Art of the Americas

Arthur Wesley Dow was a prodigious artist and influential art educator near the turn of the century. He taught design, photography, painting, pottery, and printmaking for over thirty years at the Pratt Institute, Columbia Teacher’s College, and the Art Students League in New York City. Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Dow maintained a studio there staring [...]

Carlos Cortez Coyle attended the Berea Foundation School. Although he drew as a student he did not devote concentrated time and effort into his art until 1929. Coyle was an avid journaler, and from his diary we know that the beginning of his artistic career coincided with the death of his mother. In his paintings, [...]

Murals have long been celebrated as an effective way to build public morale. During the Great Depression, the federal government hired artists to embellish existing public buildings to present an image of American dignity. Long was commissioned to do work in several courthouses, post offices, and federal buildings in Kentucky. This study is for a [...]

Cindy Sherman is most known for her experimental portraiture and reappropriation of female stereotypes found in film. She typically uses herself as a model for her photographs, assuming multiple roles as hairdresser, director, and costume designer. Sherman is very concerned with women’s roles in culture, and how women have been silenced. In this photograph, Sherman [...]

Since the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns has reworked key motifs—flags, targets, maps, the alphabet, and numbers—in a serial fashion, exploring the impact of changes in color, scale, sequence, and medium. Johns favors subjects that “the mind already knows” but overlooks due to constant exposure. The subject of the series this piece is a part of, therefore, [...]

Doris Ulmann was known for her photographs of Appalachian people, often hard at work. When Ulmann came to the Berea area, she saw Appalachians working their crafts in traditional ways that were very foreign to her industrial, Northern background. These men chaining a warp are performing a key step in one of Appalachia’s quintessential crafts. [...]

This photograph of an African American woman with an open book was taken in Berea, Kentucky--home to Berea College and the Doris Ulmann Galleries. Doris Ulmann’s portraits of Appalachian people were close to her heart, having spent much of her later life in Appalachia. Doris Ulmann was a woman who valued people of all backgrounds, a [...]

Charles Counts was an American Renaissance man who worked to preserve the art forms of his native Appalachia. He was a proficient weaver, quilter, teacher, writer, and activist. However, he is best known for his pottery. Born in Lynch, Kentucky, Counts graduated from Berea College where his devotion to his native culture was fostered and [...]

Henry Ossawa Tanner, born in Pennsylvania, is known for being the first African-American painter to gain international fame. He spent a great deal of time teaching himself to paint as a young man, using art as a therapy when he was ill. In 1879 he was accepted into the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as [...]

Beginning in 1794, and continuing for some years, Gilbert Stuart traveled to Philadelphia to request sittings with George Washington. Portrait of George Washington, 1798, depicts the fruits of this labor and is one of almost one hundred portraits created of the President by Stuart. President Washington only sat for Stuart three times, forcing the artist [...]