Art serves as a mirror of society — a visual record of the historical, political, and social transformations that shape a culture’s values, struggles, and identity. From the colonial period to the present, American art has registered these shifts, revealing how artists respond to and reinterpret the conditions of their time. America in the Making by the Addison Gallery of American Art, explores how the art of the United States has long expressed the ambition of a nation in formation, through early portraits that recorded new social hierarchies and a fledgling national identity, to 19th-century landscape paintings that celebrated nature while advancing the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism.
As the nation modernized, artists tackled the complexities of 20th-century life, turning away from the visible world by mid-century, and embracing abstraction, the subconscious, and a restless new spirit of individualism and dissent. Today, art continues to respond dynamically in real time to a rapidly changing world and to grapple with the urgent concerns of our present moment.
With this exhibition, the Addison Gallery of American Art marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The entire building will be devoted to a chronological installation of works from the Addison Gallery’s permanent collection. The story of American art told through this collection is neither comprehensive nor objective and can be read as a window into the conditions, values, and assumptions under which it has been assembled and continues to grow.
Its strengths and omissions reflect the circumstances of its formation, including individual taste, institutional priorities, and broader social and cultural forces. In this sense, the exhibition also offers a portrait of a collection in formation, one that, like America itself, remains continually “in the making.”
Learn more at addison.andover.edu.
