Reading American Art

This anthology brings together twenty works of recent scholarship on the history of the visual arts in the United States from the colonial period to 1945. The selected essays - all written within the past two decades - reflect the interdisciplinary character of current art historiography in America and the variety of approaches that contribute to the dynamism in the field. The authors take up diverse subject - from colonial portraits to nineteenth-century sculptures of women to photographic images of New York - and invite those with a general knowledge of the history of American art to think more deeply about art and culture.