There is no open road here.
Seeing America – Periods: 1945-1980
Buttons, flags, and booze — Ben conjures up a specific time and place.
Politics and humanity in 1970s New York
Museum visitors often mistake this sculpture for a real person
Disillusionment in 1970s America
At this party, everyone has the same face and seems profoundly alone.
Fashion & alienation in 1960s New York
From the Manhattan Project to nursery rhymes, a collision of art and science.
If All the World Were Paper…
Does the figure emerge from the flag, or does it imprison him?
Teaching guide
Benny Andrews, Flag Day
An explosion in a mine kills 111, Shahn captures the devastation of those left behind.
A mine disaster and those left behind
A portrait of a president transformed by tragedy.
Rauschenberg’s Homage to JFK
The artist asks us if maintaining can be as important as creating.
Maintenance art
Go backstage at the 1960 Democratic National Convention with photographer Gary Winogrand.
JFK and the power of media
Spirituality and transcendence were important postwar themes expressed in Rothko's work.
Transcendence and Cold War
Lawrence captures the vitality of Harlem and highlights the issues around access to medical care for people of color.
A Harlem street by Jacob Lawrence
A powerful accumulation of names is inscribed on slabs of reflective stone that cuts into the earth on the Mall.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
This sculpture, installed on the Yale campus during Vietnam War protests, was never meant to be permanent.
Protesting the Vietnam War, with lipstick
Drought and rain govern when this work of art in Utah’s Great Salt Lake can be seen.
Entropy and environment at Spiral Jetty
Hopper gives us a window into the urban isolation and anxiety of WWII-era New York.
Wartime alienation, Hopper’s Nighthawks
New York put growth ahead of all else, resulting in the loss of important historic buildings, like Penn Station.
A Landmark Decision
The American flag is a potent symbol that has different meanings for different viewers.
Icon and irony: Jasper Johns, Flag
Asawa was interned in World War II, but we must be careful about interpreting her artworks as related to that trauma.
From wire to weightlessness
![Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola [3], 1962, casein on canvas, 176.2 x 137.2 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts)](https://smarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/warhol.jpg)
Warhol’s art celebrates the consumerism and advertising that inundated American culture in the 1960s.