United States Arts and Literature

USA Arts and Literature

Literature

17th-17th centuries: Colonial times

When the first colonizers from Europe came to America, there was already an ancient literature. But the poetry and prose of the Indians was orally practiced, and the new residents had little interest in documenting it. The first written literature consisted largely of letters, travelogues, sermons and autobiographies, most of them of little literary interest. William Bradford’s “History of Plimmoth Plantation” (begun in 1630, published in 1856) describes the tribulations of Mayflower migrants when they arrived in England in 1620, while adventurer John Smith painted the new country’s vast natural resources in “A Description of New England” (1616).

United States Population Pyramid

  • Countryaah: Population and demographics of United States, including population pyramid, density map, projection, data, and distribution.

The majority of immigrants from Europe were Englishmen, e.g. Anne Bradstreet, America’s first poet of any significance. She was born in England and emigrated to Massachusetts in 1630. In 1649, her brother-in-law brought her poems to London and had them printed under the name “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). Many of the immigrants had left home for religious reasons and formed when they came to the new country, New England, Calvinist-inspired parishes. The Puritans, as they came to be called, influenced the religious literature that dominated the early times. The priest Cotton Mather wrote more than 450 works, e.g. “Magnalia Christi Americana” (1-22, 1702) and “The Christian Philosopher” (1720).

But Puritanism also characterized other literature, such as Mary Rowlandson’s diary. She was a respected priestess in Massachusetts when, in 1675, with her children, she was captured by Native Americans who attacked the small town where she lived. Thanks to her Puritan belief that it was God Himself who was behind her tribulations, she could not only be surprisingly objective in her image of the Indians, but also see the whole experience as spiritual development.

The last great Puritan theologian became the most influential. In his sermons and other writings, Jonathan Edwards built up a system of rational idealism that would have great significance for the future.

Already during the earliest period in American literature, three spheres of interest emerged that continued to characterize American literature and culture in general: the interest in adventure in all forms, the interest in morality, often in Puritan form, and the interest in politics, often with utopian features.

Puritanism had to fall back on the Enlightenment from the mid-18th century, and from that time it became more common with American writers born in America. The universal genius Benjamin Franklin belonged to them. In the midst of his work as a politician, philosopher and scientist, he also had the opportunity to write literary works. “Autobiography” (1791; “Autobiography”).

The poet Philip Freneau wrote the poem “A Poem on the Rising Glory of America” ​​as early as 1772, and the future of America was the most important subject of his writings, e.g. the long poem “The British Prison-Ship” (1781).

19th Century: Romance

It was not until the 19th century and the romance that a literature emerged in the United States that related independently to European role models. Charles Brockden Brown has been named the first American novelist of importance. Washington Irving became the leading figure in a literary coterie that emerged in New York during the first decades of the 19th century. His collage-like “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Geuf” (1-3, 1819-20) was something new in contemporary literature, and stories like the one about Rip Van Winkle attracted great attention. He became the first internationally known American author. If Irving transformed the American short story and its essence, coterie comrade William Cullen Bryant became a poet in poetry. During the latter part of his life, the romantic poet became a leading liberal publicist. As head of the New York Newspaper Evening Post, he ran campaigns on major issues of the time. The third major innovator in the so-called Knickerbocker coterie was James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper not only created the Native American novel with his famous books, e.g. “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826; “The Last Mohican”) but also a portrait of the new, democratic man.

With RW Emerson, HD Thoreau and the other transcendentalists, the literary center of gravity was moved from New York to Boston and to the small town of Concord in Massachusetts. Under the influence of i.a. the European romance was created here not only a new, natural literature but also a philosophy in which nature became the source of power that illuminated the spheres of religion, morality and politics. In lectures, in prose poems such as “Nature” (1836; “Nature”) and in essays collections, Emerson presented his theories on the correspondences between the earthly and the divine. Thoreau used his diaries to launch his belief in nature and the right of the individual. “Walden” (1854; “Forest Life at Walden”), the depiction of two years of hermit life in nature, is a concentrate of Thoreau’s philosophy of life.

By the middle of the 19th century, American literature had three central figures, each of which in its own way would influence modern literature: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Poe was not only the great romantic poet but also the founder of the detective novel and a horror story master. Melville lived a large part of his life in obscurity, and only afterwards has he understood the greatness of the symbolic novel “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale ”(1851;“ Moby Dick or the White Election ”) and philosophical allegories such as“ Billy Budd, Foretopman ”(posthumous publisher 1924). Whitman was not only the usher of modern America but also, in collections such as “Leaves of Grass” (1855; “Straw of grass”) and alongside Baudelaire in France, the starting point for all modern poetry. Whitman stood for the free form, the free-flowing, visionary thinking,

Realism

The romance in the United States was followed by realistic trends. These could take different expressions, such as in Bret Hartes’s depictions of the miners’ camps, Joel Chandler Harris’s classic stories of Black folk culture, George Washington Cable’s New Orleans stories, William Dean Howell’s social novels, and Mark Twain’s popular stories of life on and in Mississippi. Howells also became the leading theorist and polemic of realism.

In contrast to these discoverers of reality, poet Emily Dickinson and novelist Henry James went the inward path but, despite a withdrawn life, formulated important truths about modern man.

20th Century: Naturalism and Modernism

At the beginning of the 20th century, American literature was dominated by realistic and naturalistic trends, and the American dream was strongly criticized by writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Frank Norris. Problem novels where the individual is tried under the pressure of society were also written by Ellen Glasgow and Willa Cather. Social indignation was strong with writers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London and with investigative journalists, muckrakers, like Lincoln Steffens. There were also poets who viewed the modern society with great pessimism. Edwin Arlington Robinson belonged to them, while Carl Sandburg, in Whitman’s successor, still defeated the democratic United States.

The 1910’s and 1920’s saw the emergence of more experimental prose and poetry. John Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein showed new ways of writing prose, while the imaginaries with Ezra Pound at the forefront provided the conditions for modernist poetry. Revolutionary things also happened in the field of drama. Eugene O’Neill is known as America’s greatest playwright during the 20th century. In his attempt to renew the American theater, he experimented with several different styles and subject areas. See further Drama and theater below.

Mellankrigstiden

Several of the writers of the inter-war generation were emigrants. TS Eliot, one of the central lyricists and theorists of modernism, lived most of his life in London. Gertrude Stein kept a salon in Paris, and Ernest Hemingway was among the visitors. F. Scott Fitzgerald set the tone of the time with his revealing images of a lost generation.

However, there were central writers who spent most of their time in the United States. William Faulkner preferred to stay at home in Mississippi, but he used Joyce’s and Proust’s techniques to give his now classic image of the southern states and of the modern man’s existential situation. Instead, Hemingway, the second great modern American stylist, used the international arenas to showcase his world of masculine ideals. Like the First World War, the second became a water divider between the generations.

Postwar

The war experiences weighed heavily on writers like James Jones, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. The war novels have continued to be a typical American genre with the Korean War first and then the Vietnam War as substance. Beat poets called themselves a new generation of writers with proseists like Jack Kerouac and poets like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the forefront.

Developments since 1945 have been characterized by diversity. New genres and styles have been tried. The dream of “The Great American Novel” has been replaced by more limited experience descriptions. The position of women in family and social life has been focused by theorists such as Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar and by fictional writers such as Marilyn French, Anne Tyler and Gail Godwin.

The situation of blacks is described by more and more voices. The first voices belonged to escaped slaves in the 19th century who wrote down their lives, but during the 20th century came masterpieces such as Richard Wright’s “Native Son” (1940; “Son of his Country”) Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (1952; ” Invisible Man ”), and later contributed Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou to the multicolored image of the United States.

Writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich and James Welch belong to the American indigenous population.

The Jewish storytelling tradition includes writers from originally Yiddish-speaking immigrants such as Isaac Bashevis Singer to Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and young talents such as Cynthia Ozick.

Another area of ​​experience is the regional one. American writers in the west and east, north and south are not the same. Most notable are the southern writers, with Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, William Styron and Barry Hannah at the forefront.

Influenced by Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, a generation of postmodernists, metafiction writers and black humorists emerged during the 1960’s. John Barth parodies all kinds of literary forms, while Kurt Vonnegut mixed science fiction elements and war reports in “Slaghterhouse-Five” (1969; “Slaughterhouse 5”). Thomas Pynchon looked at the high-tech and rubbish culture of American society and found that a world that is a bad joke can only be met with a dark laugh. Joseph Heller described how human innocence was destroyed by the social system.

A number of authors have combined the social-critical tradition of the 1930’s with the black humor tradition of the late 1950’s: EL Doctorow, Jerzy Kosinski, Walter Abish and Don DeLillo. Joyce Carol Oates has written many socially critical novels, but also horror-romantic exercises and sociological case studies.

Dirty realism may partly be seen as a reaction to all the experimentation in recent decades of prose. It is important to portray reality even if one does not disregard language and novel form. Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, JA Phillips, Richard Ford and many others are usually referred to as “dirty realists” or “minimalists”.

In many countries today, writers are emerging who see existence from a multicultural perspective. In the US, for example, Oscar Hijuelos, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee and all the chicano writers (see chicano literature). You could call it “world fiction” or talk about a new “maximalism”.

The American genres

During the 20th century, American literature has also become dominant throughout a number of genres. Wild West literature with roots in Cooper but also in the late 19th century mass market leaflets has periodically been internationally popular with entertainment writers such as Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour but also with serious moral dramas such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1940; “Meeting at Oxoket”). In Poe’s aftermath, horror literature in the United States has been developed by a number of authors, including HP Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub and Stephen King, The roots of science fiction literature are found in European 19th century writers, but the genre gained its name and strongest foothold in the United States in the 1920’s, and since then has to be essentially regarded as an American literary form with internationally dominant authors such as Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin. Strong branches of modern crime literature have virtually American characters: the “hard-boiled” private detective novel with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis, and the often socially critical police novel from Ed McBain to James Ellroy.

 

Arts

The history of the arts in the United States has been characterized by the heterogeneous composition of the population, where many diverse cultures, including the indigenous indigenous people, have prevailed. Historical surveys have traditionally been based on the European colonization, and it was not until the latter part of the 20th century that the art of Native American people began to be included in North American art history (compare ancient American art and architecture).

The 18th and 19th centuries

The first colonists’ art holdings were dominated by portraits by anonymous painters, during the 18th century also by immigrant artists. These include the Irish pastel painter Henrietta Johnston, the Scottish John Smibert and the Swedish Gustavus Hesselius. With the American-born John Singelton Copley and Benjamin West, who both settled in the United Kingdom, apart from their efforts as portraits, the first domestic history painting of importance was added.

At the end of the 18th century, there was a need for art that could manifest the new state formation. The public of art, still few, demanded portraits of prominent citizens, notably George Washington, whose official portrait was Gilbert Stuart. The sculpture experienced a flourishing period during the 19th century, especially through the glorification of the nation’s heroes. Patience Lovell Wright, who worked in wax, is counted as America’s first sculptor. Around 1800, the first artistic institutions were added, several at the initiative of Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia.

Landscape painting was represented by the Hudson River school from the 1820’s, with Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty and Asher B. Durand. The most popular landscape painter of the 19th century was Frederick E. Church with grand epic landscapes, while George Inness, influenced by the French Barbizon School, renewed the subjective landscape painting. The colonization of the West gave rise to new landscape views and Native American motifs. George Cetlin. Small-town buildings and agricultural countryside were reproduced within the naïve painting; its chief representative is Edward Hicks. A special position was taken by bird painter JJ Audubon, and the genre painting was represented by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham and Lilly Martin Spencer. Reproductions in color lithography spread genre and landscape paintings to a large audience. Among the company Currier & Ives most hired artists heard GH Durrie (1820–63) and Fanny Palmer (1817–75). The latter’s panoramic series, e.g. “Across the Continent” (1868), helped to create a sense of national unity after the Civil War. Even the folk art, e.g. the patchwork, taken motifs from home life. From being merely a utility object, it developed into a narrative art practiced by women during the 19th century. The patchwork has received a renaissance from the 1960’s and has given rise to its own art style.

A realistic way of expression became more prominent in the painting after the Civil War and was mainly represented by Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Homer’s main motive was the fisherman’s struggle with the sea. Two of Eakin’s paintings belong to the classics of American art: “Max Schmitt in a single Scull” (1871) and the operating interior “The Gross Clinic” (1875). The romance was represented by Albert Pinkham Ryder’s visionary landscape. Patriotism was mainly expressed in the monumental sculpture. by John Quincy Adam Ward.

America’s most famous artists from this period were active in Europe. James McNeill Whistler, from the outset realist, came under the influence of impressionism and Japanese art to proclaim modernism. Mary Cassatt with innovative portrayals of women and children belonged to the Impressionists. John Singer Sargent, a resident of the United Kingdom, was a leading social media portraitist. American photographers, including Eadweard Muybridge, for his part, gained importance for European painting through his studies of humans and animals in motion.

The civil war and the period thereafter meant an upsurge in popular and newspaper presses and a beginning of social criticism, represented among other things. by illustrators such as Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler. Within the new arts comic drawing and photography, where the United States came to occupy a pioneer position, there were strong socially critical elements. Photographic images from the Civil War documented events on the battlefields. Jacob A. Riis with the book “How the Other Half Lives” (1890) and later Lewis W. Hine highlighted the disadvantaged groups of society, while Edward S. Curtis photographed the repressed Indian culture.

The first ones in the painting to break a romantic tradition were the group The Eight, or The Ashcan School, whose members include Robert Henri as a leading figure mainly portrayed the rapidly growing metropolitan social life and its many problems, while Edward Hopper showed people’s strangers in a desolate metropolitan landscape.

The industrial boom of the late 19th century produced a new money-rich class, investing in both older European art, representing tradition, and modern art, representing the new and forward-looking nation. The collections often formed the basis of museums. Some great art collectors were financial magnates JP Morgan, John G. Johnson and JD Rockefeller. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz played for several decades a central role as an introducer of the art of the new age.

The 1900’s and 2000’s

American modernism in the early 1900’s was still based on European grounds. American artists in Paris helped break up the provincial feel of the national art scene. At the siblings Leo and Gertrude Stein’s home in Paris, they met Matisse, Picasso and other members of the vanguard. Max Weber, who came to Paris in 1905, united fauvism and cubism, and again in New York, he, like his European counterparts for older cultures, became interested. Marsden Hartley was instead influenced by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and exhibited with them in Berlin in 1912. Lyonel Feininger became a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. In Paris, New Society of American Art was formed in 1908, and in the United States a few critics and magazines took on the modern. Stieglitz exhibited in his gallery 291 (1905–17) both Europeans and young Americans, e.g. Joseph Stella, John Marin, Stanton Macdonald Wright and Morgan Russell with their early abstract synchronism. Arthur G. Dove performed 1910 in the United States’ first abstract painting “Abstraction No. 1 “. The breakthrough for modernism came in 1913 with the exhibition Armory Show in New York, where European modernists were introduced on a broad front, while American modernists were introduced in 1916. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Even Georgia O’Keeffe, with his organic-abstract images, belongs to American modernism. where European modernists were introduced on a broad front, while American modernists were introduced in 1916. The year before, Dadaism had been introduced in New York through, among other things. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Even Georgia O’Keeffe, with his organic-abstract images, belongs to American modernism. where European modernists were introduced on a broad front, while American modernists were introduced in 1916. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Even Georgia O’Keeffe, with his organic-abstract images, belongs to American modernism.

An extensive expansion of cities and institutions aroused the demand for monumental works. Several European sculptors worked in the United States, in addition to Carl Milles, for example. Aleksandr Archipenko, Naum Gabo and Jacques Lipchitz and Gaston Lachaise and Elie Nadelman; the latter are regarded as the pioneers of modernist American sculpture. The 1920’s metropolitan culture was depicted, among other things. in Florine Stettheimer’s painting. Other groupings, e.g. the precisionists with Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, in their objectively abstract paintings, celebrated the new industrial landscape. In particular, Grant Wood with his emblematic painting “American Gothic” (1930) represented the so-called regionalists. At the same time, interest in rural life and naïve painting attracted attention to Grandma Moses, who at the age of almost 70 began to depict his homeland.

1930’s depression and difficult social conditions affected art life. Many artists became involved in left-wing political associations. Artistic motifs included a social critique of American society. Diego Rivera and other Mexican murals, occasionally operating in the United States, influenced American artists. Also significant was a congressional decision in 1934 to initiate the Federal Art Project. Active in this area were Ben Shahn, Isabel Bishop, Andrew Wyeth and Alice Neel. The abstract art was represented by sculptors Burgoyne Diller, Richard Lippold and Alexander Calder with their mobiles.

During World War II, the US’s former isolationist policy was also broken in the cultural sphere. The art, supported by both federal institutions and commercial interests, became an ideological force to be reckoned with, which meant for artists the freedom to develop, without restriction, an American character. At the Venice Biennale in 1950, the still-dominant hegemony of American art was established. Although the art of the 1940’s meant a decisive crime with European tradition, it was initially influenced by it. Already in the 1930’s came from Germany Hans Hofmann, Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger and László Moholy-Nagy, who all through their teaching actions became important to American artists. During the war years, European artists sought refuge in the United States. To New York came surrealists like André Bréton, Roberto Matta, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, but also Piet Mondrian and Ferdinand Léger, who all exhibited in Peggy Guggenheim’s newly opened gallery Art of This Century. A unifying link between the European and American artists was Arshile Gorky. Both Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock took the impression of the surrealist’s freedom message. In the first American direction, abstract expressionism, the freedom of painting itself became essential. Within abstract expressionism, several individual features were represented, represented by, inter alia, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. A unifying link between the European and American artists was Arshile Gorky. Both Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock took the impression of the surrealist’s freedom message. In the first American direction, abstract expressionism, the freedom of painting itself became essential. Within abstract expressionism, several individual features were represented, represented by, inter alia, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. A unifying link between the European and American artists was Arshile Gorky. Both Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock took the impression of the surrealist’s freedom message. In the first American direction, abstract expressionism, the freedom of painting itself became essential. Within abstract expressionism, several individual features were represented, represented by, inter alia, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland.

In the 1960’s, the epoch-making pop art was added. The New Realist exhibition in 1962 is usually regarded as its starting point, but already in 1955 Robert Rauschenbergs had made his “Bed” where the bedding served as a tablecloth. The pop artists used new materials and techniques, freely combined with each other in assemblies or combines. They distorted older history traditions and derived motifs from American everyday culture and advertising. Jasper John’s meticulously painted flags and beer cans cast in bronze’s changed artistic value perspective, and so did Andy Warhol’s repetitive silkscreen print canning jars and idol portraits, Roy Lichtenstein’s magnum-sculpted old-time-painted stained-glass windows, and Tom Wesselman’s scintillating stained-glass paintings and disharmonious act paintings. George Segal’s casts of human bodies composed of objects can be seen as a precursor to Edward Kienholz and Duane Hanson’s true-to-life depictions of people and environments, even with smells and sounds. Richard Estes and Chuck Close include the photo realists in the painting. An approach to theater and other art forms occurred during the 1960’s with happenings and performance by pioneers such as Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann, performed in non-traditional arenas and often in collaboration with free dancers and musicians. The artwork’s extension outin the room and out of the room and away from traditional art scenes continued with the conceptual art and directions such as body art, land art and installations, eg. Robert Smithson’s nearly 500-meter-long sculptural formation in Salt Lake City, “Spiral Jetty” (1970), and the Bulgarian-born Christos packaging of buildings. Other directions that art took in the 1960’s were the art of art and minimalism, both inspired by Josef Albers. Among the minimalists are the painters Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella and Dorothea Rockburne. Primarily associated with minimalism are sculptors such as Sol LeWitt, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Don Judd and Tony Smith. Louise Nevelson’s monumental wooden box shapes and Eva Hesse’s sculptures in ropes and other organic materials also influenced the development of the sculpture. From the late 1960’s, a feminist movement emerged with leading figures such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. In the 1980’s, female artists formed the Guerilla Girls Action Group, which criticizes the patriarchal structure of the art world.

The liberation from traditional values ​​that began in the 1940’s culminated in the 1980’s in the postmodernist art’s discussion of identity and self-concept. The media, techniques, expressions and clichés of the mass media world were overthrown and often given ironic significance, e.g. in Cindy Sherman’s photos, Sherrie Levines, Laurie Simmons and Allan McCollum’s depiction of art objects, Jeff Koon’s sculptures, Barbara Kruger’s posters, Jenny Holzer’s neon signs with texts and Dara Birnbaum’s and Bill Viola’s video films. Among the new ones was also Keith Haring’s graffiti painting and Mike Kelley’s cuddly toy animals. The 1980’s also meant that the cultures represented by e.g. African Americans, Chicanos and Native Americans were legitimized and new museums and art halls were set up with such focus, which included meant that the collective mural, altar installations and shamanistic art were noticed. Among the artists were Jimmy Durham, David Hammons, Amalia Mesa-Bains and Ana Mendieta. The 1980’s and 1990’s focus on the body as a sign got prominent interpreters in i.a. Mary Kelly, Kiki Smith, Sue Williams and the current Louise Bourgeois. Other artists that were particularly noted in Europe include Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Richard Nonas, Charles Ray and Nancy Spero.

At the end of the century, there was a marked diversity in American contemporary art and new technology was increasingly used. The Los Angeles art scene was gaining importance, as were artists such as Gary Hill and Bill Viola, who made an appearance with their video works. Ann Hamilton became known for extensive multimedia installations. Mention should also be made of the circle around Mike Kelley with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and John Miller. In the last decade of the 20th century, photography also began to gain recognition in the international art world, which contributed to increased interest in the work of American photographers such as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.

By the turn of the millennium, painting had once again become fashionable and in demand – a trend that has kept itself sales-wise even though painting has not always been particularly prominent at the international art biennials. Works by a previously somewhat overlooked 1980’s artist such as the prematurely dead Jean-Michel Basquiat have, for example. in the 2000’s, prices were sold at increasingly large prices at the large auction companies. The 2000’s also meant increased international demand for concept artist Jeff Koon’s kitschy and spectacular works.

Incidentally, it can be stated that the concept of American art has been partially redefined from standing for a kind of national identity creation to becoming more fluid and less ethnocentric. Kara Walker has become known for her black silhouettes in paper, works that explore ethnicity, gender, violence and sexuality – subjects she associates with her own identity as an African American woman. Theory and practice are interconnected in a kind of entertaining pedagogy. Another African-American artist who has talked about himself is Glenn Ligon, a concept artist who takes up topics such as race, language, identity and sexuality in works that are often text-based. Shirin Neshat, who came from Iran to New York in 1974, has become a world name and is best known for his photo portraits of Muslim women but has been focusing on video art and film since the late 1990’s.

See also abstract expressionism, assembly, chicano art, combine painting, happening, Native American art, concept art, country art, minimalism, performance, pop art, superrealism.

United States Arts and Literature