Contemporary, Indigenous and digital art

The art of the last half-century is too varied to fit a single story. Artists work in every medium, from paint and photography to installation, video, performance, data and artificial intelligence. Many of the most important voices come from communities that the traditional canon excluded, including Indigenous artists who draw on traditions thousands of years old while responding to colonial histories and contemporary life. This lesson looks at a selection of these developments most relevant to image makers: national landscape traditions and their critics, Indigenous art in Canada and the United States, the protocols for respectful engagement with Indigenous imagery, large-scale photography and video art, and the debates around digital and AI-generated images.

Revisiting the national landscape

Lesson 5 showed how nineteenth-century landscape painting was bound up with national identity. In the twentieth century, these traditions continued and were challenged.

In the United States, the landscape tradition continued in regionalist painting of the 1930s and in the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, who moved from close-up paintings of flowers and New York skyscrapers in the 1920s to the desert landscapes, bones and adobe architecture of New Mexico, where she settled permanently in 1949. Ansel Adams's photographs of the national parks became national icons, reproduced on calendars and posters.

Later critics pointed out that many celebrated images of the American West presented the land as empty wilderness, overlooking the Native nations whose homelands they depicted and the forced removals that accompanied the creation of some parks. Today, museums increasingly present these works alongside Native perspectives on the same lands, and Native artists reclaim the landscape tradition on their own terms.

Indigenous art: continuity and innovation

Indigenous art in North America is not a single tradition but the art of hundreds of distinct nations, each with its own visual languages, materials and protocols. Contemporary Indigenous artists work in every medium, often combining customary forms with contemporary practice and addressing colonization, land, language, identity and survival.

Native American artists in the United States have long worked across customary and contemporary forms. In the early twentieth century, Pueblo potters such as Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso developed celebrated black-on-black pottery. The Institute of American Indian Arts, founded in Santa Fe in 1962, trained generations of artists who challenged romantic stereotypes. Fritz Scholder and T. C. Cannon painted Native subjects in bold, Pop-influenced styles in the 1960s and 1970s, confronting clichés of the noble savage.

Contemporary Native artists continue to transform American art. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, made layered paintings and maps addressing land, history and consumerism; in 2023 she became the first Native American artist to have a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Wendy Red Star, of Apsáalooke (Crow) heritage, uses staged photography and archival images to critique historical representations of Native people. Jeffrey Gibson, of Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, became the first Indigenous artist to present a solo exhibition in the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2024.

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, centered in New York, was a flowering of African American literature, music and visual art. Painters such as Aaron Douglas combined modernist geometry with African motifs, and the photographer James Van Der Zee documented Harlem life in elegant studio portraits. Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, sixty small panels completed in 1941, told the story of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities in a bold, flat, cinematic sequence; the series is now divided between MoMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington.

Protocols and respect: cultural appropriation

Indigenous imagery has often been copied without permission, from souvenir trinkets and sports logos to fashion and stock graphics. Cultural appropriation describes taking elements of a culture, especially a marginalized one, without understanding, permission or benefit to its people, in ways that can distort meanings, sacred contexts or ownership. Many Indigenous designs are not public decorations but belong to particular families, clans or nations, with rules about who may use them.

In the United States, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 makes it illegal to market products in a way that falsely suggests they were made by Native Americans or by a particular tribe. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, with updated regulations in effect from 2024, requires museums to consult with tribes and return certain cultural items and ancestral remains.

Contemporary photography and video art

Since the 1970s, photography and video have become central to contemporary art. Large-scale color photographs, often printed several meters wide and sometimes staged like paintings, rival history painting in scale and ambition. German photographers trained by Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed industrial structures in neutral, grid-like series, made monumental images of buildings, crowds and landscapes.

American artists shaped contemporary photography and video in many ways. Nan Goldin's slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first shown in the 1980s, presented intimate snapshots of her friends set to music, influencing confessional photography. Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series of 1990 used staged photographs and text to explore Black women's lives. Bill Viola made slow-motion video installations inspired by Renaissance and Baroque painting, translating devotional imagery into time-based media.

Video art began in the 1960s, when portable video equipment allowed artists such as Nam June Paik to manipulate television images. Today, multi-screen installations, projection mapping and immersive environments draw on cinema's techniques but place viewers in galleries, public spaces and virtual worlds.

Digital art and artificial intelligence

Digital tools have transformed image making, from digital photography and editing to 3D rendering, generative art made with code, and images produced by AI systems trained on vast collections of existing images. Early computer artists in the 1960s, such as Vera Molnár, used plotters and simple programs to explore systematic variation. Today, artists such as Refik Anadol create large data-driven installations; his work Unsupervised, which used a machine learning model trained on MoMA's collection, was shown at the museum in 2022 and 2023.

AI image generation has raised intense debates. Many artists object that their work was used to train systems without consent or payment. Courts and copyright offices are deciding whether AI-generated images can be protected, and whether training on copyrighted images is lawful. The guidance changes quickly, so check current sources.

In the United States, the Copyright Office has stated that works must have human authorship and that purely AI-generated material cannot be registered, while human selection, arrangement and modification can be protected; its January 2025 report on copyrightability set out this position. Courts upheld the human authorship requirement in Thaler v. Perlmutter. Lawsuits over training on copyrighted images were ongoing at the time of writing (October 2026).

For image makers, art history offers useful perspective. Each new technology, from the camera obscura and photography to photomontage and digital editing, provoked fears about the end of art and debates about skill, authorship and authenticity. Those debates were resolved partly through law and partly through artists discovering what the new tool did best. The same process is now unfolding with AI.

What image makers take from contemporary art

Contemporary art shows that every medium, including photography, video, installation, code and AI, can carry serious artistic ideas. Revisiting national landscapes teaches that images of land carry histories of who is included and excluded. Indigenous artists demonstrate continuity and innovation, and their protocols teach respect, permission, attribution and shared benefit. Large-scale and staged photography connect directly to painting's history. And AI debates echo earlier controversies about photography and montage, reminding you to understand both the law and the ethics of the tools you use.