Martha Wilson, the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive, a pioneering performance-art venue and “alternative” museum that opened in New York in 1976 and now exists only on the Internet, says, “I think the labels ‘American artist’ and ‘American art’ mean less and less these days. Avant-garde artists, at least, have always been international in their outlook and sensibility.” For Wilson, use of the term “American art” in an art-historical context now seems to refer specifically to the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the post–World War II period. By that time, creatively and commercially, the international art market’s center had shifted from Paris to New York.

Today, Wilson observes, artists from all over the world try to maintain active links to New York, or to keep studios in the city. “That way, they can say they’re based in New York,” she explains. That credential implies direct involvement with the U.S. and its culture. The U.S. is also home to countless self-made “American artists” like the Tokyo-born, pop-expressionist  painter-sculptor Ushio Shinohara, who came to New York from Japan in the late 1960s and, unusual for his generation, stayed for good. Shinohara has become an American artist in spirit, as he eagerly points out. But is he a Japanese-American–international artist hybrid, too?

In dealer Rae Anne Robinett’s experience, for many foreign collectors and curators, the hyphenated identity labels Americans themselves use are pretty meaningless. “They see artists from the United States as American—period,” says Robinett, a Mexican- American herself who, as the director of Faufitown Projects, a contemporary art gallery in Santa Monica, California, has done a lot to promote the work of Chicano artists. She adds: “Foreigners see me as just another gringa.” (“Chicano” itself is a loaded term, usually referring to persons of Mexican descent who were born in the U.S. However, not all Mexican-Americans use or accept it, perhaps because of its separatist connotations.)

James Ballinger, the Phoenix Art Museum’s director and former curator of American art, notes that the rash of art fairs and biennale expositions that has emerged in recent years all over the world may actually have encouraged artists from the many countries that take part in them to create work with global appeal for an international audience. However, for curator and critic Joseph Jacobs, the label “American art” is “still valid” to describe what some artists are making and presenting. More precisely, Jacobs notes, many artists all over the world “are using the same formal or technical vocabulary, but the issues they’re dealing with are often different. Some artists are still dealing with issues that are very specific to America—for example, the pessimism that has come with the Iraq war crisis.”

Wilson agrees. “A big effect of globalism has been to help people focus on local issues and identities; that includes Americans,” she says. Over the past 30 years, Wilson has worked with thousands of artists from around the world. Recently, she says, she has met American artists “whose Midwestern or Southern regional identities have mattered deeply to them.”
 
She cites New Orleans–born Rashaad Newsome, a digital-media artist who is  creating a performance piece for 60 black women that is based on “black vernacular body gestures” such as familiar, expressive movements of the head or the eyes. Newsome’s choreography will call attention to and celebrate certain specific, sociocultural customs, but in its respectful look at the behavior of a small part of the human family, it could turn out to be something more than just an American work of art. As the art historian Dore Ashton wrote in her 1962 book, The Unknown Shore: A View of Contemporary Art, when artists “transcend locality and place in their imagery,....they enter the universal realm of art.” Such works embody or express ideas that are “far larger than mere nationality.”

Patterson Sims, director of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, believes the terms “American artist” and “American art" still  mean something to many people for the simple reason that “American culture remains the dominant culture in the world against which others are judged.” Artists everywhere, he notes, have recognized and responded to this de facto “cultural mperialism.” Sims cites, for example, the contemporary British art star Damien Hirst, “whose career has been indelibly linked to American culture and largely dependent on his successes in the New York art market.”