Lecture 1: New Territories [1776-1880s]

Looking at 8 key works, we will explore how a fine art tradition evolved from Native American peoples, folk artists and sign painters to reflect the Declaration of Independence.There was portraiture by C18th enslaved African painter Prince Demah and the like to epic narrative paintings like John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark, 1778. Then, as explorers travelled westwards during and after the Gold Rush, how landscape painters adapted European Romanticism in large-scale works like Bierstadt's The Last of the Buffalo 1888 and how the American Civil war and the battle for America was played out in art.

Lecture 2: Creating the USA [1890-1950]

Looking at 9 key works, we'll see how industrialisation, regionalism, the Wall Street crash and Great Depression, the War, Red Scare and Cold War brought challenges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. From the gritty realism of the Ash Can School to the much parodied Grant Wood's American Gothic 1930, or Dorothea Lange's poignant Migrant Mother photograph, see how art captured a historic moment. Hopper's lonely Night Hawks 1942 might have summed up feelings of alienation in the big city, but Abstract Expressionism was more than an avantgarde movement - it was promoted by the CIA as part of its Cold War strategy.

Lecture 3: Stars and the Stripes [1960-now]

Looking at 8 key works, we'll discover how the huge societal changes brought about by the Civil Rights movement, the Women's Movement and so on saw an art world look beyond the gallery space and the frame. Warhol reflected the horror of the Kennedy assassination in his Jackie series; Jasper Johns dared to revisit the American Flag; Jeff Koons came to epitomise 80s consumerism; Cindy Sherman reflected the legacy of a TV watching generation,  and artist Kara Walker recast American history from an African American perspective.