The Ashcan School
From the National Humanities Center website:
"'How did the ethnically and culturally diverse urban environment of early twentieth-century America find its way into art? How did artists see the new immigrants who flooded into American cities from 1890 on? What kinds of visual languages did they draw on in approaching a subject that had been generally off limits to painters of the previous generation—the urban poor? This workshop will look at how the Ash Can artists built on older visual and art historical traditions, while also considering what was new about their work. It will also consider the subject matter they shared with the popular culture of early twentieth-century films, graphic journalism, and cartooning. Using a variety of perspectives, this workshop will consider the role of the visual in exploring the defining challenges of a pluralistic urban democracy in the new century."