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While important new scholarship on the history of American fascisms has emerged in recent years, panels on art and fascism have still failed to consider the American context. This session asks whether Cécile Whiting’s 1989 assertion—that there were no fascist artists in America, only anti-fascist ones—still rings true. Whether or not American artists identified as fascist, how did they engage with the ideologies, aesthetics, techniques, and visual cultures of fascism?

This panel investigates how the history of American art intersects with fascism, broadly defined. Specific topics include the visual culture of Jim Crow; the fascist ideologies of modernist architecture in the US; and the construction and reception of fascist art in Latin America. In keeping with CAA’s collaboration with the Committee of Women in the Arts, this panel also addresses the role of women in producing and promoting art aligned with fascist politics, as well as how constructions of gender and sexuality intersected with those of race, ethnicity, class, age, and disability in furtherance of fascist ideologies. In considering American situations outside of the United States and a wide range of art and visual culture, this panel begins to define what “fascist art” could mean in an American context.