Art in America Marks America’s 250th Anniversary With an A to Z Reframing of US Art History
As the United States moves toward its 250th anniversary, Art in America is treating the approaching date less as a patriotic pageant than as an occasion to reconsider what “American art” has meant, and who gets to define it. The magazine has launched a new editorial project that asks invited contributors to narrate the country’s art history through a sequence of key terms, arranged from A to Z, rather than through a single master narrative.
The framing reaches back to a charged point of origin: 1913, the year Art in America was founded and the year the Armory Show introduced many Americans to the European avant-garde. That exhibition, staged at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, famously unsettled audiences with works such as French artist Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912). In the years that followed, Duchamp would further upend the rules of art with “Fountain” (1917), his porcelain urinal readymade that helped alter the course of modernism and cement New York’s growing cultural authority.
Those early episodes, the project suggests, already contain the paradoxes that continue to shape American art: the “anything-goes” avant-garde in the United States was propelled in part by an artist born elsewhere, and the Armory Show’s landmark venue carried associations with American militarism even as it later served a wide range of civic and commercial uses. The implication is not that these contradictions can be resolved, but that they are central to the story.
The A to Z structure is designed to keep that complexity in view. Rather than presenting a definitive canon, the series emphasizes that any account of American art is necessarily partial, shaped by competing histories and cultural claims. The editors point to the arbitrariness of what gets elevated: a letter devoted to one movement or concept could easily have been assigned to another, underscoring how quickly “the” narrative becomes “a” narrative.
The project also arrives amid contemporary debates over commemoration. The editors note that recent proposals from the Trump administration have included highly selective, monumental gestures such as a national sculpture garden of chosen “American heroes” and an “Arc de Trump.” Against that backdrop, the A to Z series positions itself as an alternative mode of remembrance: one that makes room for utopian experiments and formal breakthroughs alongside protest, refusal, and the uneasy entanglements of culture with power.
The first entry sets the tone: “A” for Abstract Expressionism. It revisits the familiar label and the competing names that once circulated around it, arguing that what bound the artists now grouped under the term was not a single look or method. Instead, the entry emphasizes a shared sense of possibility — a feeling that, for the first time, artists working in the United States were no longer trailing European innovation from afar but operating at a newly energized center of their own making. In that telling, the movement’s significance lies as much in a shift of confidence and cultural gravity as in any unified “ism.”
By organizing American art through terms rather than triumphs, the series proposes a history that can hold contradictions without smoothing them away — a useful stance at a moment when museums, public schools, and universities are facing heightened scrutiny, and when the stakes of how history is told remain intensely political.
