During American Art Week 2024!

Multiple Modernities

IAC’s 28th Annual American Art Conference
May 9 – 11, 2024

Heritage Auctions
445 Park Ave.
New York, NY

In Multiple Modernities, IAC explored the synchronicity of modern expressions and movements in American art.

It can be argued that the “modern” in American Art, at least as we recognize it from our 21st-century vantage, had origins at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876. There, responding to the decision by Organizers of the Philadelphia Exhibition to exclude works by women from the Art Gallery building, the Women’s Centennial Executive Committee created “their own pavilion, built with funds completely raised by women, with all exhibits created and operated by them,” as Stephanie Grauman Wolf writes. This was truly modern in a general sense, celebrating women’s achievements across multiple domains and serving as a powerful argument for women’s autonomy. It was also modern in a very specific way: at the Pavilion (as in the Art Gallery) painted ceramics and glass were exhibited alongside works on canvas, thus elevating what had heretofore been considered merely utilitarian to the realm of art.

The birth of the modern thus saw an increasing acceptance of varied media as appropriate to the creation of fine art. Photography would slowly emerge in the 20th century as an art form, expanding beyond its primarily documentary purposing. Unusual materials such as chrome and aluminum would find their way into artistic production. Collage—by Stella and Dove, to name just two—would emerge as a respected form. Works on paper, Georgia O’Keeffe’s, for example, or in textile or wood, achieved new-found respect.

At the same time, older media would come to enjoy new life. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw what might be considered a rebirth of the mural as exemplified by Mary Cassatt’s progressive “Modern Woman” for the 1893 Women’s Pavilion at World’s Columbian Exposition. And this new life of the mural would be accompanied by a rediscovery of the tradition of true fresco often associated with the Renaissance. Tempera, too, would see a resurgence.

American Modernism, but one manifestation of the modern, would emerge in the first part of the 20th century, responding to and expanding upon European expressions. Modernism would see a movement towards abstraction in pursuit of a “truer” way of rendering a new, more industrialized world, with artists turning, in the words of William C. Agee “from the known, observable world around us to a mode of exploring in personal expressive ways … [their] interior life,” as manifest, for example, in the focus on the supernatural, the spiritual, and the sub- or unconscious in the works of the surrealists and Spiritual Moderns.

Equally essential to the modern in American art is the expression of social engagement. Professional African American artists grappled with European Modernism as they sought to represent and define themselves and their history. Indigenous peoples would engage with and shape the modern as well.

While abstraction tended to characterize Modernism, the figurative remained in service to the modern, harnessed to express powerful social messages in, for example, the work of Ben Shahn, or in sculpture, an important tool in the making and unmaking of race in the United States. The commitment to the figurative would include both embrace and repurposing of iconic works from the modern canon such as Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe.

The emergence of the modern in American art can thus be traced to changes in perception of what constituted art, the forms it could take and how—and not least, by whom—it might be created. This change in perception, and the art it made possible, was the focus of IAC’s 28th annual American Art Conference.

We gratefully acknowledge Leadership Funding for Multiple Modernities from O’Brien Art Foundation and Anchor Sponsorship from Heritage Auctions.

We are grateful as well for funding from CollisArt LLC; D. Wigmore Fine Art; James Dicke II; Jason Schoen; Kenneth R. Woodcock; the Steven Alan Bennett Foundation; The Louis and Lena Minkoff Foundation; and anonymous donors (as of May 3, 2024).

We are deeply grateful for the media sponsorship provided by The Magazine ANTIQUES, and American Fine Art Magazine.

Program agenda

Thursday, May 9, 2024
Formal sessions took place at Heritage Auctions, 445 Park. Ave, New York, NY (between 56th and 57th Streets). Program subject to change.

Friday, May 10, 2024
Formal sessions took place at Heritage Auctions, 445 Park. Ave, New York, NY (between 56th and 57th Streets). Program subject to change.