100 Artworks About America: A New List Reframes National Identity
As the United States moves toward its 250th anniversary, the question of who belongs in the national story has become newly charged. That tension now runs through a major new project from and Art in America: a list of the 100 greatest artworks about America, assembled after more than a year of planning and more than a month of debate over its scope and ranking.
The editors made a deliberate choice. This is not a list of the best American artworks, a category they found too broad and too difficult to settle. Instead, it gathers works that directly contend with America, Americanness, and American history. The result is less a canon than a map of competing visions — one that stretches from an 18th-century painting of a Founding Father to a 21st-century video essay on anti-Black racism.
The range is wide and pointed. The works address the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the American War in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, the Trail of Tears, mass incarceration, and the Great Depression. They also move across artistic movements, including the Hudson River School, Pop art, the Harlem Renaissance, Conceptualism, and Minimalism. In other words, the list treats American art history as a field shaped by conflict, migration, and revision rather than a single inherited style.
That openness extends to the artists themselves. Inclusion did not depend on being born or based in the United States. Alongside Native American artists and U.S.-born painters and sculptors, the list includes artists from Korea, Moldova, Iraq, Chile, Vietnam, Cuba, Hong Kong, Japan, Switzerland, and Mexico. Some spent significant time abroad, approaching the United States from a distance that sharpened their perspective.
Among the works singled out is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1994 sculpture “Untitled” (America), ranked No. 55. Gonzalez-Torres described the United States as a place of both opportunity and injustice, and he once wrote, “Democracy is a constant job, a collective dedication.” That line gives the list its moral center: a recognition that the nation is not a fixed idea, but an argument continually being made.
The project was built collectively, with each editor proposing works and defending them in meetings and on Slack before the final ranking was set. That process of disagreement may be the most American part of all. The list ultimately suggests that the country’s art history is strongest when it makes room for contradiction, memory, and difference — not despite them, but because of them.
