**From the earliest stirrings as a republic to the information age, America has been a country of triumph and struggle, imagination and innovation. And for nearly three centuries the country´s artists, witnesses to the nation´s extraordinary arc of development, have created a rich, visual record that offers insights into our beginnings and growth as a nation. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, home to one of the country´s finest collections of American art, is housed in the building that once served as the United States Patent Office, a nineteenth century clearinghouse for patents on inventions. It seems appropriate that an art museum, dedicated to collecting and preserving the nation´s artistic creativity; has found home in the very building that promoted innovation early in the nation´s history. And innovation is still the watchword: For the past six years, the landmark building underwent extensive renovation, allowing the Museum to expand its gallery spaces-and its capacity-to present its collections to the American people. America´s Art is published on the occasion of the Museum´s reopening and gathers 225 of its best works, culled from a collection of forty thousand objects. Like the Museum´s renovation, this catalogue embraces a bit of innovation itself. The book broadly sketches periods in America´s history-from the colonial period and Revolution through the Civil War, to the Gilded Age, World War II, and modern art-to create a vibrant portrait of creativity, reflection and celebration. The opening chapter looks at European influences in the religious images of New Spain, while classical images from colonial New England reveal the young nation´s early gifts for adaptation. Subsequent chapters track the visual splendor of the western landscape, the great expansion west, and the tragic eclipse of the Native American way of life. **Brother against Brother** illustrates the Civil War: Painting and sculpture of individuals, particularly Lincoln frame classical ideals of presentation, while photographs offer candid, elegiac images of war´s destruction. The twentieth century follows, with the rise of industry and the city, World Wars, a Great Depression. Amid these challenges came the Harlem Renaissance, a creative flowering that took hold of New York´s Harlem district in the 1920´s and 1930´s. African American artists such as Jacob Lawrence and James van Der Zee rose to national prominence with images that chronicled not only Harlem life but also the influences of African art. Final chapters look at folk art and the freer creations of the abstract expressionists. By the 1940s and 1950s the art world has thrown the possibilities wide open. Artists translated on the canvas an inner landscape of emotion, literally bold strokes of self-discovery that forever redefined ideas of exploration and meaning. And the 1990s, Nam June Paik´s Electronic Superhighway, a blinking, neon-lit marvel, conveys the modern era´s preocupations, further extending notions of artistic expression. Together, the images in America´s Art both define and fail to define a country that is still a work in progress itself**, the editors. Foreword, Eleanor Harvey. Introduction, Elizabeth Broun. From distant shores. This Other Eden. Liberty More than Life. Ever Westward. Hand to the Plow. Brother against Brother. The Rise of Industry. An Eye for Beauty. Seeing the City. The Harlem Renaissance. South by Southwest. The Great Depression. Folk Traditions. Americans at Midcentury. The Abstract Impulse. Toward the Millennium. Catalogue. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. Ackowledgments.

Slowik, Theresa J. . (2006). America´s Art (1a.ed. ed.). Harry N. Abrams.