Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
American Impressionism was a style of painting related to European Impressionism and practiced by American artists in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth. The style is characterized by loose brushwork and vivid colors with a wide array of subject matters but focusing on landscapes and upper-class domestic life.
Frederick Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.
Barbara Buhler Lynes is an art historian, curator, professor, and preeminent scholar on the art and life of Georgia O'Keeffe. She retired on February 14, 2020 from her position as the Sunny Kaufman Senior Curator at the NSU Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida to continue her scholarly work on O'Keeffe and American modernism. From 1999 to 2012, she served as the founding curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she curated or oversaw more than thirty exhibitions of works by O'Keeffe and her contemporaries. Lynes was also the Founding Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center from 2001 to 2012. Prior to her work at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Lynes served as an independent consultant to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from 1992 to 1999 and has taught art history at Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, Montgomery College, and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
The Crocker Art Museum is the oldest art museum in the Western United States, located in Sacramento, California. Founded in 1885, the museum holds one of the premier collections of Californian art. The collection includes American works dating from the Gold Rush to the present, European paintings and master drawings, one of the largest international ceramics collections in the U.S., and collections of Asian, African, and Oceanic art. The Crocker Art Museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is dedicated to the artistic legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe, her life, American modernism, and public engagement. It opened on July 17, 1997, eleven years after the artist's death. It comprises multiple sites in two locations: Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Abiquiu, New Mexico. In addition to the founding Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, the O'Keeffe includes: the Library and Archive within its research center at the historic A.M. Bergere house; the Education Annex for youth and public programming; Georgia O'Keeffe's historic Abiquiu Home and Studio; the O'Keeffe Welcome Center in Abiquiu; and Museum Stores in both Santa Fe and Abiquiu. Georgia O'Keeffe's additional home at the Ghost Ranch property is also part of the O'Keeffe Museum's assets, but is not open to the public.
The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art is an art museum located on the campus of the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. The permanent collection has over 15,000 objects. Admission is free and open to the public.
The New Britain Museum of American Art is an art museum in New Britain, Connecticut. Founded in 1903, it is the first museum in the country dedicated to American art.
The Florence Griswold Museum is an art museum at 96 Lyme Street in Old Lyme, Connecticut centered on the home of Florence Griswold (1850–1937), which was the center of the Old Lyme Art Colony, a main nexus of American Impressionism. The museum is noted for its collection of American Impressionist paintings. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993. The site encompasses 12-acres of historic buildings, grounds, gardens, and walking trails.
The Reading Public Museum is a museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, located in the 18th Ward, along the Wyomissing Creek. The museum's permanent collection mainly focuses on art, science, and civilization and contains over 280,000 objects. It also has a planetarium and a 25-acre (100,000 m2) arboretum.
The David Owsley Museum of Art (DOMA) is a university art museum located in the Fine Arts building on the campus of Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, the United States of America. The museum's name was changed on October 6, 2011, from the Ball State Museum of Art to the David Owsley Museum of Art in honor of David T. Owsley, grandson of Frank C. Ball, to recognize his donation of over 2,300 works of art and planned gift of $5 million. Since departments within the Fine Arts Building relocated to other areas on Ball State's campus, the museum has expanded its galleries, beginning in early-mid-2012 and ending in 2013.
Washington County Museum of Fine Arts (WCMFA) is an art museum located in Hagerstown, Maryland, United States. The building is located off Park Circle and serves as a centerpiece in Hagerstown City Park. The museum was donated in 1929, by Mr. and Mrs. William Singer, Jr. It was completed in 1931, and two wings were added in 1949. The museum provides residents and visitors with access to a nationally recognized permanent collection and a rotating schedule of exhibitions, musical concerts, lectures, films, art classes and special events for children and adults throughout the year. The collections include 19th & early 20th Century American Art, Old Masters, and Decorative art.
The Addison Gallery of American Art is an academic museum dedicated to collecting American art, organized as a department of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
The Georgia Museum of Art is an art museum in Athens, Georgia, United States, associated with the University of Georgia (UGA). The museum is both an academic museum and, since 1982, the official art museum of the state of Georgia. The permanent collection consists of American paintings, primarily 19th- and 20th-century; American, European and Asian works on paper; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings; growing collections of southern decorative arts and Asian art; and a strong collection of works by African American artists. It numbers more than 17,000 works, growing every year.
Warren Adelson is an American art dealer, art historian, and author specializing in 19th and 20th-century American Painting as well as contemporary art.
José D. Padilla is the 19th President of Valparaiso University. Padilla was most recently vice president, university counsel, and secretary of the University of Colorado system, and previously held similar roles for 15 years at DePaul University.
Rust Red Hills is a 1930 landscape painting by American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. It depicts red and brown hills under a glowing red and yellow sky in northern New Mexico. At its initial exhibition in 1931, O'Keeffe indicated that it was one of her own best-loved paintings from that time period. The work is currently held by the Brauer Museum of Art, but in 2023, Valparaiso University, which runs the museum, announced they planned to sell the painting and two others to raise money to renovate the student dormitories. Art associations protested the pending sale as an ethical violation of the deaccessioning process.
In early 2023, Valparaiso University announced that they had decided to sell three paintings in their collection to fund dormitory renovations under the leadership of president José Padilla. The proposed sale of three paintings—Mountain Landscape by Frederic Edwin Church, The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate (1914) by Childe Hassam, and Rust Red Hills (1930) by Georgia O'Keeffe—sparked fierce opposition, including protests from faculty, students, and Richard H. W. Brauer, founder and director of the university's Brauer Museum of Art.
Mountain Landscape, previously known as Sunset—West Rock, New Haven, is an 1849 landscape painting by American artist Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School, completed during his early period. The work depicts a mountain landscape with a lake and a small farm in the Northeastern United States based on Church's travels through the state of Vermont. The painting was originally part of the Nickerson art collection but was later donated to Valparaiso University as part of the Sloan bequest in 1953 and exhibited at the Brauer Museum of Art. In 2023, the university proposed selling the painting as an asset to fund dormitory renovations, leading to a contentious debate about the ethics of deaccessioning artwork.
The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate, also known as The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate, Sausalito, California, is a 1914 painting by American Impressionist Childe Hassam. The painting features a depiction of the Golden Gate Strait, the narrow passage that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean in the distance, from a position viewed near Sausalito. The Marin Headlands peninsula, as it appeared before the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, looms large in the painting. The "silver veil" in the title refers to the famous weather phenomenon of the San Francisco fog. Hassam was in the Bay Area at the time working on preparations for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition the next year.
