This depiction of the Virgin of Guadalupe is a copy of the miraculous image enshrined at Tepeyac, north of Mexico City. Its divine origin is corroborated by four vignettes of the story of the Virgin’s appearance to an Indigenous man, Juan Diego.

At the left of this landscape is a purported wilderness. Thomas Cole looks out from the center, presenting a cultivated landscape with evidence of clear-cutting on the distant mountain, a visual warning of the ecological cost of unchecked development.

Edmonia Lewis, an artist of African American and Native American (Anishinaabe) descent, completed a series of idealized sculptures on the popular theme of the fictional star-crossed lovers Hiawatha and Minnehaha, drawn from an 1855 epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Created by a Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, artist, this pouch features both European materials and Indigenous imagery. The wool has been processed to resemble buckskin, while the image of twin brothers refers to the Haudenosaunee creation myth of good and evil.

Standing Bear, a respected Lakota artist and leader, fought in the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, in which Indigenous nations defeated U.S. troops. This vivid depiction evokes the scale and intensity of the struggle, presenting violence and loss on both sides.

John Singer Sargent’s portrait of fellow American expat Virginie Gautreau caused a scandal in 19th-century Paris. Viewers were offended by the unconventional portrait of the celebrated beauty who was considered, like the artist, an interloper in French society.

Leslie Garland Boiling, a self-taught African American sculptor, carved small-scale narrative subjects chronicling the Black working class in the segregated South. Cooking-on-Saturday affirms a routine of familiar domestic activities undertaken by women on specific days

Among the most significant Black artists of his time, Bill Traylor directly experienced historical change in the U.S., from enslavement through the Great Migration. His more than 1,000 works capture undervalued aspects of life in the early 20th-century urban South.

Contemporary artist Jodi Archambault mixes innovation and tradition, combining digital design tools with Lakota regalia-making skills. This dress was meant to be danced in a powwow, a community celebration of Native sovereignty and identity.

Frederic Edwin Church painted this landscape after his second trip to South America. When it was unveiled in New York in 1859, thousands of people flocked to see this composite image showing the incredible range of climates in the Andes Mountains, a novelty for New Yorkers.

A symbol of Black self-sufficiency after the Civil War, the watermelon was later twisted by many White people into a vehicle perpetuating negative stereotypes. African American painter Charles Ethan Porter reclaimed the subject in artistic terms.

A celebration of U.S. geography, this vase was inspired by Pueblo pottery and Toltec motifs. Pinecones and needles, magnolias, and cacti represent different regions, and the goldenrod, fashioned from gold mined in the States,  symbolizes the country as a whole.

Winslow Homer painted this dramatic scene just after the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American War. The epic struggle between man and nature can also be understood in terms of the U.S.’s imperialist ambitions in the Atlantic World as well as contemporary racial politics.

The famed pottery of Maria and Julian Martínez expresses ancestral connections to land, water, and place. The Tewa Avanyu water serpent evokes reverence for water in the arid Southwest. The couple drew from ancient traditions to harvest the clay, and fire and paint the jar.

Painted by an Indigenous artist active in Pátzcuaro (Michoacán), this large tray exemplifies ways in which local artistic traditions in Mexico were profoundly transformed by luxury goods imported from Asia through the so-called Manila galleons.

Ralph Earl painted small-town Connecticut merchant, Elijah Boardman, alongside his inventory of silks, wools, cottons, and linens, which would have been imported from India, China, and Europe. He also sold West Indian luxury goods such as sugar, rum, molasses, and indigo.

Of the many American artists in Paris at the time, Mary Cassatt was the only one to exhibit with the French group known as the Impressionists. Celebrated for her tender, intimate depictions of women and children, she helped popularize the taste for Impressionism in America.

Historical and contemporary Diné (Navajo) weavings are highly valued. Traded with other Indigenous peoples, by the mid-1800s, settler communities were seeking out blankets as souvenirs. This dynamic art form flourishes today through new generations of weavers.

The Broncho Buster represents an iconic White cowboy—a rough-and-ready man who confidently tames a wild horse, and, thus, Indigenous land. While Frederic Remington mythologized this type for his East Coast audience, in reality cowboys were diverse in ethnic and cultural origin.

This storage jar, inspired by blue-and-white porcelains from China, may have held cacao beans. It is decorated with stylized birds, possibly a phoenix transformed into a quetzal, an extravagantly plumed bird considered sacred by many Mesoamerican peoples.

This monumental storage jar—created by enslaved African American potter and poet David Drake—bears his signature, date, and longest known verse, which reveals its purpose as well as the South Carolina potter's creative agency and authorship in an act of defiance.

Edna Oktokiyuk, a Yup’ik woman in Alaska, made this parka from dried seal intestines. Its beauty and the protection it offers honor the animal’s soul. Along the seams, the beaks and feathers of the auklet, a small seabird, provide a striking contrast to the parchment-like surface.

Hawaiian quilts are distinctive from mainland American examples in size and subject. Rather than small blocks of decorative elements, Hawaiian quiltmakers created large-scale designs inspired by the environment, especially the islands’ colorful native plants.

Brooklyn-born Marie Zimmermann was a gifted and inventive metalworker who described herself as making everything “from tiaras to tombstones.” Her work as an artist afforded her independence and allowed her to blaze a trail for female designers and artists to come.