ARTnews and Art in America Name 100 Best Artworks About America

Key facts

• List published by ARTnews and Art in America ahead of US 250th anniversary
• Includes 100 artworks spanning from before 1776 to present
• Features works in various media: painting, sculpture, print, drawing, video, film, digital
• rafa esparza's 2019 performance 'bust: indestructible columns' took place on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C.
• Bureau of Inverse Technology's 'BIT Plane' (1997–98) involved a radio-controlled aircraft over Northern California tech companies
• Bruce Nauman's 'American Violence' (1981–82) uses neon and text to address brutality and American identity
• Nam June Paik's 'Electronic Superhighway' (1995) is a 51-channel video installation
• Charles Willson Peale's portrait of Yarrow Mamout (1819) depicts a formerly enslaved Fulani Muslim who became a property owner in Washington, D.C.
• Maria and Julian Martinez developed black-on-black pottery technique at San Ildefonso Pueblo
• Benjamin West's painting of Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment (ca. 1816) is an allegorical work
• Martha Rosler's 'House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home' series (ca. 1967–72) juxtaposes Vietnam War photos with interiors
• Walter De Maria's 'The Lightning Field' (1977) in New Mexico consists of 400 stainless-steel poles
• Georgia O'Keeffe's 'Pelvis with Distance' (1943) combines animal bones and American West landscape
• Robert S. Duncanson's 'Uncle Tom and Little Eva' (1853) depicts a scene from Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel
• Harry Gamboa Jr.'s 'Decoy Gang War Victim' (1974) was a performance by Asco collective
• Martin Wong's 'El Caribe' (1988) depicts an alter ego of a Puerto Rican man
• Charles Sheeler's 'River Rouge Plant' (1932) is a Precisionist painting of a Ford Motor Company factory
• Isaac Julien's 'Lessons of the Hour' (2019) is a 10-screen video installation about Frederick Douglass
• Henry Ossawa Tanner's 'The Banjo Lesson' (1893) depicts an elderly Black man teaching a boy
• Alfredo Jaar's 'A Logo for America' (1987) appeared on a video screen in Times Square
• Joe Overstreet's 'Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace' (1968) was begun the day after MLK's assassination
• Rupert García's '¡Cesen Deportación!' (1973) is a poster from the Chicano movement
• Carleton Watkins's photograph of Vernal Fall (1861) helped convince President Lincoln to protect Yosemite
• Marisol's 'The Family' (1962) critiques the American nuclear family
• Tiffany Studios' 'Hartwell Memorial Window' (1917) exemplifies opalescent glass innovation
• Danh Vo's 'We The People' (2010–16) replicates the Statue of Liberty in 250 pieces spread across 15 nations
• Cameron Rowland's 'Depreciation' (2018) involves a one-acre plot on Edisto Island appraised at $0
• Dara Birnbaum's 'Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman' (1978–79) recuts CBS Wonder Woman clips
• Pablo Delano's 'The Museum of the Old Colony' (2016–ongoing) critiques US imperialism in Puerto Rico
• Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani's 'Untitled (Atomic Bomb Dome and Kannon)' (2001) reflects on Hiroshima and internment
• Ernie Barnes's 'Sugar Shack' (1976) depicts Black joy through dance