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:

• Claiming Yosemite: The California Genocide, the Civil War, and the Invention of National Parks, the first new, revisionist 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 explains how and why the United States invented the national park at Yosemite between 1851 and 1866. It identifies three key factors: the conduct of the California Genocide; sectional tensions surrounding the Civil War; and essays and artworks, especially by transcendentalist minister Thomas Starr King, photographer Carleton Watkins, and painter Albert Bierstadt. It will be published by Stanford University Press/Redwood Press in spring 2027.
• A not-yet-titled project that reveals how visual art has impacted the United States. This book will identify artworks important to the evolution of the nation, investigate the moments of their production, presentation, and re-presentations, and explain how they have informed the construction of our country between the 1780s and the present. This book will also recognize that art continues to influence the US. In addition to investigating historical artworks, it will present ways in which today’s artists are revising, addressing, and transforming our understandings of the nation’s story, stories that have the potential to unite us just as yesteryear’s art did.

Books to which Green has contributed are listed here.