Uptown, Downtown: American Art for a New Century, 1890–1920

One Monday: November 16 | 1:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Bethany Congregational Church | 556 N. Hope Avenue, Santa Barbara
VISTAS member price: $20; non-member price: $30

Presented by Lori Windsor Mohr
At the turn of the twentieth century, a group of artists in New York City changed the course of American art by rejecting polished, idealized art for paintings that depicted ordinary people grappling with the dizzying changes wrought by industrialization and rapid urbanization. As former newspaper illustrators, Robert Henri, George Bellows, William Glackens, George Luks, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn found the pulse of a nation in its city streets, parks, department stores, and entertainment venues—from vaudeville to opera. Theirs were realistic scenes of a world in transition—working-class and immigrant life alongside middle-class leisure in a city transformed by technology. Critics sneered at the very idea that such subject matter would be considered worthy of art, giving the movement its name, the Ashcan School. Yet these “Apostles of Ugliness” created the first authentically American urban art, capturing the energy of a city racing toward the future, and opening the door to abstract art and the American modernism that would follow.