In 1830 painter George Catlin (1796–1872) established his studio headquarters in St. Louis, then a fledgling gateway to the western territories. Among his first subjects were Native American delegations. In 1832 Catlin embarked on a painting expedition up the Missouri River. While he often misinterpreted the everyday life of the tribes he encountered, his artworks nevertheless influenced Euro-American perceptions of Native American cultures. The bluffs portrayed today include Bellerive Park.

Born and raised in Lawrence, James Penney (1913–1994) studied art at the U. of Kansas. Graduating in 1931, he moved to New York City to pursue a professional art career. He remained devoted to his home state. “You don’t have to go to the Metropolitan to see good pictures. There are a few in the new collection at the Kansas City Art Institute that won’t be surpassed anywhere.” He hastily painted these impressions of the state’s agrarian landscape while teaching summer art classes in Lawrence.

Ceramic sculptor Jun Kaneko visited Nebraska in 1983 to experiment with massive industrial kilns at the Omaha Brick Works. A few years later, he moved permanently to Omaha, repurposing a turn-of-the-century warehouse in the Old Market neighborhood into a studio and gallery. The 38,000-sq. ft. building provided flexible space for Kaneko to hand-build his large sculptures, and then fire them in floor-to-ceiling kilns. The towering artworks are known as Dangos, after the Japanese word for dumpling.

As one the most visited national parks in the United States, Mount Rushmore is not exactly “off the beaten track.” However, transparency photographs from the Archives of American Art show rare color glimpses into the monument’s construction. Shown here is sculptor Gutzon Borglum—precariously perched on the edge of a scaffold—overseeing the carving of President Lincoln’s nose. Borglum worked on Mount Rushmore from 1927 until his untimely death in 1941. His son, Lincoln, completed the project.

In 1960 the Benedictine Sisters of Annunciation Monastery hired Bauhaus architect and designer, Marcel Breuer (1902–1982), to design its new spiritual home. Precast, concrete “vees” carry the weight of the cloister roof and frame views of the Great Plains. This strikingly modern cloister demarcates monastic space from everyday life. Breuer was praised for embracing “Benedictine spirit in form and flexible function,” echoing Breuer’s articulation of the Bauhaus doctrine “form follows function.”

Inspired by the 1970s women’s movement, a group of feminist artists formed the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM); a welcoming support system for women artists. What began as a drawer of slides in the College of Saint Catherine art department grew into a gallery in Minneapolis by 1976. “In the past women didn’t have the chance to see what other women were making. We need the opportunity to show, and to get feedback from other women,” said artist Terry Becker in the Twin Cities Reader.

In 1936 John Steuart Curry was appointed the first artist-in-residence at the U. of Wisconsin’s School of Agriculture as part of a progressive initiative to infuse practical agricultural training with art education. For ten years, the Kansas-born painter advocated for rural arts. Familiarizing himself with what he called the “Wisconsin Scene,” Curry often joined the sidelines of Badger football. In this 1937 photo, Curry—sketchpad in hand—unintentionally finds himself caught up in a scrimmage.

As painter Ray Yoshida (1930–2009) explored Chicago he was drawn to details most overlooked; a tooth painted on a dentist’s office window, a sewing machine on a dry cleaner’s sign, and a hairdryer and scissors above a salon door. His collection of Polaroids and other idiosyncratic images—like comic strips and candy wrappers—inspired his collages and paintings. Yoshida’s vision of the city’s vernacular landscape influenced generations of his students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

A small town in Indiana was twice founded with utopian intentions—first as a Lutheran separatist colony called Harmonie (1814–1825); and then as a non-secular social experiment, New Harmony (1825–1827). In 1960 architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005) accepted an unconventional commission—to create a non-denominational site of reflection. The Roofless Church offers a serene courtyard and small chapel. Celebrating the town’s humanist legacy, the church welcomes all visitors to worship under the sky.

Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) grew up in Bloomfield Hills. Written in 1953 to his second wife, architectural critic Aline Saarinen, this illustrated letter documents his intense productivity. At the time, he was working on the master plan for the North Campus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The Michigan School of Music, sketched here in plan and elevation, was finished in 1964, a few years after his untimely death.

Experimental workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art ushered in the American studio glass movement. Harvey Littleton, U. of Wisconsin ceramics professor; and Dominick Labino, scientist at the local Johns-Manville plant, explored techniques for working with molten glass in small studio furnaces. They proved “the studio craftsman can work with hot glass, without danger of burning the place down.” Toledo, a leading city in glass manufacturing, became the educational center for contemporary glass art.

This guide comes from the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. The Archives of American Art is the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America. Since 1954, the Archives has collected more than 20 million letters, scrapbooks, and audiovisual recordings of artists, dealers, collectors, critics, scholars, and other art world figures.