Married artists Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009) wrapped, draped, and fenced massive features of the environment. In 1983, they surrounded 11 islands in Biscayne Bay, in greater Miami, with hot pink fabric. Though it took more than two years to plan, the installation was on view for just two weeks. Working with teams of Miami government officials, scientists, lawyers, and engineers to secure several permits, they removed almost 40 tons of garbage from the man-made islands.

Howard Finster (1916–2001) was a folk art phenom. In the 1960s, he began constructing Paradise Garden, a two-acre spiritual environment at his home in Pennville, Georgia. His plan was to display all the inventions of mankind and to spread the Word. Embedded in the garden’s cement walls, walkways, and playhouses are Bible verses, accumulated bicycle parts, TV tubes, mirror glass, Coca-Cola bottles, junk jewelry, plastic toys, a mound of cement snakes, and his son’s tonsils “put up in alcohol.”

Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956) kept a diary at the SC Coeducational Institute boarding school. She detailed day-to-day life—art classes, friends, and the weather. On the train home to WV she looked out the window and observed: “It was a lonely spring evening, I watched the sun go down behind the tall green pines. The moon came up and greeted the lonely little girl. I watched the old moon and it seemed to speak and cheer me on my lonely journey.” She became a multi-talented printmaker and designer.

The Penland Mountain School of Crafts is nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. The historic school’s serene and secluded location fosters a strong sense of community. Penland student Peter Ray took this photograph of an Easter parade, an annual occasion that brought together students and instructors to make creative costumes and props.

At the onset of US military engagement in World War II, Leslie Cheek (1908–1992) resigned from his position as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art to join the U.S. Army. As chief of the Camouflage Section of the Engineer School at Fort Belvoir, Major Cheek oversaw many aspects of camouflage education. Students were tasked with solving a specific problem, as in this case study. A student identified the ways in which a small parts plant in Virginia might be obscured as an amusement park.

Alma Thomas (1891–1978) developed her signature style of exuberant, rainbow-hued abstractions from the sunny kitchen of her row house off Logan Circle. She was the first student to earn a degree in Fine Arts from Howard University. After graduating, she took a job at Shaw Jr. High, mentoring generations of students until she retired in 1960 to devote more energy to painting. She was in her 70s when her artworks began to receive national acclaim. Today her home studio is an Historic Landmark.

Sculptor and racecar driver Salvatore Scarpitta (1919–2007) grew up immersed in American car culture. Here Scarpitta zooms by in a mini sprint car he had built. Homespun dirt tracks like Hagerstown Raceway fueled Scarpitta’s interest in crafting and driving. “Racing cars were my way of showing that I, too, knew something of America.” He fluidly shifted gears between the racing and art worlds. Art dealer Leo Castelli sponsored Scarpitta’s sprint car team and exhibited the cars as works of art

Cuban-born painter Emilio Sanchez (1921–1999) traveled the world. Architectural features like doorways, windows, and chimneys were among his itinerant interests. In the late 1940s, he visited New Castle, Delaware. This sketch details a cupola of the “Old Arsenal,” a 19th-century armory. When the building was renovated in 1936 as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the cupola was redesigned to better reflect the colonial character of the small town on the Delaware River.

Palmer Hayden (1890–1973) compiled dozens of sketchbooks during his celebrated career as a painter of African American subjects. They document the years Hayden lived in France and also his travels in the United States. While on a road trip in 1938, Hayden stopped to sketch the cityscape of Weirton, a town in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. This drawing shows smoke billowing from steel mills. At the time, Weirton was a leading producer of steel in the United States.

Artist Henry Mosler (1841–1930) kept a diary of his experience in KY as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and an aide-de-camp in the Ninth Indiana Volunteer Regiment. On Oct. 8, 1862, he witnessed the Battle of Perryville. After the bloody battle ended, he wrote of a field hospital, “About 200 wounded were lying suffering some crying Oh! mother Oh! Doctor Oh give me some water. enough to make any one feel the terror of this war.” His illustration of the battle was published in Harper’s Weekly.

The Federal Art Project, a New Deal program administered by the federal government, established several “Negro Art Centers” in the 1930s to offer free art education in African American communities. This photograph was taken just before a center opened at the historically black university, Lemoyne College, in Memphis. Students and their instructor, painter Vertis Hayes, put the final touches on their mural, Progress.

Lonnie Holley (b. 1950) worked several odd jobs in Birmingham before he found his calling as an artist. Soon after his 29th birthday, he began making artwork from scavenged sandstone and metal. The Birmingham Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum were among the first institutions to acquire his visionary sculptures in the early 1980s. Art dealer Jimmy Hedges snapped these playful photographs of Holley reeling in a sandstone fish near the artist’s home in Harpersville.

The Delta Art Center was one of 107 Community Art Centers created in the 1930s as part of the Federal Arts Project, a New Deal program administered by the federal government. Many of the centers were established in rural communities like Greenville, Mississippi, where residents had less access to art education. Though the center closed when government funding ended in 1941, it was undoubtedly a catalyst for future cultural organizations in the region.

In 1941 Jacob Lawrence completed his Migration Series; 60 tempera paintings documenting the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to urban North in the early 20th c. Soon after, in New Orleans for the first time, the New York-born, African American artist experienced the Jim Crowe segregation laws he had depicted. The trip prompted a new series. “I am doing paintings of New Orleans, which is mostly to do with the Negro,” wrote Lawrence in this letter to his dealer.

The Farm Security Administration, a Federal New Deal program, hired photographer Dorothea Lange in the 1930s to document Americans coping with the Great Depression. Lange’s iconic photographs humanized the crisis. Farmers in Conway, Arkansas, bartered preserved fruits and vegetables in lieu of cash. “We put up 75 quarts of berries, 60 of beans, 60 of kraut, 30 of grapes and 20 of peaches. I swapped two bushels of grapes and got two bushels of peaches,” noted the owner of these mason jars.

As part of the New Deal’s Treasury Section of Fine Arts, Olive Rush (1893–1966) was commissioned to paint a large canvas mural in the Pawhuska, Oklahoma Post Office. After speaking with locals, Rush decided to highlight Osage Nation. “Pawhuska is the heart and center of the Osage tribe…they would hear nothing of farm subjects.” This sketch diagrams Rush’s earthy color scheme: on the left, Osage leaders meet with white settlers; and on the right, Osage leaders hold council among themselves.

From the passenger side of his car, painter Earl Staley (b. 1938) filmed every sign on the road from Houston and Galveston, and back, with his Super 8 camera. Staley’s good friend and frequent collaborator, Bob Camblin, drove the car. Their road trip was a riff on Pop artist Ed Ruscha’s 1966 book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. While the Sunset Strip is just a mile and half stretch in Los Angeles, Staley traveled more than 100 miles round trip on Interstate 45. Click below for the video.

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.