Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World, 2023
There has been a rich dialogue between Native Studies/Critical Indigenous Studies (NS/CIS) and Bl... more There has been a rich dialogue between Native Studies/Critical Indigenous Studies (NS/CIS) and Black/Critical Race Studies (B/CRS) in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-Arst-century scholarship. But there has been less interaction between those Aelds in premodern scholarship. The following
Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism, 2023
A critical assessment of the depictions of Native Americans of the American West by the American ... more A critical assessment of the depictions of Native Americans of the American West by the American artist Alfred Jacob Miller following his trip into the North American interior in 1837.
Faces from the Interior: The North American Portraits of Karl Bodmer, 2021
A critical assessment of the paintings of Native Americans by the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer during... more A critical assessment of the paintings of Native Americans by the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer during his trip into the North American interior, 1833-1834
My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the t... more My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the twentieth century. For decades Native visual and material culture was viewed under the guise of ‘crafts.’ I look back to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on Haudenosaunee material culture. His writings helped establish a specific notion of Haudenosaunee material culture within the scholarly field of anthropology in the nineteenth century. At that point two-dimensional arts did not play a substantial role in Haudenosaunee visual culture, even though both Tuscarora and Seneca artists had produced drawings and paintings then. I investigate the turn toward collecting two-dimensional Haudenosaunee representational art, where before there was only craft. I locate this turn at the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s. It was at this point that Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker recruited Native crafts people and painters working in two-dimensional art forms to p...
Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960, ed. Elizabeth Finch and Marshall Price. New York: Rizzoli Press, 2020
Reviews the cultural milieu of Lichtenstein's paintings from the 1950s, which reinterpreted class... more Reviews the cultural milieu of Lichtenstein's paintings from the 1950s, which reinterpreted classic paintings of the American West in an abstract expressionist idiom.
My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the t... more My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the twentieth century. For decades Native visual and material culture was viewed under the guise of 'crafts.' I look back to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on Haudenosaunee material culture. His writings helped establish a specific notion of Haudenosaunee material culture within the scholarly field of anthropology in the nineteenth century. At that point two-dimensional arts did not play a substantial role in Haudenosaunee visual culture, even though both Tuscarora and Seneca artists had produced drawings and paintings then. I investigate the turn toward collecting two-dimensional Haudenosaunee representational art, where before there was only craft. I locate this turn at the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s. It was at this point that Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker recruited Native crafts people and painters working in two-dimensional art forms to participate in a Works Progress Administration-sponsored project known as the Seneca Arts Program. Thereafter, museum collectors began purchasing and displaying paintings by the artists: Jesse Cornplanter, Sanford Plummer, and Ernest Smith. I argue that their representation in museum collections opened the door for the contemporary Haudenosaunee to follow.
The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas, 2019
Brief overview of memorial culture in the Americas. Considers such topics at memorialization and ... more Brief overview of memorial culture in the Americas. Considers such topics at memorialization and Indigenous cultures, commemorations of discovery and independence, and contested memorials and monuments.
Painted Journeys: The Art of John Mix Stanley, 2015
This essay considers the opposing elements of first-hand documentation vs. the recreation of hist... more This essay considers the opposing elements of first-hand documentation vs. the recreation of historical tableaux in the paintings of John Mix Stanley in the mid-nineteenth century.
Essay related to the exhibition mounted by the Newberry Library from September, 2013 to March, 20... more Essay related to the exhibition mounted by the Newberry Library from September, 2013 to March, 2014. The exhibition, titled "Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North," was comprised of materials from the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation. The catalog with five accompanying essays was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2013.
Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World, 2023
There has been a rich dialogue between Native Studies/Critical Indigenous Studies (NS/CIS) and Bl... more There has been a rich dialogue between Native Studies/Critical Indigenous Studies (NS/CIS) and Black/Critical Race Studies (B/CRS) in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-Arst-century scholarship. But there has been less interaction between those Aelds in premodern scholarship. The following
Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism, 2023
A critical assessment of the depictions of Native Americans of the American West by the American ... more A critical assessment of the depictions of Native Americans of the American West by the American artist Alfred Jacob Miller following his trip into the North American interior in 1837.
Faces from the Interior: The North American Portraits of Karl Bodmer, 2021
A critical assessment of the paintings of Native Americans by the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer during... more A critical assessment of the paintings of Native Americans by the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer during his trip into the North American interior, 1833-1834
My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the t... more My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the twentieth century. For decades Native visual and material culture was viewed under the guise of ‘crafts.’ I look back to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on Haudenosaunee material culture. His writings helped establish a specific notion of Haudenosaunee material culture within the scholarly field of anthropology in the nineteenth century. At that point two-dimensional arts did not play a substantial role in Haudenosaunee visual culture, even though both Tuscarora and Seneca artists had produced drawings and paintings then. I investigate the turn toward collecting two-dimensional Haudenosaunee representational art, where before there was only craft. I locate this turn at the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s. It was at this point that Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker recruited Native crafts people and painters working in two-dimensional art forms to p...
Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960, ed. Elizabeth Finch and Marshall Price. New York: Rizzoli Press, 2020
Reviews the cultural milieu of Lichtenstein's paintings from the 1950s, which reinterpreted class... more Reviews the cultural milieu of Lichtenstein's paintings from the 1950s, which reinterpreted classic paintings of the American West in an abstract expressionist idiom.
My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the t... more My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the twentieth century. For decades Native visual and material culture was viewed under the guise of 'crafts.' I look back to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on Haudenosaunee material culture. His writings helped establish a specific notion of Haudenosaunee material culture within the scholarly field of anthropology in the nineteenth century. At that point two-dimensional arts did not play a substantial role in Haudenosaunee visual culture, even though both Tuscarora and Seneca artists had produced drawings and paintings then. I investigate the turn toward collecting two-dimensional Haudenosaunee representational art, where before there was only craft. I locate this turn at the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s. It was at this point that Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker recruited Native crafts people and painters working in two-dimensional art forms to participate in a Works Progress Administration-sponsored project known as the Seneca Arts Program. Thereafter, museum collectors began purchasing and displaying paintings by the artists: Jesse Cornplanter, Sanford Plummer, and Ernest Smith. I argue that their representation in museum collections opened the door for the contemporary Haudenosaunee to follow.
The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas, 2019
Brief overview of memorial culture in the Americas. Considers such topics at memorialization and ... more Brief overview of memorial culture in the Americas. Considers such topics at memorialization and Indigenous cultures, commemorations of discovery and independence, and contested memorials and monuments.
Painted Journeys: The Art of John Mix Stanley, 2015
This essay considers the opposing elements of first-hand documentation vs. the recreation of hist... more This essay considers the opposing elements of first-hand documentation vs. the recreation of historical tableaux in the paintings of John Mix Stanley in the mid-nineteenth century.
Essay related to the exhibition mounted by the Newberry Library from September, 2013 to March, 20... more Essay related to the exhibition mounted by the Newberry Library from September, 2013 to March, 2014. The exhibition, titled "Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North," was comprised of materials from the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation. The catalog with five accompanying essays was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2013.
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