Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions explored modernist architecture and urban decay.
Location City: San Francisco
When an artist erases another artist's drawing, is it still a drawing, and whose? This work challenges the art definitions and contexts of its time.
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing ...
The dubious justice of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings.
Blythe, Justice
From the Manhattan Project to nursery rhymes, a collision of art and science.
Jess, If All the World Were Paper ...
Aspiration was one of only two panels to survive the Texas Centennial where it pointed to a future that transcended the racism of the day.
Aaron Douglas, Aspiration
An unflinching memorial to civil rights martyrs by the contemporary artist Thorton Dial
Thornton Dial, Blood and Meat: Survival For ...
Can the commonplace working farmland of California's Sacramento River Valley be a place of of breathtaking beauty?
Thiebaud, Ponds and Streams
Martyr or murderer? John Brown has polarized political opinion from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.
Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John ...
Teraoka draws on Japan's brilliant history of art and kabuki theatre to creating beauty from heart-rending tragedy.
Masami Teraoka, American Kabuki
Before T.V. and Twitter, politicians talked to voters face-to-face.
George Caleb Bingham, Country Politician
An inscription on the back of this sculpture identifies this as the earliest dated Buddha from China.
Seated Buddha
In a series that occupied most of his career, Motherwell addresses the violence of the Spanish Civil War.
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic ...
This is one of the most important objects of twentieth-century Euro-American visual culture. But… is it art?
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain
How do you make a nineteenth-century masterpiece ask twentieth-century questions?
Roy Lichtenstein, Rouen Cathedral Set V
Women’s labor and the passage of time are evoked in this sculpture constructed of organic materials.
Jackie Winsor, #1 Rope
Diego is sturdy, solid, unmoving. Frida looks out, quizzically, and with her hand on his, seems to be breaking free.
Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera
In this canvas, Kiefer transformed architecture meant to honor Nazi heros into a memorial for their victims.
Browse Smarthistory images for teaching & learning!
