A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more

Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University’s venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more.

Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum

"Each essay in Object Lessons . . . juxtaposes a set of artworks and reconsiders their aspects in relation to each other and their contexts. It’s profound and heady stuff, but incredibly insightful if one can parse through it. . . . Object Lessons starts to fill in some deep and gaping holes for underrepresented voices in American art history."---Cindy Helms, New York Journal of Books

Karl Kusserow is the John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Horace D. Ballard is the Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. Associate Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. Kirsten Pai Buick is professor of art history and chair of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico. Ellery E. Foutch is associate professor of American studies at Middlebury College. Jeffrey Richmond-Moll is curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. Rebecca Zorach is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University.