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Sotheby’s Marks America’s Semiquincentennial With an Exhibition of 250 Years of Art, Culture and Mythmaking

From a William J. Stone copy of the Declaration of Independence to Bob Dylan's handwritten draft of Masters of War and a 67-million-year-old T. rex, "250 Years of American Art and Culture" traces how American identity has been constructed, contested and reimagined.

Timed with the semiquincentennial anniversary of the founding of the United States, Sotheby’s is opening “250 Years of American Art and Culture,” a new blockbuster exhibition for its Breuer auction house/museum series: an extensive cross-category show exploring the continuum of American art and culture across disciplines, objects and categories. Presented as a private selling exhibition with additional loans for context and storytelling, the show traces the shaping of a specifically American narrative through the country’s art, literature, craft and ephemera.

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On view from today (July 1) through August 16, it presents the short but accelerated history of the United States in five thematic chapters rather than a strict chronology: the nation’s founding ideals, the symbolic role of the landscape, the mythology and realities of the American West, the lives and figures that shaped its social fabric and the emergence of a distinctly American visual language in the postwar period. By placing fine art in dialogue with literary and material culture, the exhibition reveals how American identity has been continually constructed, contested and reimagined over the past 250 years, as art and cultural objects helped shape a collective mythology and national imaginary.

Whitney Miller, Sotheby’s global head of retail and programming, told........

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