This text presents an overview of the most influential and best-loved American artists and their works. It covers three centuries, ranging from Puritan portraits and the American Impressionists through to the videos and digital works of today's conceptual artists. The book is shown in an A-Z format, and seeks to encourage readers to contemplate the connections between art, American history and popular culture. Each artist is represented by a colour plate of a significant work, accompanied by text placing the artist in the context of contemporary movements and preceding traditions. The book also includes a glossary of artistic terms and movements, and a directory of museums and public collections across the United States and abroad with holdings of American art.
Helen A. Harrison is an art historian, museum director and journalist who specializes in modern American art. A native of New York City, she received an A.B in studio art from Adelphi University, and studied sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and Hornsey College of Art in London. She also holds an M.A. in art history from Case Western Reserve University, where her research focused on the New Deal federal art patronage programs.
In 1990, after serving as Curator of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, Director of the Public Art Preservation Committee in Manhattan, and Curator of Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York, Harrison became Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, a National Historic Landmark and research collection in East Hampton that is administered by the Stony Brook Foundation, a non-profit affiliate of Stony Brook University. She has also been a Guest Curator at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing, New York, has taught at the School of Visual Arts, and currently holds an adjunct faculty position in Stony Brook's Department of Art, Art History and Art Criticism.
From 1978-2006, Harrison wrote art reviews and feature articles for the Long Island section of The New York Times. She was the visual arts commentator for WLIU 88.3 FM, Long Island University's NPR-affiliated radio station, from 2004-2009. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications, including the Journal of American Studies (U.K.), Prospects, the Archives of American Art Journal, American Art, Provincetown Arts, and Winterthur Portfolio. She writes a monthly column, "Eye on Art," for the Sag Harbor Express.
Harrison is the author of many exhibition catalogues and chapters in several multi-author publications, including Abstract Expressionism: The International Context (Rutgers University Press, 2007), Remembering the Future (Rizzoli, 1989), and The American Art Book (Phaidon, 1999), for which she wrote 110 entries. Her books include Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's Fair 1939/40 (New York University Press, 1980), a monograph on the artist Larry Rivers (Harper & Row, 1984), an anthology, Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach with co-author Constance Ayres Denne (Chronicle Books, 2002), and The Jackson Pollock Box (Cider Mill Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010). She is currently at work on a Jackson Pollock monograph that will be published by Phaidon in 2011. She lives with her husband, the artist Roy Nicholson, in Sag Harbor, New York.
