"A Modern Super Highway Carried Through the Countryside" from the portfolio 69

Allan D'Arcangelo

1969

A screenprint that turns the American highway into a flattened, Pop-inflected tableau—juxtaposing a warning-striped median, schematic roadways, a photographic insert, engraved clouds, and grassy textures to make roadside modernity the subject.

Your eye is seized by the vertical red-and-cream chevron that cleaves the sheet, while clipped photo, engraved cloud forms, stark black silhouettes and a field of gray texture float in flat planes of sky and land, producing a collage-like, cinematic roadside moment.

By fusing commercial printing, photography, and graphic reduction, D'Arcangelo made the everyday imagery of speed and mobility into a Pop-era meditation on American landscape and mass media, influencing later work that interrogated advertising and the built environment.

Palette

Art Terms

Screenprint Pop art Landscape Built environment Popular culture Graphic design Photomontage

Exhibitions

Committed to Print

1988

American Prints, 1960–1985

1987

American Prints from the International Program

1971

Views over America

1979