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videos + essays
Diego Rivera’s Sugar Cane
A brutal history told for a modern American city, Mexican muralism in New York
An African muslim among the founding fathers, Charles Willson Peale’s Yarrow Mamout
How a portrait of an African muslim came to hang side-by-side with the founding fathers in one of America's earliest museums.
Making an icon: JFK and the power of media
Go backstage at the 1960 Democratic National Convention with photographer Gary Winogrand.
Cheap Thrills: Coney Island during the Great Depression
According to the artist (Reginald Marsh), at Coney Island, “The best show is the people themselves.”
The triangle trade and the colonial table, sugar, tea, and slavery
Global trade in a cup of tea: Colonial America, sugar and slavery.
Impressionist color
Blue snow and violet-tinted flesh—the Impressionists radically changed our expectation of color.
Impressionist pictorial space
The surprising pictorial effects of modern art may seem at first like errors, but they are quite intentional!
Inventing America, Colt’s Experimental Pocket Pistol
The gun that "won the West" also transformed American manufacturing and marketing.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973)
The artist asks us if maintaining can be as important as creating.
Premonition or memory? George Grosz’s Remembering
Nazi violence forced many artists and intellectuals to leave Germany in the 1930s, and like Grosz, many came to the United States.
Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite, and the battle for National Parks
Captured here in paint, this grand Californian landscape would soon disappear under water.