This book presents a cutting-edge slice of works by the upcoming generation of visual artists working in the United States. Its purpose is, in a modest way, to help increase international understanding. In a nutshell, we believe that those who view this sampling of American art today will experience certain of this nation's fundamental values -- innovation, diversity, freedom, individualism, competitive excellence -- in ways that go well beyond words.

According to the U.S. Labor Department, 149,000 people currently make their living as "artists" in the United States. Since this number includes graphic designers and illustrators, one may assume that the pool of fine artists is considerably smaller, though still well up in the thousands, far too great a number to contemplate for the pages of a single book. In choosing artists for inclusion, then, we relied not only on artistic quality but on what critic Stephen Henry Madoff calls the democratic notion of representation -- "the one who reflects the many, or the many who reflect the many more."

This is a joint publication of the State Department's ART in Embassies Program and the Bureau of International Information Programs. All the artists here have made their work available through the ART in Embassies Program for exhibit in the public rooms of U.S. diplomatic residences around the world. Now in its 40th year, ART in Embassies has served as a kind of global museum for the best in American art. Program curators work directly with new U.S. ambassadors, collaborating on potential themes for the exhibitions. The curators are then responsible for proposing artists and specific works and for negotiating loans for each exhibition. The vast majority of works in these exhibitions are generously loaned by artists, galleries, museums, private collectors, and corporate collections. In making the selection of particular artists for this book, curator Virginia Shore of the Art in Embassies Program has sought to convey the considerable range of artists and diversity of media currently on display in U.S. diplomatic residences.

Here are 17 American artists then. It's difficult to generalize about them as a group beyond saying that most are on the youthful side of age 40 and that their work as a collection reflects the great imaginative variety of the current American art scene. We offer them to you in the same spirit that Wallace Stevens once wrote a poem titled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The number is arbitrary; the possibilities are infinite.