The American Visions video/discussion series with Robert Hughes, Time Magazine Art Critic, will be offered at Appleton Public Library Wednesday afternoons from 1-3pm in September and October. This fascinating PBS series is unique because it explores American history, art and architecture and it shows how there is a relationship between the art that was produced during different historical periods. Elizabeth Eisen, Community Services Librarian, will moderate the video/discussion series. If you missed American Visions the first time around or would like to see it again, please join us for lively discussion. Each video is 60 minutes in length and participants will be encouraged to express their viewpoints about what they see in the discussion period that follows.

September 5
The Republic of Virtue
Some of the first images made in America resemble ancient ones. Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers feel that classicism lends the young nation power and authority. From heroic statues of George Washington to the architecture of Washington, D.C., the new republic adopts and transforms the classical style to serve a new, democratic ideal.

September 12
The Promised Land
Before there is an America, Disparate bands of settlers strive to carve out an identity in a virgin land. In the West, Spanish missions use art to convert the natives to Catholicism. In the East, plain Protestant settlers are suspicious of art's pleasures. And in Virginia, an exiled aristocracy recreates its ideal of England. Early portraits of these settlers ask us to consider the emergence of this new person, this American.

September 19
The Wilderness and the West
From the majestic primal America, there arises the idea of landscape as God's fingerprint. Landscape painting holds deep religious and patriotic connotations; soon, the belief in Manifest Destiny is embodied in art. Traveling from Yellowstone to the Hudson Valley, Hughes explores the artists Albert Bierstadt, John James Audubon, Frederic Church, Frederic Remington and Thomas Cole. In their work he finds the conflicting impulses to worship the land and to conquer it, to create a myth of the West just as the frontier is closing.

September 26
The Gilded Age
The many sides of America in the 19th century: the extravagant "cottages" of Newport's tycoons, the triumph of the Brooklyn Bridge, the haunting realism of Civil War photography, the elegant portraits of John Singer Sargent, the American Impressionism of James Whistler and Mary Cassatt. Together with a new breed of distinctly American artists like Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, they mirror widely different experiences of the American Dream.

October 3
A Wave from the Atlantic
Waves of immigrants in the early 20th century bring both their old culture and a thirst for the new. Their tenements are documented by photographer Jacob Riis and the socially conscious Ashcan School. Then, after the historic 1913 Armory show, artists like Joseph Stella, Paul Strand, Alfred Steiglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe forge a modernism that is uniquely American. Some celebrate the industrial sublime. Yet nature is the inspiration that leads Frank Lloyd Wright to develop an organic architecture at the heart of modern design.

October 10
Streamlines and Breadlines
The mythic images of the 1920's and 30's are as urban as the skyscrapers rising up in New York and as rural as the heartland idealized by Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton. Isamu Noguchi, Lewis Hine and the artists of the WPA celebrate the worker as hero, Jacob Lawrence tells stories of black America, and ambitious New Deal projects like Hoover Dam project self-confidence in hard times. Which is the real modern America-the isolation painted by Edward Hopper, or the jazzy vitality captured by Stuart Davis?

October 17
The Empire of Signs
In the post-war era, America's power is unrivaled, and its artists make an explosive break with the past. Hughes considers the impact of Hiroshima on art, traces the development of abstract expressionism and the life of Jackson Pollack, and explores how artists as different as James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns reacted to the new consumer culture. We end with the nation on the eve of divisive conflicts, as media images begin to overwhelm anything created by artists.

October 24
The Age of Anxiety
Our final program explores how American art has reflected the upheavals of the last 25 years. Hughes traces the evolution of abstract art and minimalism and considers the spiritual richness of earth works, in which nature is the artist's medium. He ends the series by profiling a wide range of contemporary artists. Using a diversity of mediums and approaches, Richard Serra, Susan Rothenberg, James Turrell and others continue to capture uniquely American visions.

No registration is required. Participants may attend some or all of the series. The series is open to the general public. For further information, contact the Community Services office at 832-1695.