Art Terms

The start of the AIDS crisis is often identified as June 1981, when the United States’ Centers for Disease Control first reported on cases of the disease in gay men. In the subsequent decades, people living with HIV/AIDS, as well as their family, friends, partners, and caretakers, have led actions to honor people impacted by the disease, condemn governmental neglect of the ongoing epidemic, and resist widespread discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS. Motivated by this political and public-health crisis, and the profound loss and suffering it has caused, a wide range of artists, working both collectively and individually, have used their artwork to bring attention to and demand support for people living with HIV/AIDS.

The dominant artistic movement in the 1940s and 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was the first to place New York City at the forefront of international modern art. The associated artists developed greatly varying stylistic approaches, but shared a commitment to an abstract art that powerfully expresses personal convictions and profound human values. They championed bold, gestural abstraction in all mediums, particularly large painted canvases.

Non-representational works of art that do not depict scenes or objects in the world or have discernible subject matter

A fast-drying paint made of pigment suspended in acrylic polymer emulsion. A key difference between acrylic paint and oil paint is that acrylics are water-based whereas oils are oil-based.

Art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” in 1952 to describe the work of artists who painted using bold gestures that engaged more of the body than traditional easel painting. Often the viewer can see broad brushstrokes, drips, splashes, or other evidence of the physical action that took place upon the canvas.

A nonfiction film, usually lasting no more than one to two minutes, showing unedited, unstructured footage of real events, places, people, or things. Actualities, the predecessor of documentaries, were popular forms of entertainment from the early 1890s until around 1908.

Refers to the many peoples of African descent who live across the globe. For many of the people in this diaspora, their present place of residence is the result of forced migration due to historical events like the transatlantic slave trade or contemporary life-threatening events such as war or famine. Other reasons for migration include job opportunities, community finding, political exile, etc.

First coined in 1993 by the cultural critic Mark Derry, afrofuturism refers to a literary and artistic mode of reimagining Black history and culture—and possible futures—through the lens of science fiction and fantasy. Black artists in many disciplines, including music, dance, painting, and literature, use afrofuturism to recover the past, understand the present, and envision a future on their own terms.

A photographic print that uses albumen, more commonly known as egg white, as a binder layer. To make the print, a glass-plate negative is placed in direct contact with the sensitized paper and exposed. The result is that the print and the negative are the same size. Albumen prints are admired for their tonal range and strong blacks. To increase stability, these prints were often toned with gold, which turned the warm yellow image to a lush purple. Albumen silver prints were the dominant process from 1850 through the 1880s, when they were replaced by collodion and gelatin silver prints.

Common household commercial paint made with a chemically modified version of linseed oil that dries quickly to a hard, often glossy finish

A texture that often forms on the surface of dry paints that have a very high medium content and an extended drying time.

An approach to painting that emerged with the Abstract Expressionists, in which each area of the composition is given equal attention and significance. Compositions vary widely and include canvases entirely covered in layers of paint, or filled with brushstrokes, drips, stains, or other markings, sometimes with unorthodox materials embedded in the surface.

A lightly exposed wet-plate glass negative that appears as a positive when placed on a black backing.

Natural adhesive created from animal bones, used in woodworking until synthetic glues were invented

As an artistic strategy, the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of preexisting images, objects, and ideas

An intaglio printmaking technique that creates tonal areas. Its name reflects its watercolor-like effects. Powdered resin is sprinkled on a metal plate and adheres through heating. When the plate is submerged in acid, tiny areas unprotected by the resin are “bitten” by the acid, creating recesses. After the resin coating is removed, the plate is inked to fill in these recesses. When damp paper is laid on the plate and run through a press, the tiny ink-filled recesses print as tonal fields.

Also called a rendering, an architectural drawing is used to illustrate a building or portion of a building. These renderings can be done by hand or using computer software, and can represent different visual perspectives by showing buildings or a portion of a building straight on (e.g., elevation drawing), from above (e.g., plan drawing), etc. Architectural drawings can appear in a variety of forms, from watercolor over a flat structure drawn in pencil to three-dimensional scenes of photorealistic images.

An object formerly part of a built structure, intended to be part of a built structure, or representing a structural element of a building.

A presentation of an architectural concept in three-dimensional form. Can also refer to digital files representing the same.

The science, art, or profession of designing and constructing buildings and other structures for use or habitation by humans; a building, or buildings collectively; any framework, system, or other organizing structure.

An international artistic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that emphasized the unity of the arts and sought to reflect the intensive psychic and sensory stimuli of the modern city. Although it influenced painting and sculpture, the movement’s chief manifestations were in design, performance art, and architecture. Variants of the movement in cities throughout Europe and the US accrued labels such as Arte Nova, Glasgow Style, Stile Liberty, and Arte Modernista. The version commonly referred to as Art Nouveau (“New Art” in French) flourished in France and Belgium and was characterized by curving, uneven lines based on organic forms.

A movement of young Italian artists who attempted to create a new sculptural language through the use of humble, everyday materials. Meaning “poor art,” the term was introduced in 1967 by Italian art critic and curator Germano Celant to describe the work by these artists. In them, Celant found a shared revolutionary spirit inextricably linked to the increasingly radical political atmosphere in Italy at the time. By using non-precious and impermanent materials such as soil, rags, and twigs, Arte Povera artists sought to challenge and disrupt the commercialization of art.

Two groups interested in Concrete art emerged in the 1950s in the rapidly industrializing country of Brazil. Based in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the artists connected to both groups, Grupo Frente and Grupo Ruptura, departed from both abstraction and figuration to create geometric works focused solely on the principles of color, line, and shape. Some Brazilian concrete artists, such as Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, grew frustrated with the limits of Concrete art and pushed it to a new level of experimentation. Around 1960 Oiticica said, “All real art does not separate technique from expression.” They called this work, which often included the viewer as a participant, Neo-concrete art. The mostly Rio-based Neo-concretists embraced a more active, participatory relationship to objects.

A pair or group of artists who work together under one name.

A term referring to publications conceived, designed, and illustrated by artists, often self-published or published by arts organizations in large or unlimited editions. These books are usually printed commercially with the photolithography (offset) technique and meant to be an affordable art form.

Founded in England in the 1860s in response to mass industrialization, this design and architecture movement was focused on changing workers’ relationship with machines and the objects they created. In addition to their deep appreciation for handmade labor, makers emphasized functional forms, simple and clear construction, and the use of local or natural materials. The resulting international network of arts and craft knowledge and techniques had widespread influence on the global Art nouveau movement, the Bauhaus school of art and design in Germany, and many others.

A three-dimensional work of art made from combinations of materials including found or purchased objects.

Sound as recorded, transmitted, or reproduced. Could include or refer to the use of noise and/or silence.

Strategies of writing or creating art that aimed to access the unconscious mind. The Surrealists, in particular, experimented with automatist techniques of writing, drawing, and painting.

French for “advanced guard,” originally used to denote the vanguard of an army and first applied to art in France in the early 19th century. In reference to art, the term means any artist, movement, or artwork that breaks with precedent and is regarded as innovative and boundaries-pushing. Because of its radical nature and the fact that it challenges existing ideas, processes, and forms, avant-garde art has often been met with resistance and controversy.

A low-budget movie, especially one made for use as a companion to the main attraction in a double feature.

The school of art and design founded in Germany by Walter Gropius in 1919, and shut down by the Nazis in 1933. The faculty brought together artists, architects, and designers, and developed an experimental pedagogy that focused on materials and functions rather than traditional art school methodologies. In its successive incarnations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, it became the site of influential conversations about the role of modern art and design in society.

An inexpensive mechanical printing method developed in the late 19th century and named after its inventor, illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr. The method relies upon small colored dots (typically cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) that are variously spaced and combined to create shading and colors in images.

The material that holds the pigment together in paint and creates uniform consistency. Binder is often a liquid or an oil, like linseed oil, which is commonly used in oil paint.

Derived from the Greek words bios (life) and morphe (form), the term refers to abstract forms or images that evoke naturally occurring forms such as plants, organisms, and body parts.

This 1960s and 1970s cultural movement, begun by African American artists and intellectuals based in the United States, arose during a time when Black people around the world were engaged in struggles for liberation and equality—from the Black Power movement to decolonization efforts across the African continent—to promote Black self-determination (or the power to make decisions for oneself) through cultural production. Using literature, theater, and the visual arts, the movement emphasized artmaking rooted in Black history and identity. Work was made for Black audiences and was meant to be easily accessible, both in terms of its figurative content (what it depicted) and where you could find it (public murals, inexpensive prints, etc.).

The world’s first film studio, developed in 1892–93 by American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and his assistant and protégé, William K. L. Dickson. Comprised of an armature of wooden planks covered with tar paper, the structure was set on tracks so that it could be moved into optimal sunlight and outfitted with a roof made of panels that could be raised or lowered to control the amount of light coming in.

A small liberal arts college founded in 1933 by John Rice on a farm in Asheville, North Carolina, and continued under changing leadership until 1957. Courses in painting, weaving, sculpture, pottery, poetry, music, and dance placed the arts at the center of the school’s curriculum. Its program fostered exchange and dialogue between faculty, many of them refugees from World War II Europe, and a younger generation of American artists.

A computer system that runs across many traditional computers and is protected by encryption. Blockchains reliably and securely execute programs, known as smart contracts, without the need for trusting any one particular remote computer.

Brutalism is a mid-20th-century architectural style that emerged in Europe after World War II, when massive reconstruction projects and material shortages demanded more cost-effective building solutions. Architects often eliminated cladding and external ornamentation in favor of exposed building materials such as concrete, and the textures of these raw materials took on an aesthetic quality.English architectural historian Reyner Banham first defined the term in 1955, describing it as a design ethic with materially and socially responsible goals, marked by its formal clarity, structural presentation, and use of raw materials. French artist Jean Dubuffet’s concept of “art brut” and Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s use of béton brut (unpolished concrete) inspired the term. Banham credited English architects Alison and Peter Smithson as Brutalism’s pioneers.Brutalist projects spread across the UK, the US, the Eastern Bloc, and postcolonial nations in the Global South in the 1960s and ’70s. The Brutalist design approach began to decline in the early 1980s amid widespread criticism for often monumental scales and an association with large-scale public housing projects and their related bureaucracies. Today, especially in popular culture, the term is often used to summarily describe any large-scale building made of exposed concrete.

The spaces that human design and actions have shaped. These include infrastructural systems like electricity grids or highway networks, cities, buildings and other structures, landscaped areas, and resource-extraction sites like mines or oil wells. The ways in which these spaces are designed impact our social, cultural, and physical interactions with them. This term came to prominence in the United States and Europe in the 1960s, as the study of relationships between organisms and environments expanded beyond the ecological sciences into such disciplines as anthropology, psychology, urban planning, and architectural design.

A white pigment often characterized by a warm tonality and significant transparency

Calligraphy is the art of creating handwritten text using highly stylized lettering. Its historical origins span millennia and many regions of the world, including East Asia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa. Calligraphic texts may contain letters and/or symbols created using paint, ink, and other, often liquid, materials manipulated with an instrument such as a brush or pen.

William Henry Fox Talbot patented a photographic process in 1841 that led to a stable negative image. The process involves exposing a sheet of sensitized paper in the camera then developing, fixing, and washing it. The stable negative image could be contact printed. Though calotypes are soft and hazy, with visible paper fibers, the invention revolutionized image-making by making it possible to produce multiple prints from one negative image. It was also used as a means of making copies of drawings and documents. The process remained in use through the 1850s, when it was replaced by the albumen silver print.

Cameraless photographs are created by manipulating light, radiation, and/or chemicals to leave an impression on photo-sensitive paper. Examples include techniques such as cyanotypes (commonly known as blueprints), radiographs (commonly known as X-rays), chemigrams, and photograms. Today, artists continue to experiment with cameraless techniques to find new ways of capturing the world around them.

A closely woven, sturdy cloth of hemp, cotton, linen, or a similar fiber, frequently stretched over a frame and used as a surface for painting.

Small photographs mounted to cardstock, patented in 1854. These “visiting” cards, most often featuring individual or celebrity portraits, were popularly traded and collected in albums.

(verb) To form a material, such as molten metal or plastic, into a particular shape by pouring or pressing into a mold; (noun) something formed in a mold; (noun) a mold or impression taken of an object or of printing type.

The first synthetic plastic material, developed in the 1860s and 1870s from a combination of camphor and nitrocellulose. Tough, flexible, and moldable, it was used to make many mass-produced items, including photographic film for both still and motion picture cameras. Despite its flammability and tendency to discolor and crack with age, celluloid was used in motion picture production until the 1930s, when it began to be replaced by cellulose-acetate safety film.

Among the earliest known drawing materials, charcoal sticks are produced by burning vines or twigs of wood in an airless atmosphere. The black tonality of charcoal varies based on the type of vine or wood it is derived from. Composed of loosely bound, splinter-like particles that sit on the surface, charcoal marks are easily smudged or disrupted. Some artists exploit this quality by manipulating the marks with implements such as erasers, rolled paper stumps, or their fingers to create tonal effects. Charcoal crayons, developed in the 19th century, consist of charcoal powder compressed into sticks that produce a denser, darker mark.

A technique, used in conjunction with printmaking processes such as etching or lithography, that results in a two-layered paper support: a tissue-thin paper, cut to the size of the printing plate, and a larger, thicker support paper below. Both the tissue and the support sheet are placed on top of the inked plate and run together through the printing press, sometimes with a thin layer of adhesive between them to reinforce the bond produced through the pressure of the press. The process creates a subtle, delicate backdrop to the printed image. Chine is the French word for China, referring to the fact that the thin paper originally used with this technique was imported from China. In addition to China, paper was also imported from India or Japan. Collé is the French word for "glued."

The art of creating and arranging a wide range of dance, from classical ballet to experimental performance; a work created by this art. A person who creates choreography is called a choreographer.

The intensity of a given color

The dominant photographic color process of the 20th century is made up of three gelatin layers containing cyan, magenta, and yellow organic dyes. Together, these dyes produce a full-color image. From 1935 to the present day, the chromogenic process has been used to create a range of print, transparency, and film materials. Common branded products such as Kodacolor prints, introduced by Kodak in 1942, use the chromogenic process, as do materials produced by other companies such as Fuji and Agfa. Used by both professionals and nonprofessionals, chromogenic prints, also known as “C prints,” can be unstable and prone to color shift or fading.

The person who sets up both camera and lighting for each shot in a film, the cinematographer has a major influence over the look and feel of a shot or scene, and is often as highly esteemed as the director. Cinematography is the art of positioning a camera and lighting a scene.

A combination motion-picture camera, printer, and projector invented by French photographers, photographic equipment manufacturers, and brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895. The Lumière brothers used the Cinématographe to show their films when they set up the world’s first movie theater, in the back room of a Parisian café. Unlike Thomas Alva Edison and William K. L. Dickson’s electrically powered Kinetograph, the Cinématographe was compact and hand-cranked, so it could be easily transported to shoot films on location.

Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) was a group founded in Paris in 1929 by Piet Mondrian, Joaquin Torres Garcia, and Michel Seuphor. More than eighty artists from Europe and the Americas working in abstraction came together in this coalition. They advocated a geometric, analytical approach to art making, which they conceived in opposition to Surrealism’s focus on the unconscious and irrational. Key was the notion of “construction,” or logically building a work of art based on, in Joaquin Torres-García’s formulation, “the search for equilibrium, for unity, equivalent relationships between forms, planes, colors, between the simple elements that compose the work of art.”Cercle et Carré edited a magazine of the same name and held one exhibition before it disbanded in 1930. The notion of construction versus the irrational proved important for a generation of artists in South America during the following decades.

An artistic representation of a city or urban environment

The effort to match classical antiquity—and especially the art of the ancient Greeks and Romans—in artistic style, material, or subject matter. Classicism, which can refer to various kinds of artworks, like painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture, emerged in the Renaissance, and has continued to reappear throughout art history. This kind of art tends to be large in scale, usually represents a human figure or heroic story, and is often characterized by smooth lines and an emphasis on geometrical symmetry.

A European avant-garde movement active in the aftermath of World War II (from 1948 to 1951), whose name was derived from the first letters of the three cities—Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br), Amsterdam (A)—that were the homes of its members. CoBrA grew out of the artists’ critical stance toward capitalist production and consumption. As a form of resistance to Western artistic values, they explored the elements and strategies of folk art, children’s art, and art from Africa and the Pacific Islands. Their resulting work was often characterized by bold color and spontaneous brushwork that evoked the brutal nature of the social conditions of the time.

Varnish applied after the painting has dried to unify its surface gloss. Coating often becomes yellow or gray with age.

Coding is the method by which computer programmers, or coders, transmit instructions to computers. Coding transforms human language into the binary language of computers (in which there are only two possible states, off and on, commonly symbolized by 0 and 1). Programming languages have their own systems and rules that allow computers to understand and implement the instructions they are given in a sequential order.

For a brief period in the 1950s and ’60s, an out-of-the-way street at the southeastern edge of Manhattan hosted a community of artists whose work there would change art history. Fred Mitchell encouraged Ellsworth Kelly to live there, and he in turn invited Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman, and Delphine Seyrig. Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney, and James Rosenquist also moved in, and Ann Wilson and Charles Hinman briefly worked there too. Coenties Slip, named after 17th-century Dutch settlers, was originally part waterway for mooring boats and a major marketplace. By the 1950s, the neighborhood was transitioning from a maritime to a financial center. Drawn by cheap rents, open floor plans, and solitude, the artists lived and worked in former sailmaking and industrial lofts, and often incorporated objects scavenged from the demolition around them into their art. They never formed a movement; their diverse art encompasses abstraction and figuration; textiles, assemblage, film, painting––but they all had significant breakthroughs at Coenties Slip that changed the landscape of modern art, and supported each other’s need to be a part of but also apart from the cultural scene.

Derived from the French verb coller, meaning “to glue,” collage refers to both the technique and the resulting work of art in which fragments of paper and other materials are arranged and glued or otherwise affixed to a supporting surface.

A reproductive printmaking technique that is photographically based. Although collotype is increasingly rare, in the early 20th century it was employed for its effectiveness in reproducing the subtle delicacy of drawings and photographs. A photographic negative is projected onto a printing plate coated with light-sensitive gelatin that hardens and becomes receptive to the application of ink. Paper is laid on top and the image is printed on a press.

A form of abstract painting that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by large areas of color, typically without strong tonal contrasts or a defined point of focus.

An implement for drawing that contains a rod of pigments or dyes, known as “colorants,” mixed with fillers (including kaolin, chalk, or talc), synthetic resin, and wax and encased in wood or paper. A limited palette of colored pencils was first developed in the early 19th century. Modern synthetic dyes and pigments have greatly expanded the range of colored pencils available, but some of these colorants are unstable and prone to fading.

Term coined by Jasper Johns to describe a body of work by Robert Rauschenberg consisting of three-dimensional objects integrated into paintings. Rauschenberg made his first Combines in 1954, and continued to affix a motley assortment of cast-off items (from newspaper clippings and quilts to taxidermied animals) to traditional painting supports until 1964. His Combines collapse distinctions between the materials of artmaking and ordinary things; between painting and sculpture; and between the realms of art and everyday life.

A sequence of images that may or may not also contain words. This sequence is made up of several images, or self-contained sections, called “panels.” When taken together, these words and images tell a story. While there is no limit to how many panels one can include in a story, you need at least two images in order to make a comic. Comics can vary in style and medium—some are made as drawings, while others are made up of paintings or even photographs. Traditionally, comics were made on paper using a variety of materials including graphite, colored pencil, pen, watercolor, and markers, and were published as books or strips in newspapers and magazines. Today, artists increasingly create comics digitally, using computers and tablets, and comics are frequently distributed via apps or websites.

Years after Louis Daguerre invented and popularized the daguerreotype, advancements in camera technology grew. Developments like shortened shutter times and decreased lens sizes increased convenience and reduced costs, and as a result, commercial photography studios multiplied across the United States and Western Europe. By 1850, New York City alone was home to 77 studios. Among them was Matthew B. Brady’s “Gallery of Illustrious Americans” which photographed many of the country's prominent citizens, such as President Abraham Lincoln. As the 1800s ended, photography became even more inexpensive and accessible, making it possible for private individuals to keep and share images of their loved ones. In 1916, James Van Der Zee opened his Guarantee Photo Studio. There he took photos of Black Harlemites during the neighborhood’s historic Renaissance. Van Der Zee later photographed Black celebrities, like Jean-Michele Basquiat, until his death in 1983. Commercial photography's rise allowed many to fashion their self-image and capture important moments.

A canvas that has been primed before being sold

To request, or the request for, the production of a work of art

In the 1960s, many artists experimented with art that emphasized ideas over objects and materials traditionally associated with art making. In 1967, Sol LeWitt wrote in his essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” that “the idea itself, even if it is not made visual, is as much of a work of art as any finished product.” Conceptual artists used their work to question the notion of what art is, and to critique the underlying ideological structures of artistic production, distribution, and display.

This term was first introduced in 1930 by Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, who said that “nothing is more concrete, more real, than a line, a color, a plane.” Concrete art finds meaning only in its own material form, and artworks (typically paintings and sculptures) incorporate lines, colors, and/or flat surfaces (planes) that do not represent anything. Similar to but distinct from abstraction, Concrete art does not depict visual symbols or ideas from the natural world. Max Bill, a Swiss artist and designer who was educated at the Bauhaus, became a founder and leader of the Concrete art movement in the later 1930s.

Developed by the Russian avant-garde at the time of the October Revolution of 1917. Declaring that a post-Revolutionary society demanded a radically new artistic language, Constructivist artists, led by Aleksandr Rodchenko, aimed to strip their works of subjective emotional character, eventually even rejecting painting as an individualist bourgeois form. The Constructivist artist was recast as an engineer of a new society, whose practice served a greater social or utilitarian purpose.

When light-sensitized paper is placed in direct contact with a negative and then exposed, the result is a contact print. A printing frame is often used to tightly bind the materials together during exposure, thus ensuring perfect registration and crisp resolution. The resulting image is the same size as the negative, as opposed to a print created with an enlarger, which requires the image to pass from negative to paper through a lens system.

Art made in the present and recent past, currently understood as roughly 1980 to today. While contemporary artists come from different backgrounds, explore a wide range of ideas, and use different materials and techniques, many explore the social and political issues of our time.Contemporary artists often explore the category of art itself. Some appropriate existing images and objects, blurring boundaries between art and popular culture. Others experiment with mediums like video, performance, and installation. Some artists critique art institutions, including museums and galleries, asking questions about how art is displayed, discussed, and circulated. Still others include references to older artworks or artistic styles.Whether reflecting on the past or responding to the present, contemporary artists make work that invites us to think, feel, and talk about the world in new ways.

Photographs contain areas of brightness and darkness, regions of roughness and smoothness, and, at times, colors from across the spectrum. Contrast is the visual ratio of the tones, textures, and colors that are present in an image. High tonal contrast arises from the interaction of light and dark regions within an image. High textural contrast is found where areas of fine-grained detail run up against more uniform fields. High color contrast exists where colors are brought together from opposite sides of the color wheel. Contrast plays a vital role in helping our eyes understand what they see in a picture by defining the volume and edges of the objects they represent. Photographers can heighten or reduce contrast to manipulate the clarity of their images and the mood they convey.

Also called cotton canvas, cotton duck is a common support for painting. It is typically cheaper than linen and has a lighter and warmer color.

A term first used by Anthony Dunne in his book, Hertzian Tales (1999), referring to an attitude toward design rather than a movement or method. It follows in the footsteps of other practices (like Radical Design in Italy and avant-garde British architecture of the late 1960s and early 1970s) that have regarded design as a way to pose incisive questions, challenge the status quo, and think deeply about the possible future consequences of present choices. Critical Design is speculative, conceptual, provocative, and can be darkly satirical. It does not always lead to usable products, but it does produce long-term thinking, a nuanced view of consumers as complex, contradictory individuals, and alternative solutions suggesting that change is always possible, even inevitable.

In photography, editing, typically by removing the outer edges of the image.

An artistic style invented in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century, Cubism was soon adopted by an international network of artists who sought to create a new art for a new century. Cubists developed an innovative visual vocabulary that included angular lines, geometric planes, compressed space, and non-naturalistic colors. While traditional Western artists had typically used a single, stable perspective in their works, Cubists often incorporated multiple perspectives into individual compositions. They broke with artistic tradition in other ways, too: they drew inspiration from African and Oceanic sculpture, and they introduced everyday materials such as newspapers into their art.Cubism originated with the artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, whose close artistic exchange propelled the style from 1907 to 1914. After the critic Louis Vauxcelles dismissed landscapes that Braque had painted in 1908 as consisting of “cubes,” the term was embraced by a diverse array of artists and writers in the French capital and beyond. Although Cubists differed in terms of their approaches, they shared a commitment to producing art that was, as the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in The Cubist Painters (1913), “entirely new.”

In 1842, the scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel invented a new process for reproducing his notes. By combining sunlight and an iron salt solution on photo-sensitive paper, a Prussian blue image was created. Just a year after Herschel’s invention, a family friend, the botanist Anna Atkins used the technique to create copies of algae specimens, which she combined into an album. (Atkins is often credited as the first woman photographer.) In the following years, the cyanotype was used to copy architectural and engineering plans, and the distinctive blue tint gave rise to the term “blueprints.”

A panoramic mural on the inner surface of a cylindrical space, which gives viewers the illusion that they are immersed in a 360-degree view of a (typically outdoor) scene. This popular 19th-century form of entertainment often celebrated military endeavors and territorial expansion.

An artistic and literary movement formed in response to the disasters of World War I (1914–18) and to an emerging modern media and machine culture. Dada artists sought to expose accepted and often repressive conventions of order and logic, favoring strategies of chance, spontaneity, and irreverence. Dada artists experimented with a range of mediums, from collage and photomontage to everyday objects and performance, exploding typical concepts of how art should be made and viewed and what materials could be used. An international movement born in neutral Zurich and New York, Dada rapidly spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and beyond.Participants claimed various, often humorous definitions of Dada—“Dada is irony,” “Dada is anti-art,” “Dada will kick you in the behind”—though the word itself is a nonsense utterance. As the story goes, the name Dada was either chosen at random by stabbing a knife into a dictionary, or consciously selected for a variety of connotations in different languages—French for “hobbyhorse” or Russian for “yes, yes.”

One of the first practical photographic processes, publicly announced in 1839 and named for the French artist/inventor Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. A light-sensitive coating on a silver-plated copper sheet produced brilliant and sharp images, which, when sealed under glass, have proven to be extremely permanent. Since daguerreotypes are autopostive, each one is unique

Dance is the rhythmic movement of the body to express a feeling or idea, usually accompanied by music.

A transfer technique, developed in the 18th century, in which ink, paint, or another medium is spread onto a surface and, while still wet, covered with material such as paper, glass, or aluminum foil, which, when removed, transfers a pattern that may be further embellished upon. The technique was adopted by the Surrealists to create imagery by chance rather than through conscious control.

The term adopted by the Nazi regime to describe works deemed to be “an insult to German feeling.” An exhibition of the same name opened in Munich in 1937, which included works in a range of mediums that the Nazis had confiscated from public institutions in Germany. The Nazis considered virtually all forms of modern art to be “degenerate,” from German Expressionism to more international movements such as Cubism.

Formed in 1911 in Munich as an association of painters and an exhibiting society led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Using a visual vocabulary of abstract forms and prismatic colors, Blaue Reiter artists explored the spiritual values of art as a counter to [what they saw as] the corruption and materialism of their age. The name, meaning “blue rider,” refers to a key motif in Kandinsky’s work: the horse and rider. The group, which published an influential almanac by the same name, dissolved with the onset of World War I.

This term is most commonly associated with graphics, furniture, lighting, and products, but also encompasses a wide variety of related practices, including the design of exhibitions, environments, digital interfaces, film title sequences, crafted objects, textiles, clothing, and corporate identity systems. Design is a collaborative process extending from initial concept and prototype to a finished product, environment, or image, although some projects remain at the conceptual or experimental stage.

Can refer to the movement or dispersal of a group of people with a shared identity or homeland from one place to another, or to the group of people itself. Often, members of a cultural, racial, or ethnic group in diaspora form enclaves—a neighborhood or shared space—in the place they move to.

A printmaking technique initially developed as an alternative to the blueprint, which it ultimately replaced, for the reproduction of maps, plans, etc. An image is projected onto paper that has been photosensitized with diazonium salts, and then developed with photographic chemicals.

The artists’ group Die Brücke was established in 1905, a moment that is recognized as the birth of Expressionism. The affiliated artists often turned to simplified or distorted forms and unusually strong, unnatural colors to jolt the viewer and provoke an emotional response. Its leading members were Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The name Brücke (“bridge”) reflects these artists’ youthful eagerness to cross into a new future. The Brücke artists worked together communally until 1913.

A general term for any print that incorporates digital technology into the creation of an image or its printing. Until the mid-1990s, most digital images that artists made on the computer were transferred photomechanically to traditional printing plates. Since then, some artists have taken up high-resolution digital printing processes on computer-controlled printers.

A work of art consisting of two sections or panels, usually hinged together.

A method of documentary filmmaking developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the US and Canada, in which filmmakers sought to capture their subjects as directly as possible. Reducing equipment and crews to bare essentials, they used handheld cameras and attempted to make themselves unobtrusive, allowing life to unfold before the camera.

A genre encompassing nonfiction films intended to capture some aspect of reality, often for the purposes of instruction, education, or the development of a historical record.

A genre of photography that aims to objectively chronicle a subject or event

In photography and filmmaking, a technique in which film is exposed twice to capture and merge two different images in a single frame.

A unique work of art, often on paper, made with dry or wet mediums including pencil, charcoal, chalk, pastel, crayon, pen, ink, watercolor, or oils. In addition to paper, drawings may be made on other organic or synthetic supports, including parchment, vellum, or acetate. Drawings that are site-specific can be executed directly on a wall, floor, or other surface. Drawings are made as both independent finished artworks and as studies or plans for works in other mediums.

An intaglio printmaking technique that creates sharp lines with fuzzy, velvety edges. A diamond-pointed needle is used to incise lines directly into a bare metal printing plate, displacing ridges of metal that adhere to the edges of the incised lines. This displaced metal is called burr. Inking fills the incised lines and clings to the burr. Damp paper is placed on the plate and run through a press, picking up the ink from the incised lines and the burr, resulting in a characteristically fuzzy line.

A full-color photographic printing process that was popular between the 1920s and the 1950s. In these prints, three layers of dye—cyan, magenta, and yellow—are applied sequentially, by hand, to one emulsion layer. The process involves many steps and painstaking alignment of each dye layer, and as a result dye transfers are rare and were seldom made by amateurs. They are very stable, and, when executed correctly, they allow the photographer exceptional control over the final color balance.

Art that is made by shaping the land itself or by making forms in the land using natural materials like rocks or tree branches. Earthworks range from subtle, temporary interventions in the landscape to significant, sculptural, lasting alterations made with heavy earth-moving machinery. Some artists have also brought the land into galleries and museums, creating installations out of dirt, sand, and other materials taken from nature. Earthworks were part of the wider conceptual art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Also called Land Art or Earth Art.

A set of identical prints made from the same printing surface. Editions may be limited or unlimited in number. Often a certain number of prints—including artist’s proofs, printer’s proofs, and hors commerce (not for sale)—are made at the same time but kept apart from the numbered edition. Each print in a limited edition is usually numbered in the lower left margin. In an edition of 100, for example, they would be numbered 1/100, 2/100, etc.

An elevation or elevation drawing is a two-dimensional representation of one side of a building or space. It can depict one of the building’s facades or an interior surface from a straight-on viewpoint. With an elevation, you are able to understand the material qualities of a project.

A method of printing the deeply incised areas of a metal printing plate without ink, which creates a raised impression on the paper. Small or shallow objects such as coins, nails, washers, etc. can also be affixed to a smooth printing surface before printing; under the pressure of a press. The dimensional features of the affixed elements are transferred to the paper as raised and recessed areas.

A uniform mixture of oily substances and watery substances, which do not ordinarily mix. Artists may add an emulsifier, like egg yolk, to such emulsions as oil paint and water in order to encourage mixing and stabilization.

A type of paint made from fine pigments and resin that is formulated to be very fluid and that dries to a hard, glossy finish

An intaglio printmaking technique that creates a crisp, precise line that swells in the middle and tapers at the end. Lines are incised on a bare metal plate using a burin, a tool with a sharp, V-shaped blade. After inking, which fills only the incised lines, damp paper is placed on the plate and run through a press, forcing the paper into the incised lines to pick up the ink.

Written, printed, or commercially produced materials not originally intended to be seen as independent artworks. These are often related to exhibitions, performances, creative efforts, and cultural movements. Ephemera, such as flyers or posters from a historic protest or concert, can help to broaden the understanding of specific moments in history, and are sometimes the only remaining documentation of important events or performances.

An intaglio printmaking technique that creates thin, fluid lines whose effects can vary from graceful and serpentine to tight and scratchy. An etching needle, a fine-pointed tool, is used to draw on a metal plate that has been coated with a thin layer of waxy ground, making an easy surface to draw though. When the plate is placed in acid, the ground protects the areas it still covers, while the drawn lines expose the plate and are incised, or “bitten,” by the acid. After removing the coating, the plate is inked, filling only the incised lines. Damp paper is placed on the plate and run through a press, forcing the paper into the incised lines to pick up the ink.

To make an exposure, a photographer allows visible light or invisible radiation to land on a light-sensitive surface or digital sensor for a given amount of time. An action occurring early in the creation process of most photographs, the exposure can take many forms. In camera-based photography, it may involve removing a lens cap or releasing a shutter. In cameraless photography, light-sensitive material, such as film or photosensitized paper, is exposed directly to light. Early photo negatives had weak sensitivity to light, and exposures could last from several seconds to several minutes. For much of the 19th century, this limited photography to depicting motionless subjects, requiring those who posed for photographs to hold still for long periods. Technological advances would shorten exposure times enough that, by the 1880s, Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge could record crisp images of animals in motion. At the end of the 19th century, photographers began experimenting with lengthened exposures to create expressive photographs featuring softened and blurred images. A photograph can also combine two or more exposures in a single image, which are then laid on top of one another.

Encompasses varying stylistic approaches that emphasize intense personal expression. Renouncing the stiff bourgeois social values that prevailed at the turn of the 20th century, and rejecting the traditions of the state-sponsored art academies, Expressionist artists turned to boldly simplified or distorted forms and exaggerated, sometimes clashing colors. As Expressionism evolved from the beginning of the 20th century through the early 1920s, its crucial themes and genres reflected deeply humanistic concerns and an ambivalent attitude toward modernity, eventually confronting the devastating experience of World War I and its aftermath.

A game in which each participant takes turns writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, folding it to conceal his or her contribution, and then passing it to the next player for a further contribution. The game gained popularity in artistic circles during the 1920s when it was adopted as a technique by artists of the Surrealist movement to generate collaborative compositions.

Established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) provided relief to farmers who had been left impoverished by the drought and dust storms of the Dust Bowl and the financial devastation of the Great Depression. The agency resettled agricultural workers on new land and hired photographers to document their struggles. FSA photographers took over 65,000 pictures, which were frequently reproduced in publications to “introduce America to Americans” and encourage public support for rural rehabilitation, which was a program that provided aid and relocation assistance to struggling farmers. Importantly, the FSA’s photography division became one of the first large-scale projects to document the lives of African Americans.

A style of painting in the first decade of the 20th century that emphasized strong, vibrant color and bold brushstrokes over realistic or representational qualities. Central among the loose group of artists were Henri Matisse and Andre Derain. When their paintings were exhibited in 1905, a critic derisively described the works—with their expressive and non-naturalistic palette—as the product of Fauves (“wild beasts”).

Art that seeks to challenge the dominance of men in both art and society, to gain recognition and equality for women artists, and question assumptions about womanhood. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist artists used a variety of mediums—including painting, performance art, and crafts historically considered “women’s work”—to make work aimed at ending sexism and oppression and exposing femininity to be a masquerade or set of poses adopted by women to conform to societal expectations. While many of the debates inaugurated in these decades are still ongoing, a younger generation of feminist artists takes an approach incorporating intersecting concerns about race, class, forms of privilege, and gender identity and fluidity. Both feminism and feminist art continue to evolve.

Art retaining strong references to or depictions of the real world and particularly to the human figure.

The relationship between a depicted form (the figure) and pictorial space (the ground). Figure/ground relationships are often used to describe the construction of space in representational paintings, but the term can also be used to understand abstract paintings, such as those of Barnett Newman.

A series of moving images, especially those printed on photographic celluloid and projected onto a screen or other surface.

A photograph often taken during the production of a film that shows a particular moment or scene. These photographs are often used as advertisements or posters for the film.

A person who directs or produces movies.

Founded by George Maciunas and chiefly active from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, Fluxus was a loose international group of artists, poets, and musicians with a shared impulse to integrate art and life. Maciunas coined the name Fluxus to suggest “flow” and “effluent” and to describe a wide range of activities, which included scores or instructions; multiples; and concerts, performances, and “Happenings” that were often themselves in a state of flux. Fluxus works, both physical and performative, were often best characterized as having a critical attitude towards art itself rather than being overtly finished in their final state.

A specific size and style of a typeface—for example, Arial 12-point bold, or Times New Roman 10-point italic. The term is often confused with typeface, which refers to the design or “look” of type or lettering.

The shape or structure of an object, figure or structure

An object—often utilitarian, manufactured, or naturally occurring—that was not originally designed for an artistic purpose, but has been repurposed in an artistic context.

A technique that involves rubbing pencil, graphite, chalk, crayon, or another medium onto a sheet of paper that has been placed on top of a textured object or surface. The process causes the raised portions of the surface below to be translated to the sheet. The term is derived from the French frotter, which means “to rub.”

An object or environment designed to accommodate human activities such as sitting, sleeping, or eating. Examples include chairs, tables, and kitchens.

An Italian movement in art and literature catalyzed by a 1909 manifesto published in a newspaper by Italian poet F. T. Marinetti. The text celebrated new technology and modernization while advocating for a violent and decisive break from the past. Working in the years just before World War I, the Futurists portrayed their subjects—often humans, machines, and vehicles in motion—with fragmented forms and surfaces that evoke the energy and dynamism of urban life in the early 20th century.

A designed experience in which a set of rules balances chance and/or the skill of other participants with a player’s decisions. A game model laid out by the Danish game designer and theorist Jesper Juul balances the restrictions of successful game interfaces with the flexibility required for play: “1) a rule-based formal system; 2) with variable and quantifiable outcomes; 3) where different outcomes are assigned different values; 4) where the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome; 5) the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome; 6) and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” Games may be social in nature or solitary, but play is the focus in either scenario.

Formulated to react quickly when exposed to light, this paper contains silver halides in a gelatin binder. It is intended for handling in the controlled environment of a darkroom, printing with the aid of an enlarger, and requires chemical development to bring out the image in the print. Distinguished by their neutral, “black-and-white” tonality, gelatin silver papers first appeared in the 1880s, and became the most popular process of the 20th century thanks to their fast exposure times and relative ease of use.

A process common from 1860 to 1940, printing-out-paper (POP) uses strong levels of ultraviolet sunlight to bring out a visible image, rather than the chemical development required by developing-out paper. These papers were contact printed, a method most often associated with 19th-century photography. Commercially prepared printing-out-papers are still made and printed today, although they are considered a specialty product.

Art that is created, in part or in whole, through the use of an autonomous system or computer code, and that often relies on elements of randomness or chance.

A form of abstract art that combines geometric, “hard-edge,” or linear forms. When geometric shapes are arranged in nonrepresentational space (i.e., the flat space of a canvas), and refer only to themselves rather than ideas or “real life,” they are sometimes called constructive or concrete.

Relating to methods of applying a medium, such as paint, to a surface, often with active or sweeping body movements.

A thin coat of transparent or translucent paint used to modify the tone of an underlying color. Glazes can alter the chroma, value, texture, and hue of a surface. They are composed of a large amount of binder or solvent mixed with a very small amount of pigment.

From the late 1930s through the 1950s, MoMA held a series of design exhibitions and initiatives that highlighted the democratizing potential of design objects. In these so-called Good Design shows, curators and designers invited audiences to explore that potential by featuring well-designed, relatively affordable, contemporary consumer products, from domestic furnishings and appliances to ceramics, glass, electronics, transport design, sporting goods, toys, and graphics.As a result, the concept of Good Design took hold well beyond the Museum. Scholars, designers, and consumers have come to understand “Good Design” as referring to practical, aesthetically pleasing objects that reflect values from the mid-20th century and beyond, and are largely intended to solve common problems and respond to changing human needs and concerns.

A water-based matte paint, sometimes called opaque watercolor, composed of ground pigments and plant-based binders, such as gum Arabic or gum tragacanth. The opacity of gouache derives from the addition of white fillers, such as clay or chalk, or a higher ratio of pigment to binder.

Visual communication through the use of type, space, image, and color. Examples include printed materials like posters, books, and album covers, as well as film title sequences and digital works such as websites and interactive software.

A soft, greasy mineral form of carbon with a steel-gray to black metallic luster, used as a drawing material. Until the 18th century, natural lump graphite was placed in bone or wood holders for application. Since the 18th century, powdered graphite has been mixed with clay and fired to create the hard sticks used in pencils. Graphite can also be used as a powder and applied to a support with implements such as rags, fingers, or rolled paper stumps. Powdered graphite can also be mixed with water for brush application.

A historic mass movement of over six million African Americans between 1910 and 1970, as migrants sought to escape the racial violence and limited economic mobility in the Southern United States under Jim Crow laws. Many traveled by train to Northern states, like New York, but others settled in the Midwest and West. Their motivations included job and expanded educational opportunities and reuniting with family. This had extraordinary impacts on nationwide demographic and cultural landscapes.

During the 1960s and 1970s, groups of young artists, filmmakers, and activists based in the US and abroad experimented with newly available portable video cameras as an alternative to corporate television broadcasting. Often associated with countercultural movements of the time, video collectives like Raindance Corporation, TVTV (Top Value Television), Videofreex, Ant Farm, Not Channel Zero, Video Hiroba, and CADA emerged to oppose what they viewed as corporate, top-down media culture. Using new, more affordable video technologies like the Sony Portapak, artists promoted greater access to mass communication by documenting political upheavals on the streets and behind the scenes. These collectives championed video as a form of creative resistance and a medium for social change.

Emerging from the live performances and spectacles of Dada and Surrealism, Happenings were events created by artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Allan Kaprow coined the term when he used it in the title of his 1959 work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which called for the audience to carry out specific actions in an environment he staged. Happenings were the forerunners of performance art, in which the focus shifted away from audience participation and increasingly toward the actions of the artist.

A period of African American literary, artistic, and intellectual activity centered in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, spanning from the 1920s to the mid-1930s. Considered one of the most significant periods of cultural production in US history, the Harlem Renaissance fostered a new African American cultural identity.

A three-dimensional image that results when recordings of two waveforms of a light source (such as a light beam) are superimposed.

A particular gradation of color; a shade or tint. Hue can also simply mean “color.”

A term referring to any book to which an artist has contributed imagery, but often designating deluxe limited-edition volumes created in collaboration with specialized publishers who provide various levels of input.

An Italian word for “mixture,” used to describe a painting technique wherein paint is thickly laid on a surface, so that brushstrokes or palette knife marks are visible. A pastose surface is one that is thickly painted.

A label applied to a loose group of mostly French artists who positioned themselves outside of the official Salon exhibitions organized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Rejecting established styles, the Impressionists began experimenting in the early 1860s with a brighter palette of pure unblended colors, synthetic paints, sketchy brushwork, and subject matter drawn from their direct observations of nature and of everyday life in and around Paris. They worked out of doors, the better to capture the transient effects of sunlight on the scenes before them. With their increased attention to the shifting patterns of light and color, their brushwork became rapid, broken into separate dabs that better conveyed the fleeting quality of light. In 1874, they held their first group exhibition in Paris. Most critics derided their work, especially Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), which was called a sketch or impression, rather than a finished painting. From this criticism, they were mockingly labeled Impressionists. They continued exhibiting together until 1886, at which point many of the core artists were taking their work in new directions.

To make, compose, or perform on the spur of the moment with little or no preparation

A multifaceted cultural movement spanning several Latin American countries, Indigenism advocated for the defense, rights, and recognition of Indigenous peoples. Arising during the first decades of the 20th century, the movement aimed to raise political awareness of their concerns through a range of strategies and mediums, including paintings, murals, magazines, and books. Artists from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds played an important role in bringing Indigenism to the forefront of national and regional discourses.

A process of design that emerged after the Industrial Revolution, applied to products that are mass-produced and machine-made.

During the end of the 1700s, a rapid proliferation of factory-based industry and mass production began in urban areas of Great Britain, before sweeping across Western Europe and the United States, changing these regions’ economies and society. Many domestic and international migrants moved from largely agrarian areas to Manchester, England, New York City, and other new urban industrial centers looking for work opportunities in factories and other industrial workplaces. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, artists drew inspiration from these changes, using a wide range of mediums to depict these changing environments. For example, Lewis Hine’s early 20th-century photographs of exploited youth workers helped bring about the United States’ first child labor laws.

Traditional black drawing ink, which originated in Asia and is therefore often referred to as India ink or Chinese ink, consists of very fine particles of carbon pigment, usually lampblack (soot), dispersed in an aqueous solution with a glue or gum binder. Modern liquid India ink has a resinous shellac binder and may also include dye-based colorants. Sold in bottles it can be applied with a nib pen or in washes with a brush. Once dry, India ink is opaque and indelible. Brown inks such as bister and sepia were made from wood tar and cuttlefish ink, respectively.

A print created by a contact-free printer that distributes droplets of ink over a surface to create an image. Most often a print head with nozzles moves across paper depositing liquid ink in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, although some professional-grade printers employ up to 12 colors. Many different printer types exist, and they can be used with a wide range of supports including papers, textiles, and metals. Introduced in the 1980s, inkjet prints became increasingly common in the 1990s. The process, which produces prints that can closely resemble photographs made in a darkroom, continues to improve in sophistication, and is widely used today.

An art form that comprises visual elements in any medium and the space they inhabit.

A form of conceptual art, which emerged in the late 1960s, centered on the critique of museums, galleries, private collections, and other art institutions. Artists working in this vein use a range of strategies to expose the ideologies and power structures underlying the circulation, display, and discussion of art.

A general term for metal-plate printmaking techniques, including etching, drypoint, engraving, aquatint, and mezzotint. The word comes from the Italian intagliare, meaning “to incise” or “to carve.” In intaglio printing, the lines or areas that hold the ink are incised below the surface of the plate, and printing relies on the pressure of a press to force damp paper into these incised lines or areas, to pick up ink.

The field that shapes the conversation between people and machines. Successful interactive design translates and simplifies this relationship so that we are able to manage our increasingly tech-heavy lives without extensive technical training. Interactive design governs how we use all mechanical and digital devices, from the buttons and menus of ATM machines to motion-sensitive controls for video games on smartphones.

An object, like a phone, or a virtual program, like an app, that facilitates the communication between a person and a machine.

A discipline of design that focuses on the functional and aesthetic aspects of indoor spaces

A style of modern architecture that emerged in Europe (principally Germany and France) in the 1920s and 1930s. Historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson coined the term International Style to describe this plain, unadorned architecture of rectilinear forms built of steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. The style transformed the skylines of many major cities around the world.

Dialogue or narration conveyed in text that is shown between scenes of a silent film.

Identity is the way we perceive and express ourselves. Factors such as race, ethnicity, or gender—often play a role in defining our identity. However, many aspects of a our identities change throughout our lives. Our experiences can alter how we see ourselves or are perceived by others. Conversely, our identities also influence the decisions we make: Individuals choose their friends, adopt certain fashions, and align themselves with political beliefs based on their identities. Many artists use their work to express, explore, and question ideas about identity.

With a name derived from the Kikuyu word for “a group of people acting together,” a photography collective founded in 1963 as a shared political and artistic space for self-determination among a group of Black American photographers living and working in New York City. The group gathered weekly to exchange, review, and critique each other’s work. They produced two portfolios in 1964 and 1965, and were the driving force behind the publication of the Black Photographers Annual (1973–80). Key group members included Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, C. Daniel Dawson, Herman Howard, Larry Stewart, Ming Smith, and Shawn W. Walker.

Art that moves or has an element of motion. Artists making kinetic art may use motors to produce motion or may structure the work so that it is responsive to the natural movement of air currents.

The world’s first motion-picture camera, developed in 1890 by American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and his assistant and protégé, William K. L. Dickson. It was electrically powered and worked with celluloid film, which was advanced through the camera via a system of sprockets.

A cabinet-like apparatus, forerunner of the motion-picture film projector, developed in 1891 by American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and his assistant and protégé, William K. L. Dickson. When a nickel was dropped into its slot, celluloid film (recorded in the Kinetograph) would roll through the Kinetoscope, passing between a lens and an electric light bulb (another of Edison’s inventions). A peephole at the top of the Kinetoscope allowed people to view moving pictures as the celluloid rolled past.

The natural landforms of a region; also, an image that has natural scenery as its primary focus.Although landscape painting dates to antiquity, the genre remained popular among early modern artists. Driven in part by their dissatisfaction with modern urban life, many artists sought out places resembling untouched earthly paradises where they could focus on their work and observe nature closely. They generated radical artistic experiments, which might seem more likely to have been sparked by the visual and cultural stimulation of the city. But surrounded by nature and in rural communities, they began breaking the traditions of landscape painting, using, for example, non-naturalistic colors or applying paint in ways that emphasized their brushwork. Two innovations made it easier than ever for artists to paint outside, directly from nature. Improved transportation—both by railroad and automobile—allowed people to travel farther faster. And with the introduction of paint in tubes, which stayed wet and was easily transportable, artists were freed from having to mix and store their own paint and could work anywhere they wanted.

Similarly styled brushstrokes creating a grid or pattern across the canvas

A soft, malleable, dense metallic element with many different applications and uses, especially in the marking substance in pencils or as a material for sculpture.

A very opaque, crisp white pigment that is seldom used today because of lead’s toxicity

A relief printing technique for printing text and other images that are outlined and mechanically cut from metal or wood. The raised surface is inked and pressed onto paper by a printing press.

A long-bristled brush that tapers to a point. Because it can hold a considerable amount of paint, this brush can be used to make very long lines before needing to be reloaded with pigment. Traditionally used for painting lettering on signs

An additional canvas adhered to the original canvas by a conservator to provide additional support

A relief printmaking technique, also called linocut, that is usually characterized by flat, clearly delineated areas of color. An image is cut or gouged from a sheet of linoleum, which is softer and easier to carve than wood. The surface is inked and paper laid on top, with printing accomplished either by rubbing manually with a spoon or similar tool, or on a printing press.

The most common binder for oil paints, made from flax seeds

A printmaking technique that involves drawing with greasy crayons or a liquid called tusche, on a polished slab of limestone; aluminum plates, which are less cumbersome to handle, may also be used. The term is derived from the Greek words for stone (litho) and drawing (graph). When the greasy image is ready to be printed, a chemical mixture is applied across the surface of the stone or plate in order to securely bond it. This surface is then dampened with water, which adheres only to the blank, non-greasy areas. Oily printer’s ink, applied with a roller, sticks to the greasy imagery and not to areas protected by the film of water. Damp paper is placed on top of this surface and run through a press to transfer the image. In addition to the traditional method described here, other types of lithography include offset lithography, photolithography, and transfer lithography.

A practice emerging in the 1960s based on sending and exchanging works of art through the postal service. In the following decades, mail art networks expanded globally through the circulation of mailing lists, newsletters and ‘zines.

A public declaration, often political in nature, of a group or individual’s principles, beliefs, and intended courses of action. Manifestos typically materialize as written documents.

People have been creating maps since ancient times. The earliest map, thought to be a schematic representation of the night sky, was found in the caves of Lascaux, France. It dates to 14,500 BCE. While we often regard maps as objective representations, they are in fact laden with subjective views of the world. And maps change over time. Borders and boundaries are constantly in flux, shifting with wars and politics and in response to changes in international relations. Many artists have used maps to tell wide-ranging stories about conflict, migration, identity, and social, cultural, or political networks.

The production of large amounts of standardized products through the use of machine-assembly production methods and equipment.

Since the early 20th century, artists have been incorporating such non-traditional forms as dance, music, and their own actions into their art. The artists of the Dada and Futurist movements, for example, presented provocative performances meant to shock the public awake to their vision of society. But before World War II, performance occupied a less privileged place in the art world than the traditional mediums of painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Even the relatively newer and rapidly developing mediums of film and photography were more readily accepted as art than performance. By the late 1950s, artists found themselves confronted by the realities of postwar reconstruction, new wars and ideologies (among them the Vietnam War and Communism), burgeoning social movements spurred by historically disenfranchised populations and increasingly disaffected younger generations, and a flurry of technological innovations. Within this cultural climate, artists began to question the role, relevance, and definition of art as they knew it. They blurred the boundaries between disciplines and embraced and re-configured new technologies, creating works that have come to be known as Media Art. Perhaps most radically, artists from the early 20th century on have been breaking down the barriers between art and life by presenting projects outside of the context of museums and galleries, staging performances in the public sphere, and bringing everyday activities and materials into their work. Suddenly, art could be anything, and everything could be art.

Any camera that records an image, digitally or on film, larger than a 35mm frame but smaller than 4 × 5 inches. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, these handheld cameras became especially popular among photojournalists.

A drama, such as a play, film, or television program, characterized by exaggerated emotions, stereotypical characters, and interpersonal conflicts. Behavior or occurrences having melodramatic characteristics.

A term invented by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters to describe collage and assemblage works he made from scavenged scrap materials. He took the word Merz from the name Commerz Bank, which appeared on a piece of paper he cut up and included in one of his collages.

A movement in Japanese architecture of the 1960s reflecting the belief that cities could be designed according to organic paradigms. Metabolist architects hoped that the use of biological processes as models would give them efficient ways to deal with the rapid growth and technological progress of societies all over the world. Their design philosophy involved gigantic buildings. This monumental scale reflected operations they also saw at work in contemporary urban growth; their buildings were to become nodes in the organic fabric of the rapidly growing city.

Online, multidimensional universe that can simultaneously accommodate individual users and groups as well as their identities, holdings, and transactional systems within a larger and expanding ecosystem whose reliability, in part, is supported by the blockchain.

A movement beginning in the early 1920s in Mexico in which the government commissioned artists to make art that would educate the mostly illiterate population about the country’s history and present a powerful vision of its future. The movement followed the Mexican Revolution. Inspired by the idealism of the Revolution, artists created epic, politically charged public murals that stressed Mexico’s pre-colonial history and culture and that depicted peasants, workers, and people of mixed Indian-European heritage as the heroes who would forge its future. The murals were executed in techniques including fresco, encaustic, mosaic, and relief. José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were considered the leaders of the Mexican Muralism.

An intaglio printmaking technique that creates soft, velvety gradations of tone. The term comes from the Italian mezzotinto, meaning “half tint.” In this process, the entire surface of a metal printing plate is uniformly roughened using serrated tools called rockers to create tiny indentations that will hold ink. A tool called a burnisher is used to smooth over areas of the surface not intended to hold ink, creating an image or composition. When damp paper is placed on top of the inked plate and run through a press, the smoother, burnished sections result in light areas in the image, and the unburnished sections produce dark areas.

People have always moved around the world. Early humans were nomadic, traveling in search of food, shelter, and safety. Today, people move for many different reasons, including economic, political, cultural, religious, and environmental. Sometimes, events beyond people’s control, like war or natural disaster, leave them displaced and forced to migrate. Other times, people migrate voluntarily, perhaps in search of better work opportunities or a different lifestyle. For many artists, their own migrations and those of their ancestors shape their identities and the art they produce. As people move, they bring their knowledge, experiences, and beliefs with them. Often, as much as they absorb the culture of their new home, they influence it with their own traditions.

A primarily American artistic movement of the 1960s, characterized by simple geometric forms devoid of representational content. Relying on industrial technologies and rational processes, Minimalist artists challenged traditional notions of craftsmanship, using commercial materials such as fiberglass and aluminum, and often employing mathematical systems to determine the composition of their works.

A type of sculpture consisting of balanced, separate parts that move, especially in response to air currents.

A detailed three-dimensional representation, usually built to scale, of another, often larger, object. See also, Architectural Model); 2. A person who poses for an artist

Art made from the 1880s to the 1970s—a time marked by the growth of cities, the rise of industry, a surge in technologies, and the development of mass media. During this period, everyday life changed for people around the world. Artists of diverse backgrounds contributed to this change, experimenting with new subjects, styles, materials, and techniques in their works.What it meant to be “modern” depended on when and where an artist worked. Some artists developed new ways of representing external realities and inner experiences. Others broke down boundaries between art, architecture, design, and craft. Many confronted political turmoil or social and economic injustice. But across distinct eras and geographies, modern artists shared a spirit of innovation. They challenged traditional ways of making art, reimagining who art is for and what it could be.

A work of art rendered in only one color.

A unique print, typically painterly in effect, made by applying paint or printing ink to a flat sheet of metal, glass, or plastic. The painted image is transferred to paper either by manually rubbing or using a press. Mediums are applied to the plate using two different methods. In the additive, or “light-field,” technique, ink or paint is applied directly to the plate, often with a brush. In the subtractive, or “dark-field,” technique, the plate is covered with a layer of ink or paint, and the image is formed by manipulating and removing the ink or paint using a variety of tools, including brushes, rags, or the artist’s fingers. Each plate typically yields one monotype, but subsequent pulls (sometimes called “ghost impressions” because of their relative faintness) can be made from the residual mediums on the plate.

An assembly of images that relate to one another in some way to create a single work or part of a work of art. A montage is more formal than a collage, and is usually based on a theme.

A term referring to small-scale, three-dimensional works of art conceived and produced in relatively large editions, and often issued by the same individuals or organizations that publish prints.

A system developed in Germany around 1910 by painter, professor, and color theorist Albert H. Munsell, who wanted to describe color with the same degree of specificity with which we can speak about music. Based on rigorous measurements of people’s visual responses to color, the Munsell color system specifies and orders colors based on three dimensions: hue, value (lightness), and chroma (intensity or purity). In addition to being the simplest color system to grasp, it was employed by most of the New York School.

A large painting applied to a wall or ceiling, especially in a public space.

A term coined by French art critic Fénéon in 1886, applied to an avant-garde art movement that flourished principally in France from 1886 to 1906. Led by the example of Georges Seurat, the Neo-Impressionists renounced the spontaneity of Impressionism in favor of a measured painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics. Neo-Impressionists came to believe that separate touches of pigment result in a greater vibrancy of color than is achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on the palette.

An artistic philosophy that called for the renunciation of naturalistic representation in favor of a stripped-down formal vocabulary principally consisting of straight lines, rectangular planes, and primary colors. First articulated by Piet Mondrian in the journal De Stijl (The Style), Neo-plasticism (the new plastic art) was a response to the devastation wreaked by World War I, offering a way to achieve a visual harmony in art that could provide a blueprint for restoring order and balance to everyday life.

Two groups interested in Concrete art emerged in the 1950s in the rapidly industrializing country of Brazil. Based in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the artists connected to both groups, Grupo Frente and Grupo Ruptura, departed from both abstraction and figuration to create geometric works focused solely on the principles of color, line, and shape. Some Brazilian concrete artists, such as Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, grew frustrated with the limits of Concrete art and pushed it to a new level of experimentation. Around 1960 Oiticica said, “All real art does not separate technique from expression.” They called this work, which often included the viewer as a participant, Neo-concrete art. The mostly Rio-based Neo-concretists embraced a more active, participatory relationship to objects.

A form of lighting used especially on advertising signs, consisting of glass tubes filled with neon or other gases that emit colored light when subjected to an electric current; an extremely bright or vivid shade of a color.

A modern movement that developed in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. It offered a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on the objective world, as opposed to the more abstract, romantic, or idealistic tendencies of Expressionism. The artists associated with the movement were not formally organized and worked in many different locations. They are linked by their embrace of naturalism in their drawings and paintings and by their vivid, often satirical depictions of Weimar society following Germany’s defeat in World War I.

A description first used by curator William Jenkins in 1975 to characterize the photographs he included in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, which focused on artists who depicted the built, or human-made, environment with a sense of detachment.

An interdisciplinary, avant-garde movement of painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, musicians, and composers active in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s. These visual artists, many of whom lived and congregated in Greenwich Village, made primarily abstract paintings, often using gestural brushstrokes and large fields of color. Though most of the artists associated with the New York School were white men, many of whom immigrated from Europe or were first-generation Americans, women and nonwhite artists also made significant contributions to the movement. These artists’ notoriety helped shift the center of the art world from Paris to New York in the wake of World War II. The New York School encompasses Abstract Expressionism and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.

A uniquely identifiable token with an exclusive provenance. NFTs can be used to prove ownership of digital items, including works of art.

This French term, which translates to work, is often used to refer to an artist’s total body of work, encompassing all of the art they have made throughout their career. Many terms in art history remain in the language in which they were first used; see also carte-de-visite (French), impasto (Italian) and papier mâché (French), among others.

A paint in which pigment is suspended in oil, which dries over time when exposed to air

A term referring to NFTs that “live” on the blockchain; in other words, both the smart contract tied to the NFT and the media content of the NFT (the art) are written into the blockchain.

An abstract style, also known as Optical Art, developed in the 1960s and featuring geometric shapes and lines in black and white or vivid colors. Based in theories of color and perception, Op Art compositions often create optical illusions of vibration or depth.

Impenetrable to light

Derived from materials or forms with characteristics of a biological entity or organism, or developing in the manner of a living thing

A Cubist-influenced style of painting pioneered around 1912 by Robert and Sonia Delaunay and František Kupka, who turned to abstraction as a way to explore pure color and the effects of light. The term was coined by poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who related their often brightly colored, prismatic compositions to the immediate, abstract nature of music.

A work of art made from paint applied to canvas, wood, paper, or another support.

A type of spatula typically used to mix paint on the palette, but sometimes also used to apply or remove paint from the canvas

Palladium prints are made on paper coated with the chemical element palladium. Introduced during World War I as a less-expensive alternative to platinum paper (which was in short supply), palladium prints were readily available throughout the 1930s. Palladium prints are characterized by their rich, warm tonal range.

French for “chewed-up paper,” a technique for creating three-dimensional objects, such as sculpture, from pulped or pasted paper and binders such as glue or plaster.

When artists include members of the public in their creative process and encourage them to become co-authors of the work. The participatory art events known as happenings, for example, often incorporated elements of performance and improvisation.

A soft drawing stick composed of finely ground pigment mixed with a gum tragacanth binder. Pastel sticks are often applied to a textured paper support. The pastel particles sit loosely on the surface of the paper and can be blended using brushes, fingers, or other soft implements. Pastels can also be dipped into water to create a denser mark on the paper or ground into a powder and mixed with water to create a paint that can be applied by brush. Because pastel drawings are easily smudged they are sometimes sprayed with fixative, a thin layer of adhesive.

A fine crust or film on bronze or copper, usually green or greenish-blue, formed by natural oxidation; the sheen on a surface, such as one made of wood, produced by age and use; a superficial exterior layer; a coating

An implement for drawing or writing. Early pencils were composed of small fragments of natural graphite or soft metallic lead secured in wood or bone holders. A substitute for natural graphite was developed in the late 18th century and remains in use today. In this process a slurry of graphite and clay is extruded into rods called “leads” and are fired until hard. The amount of clay determines the hardness of the lead. Pencils with the most clay are the hardest and produce the lightest marks, while those with the least clay are the softest and produce the darkest marks.

Originally a 19th-century parlor trick used in Victorian stagecraft and entertainment, the Pepper’s Ghost—named after British scientist and inventor John Henry Pepper—employs a light source and angled reflection to create an optical illusion. To achieve the effect, the stage gets divided into two areas: one that audience members can see and another that is hidden. Positioned at a 45-degree angle onstage, a plate of glass (or other similar surface) reflects a brightly lit object or person in the hidden room, which appears as a ghostly figure on the main stage. This method continues to be used in theater, concerts, and live performance, often incorporating digital projection instead of a “hidden room.” Most prominently, this technique has been used to simulate live performances by celebrities after their death, but the Pepper’s Ghost has also long fascinated contemporary artists, who have replicated or experimented with the technique in multimedia installation works.

An event that could include a diverse range of actions, movements, gestures, and choreography. Performance is often preceded by, includes, or is later represented through various forms of video, photography, objects, written documentation, or oral and physical transmission.

Frames that relate to the period when the painting was made

A magazine or newspaper published at regular intervals.

Technique used to depict volumes and spatial relationships on a flat surface, as in a painted scene that appears to extend into the distance.

A photo essay is a form of visual storytelling that develops a narrative across a series of photographs. It originated during the late 1920s in German illustrated journals, initially presenting stories in the objective, distanced tone of news reporting. The photo essay gained wide popularity with the growth of photographically illustrated magazines such as VU (launched in Paris in 1928), LIFE (launched in New York in 1936), and Picture Post (launched in London in 1938). It is associated especially closely with LIFE, where the photo essay became a platform not only for informing readers, but for influencing their opinions. Through the middle decades of the 20th century, this visual format would be used to familiarize audiences with the transformations of a modernizing world, entertain them with slice-of-life stories, and introduce them to unfamiliar members of their society.

In 1902, a group of photographers banded together in protest against the conventional view of the medium as a mechanical tool. Calling themselves photo-secessionists, they were highly attuned to the technical craft of their work which they aligned with formal artistic concerns. The photographer and impresario Alfred Stieglitz championed these perspectives through a space at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City named the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, and later shortened to 291. The gallery argued for the crucial position of photographers in the development of modern art. Its exhibitions demonstrated the artistic merits of photographic approaches, and situated these pictures alongside inventive works of painting and sculpture. Stieglitz also edited a print quarterly, Camera Work, which disseminated photo-secessionists’ work through photogravures—a process by which photographs were transferred to a metal plate for printing. As the modernist impulse took root stateside, the gallery served as the American entry point for European artists like Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Constantin Brâncuși.

An artist’s book in which the art is photo-based. Photographers have been collecting their pictures in books since photography was invented. The term photobook is a more recent construction, and can be defined as a book in which photographs make a significant contribution to the content, though the sequence and placement of images, their relationship to text, and the scale and materiality are also of utmost importance to the maker. Though it can be made up of preexisting individual artworks, a photobook is often intended as a cohesive artistic expression.

One of the earliest forms of photography, a photogram is a photograph produced without a camera, typically by placing an object directly onto a light-sensitive surface and exposing it to light. The resulting image often features outlines and forms of whatever object it reproduces. Nineteenth-century practitioners valued the process for its ability to render intricate details of scientific specimens. Throughout the 20th century and into the present, artists have used the process to render common objects strange, or to produce abstract imagery.

For much of the history of the medium, a photograph was defined as a chemical image rendered visible by the action of light on photosensitive compounds. Photographic images can be made on a variety of supports, such as paper, metal, glass, and plastic. More recently, this evolving practice has come to include visual data generated from scans of analog negatives, born-digital works, and images that only circulate digitally.

A general term for any metal-plate intaglio printing process in which the image has been transferred to the plate by photographic means. Acid is used to incise the image into the plate; the plate is then inked, wiped, and printed on a press.

A type of journalism that uses photographs to tell a news story

A collage work that includes cut or torn and pasted photographs or photographic reproductions.

A machine that makes quick duplicate positive or negative copies directly on the surface of prepared paper. Also, the resulting copies.

An image or symbol representing a word or a phrase

Picture-like and representational in quality

The illusory space behind the picture plane of a painting

An international movement comprised of loosely linked camera clubs and societies that sought to highlight the artistic possibilities of photography and argue that it was a fine art equal to painting, sculpture, and other traditional mediums. Active from the late 19th century to around 1914, the Pictorialists preferred romantic or idealized imagery, used soft focus, and framed or staged scenes according to the compositional principles of painting. In order to emphasize the artist’s hand and counter the argument that photography was an entirely mechanical medium, they often used labor-intensive darkroom processes to produce unique prints. Outside of the darkroom, they mounted international salons and exhibitions and published portfolios and journals, through which they further influenced how photography was discussed and regarded.

This was an unofficial group of artists who emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York City. Though diverse in their approaches and subject matter, they were united by a common interest in using the tools of mass media to critique it, questioning notions of authorship, originality, and identity as a fixed entity. The group takes its name from an exhibition titled Pictures, organized by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in New York in 1977. Although many artists associated with the Pictures Generation used photography, they also worked in performance, installation, film, and video in order to appropriate and critique images.

Pigment is the colored portion of paint, often a finely ground powder that can be either natural or artificially produced.

Plans or plan drawings are used to illustrate the layout and orientations of a structure. Plans typically depict a building or project site from an aerial view. With a plan, you are able to observe the different rooms, corridors, and entrances of a structure, as if looking through an “invisible” ceiling. Plan drawings can also depict multiple buildings in a proposed site and the proximities or relationships between those multiple buildings.

A term applied to many natural and synthetic materials with different forms, properties, and appearances that are malleable and can be molded into different shapes or objects.

Platinum prints are prized for their rich tonal scale and durability. Created using a process based on the light sensitivity of a combination of iron oxalate and a platinum salt. After the sensitized paper is exposed, the print is developed and washed to remove residual chemicals, leaving a final image consisting of finely divided metallic platinum. Platinotype was the original platinum paper invented and marketed by William Willis, Jr., and his Platinotype Company of London.

French word for “stencil.” A method of applying colored paint, usually to paper, through cut-out areas of a thin material, such as paper, copper, or plastic, using tools such as a brush, dabber, or spray gun.

A painting technique developed by French artists Georges-Pierre Seurat and Paul Signac in which small, distinct points of unmixed color are applied in patterns to form an image.

The brand name of a point-and-shoot camera that uses a self-developing instant film to rapidly produce a photographic print. Instant film includes chemicals that begin working while the film is being ejected from the camera, and the picture is fully developed within minutes. A commercially available instant-print process (called the “Polaroid-Land” process) was first developed in 1947 by Edwin H. Land, who was supposedly inspired by a question from his three-year-old daughter while on a family vacation: “Why can’t I see the picture now?” Polaroids gained widespread popularity in the 1970s, but their usage was eventually impacted by the development of digital camera technologies, which also satisfied the urge to instantly see one’s photographs.

A movement comprising initially British, then American artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Pop artists borrowed imagery from popular culture—from sources including television, comic books, and print advertising—often to challenge conventional values propagated by the mass media, from notions of femininity and domesticity to consumerism and patriotism. Their often subversive and irreverent strategies of appropriation extended to their materials and methods of production, which were drawn from the commercial world.

Cultural activities, ideas, or products that reflect or target the tastes of a broad swath of a society. Popular culture commonly includes—and is transmitted by— television, music, and film, books, periodicals, and but can even be movement or images circulated through one of those platforms or social media (like a dance on TikTok or a meme on Instagram).

A group of prints, often focused on a common theme, by a single artist or a group of artists, usually housed in a protective box or folder, and containing a title page and colophon.

A representation of a particular individual, usually intended to capture their likeness or personality.For as long as people have been making art, they have been portraying themselves and others. Portraits can be literal, realistic representations or they can be interpretive, symbolic. By the turn of the 20th century, photography had become the most accessible and popular medium for portraiture. As though photography freed them from the burden of producing realistic depictions, many late-19th and early-20th-century artists began exploring new ways to represent people. Many artists sought to represent the character and psychology of their sitters; similarly, in their self-portraits, they aimed to communicate something of their innermost selves. If they were familiar with their sitter, they might seek to express their relationship to him or her. Their interest in the subjective and emotional, coupled with their desire to break with the traditions of the past, led these artists to make formal innovations that would radically alter the genre of portraiture.

A term coined in 1910 by the English art critic and painter Roger Fry and applied to the reaction against the naturalistic depiction of light and color in Impressionism. Though Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat each developed their own distinctive styles, they were unified by an interest in expressing their emotional and psychological responses to the world through bold colors and expressive, often symbolic images. Post-Impressionism can be roughly dated from 1886 to 1905.

In 1869 someone sent the first postcard, in Austria. Though it was initially considered improper and insecure, the postcard quickly grew in popularity, and was embraced as an inexpensive, casual way to stay connected to others in an increasingly fast-moving world. Trains and steamships fueled both the movement of and market for postcards. In 1893 the World Columbian Exposition, which hosted over 25 million people in Chicago, Illinois, presented the first souvenir postcards. By the early 1900s, new technology, like the No. 3 Folding Pocket Kodak Camera, made printing photographs directly onto greeting cards possible, making photographic postcards an accessible way to stay connected to those far away.

A large, usually printed placard, bill, or announcement, often illustrated, that is posted to advertise or publicize something, or used for decoration; an artistic work, often a reproduction of an original painting or photograph, printed on a large sheet of paper.

Postmodernism refers to a reaction against modernism. It is less a cohesive movement than an approach and attitude toward art, culture, and society. Its main characteristics include anti-authoritarianism, or refusal to recognize the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be; and the collapsing of the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, and between art and everyday life. Postmodern art and architecture can be also characterized by a deliberate use of earlier styles and conventions, and an eclectic mixing of different artistic and popular styles and mediums.

A popular 19th-century optical toy, invented by a Parisian science teacher named Charles-Émile Reynaud, comprised of a cylinder fitted with a strip of paper printed with 12 sequential image frames. When the cylinder spins, a mirror fixed in its center reflects the images and makes them appear animated.

In architecture, the assembly of buildings or their component parts at a location other than the construction site. Prefabricated units may include doors, stairs, window walls, wall panels, floor panels, roof trusses, room-sized components, and even entire buildings. While the concept and practice of prefabrication has been part of human experience for centuries, its modern sense dates from about 1905. This building method controls construction costs by economizing on time, wages, and materials.

A primary color is one that cannot be made from a combination of any other colors. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. A secondary color is made by combining two primary colors. For example, the combination of the primary colors red and yellow makes the secondary color orange.

A term that has been used to refer to the art of various historical European periods and of non-Western societies. In the mid-19th century, it was primarily applied to 14th and 15th century Italian and Flemish art, which modern artists prized for what they saw as its simplicity, sincerity, and expressive power. Use of the term then broadened to encompass a range of non-Western art, sweeping from South America to Southeast Asia. At the beginning of the 20th century, European artists embraced African and Oceanic masks and statuary and the term came to be associated with work from these regions. Such work deeply impacted these artists, who perceived in it a physical directness and emotional charge that they found exciting and distinct. By the late 20th century the term, with its derogatory connotations, fell out of favor.

A work of art on paper that usually exists in multiple copies. It is created not by drawing directly on paper, but through a transfer process. The artist begins by creating a composition on another surface, such as metal or wood, and the transfer occurs when that surface is inked and a sheet of paper, placed in contact with it, is run through a printing press. Four common printmaking techniques are woodcut, etching, lithography, and screenprint.

The specialized technician or establishment that provides expertise on printing and often collaborates with artists to make prints. The printer also executes the prints in an edition, following an example authorized by the artist.

The design of items intended to be manufactured, most often for specific utilitarian purposes. Examples include typewriters, kitchen appliances, and utensils.

Progressive art studios, sometimes called supportive art studios or disability art studios, are nonprofit organizations dedicated to supporting artists with mental health conditions and intellectual and developmental disabilities as they seek to build and sustain careers in the arts.Creative Growth, which opened in 1974 in Oakland, California, was the first progressive art studio in the United States. Started by Florence Ludins-Katz, an artist and teacher, and Elias Katz, a psychologist, Creative Growth established a creative community program structure “guided by the principle that art is fundamental to human expression.” Disability arts and social service organizations have expanded on this model and founded progressive art studios across the country.Progressive art studios champion artists in developing their artistic practices and pursuing self-sustaining careers. The studio environment is facilitated by staff, often artists themselves, who provide mentorship and support the artists in navigating the studio environment, taking ownership of their art-making process, building community with fellow artists, and exploring new mediums and creative ideas. Studios also provide art supplies and exhibition opportunities, and often act as galleries, selling the artists’ work and generating income for them.

A print that is not part of the regular numbered edition, including examples printed in advance of the edition, such as “trial proofs,” that are used to assess progress on the image; “working proofs” that the artist has modified with hand additions; as well as “artist’s proofs” and “printer’s proofs,” which are indistinguishable from the edition and reserved for artist and printer.

Any systematic, widespread dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, practices, etc. intended to further one’s own cause or to damage an opposing one. Propaganda is often used to deceive a public or distort information. Propaganda may take many different forms, including public or recorded speeches, texts, films, and visual or artistic matter such as posters, paintings, sculptures, or public monuments.

A preliminary model or release of a product built to test its viability, from which other versions are copied or developed.

A cohort of Italian architects and designers active from the late 1960s through the 1970s. They placed themselves in opposition to the rationalism and functionalism of 20th-century modernism and formed during a tumultuous period characterized by political violence and extremism, student uprisings, and social unrest. Working in collectives including Archizoom, Superstudio, and Studio Alchimia, they produced experimental, anti-establishment architectural and interior designs, furnishings, and objects. A spirit of playfulness undergirded an approach that had serious aims. Their eccentric output—ranging from speculative monuments meant to foster worldwide order to lounge chairs shaped like an oversized patch of grass—broke from what they saw as the prescriptive thinking of the past to shape a future free of war, inequality, materialism, and other human ills.

Bright light, usually beamed obliquely, used to reveal such things as surface texture and detail

A term invented by Man Ray, in which he merged his name with the word “photograph” to describe his particular approach to the technique of making photograms. As old as photography itself, photograms are photographic prints made by placing objects and other elements on photosensitive paper and exposing it to light, without the use of a camera.

A term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1916 to describe prefabricated, often mass-produced objects isolated from their intended use and elevated to the status of art by the artist choosing and designating them as such. The term “assisted Readymade” refers to works of this type whose components have been combined or modified by the artist.

A mode of art practice that establishes spaces, situations, or environments for a variety of social interactions. In essence, the social space or interaction becomes the work of art itself. The term was popularized by French critic and curator Nicholas Bourriaud in 1998.

Figures or forms carved or molded so as to project from a flat surface, as in sculpture, or the apparent projection of such shapes in a painting or drawing. A work of art featuring such a projection; a method of printing in which the image is carried on raised surfaces, such as letterpress.

A general term for those printmaking techniques in which the printing surface is cut away so that the image alone appears raised on the surface. Relief prints include woodcut, linoleum cut, letterpress, and rubber or metal stamping. The raised areas of the printing surface are inked and printed, while the areas that have been cut away do not pick up the ink

Any of numerous plant-based, clear, translucent, yellow or brown, solid or semisolid, viscous substances—including copal, rosin, and amber—used principally in lacquers, varnishes, inks, adhesives, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. Resins can also be made from synthetic sources.

A conservative cultural movement in France in the years following World War I. This movement was defined by a renewed interest in classicism, nationalism, and a rejection of the avant-garde. Many artists—especially those who experienced battle firsthand—were deeply affected by the destabilization wrought by WWI and the horrors of modern industrial warfare, and reacted to this shock by rejecting new, experimental art in favor of work that embraced academic fine-art traditions and emphasized balance, precision, and order.

A series of actions, performed by an individual or group, according to a prescribed sequence. Rituals often include objects, dress, music, or body movements that are symbolic or have spiritual meaning.

The photoreceptor cells in our eyes that are responsible for our sensitivity to light and color

The earliest paper-based photographic material. So named because it was made by coating water containing a soluble salt onto a sheet of paper, which was then coated with silver nitrate to produce a uniform coating of a light-sensitive silver compound

A saturated color has a wet appearance. Saturated colors are often lower value and higher chroma than unsaturated colors. A saturated color in paint may be obtained by adding medium or by varnishing a painted surface after it dries.

A written notation of a musical or dance composition, which allows the work to be performed at a later date or by another performer. Composers interested in incorporating non-traditional sounds into their music and choreographers experimenting with different kinds of movement invented new notational symbols for their scores, which could be read by non-specialists or artists from other disciplines. Scores are as varied as the artists who make them and can feature, for example, magazine and newspaper clippings, drawings, or color-coded stage directions.

A stencil-based printmaking technique in which the first step is to stretch and attach a woven fabric (originally made of silk, but now more commonly of synthetic material) tightly over a wooden frame to create a screen. Areas of the screen that are not part of the image are blocked out with a variety of stencil-based methods. A squeegee is then used to press ink through the unblocked areas of the screen, directly onto paper. Screenprints typically feature bold, hard-edged areas of flat, unmodulated color. Also known as silkscreen and serigraphy.

A three-dimensional work of art made by a variety of means, including carving wood, chiseling stone, casting or welding metal, molding clay or wax, or assembling materials.

A section drawing (also called a section, or sectional drawing) depicts a structure as though it had been sliced in half or cut along an imaginary plane, usually at a vertical orientation, allowing the viewer to see the interior of a building and, if applicable, its different levels or floors.

A representation of oneself made by oneself.

In painting, a color plus black

A shallow enclosing case usually with a glass front in which something is set for protection and display.

A short film. Today, any film running for 40 minutes or less and therefore not considered long enough to be a feature-length film.

A stencil-based printmaking technique in which the first step is to stretch and attach a woven fabric (originally made of silk, but now more commonly of synthetic material) tightly over a wooden frame to create a screen. Areas of the screen that are not part of the image are blocked out with a variety of stencil-based methods. A squeegee is then used to press ink through the unblocked areas of the screen, directly onto paper. Screenprints typically feature bold, hard-edged areas of flat, unmodulated color. Also known as silkscreen and serigraphy.

A rendering of the basic elements of a composition, often made in a loosely detailed or quick manner. Sketches can be both finished works of art or studies for another composition.

A very tall building, often higher than 492 feet (150 meters). The term was first applied to steel-framed buildings of at least 10 stories in the late 19th century.

A movement that flourished between the two World Wars in response to the social and political turmoil and hardships of the period. Artists turned to realism as a way of making art easily accessible and legible to the wider public, often portraying their subjects—including well-known figures and anonymous everyday workers—as heroic symbols of persistence and strength in the face of adversity. Through their work, they aimed to call attention to the declining conditions of the poor and working classes, and to challenge the governmental and social systems they held responsible.

A set of coded instructions to direct the actions of a computer. Used by artists and designers to create everything from usable software like fonts and video games to complex interactive artworks.

A substance capable of dissolving another material. In painting, the solvent is a liquid that thins the paint.

Sounds that are most often added during editing, rather than recorded at the time of filming. Sound effects take a number of different forms. For example, “spot effects” are single sounds, like a gunshot or a thunderclap, and “atmospheres” are continuous sounds, like rain or traffic. Sounds may be directly linked to the action that appears in the shot, like footsteps, or they may provide information about what can’t be seen on the screen, like an approaching train or birdsong.

A sound technology, first developed in the early 20th century, that became commercially viable in the late 1920s. In this system, music and dialogue were recorded on waxed records that were played in sync with the film via a turntable connected to a film projector through an interlocking mechanism.

A sound technology, initially developed in the early 20th century, that became commercially viable in the late 1920s and eventually supplanted the sound-on-disc system. In sound-on-film, sound waves were converted into light waves that were then photographically inscribed onto the film itself. This allowed for a single strip of film to carry both pictures and the soundtrack, which was imprinted alongside the pictures and read by special projectors.

An audio recording composed of multiple sound clips that, once assembled and arranged, creates an environment that surrounds the listener. These sounds can capture a real place or a place that no longer exists. They can also come from someone’s imagination. Taken together, the various sounds that make up a soundscape help tell the story of a place, person, object, or idea, like a neighborhood, a historical figure, a painting, or a memory. Anyone—from sound designers (like musicians or audio engineers) to visual artists to historians—can create a soundscape.

Established in 1940, the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) emerged from the organizing of Black artists in Chicago beginning as early as 1932. These artists were driven by a desire to access formal arts education and to exhibit their work, and the availability of government funding for the arts under the Works Progress Administration provided an opportunity for the founders of the SSCAC, including Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, Archibald Motley Jr., and Charles White, to formally establish the Center, which today is the only remaining community art center from the era. Located in the Bronzeville neighborhood, then the heart of Chicago’s Black community, the SSCAC provided studio and exhibition space, offered art classes, and—most importantly—served as a gathering place for a local arts community that was denied entry elsewhere. Decades before the Black Arts movement, the SSCAC also provided support for artists making work about the Black American experience, and for Black audiences.

An illusion created for movies and television using props, camerawork, computer graphics, etc.

The name taken by a group of Black artists who gathered in Romare Bearden’s New York City studio in 1963, originally to discuss how they might support that year’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Participants included Charles Alston, Emma Amos, Calvin Douglass, Perry Ferguson, Reginald Gammon Jr., Felrath Hines, Alvin Hollingsworth, Norman Lewis, William Majors, Richard Mayhew, Earl Miller, Merton D. Simpson, Hale Woodruff, and James Yeargans. Members, who worked in a wide range of styles and mediums, rented a meeting space on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan. Among the topics of discussion and debate was artists’ responsibility to promote civil rights. In 1965, prior to losing their lease, they organized a single group exhibition at the space.

Paint thinned with solvent and applied to the canvas like a wash. Rather than remaining on the surface, a stain is absorbed into the canvas.

Produces an image or pattern by applying pigment to an intermediate object—usually a thin sheet of material such as paper, plastic, wood, or metal—with designed gaps that allow the pigment to reach the exposed portions of a surface below. The stencil is both the resulting image or pattern and the intermediate object.

In the 1850s, stereographs became the first mass-produced images sold. When a card with two similar images side by side is viewed through a set of lenses, it creates an optical illusion that gives the impression of a single, three-dimensional image. The earliest stereograph was invented before the advent of photography by Sir Charles Wheatstone, using illustrations. In the following years, the technology was improved upon and came to include photographs. After being exhibited at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, the stereograph grew in popularity and spread internationally.

A representation of natural or manmade objects in any arrangement or combination an artist devises and in any medium.

A type of photography nearly as old as the medium itself, in which photographers seek their subjects on the streets and in public places, aiming to capture candid pictures of people and moments of everyday life.

An approach to photography that involves making pictures, chiefly portraits and still lifes, within the tightly controlled spatial environment of the photographer's studio.

A term coined by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich in 1915 to describe a new mode of abstract painting that abandoned all reference to the outside world. His new style claimed "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts" and rejected the deliberate illusions of representational painting. Using the basic components of painting’s language—color, line, and brushwork—he constructed a visual vocabulary of colored geometric shapes floating against white backgrounds, which he felt mapped the boundless space of the ideal.

An artistic and literary movement led by French poet and writer André Breton from 1924 through World War II. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists sought to overthrow what they perceived as the oppressive rationalism of modern society by accessing the sur réalisme (superior reality) of the subconscious. In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Breton argued for an uninhibited mode of expression derived from the mind’s involuntary mechanisms—particularly dreams—and called on artists to explore the uncharted depths of the imagination with radical new methods and visual forms. These ranged from automatic drawings to hyper-realistic painted scenes to uncanny combinations of materials and objects.

An international avant-garde artistic movement that began in France and spread across Europe and North America during the last two decades of the 19th century. Symbolist artists reacted against the rationalism and materialism dominating Western European culture with work that conveyed emotions or ideas, rather than representing the world in an objective or naturalistic manner. Symbolist artists often used color and line expressively to create scenes with figures drawn from biblical, mythological, or fantastical sources.

The outside edges or sides of the painting where tacks or staples may be used to hold the canvas in place

A painting medium in which colored pigment is mixed with a water-soluble binder, such as egg yolk; a painting done in this medium.

A work consisting of natural or artificial fibers, often woven. Can refer to artist-created sculptures, hand-woven works, and industrially produced fabrics.

In painting, a color plus white; a shade or variety of color

An autopostive photographic print on a piece of blackened iron, in effect a less expensive version of the ambrotype.

In painting, a color plus gray; the lightness or darkness of a color

Allowing light, but not detailed images, to pass through; semitransparent

Allowing light to pass through so that objects or images behind can be distinctly seen; see-through

A work of art consisting of three sections or panels, usually hinged together.

Countercultural resistance to the repressive authoritarian regime in Brazil during the mid-1960s helped fuel a vibrant movement in music and the arts called Tropicália. Espousing a spirit of freedom and playfulness, the artists associated with Tropicália rejected increasing prohibitions on civic life. In the visual arts, it also represented a shift away from Brazil’s earlier, more formal Neo-Concrete movement.Artist Hélio Oiticica coined the term Tropicália in 1967, using it as the title for an interactive installation featuring sand, palm trees, and simple structures. Oiticica’s work brought public spaces inside the museum while evoking Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and critiquing Brazil’s image as a tropical paradise. Other artists like Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape sought to engage the public as participants in their work, creating sensorial objects that they invited the public to enter, touch, manipulate, and even create for themselves.Musicians such as Os Mutantes, Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil wrote satirical song lyrics and experimented with international rock and regional styles. The “Tropicalistas” distanced themselves from the melodic bossa nova of the early 1960s, which they associated with middle-class silence during the rise of authoritarianism. Tropicalista performances provided an outlet for audiences to express their desire for a more open society.In 1968 the government arrested many individuals associated with Tropicália, forcing leading artists and musicians into exile in London, Paris, and New York, where they brought the movement to wider global audiences.

A turpentine burn is made by soaking a rag in solvent and scrubbing the canvas directly. This technique removes paint and leaves a stain on the canvas.

The art and technique of designing, arranging, and printing with type.

A canvas that has not been primed prior to painting

A canvas that has not been sized prior to painting

A canvas that remains loose and has not been stretched over stretcher bars. Jackson Pollock and others often preferred to paint on unstretched canvas.

With the Industrial Revolution came widespread migration to big cities in the United States and parts of Western Europe, and this influx of people led to developments like skyscrapers and large-scale public transit. Most new migrants lived in rentals and tenement buildings, often clustered into new neighborhoods by cultural and ethnic origin. There they built communities and worked to maintain cultural traditions. Noise, pollution, health, and social problems became inescapable in this shifting urban landscape.

A synthetic resin that is extremely strong and often glossy. Urethanes can be used in adhesives, sealants, and enamel paints.

Transparent, hard protection or film, like a drying oil, that is often applied to paintings to seal and protect the surface

A type of theatrical variety show, developed in the early 1880s in America, that remained the most popular form of entertainment until radio and film supplanted it in the late 1920s. It incorporated an array of short performances like singing, ventriloquism, plate-spinning, contortionists, dancing, performing animals, and, at its heart, comedy. Reflecting both the cultural diversity of early-20th-century America and its prejudices, vaudeville fused such traditions as the English Music Hall, minstrel shows of antebellum America, and Yiddish theater.

An industrial object designed to transport people or objects. Examples include cars, bicycles, airplanes, and boats.

Term for measurement of speed, often used with “viscosity” and “muscular” to describe gestural painting

An umbrella term used to distinguish fine art photographs from those made for a huge range of purposes, including commercial, scientific, forensic, governmental, and personal. Snapshots capturing everyday life and subjects are a major form of vernacular photography.

A term describing moving-image artworks recorded onto magnetic tape or digital formats, or generated using other mechanisms such as image-processing tools.

The thickness of a liquid

Visualization design aims to make information understandable and even beautiful. It translates and synthesizes highly complex ideas and experiences into clearer formats, bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative data through visual means. Visualization design is not a new field: maps and diagrams are common examples of how information can be translated visually for practical uses. Architects and designers are working together using visualization data to expand the limits of how we digest data and make information transparent and accessible for all.

A short-lived British avant-garde movement, formed in London in 1914, with the aim of creating art that expressed the dynamism of the modern world. Visually, it may be thought of as the British equivalent to Italian Futurism. Vorticist art features Cubist fragmentation combined with hard-edged imagery inspired by machines and the urban environment.

Paints composed of pigments ground to an extremely fine texture in an aqueous solution of gum Arabic or gum tragacanth. The absence of white fillers, such as those in gouache, creates a medium with luminous transparency.

A work created as a website and intended to be presented and accessed via the internet.

In photography and filmmaking, a shot that reveals much of the context or setting, or a large group of people.

A printmaking technique that involves printing an image from a carved plank of wood. The image is cut into the wood using tools such as chisels, gouges, and knives. Raised areas of the image are inked and printed, while cut away or recessed areas do not receive ink and appear blank on the printed paper. Woodcuts can be printed on a press or by hand, using a spoon or similar tool to rub the back of the paper.

Among the most famous of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, formed to relieve unemployment during the Great Depression, the WPA ran from 1935 to 1943 and employed millions of people, including artists, to carry out public works projects across the United States. The public artworks that came out of this program include murals, posters, sculptures, paintings, graphic arts, and more.

A label applied to a loose group of British artists who began to exhibit together in 1988, and who became known for their openness to materials and processes, shock tactics, and entrepreneurial attitude. Many of the Young British Artists (YBAs) studied at Goldsmiths College of Art in London, where an interdisciplinary approach to art making and teaching helped to foster experimentation and new forms of creativity. In 1988, while still a student at Goldsmiths, Damien Hirst organized Freeze, an exhibition of his own and his fellow students’ work, which is said to have introduced the YBAs to the public. Although certain broad formal and thematic trends may be seen in YBA art, there is no single, unified style or approach.

Short for “magazine,” a zine is a self-published booklet created with a DIY (do it yourself) ethic. Usually made in small batches by nonprofessional publishers, zines have historically been used to spread countercultural or “underground” ideas, like punk culture and activist politics.

A pre-cinematic device consisting of a cylindrical drum with evenly spaced vertical slits cut into its sides. Its interior held a paper strip printed with sequential drawn or photographic images, which would appear animated when the drum was spun.

A term describing the abstraction pioneered by the Dutch journal De Stijl (The Style), founded in 1917 by the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg. This international group of artists working in all mediums gave up naturalistic representation in favor of a stripped-down style mostly made up of straight lines, rectangular planes, and primary colors. In response to the devastation caused by World War I, de Stijl artists aimed to achieve a visual harmony in art that could provide a model for restoring order and balance to everyday life.

A concept referring to the next iteration of the Internet, the fundamental infrastructure of which will rely on blockchain technology. The ethos of web3 is to create a more equitable and decentralized system that empowers users with ownership over their online interactions and their data. A loosely defined and evolving term, web3 encompasses NFTs, the metaverse, and DeFi (decentralized finance), among other domains.