Penn has a long tradition of supporting graduate study in the arts of the United States between the eighteenth century and the present. Several members of the faculty collaborate in teaching and advising students in this field.

Huey Copeland's writing frames 20th- and 21st-century American art with an alertness to its entanglement in the visual, cultural, and social reproduction of anti-black logics rooted in the history of transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. 

Michael Leja’s work encompasses early mass-produced images, skeptical forms of seeing engendered in modern life and art circa 1900, and the re-imagining of self in which Abstract Expressionist painting was engaged.  

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has explored issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the art of Kara Walker, Sargent Johnson, and in nineteenth-century portraits of African-Americans.  Kathleen Foster, Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is Adjunct Professor at Penn; among her areas of expertise are the art of Thomas Eakins and Thomas Chambers, academic realism, and landscape painting.

Penn and the city of Philadelphia hold tremendous resources for students of the art and architecture of the United States.  The collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Library Company, Free Library, and numerous other institutions are unsurpassed.  At Penn, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies conducts an active program fostering interdisciplinary study.