Sarah Kersting - American Art and Visual Culture
Sarah Kersting is an artist and graphic designer based in Echo Park. She works across different mediums with an emphasis on bold acyrlic and ink illustrations and expressive digital drawings. Her signature style, California Ornamental, brings together her background in American studies and Italian art history by wedding nostalgic Americana iconography with the Italian Grottesque traditional style of ornamentation. After working in the fashion industry in New York for two years, and completing a Graphic Design Certificate at Otis College of Art & Design, Sarah is now working as an illustrator and print designer at Staud in Los Angeles.
Area of Concentration Courses
American Studies H110: What Is This?!
Anthropology 121AC: American Material Culture
Asian American Studies 138: KPOP! Understanding Korean Pop Culture and the Korean Wave
History of Art 186C: Contemporary Art in the Americas
Histort of Art 190G: The Transatlantic Gilded Age and Its Discontents
Thesis
The Cowboy in the West Wing: On Western Artworks in the Oval Office
The artworks that hang on the walls of the Oval Office capture shared American cultural myths and values that are reflected in other modes by which the president expresses his ideal vision of this nation. This is particularly true of artworks which depict elements of Western frontier history, a proliferation of which can be seen in the Oval Office redecorations in the second half of the 20th century. While there are several thematic threads in the body of artworks that have decorated the Oval Office, that of the Western frontier narrative is of particular interest because its ubiquitous presence in many presidents’ speeches demonstrates its persuasive power in our culture. Assembling a nearly complete inventory of the Oval Office, I found not only that these artworks stem from culturally prized oversimplifications of frontier history that champion the Eurocentric vision of this continent, but that this oversimplification has repercussions in the present.
