Reflecting on American Identity at the Nation’s 250th Anniversary

“What is an American?” This is the question posed by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s print currently on view in an exhibition in the Museum’s Howard Mele Gallery. Planned to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “What Is an American?”: Artists Reflect brings together prints, drawings, and photographs from the past century by more than two dozen artists, each engaging the concept of Americanness in their own way.

Over her long career, Smith (1940–2025; an enrolled citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) took up questions of Native American land and identity. In her five-and-a-half-foot-tall print from which this exhibition takes its name, Smith presents an over-life-size figure in apparently Native dress, cropped at the neck and knees, with a red, white, and blue stream pouring from his left palm. The figure is surrounded by images and phrases invoking consumerism, the internet age, and American pop culture, alongside repeated images of buffalo, in reference to the US government’s attempt to eradicate Indigenous populations through the mass slaughter of a staple food source. The tiled buffalo evoke sheets of grocery or food stamps, and together with collaged labels for commodity foods issued by the US Department of Agriculture, they allude to the food insecurity and government dependency experienced in impoverished Native communities today. The titular question is raised at the bottom of the print: “What is an American?” Smith doesn’t offer a straightforward answer, instead providing a few wry suggestions using collaged phrases: “Americans have big ideas.” and “An American is an Optimist.”

The works in “What Is an American?” reflect a wide assortment of identities and experiences in the United States. Some examine how notions of Americanness intersect and overlap with multiple cultural, racial, or sexual identities. Kemar Keanu Wynter’s drawing records stories and recipes from his Jamaican-born mother, while Frank Espada’s photograph documents a child of the Puerto Rican diaspora’s integration into the Pennsylvania school system. David Wojnarowicz’s print details his experience as a gay man at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as he lost friends, lovers, and eventually his own life to the disease while the American government and media blamed and stigmatized him and his peers. Minor White’s photograph depicts a storefront in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the run-up to its first public Lunar New Year celebration, organized to counteract surging anti-Chinese sentiment in the early Cold War years. Together the works tell stories of American identities that are layered and complex while often subject to erasure or discrimination.

Several artists depict or refer to potent American symbols (such as the American flag), events (like the Boston Tea Party), or historical figures. The portraits by Elizabeth Catlett, John Steuart Curry, and Wadsworth Jarrell of Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and Angela Davis, respectively, honor slavery and prison abolitionists who were considered criminals by their contemporaries. Such representations show how figures who were previously portrayed as anti-American could come to be lauded as heroes. Indeed, several of the artists included in the exhibition—such as Hugo Gellert, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Joseph Hirsch—were themselves incarcerated, blacklisted, or otherwise targeted by the US government due to their political activism or immigrant backgrounds.

Also included in the exhibition are six prints from the Kent Bicentennial Portfolio, commissioned by the Lorillard Tobacco Company in 1976 and distributed to museums and institutions across the country. Lorillard saw the project as a way to bolster the company’s national reputation through a show of generosity and patriotism, perhaps proving Smith right in her pinpointing of consumerism as central to American life. Each artist was asked to respond to the prompt “What does independence mean to me?,” yielding diverse reflections on America. While the company’s intention was no doubt celebratory, one finds hints of critique and ambivalence in many of the prints, particularly in works that show the struggles of various groups to attain basic rights in the United States. Jacob Lawrence’s contribution shows the experiences of Black migrants who fled the racial oppression of the South in the 1920s; Marisol’s print depicts the abolitionist suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, highlighting the fight for women’s rights; Fritz Scholder’s Bicentennial Indian references the struggles of the American Indian movement; and Colleen Browning’s Union Mixer commemorates the hard-fought wins of the labor movement. Ed Ruscha’s seemingly celebratory America, Her Best Product removes the familiar phrase “Made in U.S.A.” from any grounding context, emptying it of meaning or material referent. What is “her best product” we are left to consider. Given the sponsorship of Lorillard, one wonders if Ruscha had in mind tobacco, America’s earliest cash crop that was closely tied to the history of slavery.

On the occasion of the 250th, the question “What is an American?” is as relevant as ever. Issues of immigration, citizenship, patriotism, imperialism, civil rights, free speech, and the right to protest remain at the center of contemporary debates. The works in this exhibition thus offer not only glimpses into how artists of the past century have reflected on American identity but also blueprints for the future. They are a reminder that as much as our current political moment might feel unprecedented, there have always been struggles, and artists have been there to document, to give voice, and to speak truth to power.