ESSENTIALLY: Umbrella terms used to categorize works of art.
ETYMOLOGY: French term meaning 'a kind, sort or style.'
EXAMPLE: Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico, Marsden Hartley, 1920

As with movies and books, art can be organized according to genre. The terms 'portrait,' 'landscape,' and 'still life' (just three of the most common examples) can describe individual works as much as they can describe entire categories of artwork. And while they are generally self-explanatory in what they depict (portraits, as most would suspect, illustrate people), they come with their own histories, coded and shaped by politics and social mores over centuries.

Modernist Marsden Harley used a combination of geometry and organic lines in his Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico (1920) to comment on the real matters of increasing industrialization while breaking with realism as a style. Landscapes have also been used to more nefarious ends. Those made during the 18th- and 19th-centuries depicting the American West, for example, frequently propagated the idea of manifest destiny (which promoted the westward movement of European peoples to populate the US from coast to coast), showing great expanses of 'untouched' wilderness while erasing the indigenous peoples who already lived there.

In Western societies in particular, some genres of art were considered off-limits to women for hundreds of years, like grand history paintings that documented specific, real-life events. Because of these restrictions, some female artists turned to still life or other genres, using allegory to tackle the themes they would not otherwise be permitted to.

Contemporary artists continue to play with genres and are addressing the outdated conventions that dictate who or what is a worthy subject for their work. Harlem-based painter Jordan Casteel turns her eye to family members and neighbors, creating portraits of Black and Brown figures with the nuance rarely offered in the traditional canon. Likewise, Troy Lamarr Chew II transforms the still life by replacing its traditional trappings (exotic fruits, antique silver) with the familiar items he grew up with (toy cars, canned foods, sneakers), resonating with viewers that much more as he does.

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