American Representational Art

American Representational Art

The focus of Resource Library and the TFAO Free Online Digital Library is American representational visual art. While visual art -- with the exception of unaltered photographs -- is abstracted to some degree, representational art is easily recognizable by the vast majority of people as depicting objects in the natural world, expressed through classical realism, impressionism, surrealism, and figurative modernism. American representational art is further defined by Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO) as art that:

was created from the earliest period of American art history to the present time
was created by United States citizens, American colonists or Native Americans living in the era prior to the formation of the United States
excludes art recognized by experts as being conceptual abstract art

Resource Library's:

-- coverage includes decorative arts, drawings, painting, photography, prints and sculpture. Scholarly study of the historical relationship between conceptual and representational art is a further area of interest. Other disciplines within American representational art including architecture, broadcast media, film and digital media are less emphasized by Resource Library.

-- content timeline spans the pre-Colonial period to the present and covers significant artistic achievement in every state of the Union, while building an interconnected body of knowledge including, but not limited to, the relationships of American artists to their teachers in foreign nations and America, the history of American art centers, schools and ateliers, and the evolution of methods and styles of artistic expression.

Resource Library favors artistic expression of the splendor of nature and the progress and accomplishments of American civilization.

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Search Resource Library for thousands of articles and essays on American art.