The American West
The landscapes, peoples and myths of the western United States, from survey paintings and photographs to cowboy art and Native responses.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for The American West are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
As the United States pushed west in the 19th century, artists travelled with traders, surveyors and armies, and their pictures shaped how the region was imagined. George Catlin spent the 1830s painting Plains peoples along the upper Missouri, recording nations whose ways of life were already under pressure. Albert Bierstadt's The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863) enlarged the scenery into a theatrical promised land, and Thomas Moran's sketches from the 1871 Hayden expedition helped persuade Congress to create Yellowstone National Park the following year.
Photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan hauled glass-plate cameras across deserts and canyons for government surveys. The cowboy became a national hero in the paintings of Charles M. Russell and later on screen. Native artists have since answered these images: Wendy Red Star's Four Seasons (2006) poses the artist in Crow regalia before obviously artificial scenery and inflatable animals, puncturing the romantic diorama.
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The Art Market
The Artist's Studio
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The Body
The City
The Domestic and Domesticity
The Elements
The Environment
The Fantastic
The Mundane
The Seasons
The Senses
The Sublime
Time
Times of Day
Traces, Indexes, and Implied Presence
Trauma and Struggle
Urbanization
Utopia
Vacant and Vacated Spaces
Violence
Virtue and Vice
Visual Perception
War and Military
