Collective History
Art about the shared past of a nation, people or community, rather than one person's memories.
1,064 works · 10 related artists
About
Collective history is the story a people or nation tells about itself, and art helps write, contest and mourn it. Rome carved Trajan's Dacian campaigns in a spiralling band around his column, dedicated in AD 113, and modern states commissioned murals and monuments on the same principle: between 1929 and 1935 Diego Rivera covered the main stairway of Mexico's National Palace with the country's history from before the conquest to the Revolution.
After the Second World War many artists turned to what nations preferred to forget. Anselm Kiefer confronted Germany's Nazi past in heavy, scorched landscapes of the 1970s and 1980s. William Kentridge's animated Drawings for Projection, begun in 1989, follow apartheid-era Johannesburg through erased and redrawn charcoal, and Kara Walker's black cut-paper silhouettes restage the violence of American slavery. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) lists the dead on black granite instead of raising a heroic statue.
