Tyler Green is an historian, critic and author whose work examines the ways in which artists and their work have engaged with and impacted national histories. Green is also the producer and host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, the leading audio program about art.

Green’s most recent book is Emerson’s Nature and the Artists: Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea. It was published by Prestel in October 2021. The book features a new consideration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic 1836 text, new research that reveals how Nature was informed by Emerson’s engagement with American art, and critical analysis of how the ideas Emerson presented in Nature informed American art for 100 years after Nature was published. Emerson’s Nature also examines how Emerson joined his Anglo-Saxonist white-race theory to ideas about nature in ways that helped bake whiteness into the American landscape tradition. The book features about 75 artworks reproduced in-line with Green’s essays and within the text of Emerson’s Nature. In adherence with Emerson’s landmark definition of landscape as a public commons, all of the images in the book come from museums and libraries with open-access policies. It is available in both the US and in Europe.

Green’s first book was Carleton Watkins: Making the West American. It was published by University of California Press in 2018 and won the 2019 California Book Awards gold medal for contribution to publishing. Purchase it from your favorite bookstore or website via the links here.

Green’s forthcoming books include:

• A yet-to-be-announced collaboration with an artist in which Green will consider a key way in which American painters addressed the antebellum crisis over America’s foundational republicanism and the arrival of the Civil War; and
• Claiming Yosemite: The Civil War, the California Genocide, and the Invention of National Parks, the first new history of the national park idea since Hans Huth’s 1948 Sierra Club Bulletin essay “The Story of an Idea.” Thanks to substantial new research, Claiming Yosemite will reveal how the United States’ preservation of Yosemite and the nearby Mariposa Grove and the invention of the national park was a product of three factors: (1) the California Genocide (1846-73), which enabled the Yosemite Idea and to which the Yosemite Idea contributed; (2) the Civil War (and the sectional tensions that preceded it); and (3) the essays, lectures and especially the art of Republican and Unionist artists and writers. After vigilantes funded by the state of California and the US Army killed and forcibly removed nearly all Native Americans then resident within Yosemite Valley and the region to its west in three successive campaigns in 1851-52, the preservation of Yosemite advanced as a conjoined cultural, political, and Unionist response to America’s sectional tensions within California, grew into federal legislation proposed by a group of no more than a half dozen San Franciscans and passed by Congress in the spring of 1864, and was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln that summer. This radical new thing, a national park, was defined in a report commissioned by the state of California in 1865-66. The state would formally reject the report it had commissioned as part of a bureaucratic power play by which one state commissioner tried to maintain his agency’s budget, but no matter. That report guided the creation and administration of Yosemite as a park and, to this day, defines the national park.

Books to which Green has contributed are listed here.