Elaine Velie

A documentary explains how the Cold War-obsessed State Department deployed visual art to spread its message of American superiority. Robert Rauschenberg won the 1964 Venice Biennale with his United States Information Agency-sponsored project (the first and last of its kind), shifting the center of the art world from Europe to the United States. But just a year later, the Civil Rights movement and the invasion of the Vietnam rendered the government’s Venice preoccupation an archaic distraction from the real issues facing Americans at home.

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