How art played a central role in the design of America’s racial enterprise—and how contemporary artists resist it. Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America’s racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces—the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders—to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design. Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Zorach shows how contemporary artists—including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gaspar, Kerry James Marshall, Alan Michelson, Dylan Miner, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams—have mined the relationship between environment and social justice, creating works that investigate and interrupt White supremacist, carceral, and environmentally toxic worlds. The book also draws on poetry, creative nonfiction, hip-hop videos, and Disney films to illuminate crucial topics in art history, from the racial politics of abstraction to the origins of museums and the formation of canons.

Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) was a prolific artist, writer, and critic, who entered the New York art scene in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, she became known both for her large-scale fabric sculptures--inspired by the lives of historical women--and her involvement in the feminist art movement. As the decade progressed, Mayer gravitated away from sculpture as a fixed form and the gallery as the primary setting for experiencing art. In 1977, she began to create ephemeral outdoor installations using materials such as balloons, snow, paper, and fabric. Mayer called these projects "temporary monuments," and she intended for them to celebrate and memorialize individuals and communities through their connections to place, time, and nature. Temporary Monuments: Work by Rosemary Mayer, 1977--1982 is the first comprehensive presentation of this body of work and includes Mayer's documentation of these impermanent artworks. Mayer created photographs, writings, artists' books, and drawings that expand the realm of these projects and reflect her interest in exploring ideas through a variety of media. An introductory essay by Gillian Sneed situates Mayer within the New York art world of the 1970s and '80s and argues that Mayer's public art anticipated more recent practices of site-specific and socially engaged art.

"There is no question that art has played a key role in constructing the public understanding of "America." Probing the intersection of art, nature, race, and place, Temporary Monuments examines how art and artists have responded to this legacy by imagining new ways of constructing notions of land, culture, and public space. Zorach demonstrates how art historical tropes play out through and against the construction of race in a series of real and conceptual spaces that are key to how we imagine this country. Ranging from the museum, the wild, and the monument to the garden, the home, and the border, Temporary Monuments incorporates memoir, historical narrative, literary analysis, and close looking at objects that date from significant moments in American history. Works by artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Dawoud Bey, George Catlin, Theaster Gates, Kerry James Marshall, Dylan Miner, Barnett Newman, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams help to pry open knotty questions about the relationship between the environment, social justice, history, and identity"--

This is the first in-depth study of the major role played by royal monuments in the public space of expanding cities across eighteenth-century Europe. Using the royal monuments as the basis for its examination of modern European cities, the book considers the development of urban landscapes from the creation of capital cities to the last embers of the Ancien Régime and at how the royal politics of the arts affected the cityscapes of the time.