The Midway Plaisance was a mile-long carnival area adjacent to the Chicago World's Fair, featuring carnival rides, performances, food stalls, and inhabited “villages” purporting to display architecture and customs from around the world.
Location City: Chicago
The white, Beaux-Arts buildings declared that the center of the world's innovation had moved to the United States; and it was and ought to be under the exclusive control of white men.
The World’s Columbian Exposition: The White City ...
Suffused with the contemporary racist pseudoscience of Social Darwinism—which claimed that white people with northern European ancestry were the most “evolved” race—the World’s Columbian Exposition cast other races and cultures as the living relatives of white people’s distant ancestors.
The World’s Columbian Exposition: Introduction
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884 by Georges Seurat is considered to be one of the most important 19th century paintings. Find out more with James Rondeau, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of ...
What does a Kwakwaka'wakw belt have to do with photographic manipulation?
Ceremonial belt (Kwakwaka’wakw)
Abstract expressionism invites us in
Finding meaning in abstraction
Must art be beautiful?
The Old Guitarist, and the question of ...
This jug is one of the earliest known alkaline-glazed stoneware face vessels made by slaves or their descendants in the Edgefield District of South Carolina.
Cultures and slavery in the American south: ...
Revisiting a frozen sea, memory and science in the 19th century
Frederic Edwin Church, The Iceberg
The Wyeths have a long history of painting the American story.
Jamie Wyeth, Kalounna in Frogtown
There is no open road
Tooker, Highway
Cuban cigars, Cuban independence
Metcalf, Havana Harbor
Celebrating America's place in the world
Childe Hassam, Horticulture Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, ...
Cotton, oil, and the economics of history
Samuel Colman, Jr., Ships Unloading, New York
In the wake of the Civil War, mending the United States, one stitch at a time.
Lilly Martin Spencer, The Home of the ...
Picasso’s portrait of Kahnweiler presents the essential innovations of Analytic Cubism.
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
The convention of elongating the figure can be seen in many of Olowe’s carvings, to visually highlight the importance of the head that holds the inner spiritual power, dignity and strength, and sacredness of one’s destiny.
Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post of Enthroned ...
Geller captures the tensions of the Jewish immigrant experience in the early 20th-century United States.
Todros Geller, Strange Worlds
The idea of sculpture was the subject of Antin’s work, which interrogates beauty, gender, and “traditional” art.
Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture
Gordon Parks and the writer Ralph Ellison collaborated to show that Harlem is everywhere.
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