Drawn from the Weatherspoon’s stellar collection, these photographs illustrate what artists have had to say about American culture from the late 19th- to the early twenty-first centuries. The period spanned by these images shows tremendous change—from civil war battles, western expansion vistas, and class and racial divisions to life in rural America today, increased economic prosperity, and hints of cultural alienation. Photographs such as the ones featured in this exhibition have shaped our ever-evolving definition of what the terms “America” and “American” mean—through the pictorial images themselves and via our interpretations of them, both at the time of their fabrication and present-day.
