Is there an “Art of the American West”?

What is the Art of the American West? Is it a discrete field? How are its boundaries defined—and should they be? Is it the same as “Western Art”? Is it a small canon of mostly White, male artists rendering “cowboys” and “Indians” and their heirs in contemporary painters and sculptors? Does it comprise makers of all backgrounds and media in the region? What are the implications of including or excluding Indigeneity in this disciplinary framing? Where does it sit within related fields, like American Art and Native American Art?

This panel invites papers that analyze case studies to address these historiographic and methodological questions. Topics might include the role of museum collections in canon formation and critique, the function of a repeated list of key artists moving from east to west in museum exhibitions and books related to the American West, the role of race in these constructions, regional bias within the field of American art, and/or entwinements with histories of photography. Equally welcome are talks reinterpreting key figures in the “Western Art” canon; challenging regional borders that frequently frame constructions of the West; analyzing past or recent exhibitions that challenge inherited narratives like “The West as America” (1991), “Knowing the West” (2024) and “Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea” (2023); and exploring with methodological insights from art history, Native American Studies, or other related disciplines.