Visual Culture in America (Resources)

1893-1939: “The United States has always had a visual culture. However, with the advent of modernity (new marketplaces, technologies and social relations as well as the new ideas and aesthetic forms associated with Modernism), an extraordinarily varied and complex visual culture emerged. The surfaces of life (what the poet, Vachel Lindsay, called America’s ‘hieroglyphic civilization’) became so much more important from the late nineteenth-century onwards, and not just for artists.”