LACMA

Art of the Americas, Level 3: Artworks on view

The American collection is the oldest in the museum, having begun with the acquisition of George Bellows’s Cliff Dwellers in 1916. Today the collection—consisting primarily of paintings and sculptures dating from the colonial period to World War II—provides an excellent survey of the development of art and culture throughout the nation and the region. Combined with related holdings of American decorative art, the collection recently moved to redesigned and expanded galleries emphasizing the international context of our nation’s art.

Henry Inman

American Stories (Through a Mirror, Darkly)

April 21, 2010

When I was a kid, I lived in the nineteenth century. Admittedly, I was an old guy before I realized that poignant detail about my grandfather’s farm. Everything about it was of a distant time, for there was not one modern convenience in sight. Everything was intensely labor related. But at nine years of age, the world was still a wonder and so the anachronism of the farm seemed rather like implacable fact. And nothing so reminded me of that moment than seeing Winslow Homer’s Cotton Pickers. This utterly striking image flooded my memory with that life and all the attending forces and beauties that the past could conjure . . .

Two Art Histories, One America

January 21, 2010

When I found out that LACMA had been presented with seven rare examples of nineteenth-century Pueblo pottery, I was thrilled to realize that the scope of our historical American art collections was finally more comprehensive. Like many museums across the country, LACMA’s American art collection technically did not include works made by American Indians. Instead, it contained many works of art, especially from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, depicting American Indians generically and often stereotypically (with the important exception of our recently acquired portraits of Chippewa chief No-Tin). The conventional notion was that American Indian art is not American art per se, the latter being traditionally understood as fine and decorative arts produced from the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century by formally trained, non-Native American artists . . .

Ask a Curator: What’s Your Motivation?

August 13, 2009