New Book Examines Federal Arts Funding For 1976 Bicentennial

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A new academic art history book, What Was America?: Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era, by Elise Armani and Katy Siegel, published by Yale University Press in 2026, explores the crucial role of federal arts funding in fostering national identity during the 1976 Bicentennial. The 224-page book features 69 color and 47 black-and-white illustrations.

The authors, an art history PhD candidate/museum curator and an art history professor, respectively, analyze how the extensive cultural project commemorating the Bicentennial, which was likely the United States' most ambitious cultural undertaking ever, was facilitated by federal leadership. This nationwide commemoration involved a remarkably diverse series of events across the country, from the National Mall to Galveston, Texas, and at institutions like the deYoung and MoMA, as well as in mobile trucks.

The federal government, through the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, in conjunction with the General Services Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other agencies, contracted, licensed, promoted, and indexed various initiatives. These included time capsule deposits, short films on PBS, the establishment of a new National Museum of History and Technology, new public parks, fine art triptychs, marquee sculptures, patriotic paint jobs on fire hydrants, Tall Ships tours, and numerous handicrafts, documents, maps, and memorabilia.

The book argues that art was surprisingly paramount in this event of collective self-identification, historical commemoration, and political convocation, offering novel opportunities for everyday people to appreciate and deliberate what America was. The authors state that the diverse and heterogeneous culture displayed across the country during its birthday could only have been facilitated by federal leadership, regional institutions, cooperating states, and civic and philanthropic partnerships.

What Was America? highlights the methodology of studying federated art, tracking state aesthetics in a middle distance, arguing for an essential state role parallel to provisioning basic services like education and healthcare, in endowing a wide-open aesthetic field of form and meaning and collective sensibility. The book also notes that its publication“coincides with a dramatic narrowing of national possibility under the ever-increasing pressure of capitalism, the policy of socialism for corporations and austerity for citizens, and most specifically, the defunding of culture, including art as well as science and public education.”

The publication suggests that the 1976 Bicentennial represented“a high point in collective attention to, participation in, and funding of the arts.” The book concludes by emphasizing how defunding the arts has contributed to civic disintegration. Its chapters explore dynamics between the Bicentennial and 1970s culture, featuring representative artworks such as Bruce Blackburn's 1970 graphic logo for the Bicentennial, Ant Farm's 1975 Citizens Time Capsule, and Faith Ringgold's The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1976).

Source: ARTnews

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