American Art Journal

The leading peer-reviewed journal of American art history and related visual culture

Since its founding in 1987, American Art has been an indispensable source for scholars, educators, curators, museum-goers, collectors, and professors and students at colleges and universities worldwide. The journal critically engages material and conceptual conditions of art and provides a forum for the expanding field of American art history. It considers the role played by art in the ongoing transnational and transcultural formation of America as a contested geography, identity, and idea. Full-color plates and concise prose offer broad appeal.

Learn more about American Art's new professional development program, Toward Equity in Publishing.

Current Issue – Fall 2023

American Art Cover for Fall 2023

Lalla Essaydi, Les Femmes du Maroc: La Grande Odalisque, 2008. Chromogenic print mounted to aluminum with a UV protective laminate, 30 × 40 in. © Lalla Essaydi, Courtesy the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

In the Fall 2023 issue of American Art:

  • Commentaries on creativity and intellectual property: from battlefield sketches to animal selfies
  • Augusta Savage’s public monuments to Black icons---an unrealized present
  • Contemporary photographs of ethnic drag in military training exercises
  • Robert Rauschenberg’s journalistic solvent transfers

American Art is committed to the principles of justice and equality expressed in the Statement from the Secretary of the Smithsonian from May 31, 2020.

Sami Siegelbaum is the recipient of the 19th Annual Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award for his article “Christopher D’Arcangelo Speculates: Transcending the Art-Labor Dialectic in Post-Fiscal-Crisis New York.” Read it in the Spring 2022 issue of American Art.

The Summer 2019 issue of American Art is our current open-access issue: read it for free!

Subscribe to American Art

A one-year subscription for individuals costs $50, and provides full online access to all back issues of American Art. Members of Friends of the Smithsonian, Smithsonian National Associates, American Studies Association, and the College Art Association receive subscriptions at the discounted price of $40. The rate for students is $35. Higher rates apply for institutions.

For information on subscribing, purchasing single issues, or submitting articles to the journal, which is published for the museum by the University of Chicago Press, please visit http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/amart. This link also acts as a portal to the electronic edition of the journal.

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Write for American Art

American Art invites submissions of original scholarly manuscripts. Acceptance is determined by editorial needs and double-blind peer-review. For more information, see Journal Author Submission Guidelines. Prospective authors are welcome to write to executive editor Robin Veder and sign up for a consultation, if desired.

Editorial Board

  • heather ahtone, First Americans Museum
  • Kirsten Pai Buick, University of New Mexico
  • Mary Coffey, Dartmouth College
  • David J. Getsy, University of Virginia
  • Anne Collins Goodyear, Bowdoin College Museum of Art
  • Michael Hatt, University of Warwick
  • Chon A. Noriega, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Jolene Rickard, Cornell University
  • Nizan Shaked, California State University, Long Beach
  • Louise Siddons, University of Southhampton
  • Cherise Smith, University of Texas at Austin
  • Shawn Michelle Smith, School of the Art Institute of Chicago