Description:
A fascinating account of the art of the US Bicentennial, offering wide-ranging perspectives on debates about national identity and history that remain pressing today
In 1976 the United States celebrated its two hundredth year with festivals, exhibitions, works of art, and historical initiatives. Over a decade, planning for the Bicentennial spanned postwar prosperity, political activism, and, toward the end, fear of national decline. The social alchemy of these conditions produced a national investment in shared cultural experience never matched before or since.
Across wildly disparate venues, demographics, interests, presidencies, and geographies, Bicentennial cultural production contended with community, the environment, immigration, heritage, technology, and what it meant to be American. This outpouring of projects both reflected and drove national debates, eliciting mass participation in negotiating US history and imagining the nation's future.
What Was America? offers a prismatic view of American art and culture in the years leading up to 1976. Ten fascinating case studies examine the individual efforts of artists such as Benny Andrews; blockbuster exhibitions, including A Nation of Nations at the Smithsonian; and popular community projects such as protest quilts and time capsules. The authors consider issues that remain highly relevant today and offer new perspectives on the possibilities for art's social role, exploring its use in defining the nation's past and future, its purpose and its people.
Review Quotes: "[Where] can we look today, amid cultural stagnation, for American art not just evincing but capacitating the good life, for aesthetics of majoritarianism against authoritarians, for flourishes of freedom against fascism? What Was America? illustrates beautifully how much that now dismantled state, the now defunded culture, once commissioned connective tissue. With such tissue always fine and presently torn, it will take a lot more than art for repair and reconstruction. But big visions and galvanic forms would help. America was an idea. And it is art's job to make some new ones."--Anna Kornbluh, Art in America
"Lively and accessible, What Was America? raises fundamental questions about what constitutes the arts and culture of a nation in search of a common identity."--Gregory Sholette, author of The Radical Unpresent "What Was America? illuminates the US Bicentennial's galvanizing effect on American art and culture. Rigorously researched and argued, the book is a timely example of how art history's strengths may answer some of its sins."--Marci Kwon, Stanford University