Americana

Images and objects associated with the United States and its national story, used both to celebrate and to question it.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Americana are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Americana gathers the things that stand for the United States: flags and frontier towns, diners, pickup trucks, Main Street and the family car. Artists have used them to tell a national story and, just as often, to test it. Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) staged the founding myth on a heroic canvas, Timothy H. O'Sullivan photographed the West for government surveys after the Civil War, and in the 1930s the Regionalist Grant Wood made Iowa farmers into emblems with American Gothic (1930).

Post-war artists grew more ambivalent. Jasper Johns's Flag (1954–55) asks whether a painting of the flag is still a flag, Robert Frank's photobook The Americans (1958) found loneliness along the highway, and Robert Bechtle's '61 Pontiac (1968–69) poses a family beside its station wagon with deadpan exactness. Look for patriotic reds, whites and blues handled with irony.