allure. And that each of us can imagine doing time in that diner affirms Edward Hopper’s status as an oracle of the collective loneliness at midcentury America’s core. —A.B.

A blue-tinted image of John F. Kennedy hovers in the center of this work by Robert Rauschenberg, pulled from a photograph and flattened into a screenprint, surrounded by fragments that don’t quite settle into a single scene. A hand gestures, an astronaut parachutes, pictures stack and slip past each other. Rauschenberg builds the painting out of the same material Americans were starting to live through—mass-media imagery from television, newspapers, and magazines. Made soon after Kennedy’s assassination, it feels less like a tribute than a record of how quickly a person becomes an image and then an icon. This is what the country looked like to itself at the time, and what it increasingly looks like now, with experience filtered through media and meaning assembled on the fly from whatever is in circulation. —D.C.

In 1992, many around the world celebrated the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas. Often, these celebrations ignored the brutal histories of colonialism and enslavement that would follow. Art institutions joined in too, and as Nao Bustamante says in the opening of her riotous performance Indigurrito—a portmanteau of “Indigenous” and “burrito”—she was told “that any artist of color must complete a performance based on 500 years of repression in order to get funded, so this is my version.” For the work, Bustamante invites to the stage “anyone who feels the guilt of last 500 years,” including “any white men who would like to take [that] burden.” Once on stage, Bustamante straps a burrito to her pelvis and asks these white men, now kneeling, to take a bite as a way to absolve themselves—and their collective breadthen—of their sins. Bustamante also strikes a more serious note, telling the audience to remember the Indigenous people whose lands they currently occupy. The work is a searing, raucuous indictment of those who have benefited from injustices of colonialism. —M.D.

In August 1965, the simmering social discontent of ’60s America reached a boiling point in Los Angeles, when a police confrontation in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts sparked days of riots against police abuse. The Watts Uprising was a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, shifting it from a predominantly Southern, nonviolent struggle against segregation to a more radical, national one focused on poverty, police brutality, and social injustice. It was a turning point, too, for Noah Purifoy, then a founding director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, where he conducted social work and taught art classes. Before the Uprising, Purifoy did not consider himself an artist. Afterward, he went out into the neighborhood to collect the scraps left behind: burnt wood, photographs, broken signs, and pieces of steel. From this debris, he began constructing assemblages he dubbed “junk art,” in an effort to create, as the catalogue for a 1966 show put it, “beauty from ugliness.” —H.J.

From his early days as a member of San Francisco’s Beat scene in the late 1950s, and across his 50-year career, the protean artist Bruce Conner worked in a wide range of media—from junk assemblages and Surrealist collages to trippy inkblot drawings and photographs of San Francisco’s punk demimonde. A contrarian whose personal mantra was “only resist,” he first gained attention for the unsettling assemblage works he produced between 1957 and 1964. During the same period, he also began making experimental films, creating collages of found and newly shot footage such as A Movie (1958), a satirical take on Hollywood tropes. In 1974, Conner requested access to the US government’s recordings of the Operation Crossroads hydrogen bomb test conducted on Bikini Atoll in 1946—the most photographed event in history—to make a film about it. To his amazement, access was granted. CROSSROADS, his chilling yet hypnotic reworking of the footage, is a 37-minute collage of underwater explosion sequences set to a soundtrack by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley. Here, Conner confronts the dark side of American triumphalism, timing the work’s release, in characteristic fashion, to coincide with the nation’s bicentennial. —A.D. 

Arguably, no figure in American history has been more glamorous and tragic than Jackie Kennedy, shown here beaming in a pillbox hat and stoic in a stunned state of glumness that signals the national mood after her husband’s murder—“the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century,” as Don DeLillo once described it. Warhol’s eye for arresting images is on display in Sixteen Jackies, as is his uncanny sense for how mechanical repetition (in this case by way of the silkscreen process he oversaw at the Factory) can abstract and clarify those images at the same time. —A.B.

Not even imprisonment could stop photographer Toyo Miyatake from practicing his craft. One of the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II by the US government, he smuggled a camera lens into the Manzanar camp in California, then became its official photographer, with one stipulation: a white assistant had to be the one to finish snapping each image. In this image produced for a high school yearbook, a hand reaches up from out of the frame and raises a pair of wire cutters to a fence made from concertina. Miyatake anxiously awaits the snip of those cutters—and remains firm in the belief that liberation will soon follow. —A.G.

View this work on the Whitney Museum’s website.

Barbara Kruger’s take on the US flag fills its stripes with questions obliquely referring to a distinctly American obsession with law and order. (Working on commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Kruger began conceiving the work during the regressive presidency of Ronald Reagan, who ran on a tough-on-crime platform. Before his political career, he had even starred as an actor in a 1953 movie called Law and Order.) “WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW?” asks the piece, which goes on to pose the decidedly unpatriotic question: “WHO SALUTES LONGEST?” Kruger’s questions are now more than three decades old, but they remain timely as ever. In 2025, for example, this piece became the backdrop for a widely circulated news photograph of National Guard officers during an anti-ICE protest in LA, spurring people to ask Kruger’s questions once more. —A.G.

Using the conventions of history painting, Kerry James Marshall addresses the historical absence of Black figures in Western representational art by centering them in his work—in this case, a monumental canvas depicting three Black children in a verdant, Norman Rockwell–esque backyard. A girl holds an American flag while two boys stand with their hands over their hearts as if reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Patriotic slogans appear on banners at the top and bottom of the canvas, along with the words—each rendered on a puffy pink cloud—“Happy July 4th Bang.” Here Marshall takes the trope of an American Independence Day celebration, traditionally depicted with white subjects, and populates it with Black figures, alongside eye-catching details such as a white utility pole that transects the composition and a barbecue grill ominously billowing smoke. In doing so, the artist asks: What does it mean to be patriotic? And (implicit in the work’s title) what harms might have been, and might still be, inflicted in patriotism’s name?—A.D. 

If, before Maya Lin unveiled this towering work, you had told the average American that they could find abstract art a moving tribute to the casualties of America’s disastrous war in Vietnam, they might have laughed in your face. In fact, her design was met with vehement resistance in some quarters at first, but many skeptics were won over, and abstraction has become a broadly accepted part of the lexicon of memorialization among US audiences. The monument takes the form of two black granite walls engraved in chronological order with the names of the more than 58,000 US servicemen and -women who died in Vietnam, forming a V that cuts into the earth. The project, which New York Times critic Paul Goldberger called “as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world,” is all the more stunning for Lin’s having conceived it while still an undergraduate student at Yale University. —B.B.

Jasper Johns gives you a stack of three paintings of the American flag, each successive canvas smaller than the one it rests on, that pushes the image out into the viewer’s space. You recognize it instantly, and then you realize you’re actually looking at it for the first time. The surface is encaustic, thick and worked over, the kind of paint application that slows down looking whether you want it to or not. In the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the flag carried enormous weight—of conformity, consumerism, and government authority—and Johns doesn’t argue with any of that. He just presents it until it starts to feel strange. That shift matters, turning a symbol everyone agrees on into something needing to be reconsidered. —D.C.

Bill Traylor, born into enslavement in 1854, spent most of his life on a plantation in Benton, Alabama. In 1935, he relocated to Montgomery, where, at the age of 82, he began to draw. By the time of his death in 1948, Traylor had created more than 1,500 images of silhouetted humans, animals, and imaginary structures. Assured, lively, and often darkly humorous, these works can also convey a palpable sense of menace. As a Black man living under Jim Crow, Traylor was no stranger to peril; he had witnessed a lynching and had lost a son in that horrific fashion. But though his drawings were based on personal memories, experiences, and observations, he was also, in the words of curator Leslie Umberger, making his art “at a time and in a place that was very risky for an African American with a point of view.” Thus, in Traylor’s work, figures are not readily identifiable as either Black or white and racial confrontations are frequently encoded, often though substituting animals for people. In this piece, for example, a fox pursues a rabbit, known in Black folklore as a quick and clever survivor against the odds. —A.D. 

In this picture of a segment of the Connecticut River known as the Oxbow, the only visible figure is Thomas Cole himself, who can be spotted within the forest, painting the very landscape we’re meant to admire. Not pictured, notably, are the Wampanoag, Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket tribes, all of whom lived on this land in Northampton, Massachusetts, prior to the arrival of European settlers. In presenting this vista scrubbed of Indigenous people, Cole offers it as a zone of untapped potential—a tactic that recurs throughout the work of Hudson River School painters, who often portrayed the American landscape as unsettled, beautiful, and free for the taking. They would have done better to remember that the land is unsettled in a different way, roiled by histories of violence and erasure that are still being disentangled today. —A.G.

If many 19th-century painters envisioned the American landscape as an awesome ecosystem unchanged by political pressure, Kay WalkingStick, a Cherokee artist with European ancestry working in the 21st century, has approached her sublime mountain ranges and waterfalls differently. Often, she bisects her landscapes, creating diptychs in which “one side involves seeing the present—it often looks like a snapshot—and the other might involve the deeper meaning of the present, or the future,” as she told Art in America in 2023. Here, her subject is the Great Smoky Mountains, through which thousands of forcibly displaced Cherokee people walked between 1838 and 1839, in what is now known as the Trail of Tears. Moving between the two differently colored halves is a procession of faintly painted people. Evicted from their ancestral lands, these ghostly figures plod on as they search for a new place to call home. —A.G.

Measuring nearly six feet tall, Elizabeth Catlett’s Political Prisoner shows a woman with her head tilted upward and her torso incised to reveal the colors of the Pan-African flag. Walking around to the back, you see that the woman’s hands have been bound behind her in metal chains. Made in the year between Angela Davis’s 1970 arrest and her 1972 trial, this evocative work rightfully casts her as a political prisoner, one whose activism the US government sought to silence. Instead of creating a straight-forward portrait of Davis, Catlett created a monument to, and calling card for, all political prisoners—across time, history, geography. Though they may be imprisoned, they will not be forgotten. —M.D.

This Thanksgiving scene by illustrator Norman Rockwell became one of the most widely circulated images of American life during World War II. The third in Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series, it was published in the Saturday Evening Post alongside an essay by Filipino American novelist and poet Carlos Sampayan Bulosan. The painting shows a family gathered around a table loaded with food, a moment of calm framed as a national ideal. Linking domestic comfort to democratic values, it suggests that stability and abundance form part of what the country fights to protect. Its popularity helped fix a vision of America centered on home, family, and shared rituals, proof of the power of art to propagate political messages. —D.C.

The phrase “Land art” tends to evoke monumental projects—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (#92 on this list), James Turrell’s Roden Crater. Marsh Ruins proves that something need not be so grand to be powerful. Beverly Buchanan created its large, rock-like shapes in 1981 in the Georgia marshes using concrete covered by a quintessential American material: tabby, a paste made of a composite of oyster shells, water, and sand that was historically used by Black residents of the area for both homes and gravestones. It has been surmised that Buchanan may have intended the piece as a kind of homage to a group of slaves who, as the story goes, escaped just after arrival on American shores. These forms stand today as anti-monuments—markers of a complex and troubled past. —S.D.

Dating from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, Plains Indian ledger drawings were an outgrowth of traditional drawings on animal hide by male artists and warriors commemorating their exploits as fighters and hunters. Executed in pencil, ink, and watercolor on the pages of ledger or account books, these drawings often depict battles with US forces during the Plains Indian Wars of the 1860s–1890s. This ledger is the work of as many as 22 Northern and Southern Cheyenne artists—most famously Howling Wolf, a Southern Cheyenne artist imprisoned from 1875 to 1878 for resisting white expansion. The drawings it contains show Native protagonists triumphantly overcoming blue-uniformed US Cavalry soldiers, as well as the occasional settler, and prevailing over rival tribes. Other drawings present less fortuitous outcomes: One, for example, depicts the aftermath of a massacre by off-screen attackers, its central image showing dead and dying warriors surrounded by a border of blasting guns. —A.D.

Invented less than half a century before the Civil War, photography became central to Americans’ understanding of themselves and their history through that bloody conflict. Along with their respective assistants, photographers like Matthew B. Brady and Alexander Gardner went out into the killing fields and documented the war. No photograph from the era is more harrowing than A Harvest of Death, which was taken by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Gardner’s field operator, in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg. For perhaps the first time, the public was confronted with “the blank horror and reality of war in opposition to its pageantry,“ as Gardner wrote in a caption. While Gardner identified the dead as Confederate rebels, historians argue they are likely mostly Union. It’s fitting, perhaps, that soldiers from two sides of a torn nation are indistinguishable in death. —H.J.

The atrocities of 1968’s My Lai massacre were so brutal that, when US soldier Paul Meadlo appeared on CBS News to discuss all the people his unit had killed, even journalist Mike Wallace was jarred. “And babies?” Wallace asked. “And babies,” Meadlo responded. Those horrifying words were then laid atop a photograph of the massacre by Ronald L. Haeberle and distributed as posters by the Art Workers Coalition, whose vital protests of the late 1960s and early ’70s sought to obliterate any perceived gap between US museums and the racism of the country they inhabited. The poster refers directly to one conflict: the American war in Vietnam, which did not end until 1975, four years after the Art Workers Coalition disbanded. But because the US continues to practice its pastime of violently intervening in foreign nations, this timeless piece can unfortunately still be applied widely today. —A.G.

In the 1930s, Philip Guston, a young leftist artist living in Los Angeles, twice looked on as police destroyed political murals he had painted—one of which depicted in part a Ku Klux Klan member whipping a Black man tied to a stake. After moving to New York in 1936, Guston became one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism before returning to representation in the late 1960s. His new realist canvases were often rendered in a deliberately cartoonish style, depicting scenes and objects from the painter’s own life. Then, in 1968, the Klansmen reappeared. Whereas Guston’s 1930s Klan figures were horrifying in their bland efficiency, these later depictions show them as bumbling idiots in patched robes. Until recently, Guston’s KKK paintings were seldom shown, as curators and gallerists worried they would be misinterpreted. But while they do not promote racism—especially given Guston’s history as a civil rights activist—how exactly are they to be read? Some have described them as political paintings for both the 1960s and the present moment. Others, noting that Guston sometimes referred to them as self-portraits, see them as an expression of growing awareness of his own privilege. “The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world,” he once said. “What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” —A.D. 

An early masterpiece of institutional critique, Mining the Museum took place in a perhaps unlikely venue: the Maryland Historical Society. Invited to mount a project there, Wilson provocatively explored the thorny subject of race as it was discussed—and quietly passed over—in American museums by curating objects from the Historical Society’s collection. In one memorable example, under the deadpan label “Metalwork, 1793–1880,” he placed the material culture of white plantation life alongside artifacts of enslavement, juxtaposing finely worked silver vessels and a pair of shackles. The piece had the power to reshape its viewers—and even the workers of the Historical Society, who were forced to look again at the ugly parts of American history held by their employer, Wilson later recalled, saying, “You couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.” —B.B.

What does an alternative history of the United States look like? That’s the question posed by Judith F. Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles, which begins with prehistoric times and initially ended with the 1960s, and is now being extended to bring the mile-long mural into the present. Showing history from the perspectives of women, people of color, and queer people, the work’s various tableaux show moments that for decades had been ignored or erased from textbooks, like Indigenous people witnessing the arrival of Spanish colonizer to Mexican repatriation during the Great Depression to housing rights activist Mrs. Law fighting against red-lining. To realize the work, initially completed over four summers in the 1970s and ’80s, Baca worked with at-risk youths, teaching them how to execute a mural. It is an expansive version of history that is essentially of the people, by the people, and for the people—all people. —M.D.

Measuring just over 14 inches by 9 inches, Some Bright Morning is modestly scaled piece that tackles one of the weightiest, most abhorrent parts of US history: the lynching of Black Americans. The first of his “Lynch Fragment” sculptures, Some Bright Morning takes its name from the story, as recounted in 100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginzburg, of an African American family in Florida who was threatened with an attack by whites that would occur on “some bright morning.” The dissonance between the threatened violence and the poetic-sounding phrase stuck with Edwards, who read it as a sign that lynching seemed to innocuous to white people. To make the sculpture, Edwards welded together found steel objects, including a chain that hangs out from the rest of the sculpture. How this series is installed, 60 inches from the ground and at a viewer’s sightline, is also intentional: We’re meant to confront this brutal history head-on. —M.D. 

More so than any other work exhibited at the polarizing 1993 Whitney Biennial, this work pushed critics’ buttons, making it the “atom bomb that went off in the museum,” as Daniel Joseph Martinez would later call it. Deceptively simple in form, the piece took over the admission tags for the Whitney Museum—then known as the Whitney Museum of American Art—except that in this case, those tags did not spell out the institution’s name. Instead, Martinez fragmented a forceful phrase: “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE.” Exhibited in a show that placed a then unusual emphasis on race and sexuality, the piece acted as an indictment of a culture of whiteness that remains dominant in many major US institutions. With the nation slated to become a majority-minority country by 2045, Martinez’s piece only looks more prescient with time. —A.G.

There’s a reason Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death topped ARTnews’s list of the 100 greatest artworks of the 21st century. From the moment it appeared at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, the work shot through the art world like a thunderbolt, instantly elevating the longtime cinematographer to a fame rarely reached by visual artists. The seven-minute video essay collages YouTube videos, news clips, music videos, and sports footage against Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.” It appears to glide through the material with a poetic deftness that captures the breadth, contradictions, agony, and ecstasy of Black life, history, and culture in America. Arriving just months after the Black Lives Matter movement’s biggest wave of protests to date and less than a week after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, it seemed to grab the American zeitgeist by the lapels, something it continues to do a decade later. —H.J.

During the Great Depression, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration employed over 8.5 million people to build roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals—and countless artists to make public murals and document the country. Photographer Dorothea Lange was among them, employed by the Farm Security Administration to document impoverished farmers. While on assignment in California, she captured this photograph of Florence Owens Thompson at a worker camp. Though Thompson later contested Lange’s depiction of her circumstances, Migrant Mother instantly became a defining symbol of farm families’ desperation during the Depression. Thompson stares pensively into the middle distance, her children sheltering against her—an image that felt like a direct appeal to the nation’s conscience. It worked: after the photograph was published in a San Francisco newspaper, federal authorities sent 20,000 pounds of food to the camp. —H.J.

In 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act passed, Howardena Pindell turned 21. Finally, she was “free.” At least, that’s what every white person seemed to tell her. Of course, that didn’t match up to her reality. In this short, biting video, Pindell recounts various racist slights she has experienced throughout her life, like how she received 50 rejections for the 50 jobs she applied for, in a matter-of-fact tone. The droll response from the work’s other character, a white woman (also played by Pindell)? “You really must be paranoid. I have never had experiences like that. But, of course, I am free, white, and 21.” The work gets right to the core of how the United States, founded on the principle that “all men are created equal,” has always been a place of inequity. —M.D.

Free-form abstraction is a hallmark of African American quilting, which makes frequent use of old fabrics with particular meaning to the maker or the maker’s community—none more so than threadbare work clothing, evocative of manual labor. This example of a “work-clothes” quilt was made by Mary Lee Bendolph, one of the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, famed for their improvisational creations. Here, denim scraps have been repurposed into an almost monochrome composition in stormy shades of indigo and gray. Punctuating the quilt’s irregular geometries, eleven pieces of white fabric come into play, transforming a work of subtle beauty into a syncopated masterpiece.—A.D.

Look, it’s not the most groundbreaking painting in the US, but The Athenaeum Portrait, Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished 1796 painting of President George Washington, is without a doubt one of the most ubiquitous. After all, a version of it sits on the US Mint’s engraving for the one-dollar bill, not to mention the fact that it inspired Stuart to create 100 copies of the portrait, each of them famous in their own right. This portrait depicts Washington at 64 years old, just three years before his death, looking stone-faced at the viewer. The work, painted in muted tones with Washington cut sharply against the background, arguably established the popular image of the president not as a king, but a sober conductor of the people. —H.J.

In this picture by Gordon Parks, Joanne Thorton and her niece Shirley Kirksey stand on a sidewalk in front of a department store; overhead is a large neon sign that reads “COLORED ENTRANCE.” The scene is quiet, almost ordinary, and that’s what gives it weight. Parks took the photograph as part of his “Segregation Story” assignment for Life magazine, which documented daily life in several cities and towns in Alabama in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott. Rather than staging confrontation, he focused on routine—the way segregation structured movement, space, and visibility. As the Gordon Parks Foundation notes, the series aimed to elicit empathy and shift how Americans saw one another. This image does that with precision, showing segregation not as spectacle but as design, built into the architecture of everyday life. —D.C.

Cady Noland’s name for this piece suggests an artwork ever in a state of becoming, and maybe that could also be said of the United States, though these days it seems to only become worse and worse. In this sardonic rendition of her home country, American flags adorn the scaffolding around walls lined with 1,100 six-packs of red-white-and-blue cans of Budweiser, the most American of beers, adding up to the most apt symbol one can imagine for a nation drunk on its own myth and yet ever under construction (tools and other equipment lie scattered about). On a railing hang a pair of handcuffs and a couple of seat belts, economically evoking beer-sodden brawls, a police state, drunk driving, and the American romance with the automobile. It’s truly an intoxicating portrait of an intoxicated populace. —B.B.

It’s a small box, not much bigger than a book, sealed behind glass. Inside, a grinning mammy figure—round face, headscarf, red dress—stands upright. In one hand she still holds a broom, in the other a rifle. A grenade sits nearby. Beneath her, the floor is lined with wisps of cotton. Behind her, Aunt Jemima’s smiling face repeats over and over, printed like wallpaper. This piece by Betye Saar starts as a cheap notepad holder built on a racist caricature, and then turns. In her hands, a distasteful trope becomes fierce and dangerous. The mammy, designed to signal obedience and comfort, now stands armed and ready. Made in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the work doesn’t argue politely. It shows how a racist image made in America can be remade to to answer back. —D.C.

For this painting, Robert H. Colescott took Emanuel Leutze’s iconic 1851 canvas Washington Crossing the Delaware and turned it on its head, replacing its subjects with Black figures rendered as stereotypes, with George Washington Carver standing in for George Washington. The work is both funny and uncomfortable, but are we meant to laugh at the absurdity of the stereotypes or the self-serious patriotism of the canonical image being referenced? It’s provocative in a way that’s typical of Colescott, who became the first Black artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale in 1997. He once said of his paintings, “If you decide to laugh, don’t forget the ‘humor is the bait,’ and once you’ve bitten, you may have to do some serious chewing. The tears may come later.” —H.J.

The faces peering out from the windows of a trolley on the cover of Robert Frank’s seminal photo book really stare you down—and invite you into the inner and outer worlds of some fellow Americans at the breaking point of the 1950s. Beat writer Jack Kerouac wrote an introduction (“That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the juke box or from a nearby funeral …“). And Frank’s arresting portraits in black-and-white capture everything from a guy glowering over dinner at a diner to debonair bon vivants at a charity ball. —A.B.

Between the early years of the 20th century and the 1970s, more than six million Black people left the American South for urban centers in the North, West, and Midwest, seeking agency, opportunity, and freedom from the racial violence and oppression of Jim Crow. Known as the Great Migration, this exodus reshaped nearly every aspect of American life, including its arts and culture. As the African American population of northern cities grew, urban Black literary and artistic movements such as the Harlem Renaissance in New York emerged and flourished. In 1940, 23-year-old painter Jacob Lawrence—later a prominent modernist painter influenced by the Harlem Renaissance—embarked on his “Migration Series,” a storyboard-like account of the Great Migration. In 60 vibrant images of people in motion, Lawrence depicts the migrants’ struggles and triumphs, beginning with the first panel’s scene of a crowded train station and ending with another packed station, accompanied by the epigraph “And the migrants kept coming.” —A.D.

The title of this video installation evokes Minimalist artworks—most notably Robert Morris’s Untitled (Corner), from 1964. But in place of that movement’s formalism, Adrian Piper serves up a blistering critique of racism in the US, suggesting that histories of anti-Black violence exist everywhere in this country, even in the corners of art galleries. A monitor plays video of Piper herself, looking directly into the camera as she informs her viewer that most Americans are of mixed racial ancestry. Then she asks what white viewers will do with the revelation that they may be among “the Black majority,” as Piper puts it. Exhibited alongside two birth certificates for the artist’s father, one of which notes that he is one-eighth Black, Piper’s video plays above a table that has been flipped, as if by an angry person engaged in an argument that remains unfinished. —A.G.

View this artwork on the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’s website.

Hokey, heartening, beguiling, stinging—that there are so many different ways to interpret American Gothic is a testament to its potency and the reason it ranks among the most immediately familiar images to an American public who neither cares nor thinks regularly about art. “There is satire in it, but only as there is satire in any realistic statement,” Wood once said of the painting. But he insisted it was more than satirical and should be regarded as a sort of tribute, too. The timing of it, near the beginning of the Great Depression, is certainly part of the story, but Wood was always sagely ambiguous about how it could—or should—be read. —A.B.

How many artists can say their work was controversial enough to set off a US Supreme Court decision? Dread Scott can. In 1989, while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Scott exhibited What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, a participatory work that placed an American flag on the gallery floor, alongside a ledger where visitors could write reactions, with the option to stand on the flag while doing so. Above hung a photomontage showing flag-draped coffins of American troops and South Korean students burning the flag. The work got swept up in a nascent culture war over SAIC’s public funding, leading President George H. W. Bush to condemn the work, and prompting Congress to amend a 1968 statute banning flag desecration regardless of intent. When Scott and others defied the law by burning a flag on the Capitol steps, they were arrested. They appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor: Flag desecration was protected free speech. —H.J.

In this haunting evocation of the racial tension of the late 1960s, Faith Ringgold presents a violent standoff between white and Black Americans in which there is no clear victor. Across a cascade of figures that rivals any history painting in visual intensity, weapons are brandished, and blood splatters everywhere. Caught in the middle are a white boy and Black girl who huddle in fear. “They are the true innocent victims here,” Ringgold said in 2019, pointing out that, back in 1967, there was “a lot of spontaneous rioting and fighting in the street and undocumented killings of African-American people, and great racism,” even though few wanted to talk about it. Her painting ensured that no one could unsee all that carnage, which she said remained unresolved. “This was going on then; it’s happening again now.” —A.G.

No artwork on this list captures art-making as an imperative action—a means to communicate, and thus preserve, one’s humanity—more precisely than this 25-gallon ceramic jar by the African American potter and poet David Drake. The monumental, alkaline-glazed vessel holds his inextinguishable will: Born into enslavement at the turn of the 19th century, Drake became a master craftsman in Edgefield District, South Carolina, a crucible of American stoneware, and inscribed his name and poems on his creations in defiance of laws that forbade Black literacy. One side of the pot reads: “when you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to get a peace, — / Dave.” —Tessa Solomon