Laura Auricchio is Associate Professor of Art History and Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at The New School in New York. ‘American art’ has always been created in a context of international exchange. In the 18th and 19th centuries, much of the art that we now consider American was made by artists who spent many years living and studying in Europe, and whose work was steeped in European traditions. Yet other US-born artists working in the same period set out to develop a distinctly national idiom, forging styles and focusing on subjects that, in their view, expressed the unique character of their native land. Is one of these groups more American than the other? Or do they represent two different but related understandings of what it means to be American? Looking closely at a selection of paintings by artists ranging from the European-inspired John Singleton Copley, Mary Cassatt and F Childe Hassam to the self-consciously American Edward Hicks and Frederic Remington, this presentation proposes a variety of answers to the central question: what makes ‘American art’ American.