Figuring America: Prosperity and Anxiety in American Art

Online, via Zoom

Open to all Members

Tuesday, July 29, 6 pm
Wednesday, August 6, 12 pm

Join Whitney Teaching Fellow Elizabeth H. Akant for a virtual talk exploring how artists have constructed, challenged, and reimagined American identity in response to the economic concerns of their time. Drawing from the newly-opened “Untitled” (America) and the soon-to-close Amy Sherald: American Sublime, examine cross-temporal artworks that reveal both continuities and ruptures to norms across a century of American culture.

Throughout this program, Akant contrasts senses of prosperity and anxiety in early industrial America through works by Charles Demuth, Elsie Driggs, and Edward Hopper. Decades later, Andy Warhol’s consumer portraits reveal how capitalism transforms both products and people into brands, while Jean-Michel Basquiat's trademark-heavy works point to  the racial erasures in Pop's consumer paradise. Barkley Hendricks, Elizabeth Catlett, and Amy Sherald reclaim figuration for Black self-presentation by depicting subjects outside traditional hierarchies. By placing these works in conversation, this talk reveals American figurative art as a continuous negotiation of belonging, prosperity, and identity and explores how economic power shapes representation itself.

Elizabeth Halide Akant is a PhD Candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her research focuses on global modernist movements, nationalist art after empire, and the impact of social-political and artistic milieus on artworks. Her dissertation explores how folk art invocations in Turkish painting from the 1930s–50s mediated varying populist political movements. She has lectured at Brooklyn College since 2020 and previously served as an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum.