The American West holds a powerful place in the cultural and political imagination of the United States. This course examines settler colonial art and visual culture from the early republic to the present, considering changing conceptions of the land across media—from maps, aquatints, and guidebooks to paintings, photographs, and films. We consider the representation of railroads, National Parks, ghost towns, and highways; terms such as distance, aridity, seriality, mythology, frontier, the sublime, and the grid; artists’ engagement with ecological questions; the construction of whiteness in and through the landscape; and sites of indigenous resistance. The focus is on works in the collections of the Beinecke Library and the Yale Art Gallery.