What, exactly, defines America? It’s a question that’s been asked for more than two centuries, and it’s one not likely to be conclusively answered anytime soon. But, with the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding fast approaching, we took the occasion to hash out a response to that query, using art as a guide.
Together, the editors of ARTnews and Art in America have constructed a list of the 100 best artworks about America. This is not a list of the best artworks by Americans, to be clear. Instead, it’s a list of the best artworks responding to American identity and all the issues that attend it.
Spanning the years preceding the founding of the United States in 1776 to our tense present, this list features paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, videos, films, and even a digital artwork that contend with a spread of issues. These works bear witness to centuries of American history and change, and they point the way forward for artists in the years to come.
Below, a look at the 100 greatest works about America, as selected by the editors of ARTnews and Art in America.
88. Martin Wong, El Caribe, 1988
In the paintings of its steadfast documentarian, Martin Wong, Manhattan’s Lower East Side—or Loisaida, to its historic Puerto Rican community—feels less like the melting pot it was at the time than a pressure cooker. It was here that Wong—an openly gay Chinese American from Portland—found himself drawn to the local Puerto Rican bikers. El Caribe is not exactly a self-portrait, but a depiction of Wong’s alter ego: an idealized and beautiful Puerto Rican man, according to the auction house Phillips. Wong was one of the many immigrants living on the LES so marginalized they often went uncounted in the state census. But rather than despair, he embraced the social porosity that allows individuals typically divided by language and geography to forge together a sense of belonging. Class and skin color may be America’s unspoken conditions of citizenship, but Wong reveled in his rebuke; anyone but the gang could eat his dust. —T.S.
65. David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Buffalos), 1988–89
David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Buffalos), a photograph showing a close-up shot of buffalos falling off a cliff, has been so widely reproduced that many may forget that it actually depicts part of a diorama at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The work has often been read as a symbol for the immense loss that Wojnarowicz witnessed during the AIDS crisis. (He would die of AIDS-related complications a few years later, in 1992, at 37.) But the buffalo and its near extinction as a way to disenfranchise Indigenous people is also an important, if under-told, part of American history: another moment in which state-sponsored violence sought to target a marginalized group. One of the US’s most politically active artists of this era, Wojnarowicz almost certainly had this in mind when making this iconic image. —M.D.