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Anita’s selections cover a lot of aesthetic territory. Some featured artists draw on traditional subject matter and techniques, while others have practices that are highly conceptual. The figure is very much the dominant subject matter, but several artists here produce work that is purely abstract or that deals heavily with issues of abstraction. Not surprisingly, much iconography that is resolutely Western—cowboys, horses, and vast landscapes—can be found throughout this issue. I am also happy to say that the backgrounds of the individual artists are extremely diverse, with close to half of those included being of either Hispanic or African American descent.

The past twelve months have been difficult for the art market and, by exten-sion, for artists, too. With wars in Israel and Ukraine, persistent inflation at home, and an election cycle that is anything but typical—however, none of this is particularly surprising. Among its many benefits, art may offer aesthetic nourishment, but at the end of the day it will always take a backseat to everyday reality. Maslow’s Hierarchy places physiological needs at the base of its conceptual pyramid and self-actualization at its apex. We are clearly in a time when most people are focused on attending to their individual pyramid’s foundation.

Emerging artists always suffer the most when the art market contracts, and as the number of artists has swelled over the past two decades, this trend has become increasingly apparent. There are now more ‘professional’ artists than at any point in history; likewise, there are more commercial…

In a 1960s interview, Nina Simone insisted that “an artist’s duty is to reflect the times.” The urgency with which Simone expressed this condition, sixty years ago, remains pertinent for our contemporary moment, where duty has been in lockstep with US politics. At the time of writing this essay, President Joe Biden has withdrawn from the race for re-election and has effectively passed the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Political pundits, critical race theorists, and visual culture experts alike have all warned that Ms. Harris’s identity will unquestionably be under attack, subject to debate, and divorced from credentials, which, for better or worse, have positioned her to ascend to the highest office in the land. The art presented in this issue of New American Paintings, as with many other volumes before it, considers identity and its social, political, and sometimes environmental resonances, which are still central in figurative works.

The vagaries of this contemporary moment have prompted those critical of the two-party electoral system to call for a different way of governing, for the American people to envision another way of organizing that activates political imagination toward a new world order. This exigency is not new to artists; they are who critically examine our relationship to old structures of power, seeking novel approaches of defining the world in which we live. Many of the artists here explore figuration as the fulfillment of social questions through a personal narrative. In so doing, their art…