U.S. Culture
ranging from presidential papers and historical maps to original
government documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It houses hundreds of millions of
books, journals, photos, and other government papers that document the
life of the American people and its government. The library system is
deeply entrenched in the cultural life of the American people, who have
from their earliest days insisted on the importance of literacy and
education, not just for the elite but for all Americans.
Museums
The variety of print resources available in libraries is enormously
augmented by the collections housed in museums. Although people often
think of museums as places to view art, in fact museums house a great
variety of collections, from rocks to baseball memorabilia. In the 20th
century, the number of museums exploded. And by the late 20th century, as
institutions became increasingly aware of their important role as
interpreters of culture, they attempted to bring their collections to the
general public. Major universities have historically also gathered various
kinds of collections in museums, sometimes as a result of gifts. The Yale
University Art Gallery, for example, contains an important collection of
American arts, including paintings, silver, and furniture, while the
Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at
Berkeley specializes in archaeological objects and Native American
artifacts.
The earliest museums in the United States grew out of private collections,
and throughout the 19th century they reflected the tastes and interests of
a small group. Often these groups included individuals who cultivated a
taste for the arts and for natural history, so that art museums and
natural history museums often grew up side by side. American artist
Charles Willson Peale established the first museum of this kind in
Philadelphia in the late 18th century.
The largest and most varied collection in the United States is contained
in the separate branches of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C. The Smithsonian, founded in 1846 as a research institution, developed
its first museums in the 1880s. It now encompasses 16 museums devoted to
various aspects of American history, as well as to artifacts of everyday
life and technology, aeronautics and space, gems and geology, and natural
history.
The serious public display of art began when the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City, founded in 1870, moved to its present location in
Central Park in 1880. At its installation, the keynote speaker announced
that the museum’s goal was education, connecting the museum to other
institutions with a public mission. The civic leaders, industrialists, and
artists who supported the Metropolitan Museum, and their counterparts who
established the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago,
and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were also collectors of fine art.
Their collections featured mainly works by European masters, but also
Asian and American art. They often bequeathed their collections to these
museums, thus shaping the museum’s policies and holdings. Their taste in
art helped define and develop the great collections of art in major
metropolitan centers such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.
In several museums, such as the Metropolitan and the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C., collectors created institutions whose holdings
challenged the cultural treasures of the great museums of Europe.
Funding
Museums continued to be largely elite institutions through the first half
of the 20th century, supported by wealthy patrons eager to preserve
collections and to assert their own definitions of culture and taste.
Audiences for most art museums remained an educated minority of the
population through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century.
By the second decade of the 20th century, the tastes of this elite became
more varied. In many cases, women within the families of the original art
patrons (such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller,
and Peggy Guggenheim) encouraged the more avant-garde artists of the
modern period. Women founded new institutions to showcase modern art, such
as the Museum of Modern Art (established by three women in 1929) and the
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Although these museums still
catered to small, educated, cosmopolitan groups, they expanded the
definition of refined taste to include more nontraditional art. They also
encouraged others to become patrons for new artists, such as the abstract
expressionists in the mid-20th century, and helped establish the United
States as a significant place for art and innovation after World War II.
Although individual patronage remained the most significant source of
funding for the arts throughout the 20th century, private foundations
began to support various arts institutions by the middle of the century.
Among these, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Rockefeller
Foundation were especially important in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Ford
Foundation in the 1960s. The federal government also became an active
sponsor of the arts during the 20th century. Its involvement had important
consequences for expanding museums and for creating a larger audience.
The federal government first began supporting the arts during the Great
Depression of the 1930s through New Deal agencies, which provided monetary
assistance to artists, musicians, photographers, actors, and directors.
The Work Projects Administration also helped museums to survive the
depression by providing jobs to restorers, cataloguers, clerical workers,
carpenters, and guards. At the same time, innovative arrangements between
wealthy individuals and the government created a new kind of joint
patronage for museums. In the most notable of these, American financier,
industrialist, and statesman Andrew W. Mellon donated his extensive art
collection and a gallery to the federal government in 1937 to serve as the
nucleus for the National Gallery of Art. The federal government provides
funds for the maintenance and operation of the National Gallery, while
private donations from foundations and corporations pay for additions to
the collection as well as for educational and research programs.
Government assistance during the Great Depression set a precedent for the
federal government to start funding the arts during the 1960s, when
Congress appropriated money for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
as part of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities. The NEA
provides grants to individuals and nonprofit organizations for the
cultivation of the arts, although grants to institutions require private
matching funds. The need for matching funds increased private and state
support of all kinds, including large donations from newer arts patrons
such as the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Pew Charitable
Trusts. Large corporations such as the DuPont Company, International
Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and the Exxon Corporation also
donated to the arts.
Expansion
The increased importance placed on art throughout the 20th century helped
fuel a major expansion in museums. By the late 1960s and 1970s, art
museums were becoming aware of their potential for popular education and
pleasure. Audiences for museums increased as museums received more funding
and became more willing to appeal to the public with blockbuster shows
that traveled across the country. One such show, The Treasures of
Tutankhamun, which featured ancient Egyptian artifacts, toured the country
from 1976 to 1979. Art museums increasingly sought attractions that would
appeal to a wider audience, while at the same time expanding the
definition of art. This effort resulted in museums exhibiting even
motorcycles as art, as did the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1998.
Museums also began to expand the kinds of art and cultural traditions they
exhibited. By the 1990s, more and more museums displayed natural and
cultural artifacts and historical objects from non-European societies.
These included objects ranging from jade carvings, baskets, and ceramics
to calligraphy, masks, and furniture. Egyptian artifacts had been
conspicuous in the holdings of New York's Metropolitan Museum and the
Brooklyn Museum since the early 20th century. The opening in 1989 of two
Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of African
Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, indicated an awareness
of a much broader definition of the American cultural heritage. The Asian
Art Museum of San Francisco and the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian in
Washington, D.C., maintain collections of Asian art and cultural objects.
The 1987 opening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a new Smithsonian
museum dedicated to Asian and Near Eastern arts, confirmed the importance
of this tradition.
Collectors and museums did not neglect the long-venerated Western
tradition, as was clear from the personal collection of ancient Roman and
Greek art owned by American oil executive and financier J. Paul Getty.
Opened to the public in 1953, the museum named after him was located in
Malibu, California, but grew so large that in 1997 the J. Paul Getty
Museum expanded into a new Getty Center, a complex of six buildings in Los
Angeles. By the end of the 20th century, Western art was but one among an
array of brilliant cultural legacies that together celebrate the human
experience and the creativity of the American past.
Memorials and Monuments
The need to memorialize the past has a long tradition and is often
associated with wars, heroes, and battles. In the United States, monuments
exist throughout the country, from the Revolutionary site of Bunker Hill
to the many Civil War battlefields. The nation’s capital features a large
number of monuments to generals, war heroes, and leaders. Probably the
greatest of all these is Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where
there are thousands of graves of veterans of American wars, including the
Tomb of the Unknowns and the gravesite of President John F. Kennedy. In
addition to these traditional monuments to history, millions of people are
drawn to the polished black wall that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The memorial is a stark
reminder of the losses suffered in a war in which more than 58,000
Americans died and of a time of turmoil in the nation.
No less important than monuments to war heroes are memorials to other
victims of war. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened
in 1993 in Washington, D.C., is dedicated to documenting the extermination
of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II. It
contains photographs, films, oral histories, and artifacts as well as a
research institute, and has become an enormous tourist attraction. It is
one example of a new public consciousness about museums as important
sources of information and places in which to come to terms with important
and painful historical events. Less elaborate Holocaust memorials have
been established in cities across the country, including New York, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Monuments to national heroes are an important part of American culture.
These range from the memorials to Presidents George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.,
to the larger-than-life faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and
Theodore Roosevelt carved into Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Some
national memorials also include monuments to ordinary citizens, such as
the laborers, farmers, women, and African Americans who are part of the
new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Americans also commemorate popular culture with museums and monuments such
as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, and the
Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. These
collections of popular culture are as much a part of American heritage as
are fine arts museums and statues of national heroes. As a result of this
wide variety of institutions and monuments, more people know about the
breadth of America’s past and its many cultural influences. This new
awareness has even influenced the presentation of artifacts in natural
history museums. Where these once emphasized the differences among human
beings and their customs by presenting them as discrete and unrelated
cultures, today’s museums and monuments emphasize the flow of culture
among people.
The expansion in types of museums and the increased attention to audience
is due in part to new groups participating in the arts and in discussions
about culture. In the early 20th century, many museums were supported by
wealthy elites. Today’s museums seek to attract a wider range of people
including students from inner cities, families from the suburbs, and
Americans of all backgrounds. The diverse American population is eager to
have its many pasts and talents enshrined. The funding now available
through foundations and federal and state governments provides assistance.
This development has not been without resistance. In the 1980s and 1990s
people challenged the role of the federal government in sponsoring certain
controversial art and culture forms, posing threats to the existence of
the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Nevertheless, even these controversies have made clearer how
much art and cultural institutions express who we are as a people.
Americans possess many different views and pasts, and they constantly
change what they create, how they communicate, and what they appreciate
about their past.
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