The Lewis and Clark expedition holds an unrivaled position in the American imagination. Over the course of two hundred years, the expedition has become one of the primary symbols of American identity: rugged individuals conquering the entire breadth of a continent and defining a new nation. This book reevaluates the expedition and its impact on American culture. Following the spirit of intense documentation in the journals of Lewis and Clark, it presents a visual journal of recent art that examines the increasingly complex relationship between the land and contemporary culture. Mainstream...

Northwest landscape painter Victoria Adams is equally committed to the landscape tradition and the creation of exquisite scenes that address the contemporary desire for the sublime. Adams depicts idealized landscapes that evoke virgin terrain, untouched by human intervention and devoid of degradation. Through her reworking of landscape traditions and conventions, her paintings reveal the inextricable connections between beauty and the sublime and melancholia. Her paintings evoke the deep desire for the perfect moment and heighten awareness of the psychological impact of the idealized...

Throughout her six-decade career, Camille Patha's painting has oscillated between the figurative and the abstract. Patha began painting gestural abstraction in the 1960s then deliberately explored various painting styles, including hard-edged abstraction and surrealist-infused photorealism and, finally, a return to abstraction. During each era of her career, Patha demonstrated a full mastery of painting, presenting canvases that wholly embody her imagery and vocabulary with an unwavering voice and shocking vigor. Patha asserts her power as a painter by creating imagery of a complete...

Art AIDS America is the first comprehensive overview and reconsideration of 30 years of art made in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This book foregrounds the role of HIV/AIDS in shifting the development of American art away from the cool conceptual foundations of postmodernism and toward a new, more insistently political and autobiographical voice. Art AIDS America surveys more than 100 works of American art from the early 1980s to the present, reintroducing and exploring the whole spectrum of artistic responses to HIV/AIDS, from in-your-face activism to...