With its sweeping continental perspective, Frances Pohl’s Framing America has long been hailed as the most progressive introduction to the history of American art, from prehistory to the present. The Fifth Edition builds on that reputation, increasing the diversity of artists and other Americans represented, and foregrounding the role Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrants from around the world have played both in producing and inspiring American art.

For more than a generation, critics and scholars have been revising and expanding the customary definition of American art. A tradition once assumed to be mainly European and oriented towards painting and sculpture has been enriched by the inclusion of other media and the work of previously marginalized cultural groups. Now, in a brilliant combination of original scholarship and synthesis, Framing America provides the first comprehensive survey of this new, enlarged vision of American art. Here are the many strands of North America's history and visual culture: the first contacts of the Spanish with the Aztecs and other Native Americans; the post-Revolutionary definition of nationhood; the visionary feeling for landscape and nature; the images of social and military conflict of the 19th century; and the tempering of the 20th century's heady plunge into Modernism. Framing America's consistent presentation of the resonance between art and history offers a coherent sense of the evolution of a new, generously defined conception of American art.