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 – Summer 2024
Gene Davis, Black Grey Beat, 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 90 3/4 × 187 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift from the Vincent Melzac Collection, 1980.6.15 © Estate of Gene Davis / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In the Summer 2024 issue of American Art:
- What’s in a name? New perspectives on the Washington Color School
- How the Met was persuaded to acquire the Southworth & Hawes daguerreotypes
- When a U.S. Bicentennial exhibition centered the Amistad mutiny as American history
- Where architectural vision brought order to the debris of the Watts uprising
Open-Access Features
Read the abstracts of the Summer 2024 issue.
Read the feature articles that won the journal’s annual Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award
Read a full sample issue of American Art
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.
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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Browse all issues of American Art, 1987 to present
Write for American Art
American Art invites submissions of original scholarly manuscripts. Acceptance is determined by editorial needs and anonymized 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