What Was America? Katy Siegel and Elise Armani on the Bicentennial We Lost

“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel

INTRO

It’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? by Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, a new book about the art, culture and politics of the Bicentennial era. Siegel and Armani are nostalgic for nostalgia. We don’t do anniversaries as we used to, they worry.

What Was America? opens with the African-American artist Benny Andrews, who feared exclusion from the Bicentennial celebrations and responded with a feverish six years of monumental paintings. Then there are the Bicentennial quilts which Siegel and Armani see as a metaphor for a nation whose strength has always lain in its diversity. Both leftist women in Northern California and the Daughters of the American Revolution quilted the Bicentennial. 1976, then, was a genuinely national celebration.

So how will we look back at this year’s celebrations in 2076 when America celebrates its 300th birthday? The final chapter in What Was America? is on how people in 1976 imagined the America to come. School kids predicted no pens and lessons taught by computers. One person worried there would still be no woman president. Nobody predicted President Donald Trump.

“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra said, “especially about the future.” Where have you gone, Yogi Berra? Now, I’m getting nostalgic for nostalgia.

FURTHER READING

•   Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era (Yale University Press, October 2026). Siegel’s essay in Artforum on what the bicentennial tells us about the art world that followed is the short version of the argument.

•   Benny Andrews, who opens the book — his biography and chronology. The Bicentennial Series ran 1970 to 1975, one monumental painting a year. He also founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in his studio in January 1969, which protested the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem on My Mind for planning an exhibition about Harlem without Harlem, and he served as Director of the Visual Arts Program at the NEA from 1982 to 1984 — the governmental role Armani refers to at 11:53.

•   Stanley Forman’s photograph, discussed at 29:09 — what happened that day on Boston City Hall Plaza, 5 April 1976. The man with the flag was Joseph Rakes; the man being attacked was the lawyer and later academic Ted Landsmark. The book Siegel mentions is Louis P. Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America — published in 2008 rather than recently.

•   The Ant Farm Collective, whose attempts to imagine the future close the book — their work and chronology, including Media Burn and the Cadillac Ranch.

•   On the NEA’s growth under Nixon at 08:33: the chair who actually drove it was