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After World War I, artists without formal training “crashed the gates” of major museums in the United States, diversifying the art world across lines of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender. At the center of this fundamental reevaluation of who could be an artist in America were John Kane, Horace Pippin, and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses. The stories of these three artists not only intertwine with the major critical debates of their period but also prefigure the call for inclusion in representations of American art today. In Gatecrashers, Katherine Jentleson offers a valuable corrective to the history of twentieth-century art by expanding narratives of interwar American modernism and providing an origin story for contemporary fascination with self-taught artists.
A richly illustrated history of self-taught artists and how they changed American art Artists without formal training, who learned from family, community, and personal journeys, have long been a presence in American art. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, with the help of trailblazing advocates, that the collective force of their creative vision and bold self-definition permanently changed the mainstream art world. In We Are Made of Stories, Leslie Umberger traces the rise of self-taught artists in the twentieth century and examines how, despite wide-ranging societal, racial, and gender-based obstacles, they redefined who could be rightfully seen as an artist and revealed a much more diverse c...
Woven coverlets have appeared in several guises within the history of folk textiles. Created on four-harness looms, coverlets made in the nineteenth-century American South typically featured colored wool and cotton threads woven into striking geometric patterns. Although they are not as well known as other textiles and domestic objects, “overshot” coverlets were, and continue to be, significant examples of material culture that require tremendous skill and creativity to produce. They also express currents of conformity and dissent. In addition to being pleasing to the eye and hand, “overshot” coverlets have advanced a variety of social and political ends. At times exhibited in slave ...
Inside the hidden world of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn's Crown Heights--a close-knit but divided community. On a cold night in December, the members of a Hasidic anti-crime patrol called the Shomrim are summoned to a yeshiva dormitory in Crown Heights. There to break up a brawl, the Shomrim instead find themselves embroiled in a religious schism which has split the community and turned roommate against roommate, neighbor against neighbor. At the center of the storm is Aron Hershkop, the owner of an auto-repair business and the leader of the Shomrim. Hershkop watches as the NYPD builds a criminal case against his brothers and friends, apparently with the help of several local residents, who have...
Travelers' accounts of the people, culture, and politics of the Southern coastal region after the Civil War Charleston is one of the most intriguing of American cities, a unique combination of quaint streets, historic architecture, picturesque gardens, and age-old tradition, embroidered with a vivid cultural, literary, and social history. It is a city of contrasts and controversy as well. To trace a documentary history of Charleston from the postbellum era into the twentieth century is to encounter an ever-shifting but consistently alluring landscape. In this collection, ranging from 1865 to 1947, correspondents, travelers, tourists, and other visitors describe all aspects of the city as the...
An unprecedented look at Nellie Mae Rowe's art as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South During the last 15 years of her life, Nellie Mae Rowe lived on Paces Ferry Road, a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia, and welcomed visitors to her "Playhouse," which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures and hundreds of drawings. Rowe created her first works as a child in rural Fayetteville, Georgia, but only found the time and space to reclaim her artistic practice in the late 1960s, following the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employer. This book offers an unprecedented view of how Rowe culti...
An account of the life and work of a once-famous self-taught American artist of the 1940s, and a study of how artists go missing from public memory. The exhibition “Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered” at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, curated by the author and developed as an extension of the book, is on view from September 22, 2022 to January 27, 2023. A garment worker and slipper manufacturer with no training in art, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Against all odds, his wildly stylized paintings of female figures, often nude, animals, and landscapes became internationally known in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the French surre...
'A goldmine of surprising insights. Makes you smarter with every page' - James Clear, author of Atomic Habits The essential guide to improving your performance, and a powerful argument for how to succeed in any field: develop broad interests and skills while everyone around you is rushing to specialize. The instant Sunday Times bestseller From the ‘10,000 hours rule’ to the power of tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization and many hours of deliberate practice. If you only dabble or delay, you'll never catch up with those who got a head start. This is completely wrong. In this landmark book, David Epstein shows you that the way to succe...
American Workman presents a comprehensive, novel reassessment of the life and work of one of America’s most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. With a full account of Kane’s life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and around Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century, the authors explore how these occupations shaped his development as an artist and his breakthrough success in the modern art world. A rough-and-tumble blue-collar man prone to brawling and drinking, Kane also sought out beauty in the industrial world he inhabited. This Kane paradox—brawny and tough, sensitive and creative—was at the heart of ...