Sara Mary Barnes Roby (1907 - 1986), born into a wealthy family in Pittsburgh, and herself a painter, believed that the best way to support the visual arts was to acquire and exhibit the works of living artists. To this end, she established the Sara Roby Foundation and began collecting American art in the mid-1950s. While the collection is strong in the work of realist painters like Reginald...

American artist Ralph Fasanella is noted for his celebration of urban working life and the common man. Through his colorful and detailed works he critiqued many complex issues in postwar America. This beautiful and evocative online exhibit is designed to complement a lovely in situ exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Fasanella's story is fascinating; he started painting in his early...

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American artists and thinkers began to explore the possibilities of Asian culture and ideas, and along the way created a new understanding of existence, nature, and consciousness. Even a cursory glance into such developments reveals that there are Asian influences within the world of Conceptual art, Minimalism, modern poetry, and so on. This...