American Art 1961-2001takes a completely new look at the history of modern art in the United States between two decisive moments in wider American history, the Vietnam War and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, through an extraordinary selection of works by celebrated artists like Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Barbara Kruger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg, Kara Walker and Andy Warhol. The volume examines the richness and diversity of themes and currents in American art over the space of forty years, from modernist abstraction to contamination with mass production, from conceptual research and performance to demands for civil rights, through an extraordinary selection of more than eighty works of painting, photography, video and sculpture, as well as installations, from the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, one of the most important museums of contemporary art in the world. Probing the very notion of the work of art, the volume investigates its relationship with the changes in contemporary society. Several generations of American artists have experimented with languages that are in fact open to a redefinition of the boundaries of art, combining different techniques and media and using the power of art as a means of tackling themes like consumer society and mass production, feminism and gender identity, questions of race and the struggle for civil rights.