Collection

As the German army swept across Europe in 1939 to 1941, and as Japanese forces conquered the Pacific, the United States remained wary of being drawn into another tragic and costly overseas war. Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941 ended the uncertainty; the country became unified behind President Roosevelt’s ensuing declaration of war. The first several...

~Like the other two artists at the center of this study, Carolee Schneemann focused her work on the everyday materiality of bodies, but in her case that meant first...

Robert Rauschenberg is an artist whose work is conditioned by his immediate surroundings, and the single greatest influence on his works during the 1950s and early 1960s was the chaotic, culturally diverse, and volatile urban atmosphere of Lower Manhattan, where the artist lived during most of...