A Companion to American Art presents a comprehensive exploration of the methodology, historiography, and current state of the field of American art history. Featuring newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars, readings address both canonical and lesser-known artists, trends, and themes while showcasing a diversity of critical approaches to American art. Topics covered range from scholarly overviews of specific chronological periods, movements, and media to in-depth explorations of theoretical concepts; from patronage to popular visual expression; from artistic facture and form to the history of art reception; and from issues of identity and community to reflections on ecology and the environment.

Table of Contents

• Introduction American Art History Now: A Snapshot
• Writing American Art History
• Geographies: Rethinking Americanness
• Subjectivities
• Art and Public Culture
• Conclusion (An Opening)
• Writing American Art History
• Dialogue: A Conversation Missed Toward a Historical Understanding of the Americanist/Modernist Divide A Conversation Missed: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Americanist/Modernist Divide
• Areas of Difference
• Case Study: Jackson Pollock
• Concluding Observations
• Dialogue: Response: Setting the Roundtable, or, Prospects for Dialogue between Americanists and Modernists
• Mass/Popular Culture
• Formalism
• Material Culture
• Pragmatism
• A Time and a Place Rethinking Race in American Art History A Time and a Place: Rethinking Race in American Art History
• Race-ing Black Artists
• Seeing White
• The Ends of Race?
• Imagining a Post-Racial Art History
• And So, Where and When?
• Dialogue: On the Social History of American Art
• Introduction
• The Marxist Social History of Art
• Marxist and “Marxian” Social Histories of American Art
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Dialogue: Response: Our Cause Is What?
• Acknowledgments
• The Maker's Share Tools for the Study of Process in American Art
• Close Analysis
• The How-To Book
• Reconstruction
• The Maker's Share
• Materiality
• The Social
• Theorizing Process
• Conclusion
• Dialogue: The Problem with Close Looking
• Dialogue: Response: Look Away
• “Deduction” as Intense Engagement
• Affective Encounters and Differentiations, or the Politics of Engaging Surfaces
• Racialized Ontologies of the Visual
• Messy Histories, Viscerally Felt
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Looking for Thomas Eakins: The Lure of the Archive and the Object
• Dialogue: The Challenge of Contemporaneity, or, Thoughts on Art as Culture
• Dialogue: Response: Writing History, Reading Art
• Geographies: Rethinking Americanness
• Teaching Across the Borders of North American Art History
• Why Co-Teach?
• The Entangled Classroom
• Looking Ahead
• An American Architecture?
• Americanness?
• American?
• Can We Still Write About an American Architecture?
• The Pacific World and American Art History
• “Home” and “Homeless” in Art between the Wars
• Pueblo Painting in 1932: Folding Narratives of Native Art into American Art History
• Awa Tsireh's Transcultural Line
• “An Art That Is Really American”
• Nationalism Undone in Venice
• Pueblo Mentors and Friends
• Reproductions and Multiples
• Acknowledgments
• US American Art in the Americas
• Settler Modernism in Latin America
• American Sources of Modern Art
• Conclusion
• Geography Lessons: Canadian Notes on American Art History
• Only in America: Exceptionalism, Nationalism, Provincialism
• Monolingualism, Multilingualism, and the Study of American Art
• “the great car of English”
• In Other Words (Translations)
• From “English Only” to “English Plus”
• Forward (Foreword)
• Acknowledgments
• Subjectivities
• Painters and Status in Colony and Early Nation
• Portraits, History, Theory
• Artisanry and Enterprise
• Colonial Nationalism
• American Genius
• Pantaloons vs. Petticoats: Gender and Artistic Identity in Antebellum America
• Male or Man?: The Politics of Emancipation in the Neoclassical Imaginary
• Precarious Freedom: John Quincy Adams Ward's The Freedman
• The Cult of Lincoln and Anonymized Slaves: Thomas Ball's Lincoln Memorial
• Institutional Exclusion and Material Castration: Edmonia Lewis's Forever Free
• Conclusion
• Drawing Boundaries, Crossing Borders: Trespassing and Identity in American Art
• Acknowledgments
• Lookout: On Queer American Art and History
• Mobilizing Desire
• The Missing Picture
• Riding History
• From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art Historyc
• Ecocritical Art History
• Ecology and Transnationalism
• Vital Matters: Things, Objects, and the Question of the Animal
• Art History as Collage: A Personal Approach
• Acknowledgments
• Art and Public Culture
• Material Religion in EarlyAmerica
• Issues in Early Mass Visual Culture
• Developing A Canon
• Re-Envisioning Mass Audience Reception
• Patrons, Collectors, and Markets
• Superficial And Substantial Consumption
• Passive And Active Consumers
• Consuming Content And Form
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Historicism in the American Built Environment
• Modernity's Historicism
• Historicism In The Early Republic
• The Invention Of An American Tradition
• Modernism's Historicism
• History For Whom?
• The Painting of Urban Life, 1880—1930
• Photography and Opium in a Nineteenth-Century Port City
• Value in the Vernacular
• Defining The Vernacular
• Robert Arneson, Up And Down
• Meditations On A Grain Elevator
• Erasing Edward Hopper
• Realism under Duress: The 1930s
• Earlier American Realisms
• Soviet Socialist Realism
• Reginald Marsh's Baroque Realism
• Philip Evergood's Expressionist Realism