A cultural geographer and an art historian offer fresh interpretations of Muybridge’s famous moti... more A cultural geographer and an art historian offer fresh interpretations of Muybridge’s famous motion studies through the lenses of mobility and race.
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed horses in motion, proving that all four hooves leave the ground at once for a split second during full gallop. This was the beginning of Muybridge’s decades-long investigation into instantaneous photography, culminating in his masterpiece Animal Locomotion. Muybridge became one of the most influential photographers of his time, and his stop-motion technique helped pave the way for the motion-picture industry, born a short decade later.
Coauthored by cultural geographer Tim Cresswell and art historian John Ott, this book reexamines the motion studies as historical forms of “mobility,” in which specific forms of motion are given extraordinary significance and accrued value. Through a lively, interdisciplinary exchange, the authors explore how mobility is contextualized within the transformations of movement that marked the nineteenth century and how mobility represents the possibilities of social movement for African Americans. Together, these complementary essays look to Muybridge’s works as interventions in knowledge and experience and as opportunities to investigate larger social ramifications and possibilities.
This interdisciplinary study of the cultural philanthropy of bankers and industrialists in late 1... more This interdisciplinary study of the cultural philanthropy of bankers and industrialists in late 19th century California examines entrepreneurial elites' consumption of and institutional support for the visual arts as both symptom of and vehicle for a nascent, distinctly modern bourgeois class identity. It also argues that they sought to legitimate and naturalize recent trends in industrial capitalism through their patronage of specific artworks, even as critics rejected or negotiated the meanings that these executives imposed on their collections.
This project examines black and white artists' efforts towards racial integration, both at the le... more This project examines black and white artists' efforts towards racial integration, both at the level of representation and within art institutions, during the decades before the Civil Rights movement. Chapters include an overview of the visual culture of segregation, images of racial solidarity produced within the arts programs of the New Deal, graphics commissioned by multiracial labor unions, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings of the desegregation of the Coast Guard and professional baseball, the “enlightened capitalist” vision of integration in mass-market magazines like Life, Fortune, and Ebony, and efforts by black modernists like Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff to claim abstraction as a kind of integrationist visual style.
In 1934, Maynard Dixon accepted an appointment from the Public Works of Art Project to document t... more In 1934, Maynard Dixon accepted an appointment from the Public Works of Art Project to document the construction of Boulder Dam, an endeavor so gargantuan that it required the collaboration of six major construction companies. Thirty-six days on site during April and May yielded two dozen oils, watercolors, and drawings that departed from his normal repertoire of nostalgic frontier subjects. Witness to the physically punishing and psychologically alienating nature of industrial labor, not to mention significant workplace injury and death, his experiences filled him less with hope for the nation’s redemption from recession than bewilderment and pessimism about the seeming hopelessness of the project. Although Dixon privately endorsed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, his dam vignettes narrate a tragedy without clear antagonists. Nowhere on canvas does the artist indict the Six Companies who repeatedly cut wages and accelerated work schedules to meet their contracts. If anything, he seemed to indict the land itself: “I found there a dramatic theme,” he mused. ”Man versus Rock…. It gave me an impression of concealed force—and of ultimate futility.” The politics of Dixon’s PWAP commission become particularly clear when compared with alternative portrayals by contemporaries: triumphal and techntopian imagery of a harnessed nature commissioned by the region’s powerful agribusiness, construction, and tourism sectors; heroic scenes of coordinated, multiracial labor produced by Bureau of Reclamation photographer Ben Glaha and other New Deal tableaux like William Gropper’s mural for the Department of Interior headquarters; and scathing condemnations of worker exploitation and racial discrimination from leftists like poet Norman Macleod’s “Hoover Dam Remembered from El Tovar.”
Eight authors grapple with the question, What role can the Archives of American Art play in the c... more Eight authors grapple with the question, What role can the Archives of American Art play in the context of the pandemic?
Sandra Zalman and Austin Porter, eds., Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949, 2020
Over the last decade art historians invested in a more global art history have intensified their ... more Over the last decade art historians invested in a more global art history have intensified their efforts to expand or explode the modernist canon, but the discipline’s global turn actually dates back to the Museum of Modern Art’s earliest years, even as the critical orthodoxies now under attack began to coalesce. Decades before MoMA unveiled its notorious 1984 exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, its show Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (November 1948–January 1949) juxtaposed modern Western paintings with objects that spanned histories and continents to argue for a shared universal language of abstraction. Critical evaluation of Timeless Aspects of Modern Art divided along many of the same fault lines as would later emerge with MoMA’s 1984 show. While Director René d’Harnoncourt endeavored to legitimate contemporary practices of abstraction through the creation of a global genealogy, many contemporaries considered the show dubious, superficial, or inattentive to the troubling histories of Western colonialism. Close examination of debates surrounding these early ventures in global art history does not simply remind us that the conventional saga of modernism is fundamentally partisan and culturally segregated. It also, and more importantly, demonstrates that present-day attempts to renegotiate modernism’s boundaries and topographies have a long history of their own. Revisiting these projects, finally, not only discloses and critiques the particular mechanisms by which canons are formed and enforced, but also helps us envision compelling alternatives.
Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner, eds., New York, Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age , 2018
This paper highlights the formative years (1870-1899) of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, t... more This paper highlights the formative years (1870-1899) of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first public museum dedicated to the fine arts in the United States, and argues that its corporate governance structure and hybrid public-private status, which remain the prevailing model for civic cultural institutions today, were not inevitable but products of a specific historical moment and a particular social elite. Like other corporations, which were becoming the dominant American businesses at precisely the same time, the Metropolitan combined private operation, benefit, and access with public subsidy and legitimating claims of public service. Put simply, the Met was engineered to display and valorize privately owned collections at public expense. The museum’s substantial and unprecedented public financing did not, however, translate to public governance. This felicitous marriage of public financing to private governance was at once cause and product of another unlikely union: the Trustees’ frequent and lofty professions of public service and numerous restrictions to public access. This talk, therefore, reveals that tensions between private interest and public welfare are foundational and constitutional to both this first art museum and its many institutional progeny. In effect, conflicts of interest have been hardwired into modern art museums.
As one of many efforts by midcentury African American painters to reinvent abstraction into a mor... more As one of many efforts by midcentury African American painters to reinvent abstraction into a more pluralistic cultural practice, Hale Woodruff’s six-panel mural for Atlanta University, Art of the Negro (1950-51), offers a visual history of global art that freely mingles western and nonwestern art, ancient and modern cultures, and abstract and figural forms. The series unsettles and destabilizes conventional and linear histories of modernism not only by demonstrating its stylistic and demographic diversity, but also by revealing the complexity of the encounters between its practitioners and the nonwestern arts from which they drew inspiration.
A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia, Ecology, and the Material Imagination, 2017
Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic stop-motion serial photographs of humans and animals in motion have r... more Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic stop-motion serial photographs of humans and animals in motion have recently undergone a renaissance of academic inquiry, but writers invariably fixate solely on his human studies. By contrast, this talk refocuses attention on Muybridge’s long-overlooked studies of animals created during his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania (1883-1887). Current scholarship has ignored the fact that the 20,000 individual images produced for his landmark text Animal Locomotion (1887) was fundamentally an examination of the animal world: his sponsors housed the photographic experiments in the courtyard of the university’s new School of Veterinary Medicine (the second oldest in the nation) and Muybridge made extensive use of the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens (the country’s oldest). Accordingly, this project and its resulting images provide rare insight into changing conceptions about the relationship between human and animal Americans. On the one hand, Animal Locomotion manifests and naturalizes human domination over and exploitation of the animal world; on the other, it reveals a growing recognition, in the local scientific community and beyond, about the interconnectedness of human and animal species. Indeed, Penn’s Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine were pioneers of a new comparative biology that sparked unparalleled collaborations between human and veterinary medicine. Humans and animals had unprecedented proximity and intensity of contact in postbellum, urban America—as evidenced, for example, by the many outbreaks of zoonoses, or infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans—and the Muybridge project drew from and contributed to the emergence of a new and modern ecological consciousness.
Deep in the Anton Refregier papers, nested among the files of handwritten correspondence, newspap... more Deep in the Anton Refregier papers, nested among the files of handwritten correspondence, newspaper clippings, and unpublished typescripts, are a clutch of brightly colored fabric samples from the Riverdale Manufacturing Company. Commissioned by the Associated American Artists, promoted in interior design magazines, and sold exclusively at Macy’s department stores, Refregier’s Pioneer Pathways textile design (1952) was one of eight that comprised that inaugural line of artist fabrics of which Riverdale would eventually manufacture a quarter million yards. The textiles’ iconography of rustic frontier life has a long and tangled history. For Pioneer Pathways, Refregier reused imagery—most notably, the single figure of a forty-niner holding aloft a nugget of gold—from his History of San Francisco (1947-48), a 27-panel mural cycle painted in the lobby of Rincon Annex Post Office. The very last public murals completed under the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts and the largest undertaken by a single artist, The History of San Francisco‘s Social Realist style and leftist sympathies provoked some contemporaries to declare that they were “a derogatory reflection on the pioneers and history of the Great State of California.” The next several years witnessed both heated attacks from the Hearst press, regional heritage societies, fraternal and veterans’ organizations, and state politicians including second-term congressmen Richard Nixon, and passionate defenses from artists’ organizations, museum officials, local CIO unions, and the NAACP. Barely a year after meeting with eager consumers at the Herald Square Macy’s, Refregier appeared before a House Subcommittee to defend his murals from charges that they spread communist propaganda and from a Congressional resolution to remove them from public view. This essay seizes upon these swatches not only to call attention to midcentury efforts to bring American art to middle-class audiences, but also to demonstrate the fundamentally multidimensional nature of archival research. In order to fully comprehend the rich tapestry of American Art, scholars must follow not only the threads of its warp—the lives of individual artists that structure the bulk of the Archives of American Art—but also the transverse picks of its woof—the innumerable patrons, collectors, consumers, brokers, dealers, critics, and audiences with whom it comes into contact. The complex cultural lives that all artworks live are both long and defined by their connections to makers, users, and viewers alike.
Marion Wardle and Sarah Boehme, eds., Branding the American West: Paintings and Films, 1900-1950, Mar 2016
For a time during the 1930s, Maynard Dixon departed from his normal repertoire of nostalgic front... more For a time during the 1930s, Maynard Dixon departed from his normal repertoire of nostalgic frontier subjects to produce a suite of Social Realist canvases: first, a series of gritty street scenes inspired by the events of the 1934 San Francisco Waterfront and General Strikes; and second, a looser group of paintings of unemployed migrants adrift in the luminous California countryside. Scholars generally consider these works a brief and unusual detour compelled by the economic hardship of the times and largely unrelated to the bulk of his oeuvre. This talk argues that, to the contrary, the artist’s lifelong attraction and contributions to the romance for the frontier West governed his artistic response to the Great Depression. The mythology of rugged individualism that undergirds his frontier tableaux ensured that Dixon would define the crisis in personal rather than institutional terms. Although he regularly endorsed FDR’s New Deal programs in private letters, his paintings offer little beyond a bleak prognosis both for the nation’s economic prospects and its civic health. As with Frederick Remington’s illustrations of labor strife some forty years earlier, Dixon’s meditations on the San Francisco strikes configure the metropolis as the dystopian antithesis of the rustic arcadia he found in the peoples and landscapes of the high desert country. And by drawing on well-worn and nostalgic images of Native Americans, the painter depicts his rootless migrants as noble but Vanishing Okies. The politics of Dixon’s Depression-era work become particularly clear when compared with alternative portrayals by contemporaries: photographs by Dixon’s wife Dorothea Lange, illustrations by leftist artists with ties to labor unions and the Popular Front, and imagery commissioned by the region’s powerful shipping magnates.
It is a remarkable accident of history that that Jacob Lawrence, already one of the most celebrat... more It is a remarkable accident of history that that Jacob Lawrence, already one of the most celebrated black artists at mid-century, served on the first naval boat with a racially integrated crew during World War Two. In addition to creating dozens of works while a Coast Guard combat artist, he also produced after his discharge the 14-painting War series of 1947. By and large, scholars—even art historians practicing a social history of art—have considered these paintings largely in autobiographical terms, as simple documents of personal wartime experiences. By contrast, this essay treats this suite of works from the late 1940s as the artist's sustained social commentary on racial integration of both the military subjects under consideration and the art world in which Lawrence variously positioned himself.
John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill, and Jason LaFountain, eds, Blackwell Companion to American Art , 2015
The history of the art of the United States often figures the consumption of art as both arbitrar... more The history of the art of the United States often figures the consumption of art as both arbitrary and secondary to artistic production in shaping cultural forms. Newer scholarship more productively accommodates consumers and markets by treating artists as economic actors in their own right, narrating from vantage points besides those of artistic producers, and even conceptualizing consumer demand as a precondition for artistic creation.
For a brief time, and under unusual circumstances, graphic artists and labor leaders collaborated... more For a brief time, and under unusual circumstances, graphic artists and labor leaders collaborated to create a pluralistic visual culture exceptional for the period. In his 1944 comic-book history of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Association, for example, Italian immigrant print artist Giacomo Patri showcased the racial integration of the San-Francisco-based union. This work and its brethren distinguished themselves from other, more assimilationist visions of multiracial communities in which minorities accommodated to dominant culture or served as token symbols of racial inclusivity.
This commitment to a multiracial coalition bound together by more than economic necessity fostered, for a time, a culture of true interracialism. Patri’s graphics advanced this project in three important ways. First, at the level of iconography, Patri’s graphics plainly argued for the benefits of integration and the disadvantages of segregation. Second, and in terms of media, they addressed workers of all races in a widely accessible format. Finally, in relation to their institutional habitat, they were a critical component of a larger culture of labor interracialism promoted by the Bay Area CIO and San Francisco’s California Labor School. This alternative cultural ecology allowed Patri to create visual culture that was more affordable, accessible, inherently collaborative, and, above all, responsive to a multiracial working-class patronage and audience. His graphics both arose from and contributed to this pluralistic culture.
Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum, eds., The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century , Dec 2010
Through analysis of the cultural ecology of postbellum San Francisco, this essay argues that Cali... more Through analysis of the cultural ecology of postbellum San Francisco, this essay argues that California’s entrepreneurial elites reorganized the regional art world, particularly over the course of the watershed decade of the 1870s. For leading patrons, art gradually but dramatically changed its function from educational philanthropy to a mark of class distinction; its audience, from a democratic commonwealth of art lovers to a tight clique of connoisseurs; its location, from a public forum to a sacred precinct; and its scope, from local to national markets and beyond.
A cultural geographer and an art historian offer fresh interpretations of Muybridge’s famous moti... more A cultural geographer and an art historian offer fresh interpretations of Muybridge’s famous motion studies through the lenses of mobility and race.
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed horses in motion, proving that all four hooves leave the ground at once for a split second during full gallop. This was the beginning of Muybridge’s decades-long investigation into instantaneous photography, culminating in his masterpiece Animal Locomotion. Muybridge became one of the most influential photographers of his time, and his stop-motion technique helped pave the way for the motion-picture industry, born a short decade later.
Coauthored by cultural geographer Tim Cresswell and art historian John Ott, this book reexamines the motion studies as historical forms of “mobility,” in which specific forms of motion are given extraordinary significance and accrued value. Through a lively, interdisciplinary exchange, the authors explore how mobility is contextualized within the transformations of movement that marked the nineteenth century and how mobility represents the possibilities of social movement for African Americans. Together, these complementary essays look to Muybridge’s works as interventions in knowledge and experience and as opportunities to investigate larger social ramifications and possibilities.
This interdisciplinary study of the cultural philanthropy of bankers and industrialists in late 1... more This interdisciplinary study of the cultural philanthropy of bankers and industrialists in late 19th century California examines entrepreneurial elites' consumption of and institutional support for the visual arts as both symptom of and vehicle for a nascent, distinctly modern bourgeois class identity. It also argues that they sought to legitimate and naturalize recent trends in industrial capitalism through their patronage of specific artworks, even as critics rejected or negotiated the meanings that these executives imposed on their collections.
This project examines black and white artists' efforts towards racial integration, both at the le... more This project examines black and white artists' efforts towards racial integration, both at the level of representation and within art institutions, during the decades before the Civil Rights movement. Chapters include an overview of the visual culture of segregation, images of racial solidarity produced within the arts programs of the New Deal, graphics commissioned by multiracial labor unions, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings of the desegregation of the Coast Guard and professional baseball, the “enlightened capitalist” vision of integration in mass-market magazines like Life, Fortune, and Ebony, and efforts by black modernists like Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff to claim abstraction as a kind of integrationist visual style.
In 1934, Maynard Dixon accepted an appointment from the Public Works of Art Project to document t... more In 1934, Maynard Dixon accepted an appointment from the Public Works of Art Project to document the construction of Boulder Dam, an endeavor so gargantuan that it required the collaboration of six major construction companies. Thirty-six days on site during April and May yielded two dozen oils, watercolors, and drawings that departed from his normal repertoire of nostalgic frontier subjects. Witness to the physically punishing and psychologically alienating nature of industrial labor, not to mention significant workplace injury and death, his experiences filled him less with hope for the nation’s redemption from recession than bewilderment and pessimism about the seeming hopelessness of the project. Although Dixon privately endorsed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, his dam vignettes narrate a tragedy without clear antagonists. Nowhere on canvas does the artist indict the Six Companies who repeatedly cut wages and accelerated work schedules to meet their contracts. If anything, he seemed to indict the land itself: “I found there a dramatic theme,” he mused. ”Man versus Rock…. It gave me an impression of concealed force—and of ultimate futility.” The politics of Dixon’s PWAP commission become particularly clear when compared with alternative portrayals by contemporaries: triumphal and techntopian imagery of a harnessed nature commissioned by the region’s powerful agribusiness, construction, and tourism sectors; heroic scenes of coordinated, multiracial labor produced by Bureau of Reclamation photographer Ben Glaha and other New Deal tableaux like William Gropper’s mural for the Department of Interior headquarters; and scathing condemnations of worker exploitation and racial discrimination from leftists like poet Norman Macleod’s “Hoover Dam Remembered from El Tovar.”
Eight authors grapple with the question, What role can the Archives of American Art play in the c... more Eight authors grapple with the question, What role can the Archives of American Art play in the context of the pandemic?
Sandra Zalman and Austin Porter, eds., Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949, 2020
Over the last decade art historians invested in a more global art history have intensified their ... more Over the last decade art historians invested in a more global art history have intensified their efforts to expand or explode the modernist canon, but the discipline’s global turn actually dates back to the Museum of Modern Art’s earliest years, even as the critical orthodoxies now under attack began to coalesce. Decades before MoMA unveiled its notorious 1984 exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, its show Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (November 1948–January 1949) juxtaposed modern Western paintings with objects that spanned histories and continents to argue for a shared universal language of abstraction. Critical evaluation of Timeless Aspects of Modern Art divided along many of the same fault lines as would later emerge with MoMA’s 1984 show. While Director René d’Harnoncourt endeavored to legitimate contemporary practices of abstraction through the creation of a global genealogy, many contemporaries considered the show dubious, superficial, or inattentive to the troubling histories of Western colonialism. Close examination of debates surrounding these early ventures in global art history does not simply remind us that the conventional saga of modernism is fundamentally partisan and culturally segregated. It also, and more importantly, demonstrates that present-day attempts to renegotiate modernism’s boundaries and topographies have a long history of their own. Revisiting these projects, finally, not only discloses and critiques the particular mechanisms by which canons are formed and enforced, but also helps us envision compelling alternatives.
Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner, eds., New York, Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age , 2018
This paper highlights the formative years (1870-1899) of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, t... more This paper highlights the formative years (1870-1899) of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first public museum dedicated to the fine arts in the United States, and argues that its corporate governance structure and hybrid public-private status, which remain the prevailing model for civic cultural institutions today, were not inevitable but products of a specific historical moment and a particular social elite. Like other corporations, which were becoming the dominant American businesses at precisely the same time, the Metropolitan combined private operation, benefit, and access with public subsidy and legitimating claims of public service. Put simply, the Met was engineered to display and valorize privately owned collections at public expense. The museum’s substantial and unprecedented public financing did not, however, translate to public governance. This felicitous marriage of public financing to private governance was at once cause and product of another unlikely union: the Trustees’ frequent and lofty professions of public service and numerous restrictions to public access. This talk, therefore, reveals that tensions between private interest and public welfare are foundational and constitutional to both this first art museum and its many institutional progeny. In effect, conflicts of interest have been hardwired into modern art museums.
As one of many efforts by midcentury African American painters to reinvent abstraction into a mor... more As one of many efforts by midcentury African American painters to reinvent abstraction into a more pluralistic cultural practice, Hale Woodruff’s six-panel mural for Atlanta University, Art of the Negro (1950-51), offers a visual history of global art that freely mingles western and nonwestern art, ancient and modern cultures, and abstract and figural forms. The series unsettles and destabilizes conventional and linear histories of modernism not only by demonstrating its stylistic and demographic diversity, but also by revealing the complexity of the encounters between its practitioners and the nonwestern arts from which they drew inspiration.
A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia, Ecology, and the Material Imagination, 2017
Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic stop-motion serial photographs of humans and animals in motion have r... more Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic stop-motion serial photographs of humans and animals in motion have recently undergone a renaissance of academic inquiry, but writers invariably fixate solely on his human studies. By contrast, this talk refocuses attention on Muybridge’s long-overlooked studies of animals created during his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania (1883-1887). Current scholarship has ignored the fact that the 20,000 individual images produced for his landmark text Animal Locomotion (1887) was fundamentally an examination of the animal world: his sponsors housed the photographic experiments in the courtyard of the university’s new School of Veterinary Medicine (the second oldest in the nation) and Muybridge made extensive use of the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens (the country’s oldest). Accordingly, this project and its resulting images provide rare insight into changing conceptions about the relationship between human and animal Americans. On the one hand, Animal Locomotion manifests and naturalizes human domination over and exploitation of the animal world; on the other, it reveals a growing recognition, in the local scientific community and beyond, about the interconnectedness of human and animal species. Indeed, Penn’s Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine were pioneers of a new comparative biology that sparked unparalleled collaborations between human and veterinary medicine. Humans and animals had unprecedented proximity and intensity of contact in postbellum, urban America—as evidenced, for example, by the many outbreaks of zoonoses, or infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans—and the Muybridge project drew from and contributed to the emergence of a new and modern ecological consciousness.
Deep in the Anton Refregier papers, nested among the files of handwritten correspondence, newspap... more Deep in the Anton Refregier papers, nested among the files of handwritten correspondence, newspaper clippings, and unpublished typescripts, are a clutch of brightly colored fabric samples from the Riverdale Manufacturing Company. Commissioned by the Associated American Artists, promoted in interior design magazines, and sold exclusively at Macy’s department stores, Refregier’s Pioneer Pathways textile design (1952) was one of eight that comprised that inaugural line of artist fabrics of which Riverdale would eventually manufacture a quarter million yards. The textiles’ iconography of rustic frontier life has a long and tangled history. For Pioneer Pathways, Refregier reused imagery—most notably, the single figure of a forty-niner holding aloft a nugget of gold—from his History of San Francisco (1947-48), a 27-panel mural cycle painted in the lobby of Rincon Annex Post Office. The very last public murals completed under the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts and the largest undertaken by a single artist, The History of San Francisco‘s Social Realist style and leftist sympathies provoked some contemporaries to declare that they were “a derogatory reflection on the pioneers and history of the Great State of California.” The next several years witnessed both heated attacks from the Hearst press, regional heritage societies, fraternal and veterans’ organizations, and state politicians including second-term congressmen Richard Nixon, and passionate defenses from artists’ organizations, museum officials, local CIO unions, and the NAACP. Barely a year after meeting with eager consumers at the Herald Square Macy’s, Refregier appeared before a House Subcommittee to defend his murals from charges that they spread communist propaganda and from a Congressional resolution to remove them from public view. This essay seizes upon these swatches not only to call attention to midcentury efforts to bring American art to middle-class audiences, but also to demonstrate the fundamentally multidimensional nature of archival research. In order to fully comprehend the rich tapestry of American Art, scholars must follow not only the threads of its warp—the lives of individual artists that structure the bulk of the Archives of American Art—but also the transverse picks of its woof—the innumerable patrons, collectors, consumers, brokers, dealers, critics, and audiences with whom it comes into contact. The complex cultural lives that all artworks live are both long and defined by their connections to makers, users, and viewers alike.
Marion Wardle and Sarah Boehme, eds., Branding the American West: Paintings and Films, 1900-1950, Mar 2016
For a time during the 1930s, Maynard Dixon departed from his normal repertoire of nostalgic front... more For a time during the 1930s, Maynard Dixon departed from his normal repertoire of nostalgic frontier subjects to produce a suite of Social Realist canvases: first, a series of gritty street scenes inspired by the events of the 1934 San Francisco Waterfront and General Strikes; and second, a looser group of paintings of unemployed migrants adrift in the luminous California countryside. Scholars generally consider these works a brief and unusual detour compelled by the economic hardship of the times and largely unrelated to the bulk of his oeuvre. This talk argues that, to the contrary, the artist’s lifelong attraction and contributions to the romance for the frontier West governed his artistic response to the Great Depression. The mythology of rugged individualism that undergirds his frontier tableaux ensured that Dixon would define the crisis in personal rather than institutional terms. Although he regularly endorsed FDR’s New Deal programs in private letters, his paintings offer little beyond a bleak prognosis both for the nation’s economic prospects and its civic health. As with Frederick Remington’s illustrations of labor strife some forty years earlier, Dixon’s meditations on the San Francisco strikes configure the metropolis as the dystopian antithesis of the rustic arcadia he found in the peoples and landscapes of the high desert country. And by drawing on well-worn and nostalgic images of Native Americans, the painter depicts his rootless migrants as noble but Vanishing Okies. The politics of Dixon’s Depression-era work become particularly clear when compared with alternative portrayals by contemporaries: photographs by Dixon’s wife Dorothea Lange, illustrations by leftist artists with ties to labor unions and the Popular Front, and imagery commissioned by the region’s powerful shipping magnates.
It is a remarkable accident of history that that Jacob Lawrence, already one of the most celebrat... more It is a remarkable accident of history that that Jacob Lawrence, already one of the most celebrated black artists at mid-century, served on the first naval boat with a racially integrated crew during World War Two. In addition to creating dozens of works while a Coast Guard combat artist, he also produced after his discharge the 14-painting War series of 1947. By and large, scholars—even art historians practicing a social history of art—have considered these paintings largely in autobiographical terms, as simple documents of personal wartime experiences. By contrast, this essay treats this suite of works from the late 1940s as the artist's sustained social commentary on racial integration of both the military subjects under consideration and the art world in which Lawrence variously positioned himself.
John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill, and Jason LaFountain, eds, Blackwell Companion to American Art , 2015
The history of the art of the United States often figures the consumption of art as both arbitrar... more The history of the art of the United States often figures the consumption of art as both arbitrary and secondary to artistic production in shaping cultural forms. Newer scholarship more productively accommodates consumers and markets by treating artists as economic actors in their own right, narrating from vantage points besides those of artistic producers, and even conceptualizing consumer demand as a precondition for artistic creation.
For a brief time, and under unusual circumstances, graphic artists and labor leaders collaborated... more For a brief time, and under unusual circumstances, graphic artists and labor leaders collaborated to create a pluralistic visual culture exceptional for the period. In his 1944 comic-book history of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Association, for example, Italian immigrant print artist Giacomo Patri showcased the racial integration of the San-Francisco-based union. This work and its brethren distinguished themselves from other, more assimilationist visions of multiracial communities in which minorities accommodated to dominant culture or served as token symbols of racial inclusivity.
This commitment to a multiracial coalition bound together by more than economic necessity fostered, for a time, a culture of true interracialism. Patri’s graphics advanced this project in three important ways. First, at the level of iconography, Patri’s graphics plainly argued for the benefits of integration and the disadvantages of segregation. Second, and in terms of media, they addressed workers of all races in a widely accessible format. Finally, in relation to their institutional habitat, they were a critical component of a larger culture of labor interracialism promoted by the Bay Area CIO and San Francisco’s California Labor School. This alternative cultural ecology allowed Patri to create visual culture that was more affordable, accessible, inherently collaborative, and, above all, responsive to a multiracial working-class patronage and audience. His graphics both arose from and contributed to this pluralistic culture.
Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum, eds., The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century , Dec 2010
Through analysis of the cultural ecology of postbellum San Francisco, this essay argues that Cali... more Through analysis of the cultural ecology of postbellum San Francisco, this essay argues that California’s entrepreneurial elites reorganized the regional art world, particularly over the course of the watershed decade of the 1870s. For leading patrons, art gradually but dramatically changed its function from educational philanthropy to a mark of class distinction; its audience, from a democratic commonwealth of art lovers to a tight clique of connoisseurs; its location, from a public forum to a sacred precinct; and its scope, from local to national markets and beyond.
Members of the Taos Society of Artists strongly identified with Taos Pueblo society and often lin... more Members of the Taos Society of Artists strongly identified with Taos Pueblo society and often linked their painting practices to Native craftsmanship in order to rejuvenate a masculine artistic identity that they considered imperiled by modern society, and to assert the authenticity and vitality of painting in a mechanized age. This affiliation led these artists to advocate for Native property claims during the early twenties through both social activism and their artistic production. On the one hand, their support for the Pueblo marked a positive shift in both federal policy and prevailing attitudes towards Native peoples: preservationist rather than assimilationist, and more inclined towards "noble" rather than "savage" stereotypes. On the other hand, their defense of Pueblo land claims often perpetuated romantic and homogenizing conceptions of Native Americans as simple, carefree, and close to nature, but imperiled by and out of place within the modern world. Finally, the Pueblo’s gains came partly at the expense of the area’s Spanish-speaking population, and a review of Society paintings from the time reveals a composite portrait of the Nuevomexicano as an unskilled laborer and an unsuitable candidate for stewardship over the land.
Scholarship on the domestic art market has generally addressed questions of supply and the role o... more Scholarship on the domestic art market has generally addressed questions of supply and the role of cultural intermediaries. By contrast, this study of blockbuster auction sales in Victorian America demonstrates that newly ascendant entrepreneurial elites drove changes in the art trade and further suggests that how collectors acquired artworks is just as critical to understanding consumer preferences and the shape and evolution of markets as what they acquired. The American Art Association provided this client base with a novel means of art consumption that articulated, valorized, publicized, and habituated more hierarchical concepts of social class than before the Civil War.
Palmer Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints (c. 1937) has long baffled students of African-American ar... more Palmer Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints (c. 1937) has long baffled students of African-American art. Today the work features relatively flattering portraits of a black painter, woman, and child, but the canvas originally contained the garish and inflammatory characteristics of Jim Crow caricature. Consequently, contemporary scholars have criticized Hayden for internalizing prevailing stereotypes; accordingly, he has occupied a difficult and marginal position within the field. In contrast, I argue that through this canvas Hayden advanced a sharp and multi-faceted critique of how his long-time institutional patron, the Harmon Foundation, stereotyped African-American artists. Throughout his career, both Hayden’s supporters and mainstream critics repeatedly emphasized his background as a manual laborer and indelibly categorized him as an amateur despite his professional ambitions and achievements. In response, Hayden's painting at once lampooned his popular reputation, critiqued the paternalism of white cultural philanthropy, and rejected Alain Locke’s call for black artists to emulate the arts and cultures of Africa.
Focusing selectively on a single New Deal arts initiative, the Treasury Department’s Section of F... more Focusing selectively on a single New Deal arts initiative, the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts (1934–43), this essay considers controversies and negotiations over racial content in public murals. While developing their assignments, Section artists often had to attend to waves of feedback, both trivial and profound, from administrators, juries, civic leaders, postmasters, journalists, politicians, and the general public. Among their many criticisms, complainants both Black and white explicitly identified and decried racial slurs in Section productions, whether age-old anti-Black stereotypes or calumnies about a locality’s eugenic inferiority, and their attendant allegations of imbecility, depravity, devolution, and the violation of conventional gender roles. But when Black audiences did explicitly protest Section commissions both in process and following their installation, the Treasury Department heeded them far less frequently than their white counterparts. Even more, white citizens much more frequently participated as jurors in the selection process, had greater opportunities to interact with and counsel artists conducting exploratory research, and found their politicians in Washington far more willing to advocate on their behalf. As a result, we have inherited an ecology of public art that is characteristically anti-Black. Thus this study demonstrates that many of the contemporary debates that rage today owe to the different degrees to which input from discrete communities were solicited and taken into consideration.
During the Great Depression, federal arts programs provided relief employment for artists and dec... more During the Great Depression, federal arts programs provided relief employment for artists and decorated thousands of public buildings nationwide. Of the 140-odd murals and sculptures created under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934–43) that incorporate black and white subjects within the same commission, nearly two-thirds crop up in former Confederate states and of these, roughly half depict the cotton industry. The striking prominence of African Americans in these cottonscapes is doubly surprising: first, because they defied the prevailing whiteness of Southern sharecroppers in visual culture like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and second, because they proliferated during the precipitous downturn of an industry ravaged by deleterious disinvestment in infrastructure, the boll weevil, and overproduction. Rather than document present-day agricultural conditions, then, these utopian agrarian tableaux primarily function to belie and compensate for economic decline and challenges to systems of white supremacy. Practically all of these southern scenes envision sharply hierarchical mixed-race vignettes, in which generic African Americans appear servile, orderly, and yet always content in their subordination. Artists hailing from the beyond the region quickly discovered that their multiracial compositions often ran afoul of local sentiment. When community member complaints made their way to federal administrators, muralists were obliged to domesticate black bodies and augment visual racial hierarchies. Despite this, a handful of leftist artists were able to circumvent repeated pressure from local residents and federal administrators alike to include more egalitarian mixed-race workplaces and to produce more dignified portrayals of black sharecroppers.
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Books by John Ott
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed horses in motion, proving that all four hooves leave the ground at once for a split second during full gallop. This was the beginning of Muybridge’s decades-long investigation into instantaneous photography, culminating in his masterpiece Animal Locomotion. Muybridge became one of the most influential photographers of his time, and his stop-motion technique helped pave the way for the motion-picture industry, born a short decade later.
Coauthored by cultural geographer Tim Cresswell and art historian John Ott, this book reexamines the motion studies as historical forms of “mobility,” in which specific forms of motion are given extraordinary significance and accrued value. Through a lively, interdisciplinary exchange, the authors explore how mobility is contextualized within the transformations of movement that marked the nineteenth century and how mobility represents the possibilities of social movement for African Americans. Together, these complementary essays look to Muybridge’s works as interventions in knowledge and experience and as opportunities to investigate larger social ramifications and possibilities.
Papers by John Ott
Although Dixon privately endorsed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, his dam vignettes narrate a tragedy without clear antagonists. Nowhere on canvas does the artist indict the Six Companies who repeatedly cut wages and accelerated work schedules to meet their contracts. If anything, he seemed to indict the land itself: “I found there a dramatic theme,” he mused. ”Man versus Rock…. It gave me an impression of concealed force—and of ultimate futility.” The politics of Dixon’s PWAP commission become particularly clear when compared with alternative portrayals by contemporaries: triumphal and techntopian imagery of a harnessed nature commissioned by the region’s powerful agribusiness, construction, and tourism sectors; heroic scenes of coordinated, multiracial labor produced by Bureau of Reclamation photographer Ben Glaha and other New Deal tableaux like William Gropper’s mural for the Department of Interior headquarters; and scathing condemnations of worker exploitation and racial discrimination from leftists like poet Norman Macleod’s “Hoover Dam Remembered from El Tovar.”
Critical evaluation of Timeless Aspects of Modern Art divided along many of the same fault lines as would later emerge with MoMA’s 1984 show. While Director René d’Harnoncourt endeavored to legitimate contemporary practices of abstraction through the creation of a global genealogy, many contemporaries considered the show dubious, superficial, or inattentive to the troubling histories of Western colonialism. Close examination of debates surrounding these early ventures in global art history does not simply remind us that the conventional saga of modernism is fundamentally partisan and culturally segregated. It also, and more importantly, demonstrates that present-day attempts to renegotiate modernism’s boundaries and topographies have a long history of their own. Revisiting these projects, finally, not only discloses and critiques the particular mechanisms by which canons are formed and enforced, but also helps us envision compelling alternatives.
The textiles’ iconography of rustic frontier life has a long and tangled history. For Pioneer Pathways, Refregier reused imagery—most notably, the single figure of a forty-niner holding aloft a nugget of gold—from his History of San Francisco (1947-48), a 27-panel mural cycle painted in the lobby of Rincon Annex Post Office. The very last public murals completed under the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts and the largest undertaken by a single artist, The History of San Francisco‘s Social Realist style and leftist sympathies provoked some contemporaries to declare that they were “a derogatory reflection on the pioneers and history of the Great State of California.” The next several years witnessed both heated attacks from the Hearst press, regional heritage societies, fraternal and veterans’ organizations, and state politicians including second-term congressmen Richard Nixon, and passionate defenses from artists’ organizations, museum officials, local CIO unions, and the NAACP. Barely a year after meeting with eager consumers at the Herald Square Macy’s, Refregier appeared before a House Subcommittee to defend his murals from charges that they spread communist propaganda and from a Congressional resolution to remove them from public view.
This essay seizes upon these swatches not only to call attention to midcentury efforts to bring American art to middle-class audiences, but also to demonstrate the fundamentally multidimensional nature of archival research. In order to fully comprehend the rich tapestry of American Art, scholars must follow not only the threads of its warp—the lives of individual artists that structure the bulk of the Archives of American Art—but also the transverse picks of its woof—the innumerable patrons, collectors, consumers, brokers, dealers, critics, and audiences with whom it comes into contact. The complex cultural lives that all artworks live are both long and defined by their connections to makers, users, and viewers alike.
This commitment to a multiracial coalition bound together by more than economic necessity fostered, for a time, a culture of true interracialism. Patri’s graphics advanced this project in three important ways. First, at the level of iconography, Patri’s graphics plainly argued for the benefits of integration and the disadvantages of segregation. Second, and in terms of media, they addressed workers of all races in a widely accessible format. Finally, in relation to their institutional habitat, they were a critical component of a larger culture of labor interracialism promoted by the Bay Area CIO and San Francisco’s California Labor School. This alternative cultural ecology allowed Patri to create visual culture that was more affordable, accessible, inherently collaborative, and, above all, responsive to a multiracial working-class patronage and audience. His graphics both arose from and contributed to this pluralistic culture.
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed horses in motion, proving that all four hooves leave the ground at once for a split second during full gallop. This was the beginning of Muybridge’s decades-long investigation into instantaneous photography, culminating in his masterpiece Animal Locomotion. Muybridge became one of the most influential photographers of his time, and his stop-motion technique helped pave the way for the motion-picture industry, born a short decade later.
Coauthored by cultural geographer Tim Cresswell and art historian John Ott, this book reexamines the motion studies as historical forms of “mobility,” in which specific forms of motion are given extraordinary significance and accrued value. Through a lively, interdisciplinary exchange, the authors explore how mobility is contextualized within the transformations of movement that marked the nineteenth century and how mobility represents the possibilities of social movement for African Americans. Together, these complementary essays look to Muybridge’s works as interventions in knowledge and experience and as opportunities to investigate larger social ramifications and possibilities.
Although Dixon privately endorsed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, his dam vignettes narrate a tragedy without clear antagonists. Nowhere on canvas does the artist indict the Six Companies who repeatedly cut wages and accelerated work schedules to meet their contracts. If anything, he seemed to indict the land itself: “I found there a dramatic theme,” he mused. ”Man versus Rock…. It gave me an impression of concealed force—and of ultimate futility.” The politics of Dixon’s PWAP commission become particularly clear when compared with alternative portrayals by contemporaries: triumphal and techntopian imagery of a harnessed nature commissioned by the region’s powerful agribusiness, construction, and tourism sectors; heroic scenes of coordinated, multiracial labor produced by Bureau of Reclamation photographer Ben Glaha and other New Deal tableaux like William Gropper’s mural for the Department of Interior headquarters; and scathing condemnations of worker exploitation and racial discrimination from leftists like poet Norman Macleod’s “Hoover Dam Remembered from El Tovar.”
Critical evaluation of Timeless Aspects of Modern Art divided along many of the same fault lines as would later emerge with MoMA’s 1984 show. While Director René d’Harnoncourt endeavored to legitimate contemporary practices of abstraction through the creation of a global genealogy, many contemporaries considered the show dubious, superficial, or inattentive to the troubling histories of Western colonialism. Close examination of debates surrounding these early ventures in global art history does not simply remind us that the conventional saga of modernism is fundamentally partisan and culturally segregated. It also, and more importantly, demonstrates that present-day attempts to renegotiate modernism’s boundaries and topographies have a long history of their own. Revisiting these projects, finally, not only discloses and critiques the particular mechanisms by which canons are formed and enforced, but also helps us envision compelling alternatives.
The textiles’ iconography of rustic frontier life has a long and tangled history. For Pioneer Pathways, Refregier reused imagery—most notably, the single figure of a forty-niner holding aloft a nugget of gold—from his History of San Francisco (1947-48), a 27-panel mural cycle painted in the lobby of Rincon Annex Post Office. The very last public murals completed under the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts and the largest undertaken by a single artist, The History of San Francisco‘s Social Realist style and leftist sympathies provoked some contemporaries to declare that they were “a derogatory reflection on the pioneers and history of the Great State of California.” The next several years witnessed both heated attacks from the Hearst press, regional heritage societies, fraternal and veterans’ organizations, and state politicians including second-term congressmen Richard Nixon, and passionate defenses from artists’ organizations, museum officials, local CIO unions, and the NAACP. Barely a year after meeting with eager consumers at the Herald Square Macy’s, Refregier appeared before a House Subcommittee to defend his murals from charges that they spread communist propaganda and from a Congressional resolution to remove them from public view.
This essay seizes upon these swatches not only to call attention to midcentury efforts to bring American art to middle-class audiences, but also to demonstrate the fundamentally multidimensional nature of archival research. In order to fully comprehend the rich tapestry of American Art, scholars must follow not only the threads of its warp—the lives of individual artists that structure the bulk of the Archives of American Art—but also the transverse picks of its woof—the innumerable patrons, collectors, consumers, brokers, dealers, critics, and audiences with whom it comes into contact. The complex cultural lives that all artworks live are both long and defined by their connections to makers, users, and viewers alike.
This commitment to a multiracial coalition bound together by more than economic necessity fostered, for a time, a culture of true interracialism. Patri’s graphics advanced this project in three important ways. First, at the level of iconography, Patri’s graphics plainly argued for the benefits of integration and the disadvantages of segregation. Second, and in terms of media, they addressed workers of all races in a widely accessible format. Finally, in relation to their institutional habitat, they were a critical component of a larger culture of labor interracialism promoted by the Bay Area CIO and San Francisco’s California Labor School. This alternative cultural ecology allowed Patri to create visual culture that was more affordable, accessible, inherently collaborative, and, above all, responsive to a multiracial working-class patronage and audience. His graphics both arose from and contributed to this pluralistic culture.