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“Creative Composites provides an intelligent, rigorous account of several under-examined figures who gathered around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and played important roles in the first American avant-garde. Drawing on rich archival sources, Lauren Kroiz revisits the cultural debates of the period and constructs an intricate and convincing comparative analysis of the role that gender, race and ethnicity, and cultural nationalism played in the construction of American modernism. This important historical and interpretive text represents a much-needed contribution not only to the history of American art but also to American social and cultural history.”—Marcia Brennan, author of Cur...
The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided...
"Cultivating Citizens rethinks the aesthetics and politics of regionalism in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. During this period, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America's midwestern heartland. Others deemed Regionalist painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism, chauvinism, and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens shifts the terms of this ongoing debate over subject matter and style by considering heretofore neglected Regionalist programs of art education and concepts of artistic labor."--Provided by publisher.
Breaking the Bronze Ceiling uncovers a glaring omission in our global memorial landscape—the conspicuous absence of women. Exploring this neglected narrative, the book emerges as the foremost guide to women's memorialization across diverse cultures and ages. As global memorials come under intense examination, with metropolises vying for a more inclusive recognition of female contributions, this book stands at the forefront of contemporary discussion. The book’s thought-provoking essays artfully traverse the complex terrains of gender portrayal, urban tales, ancestral practices, and grassroots activism—all anchored in the bedrock of cultural remembrance. Rich in the range of cases discu...
In Politics Unseen, Ellen Macfarlane radically reframes the "pure photographs" of California art photography society Group f.64, known for depicting Western landscapes, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and faces. By foregrounding f.64 members' and their prints' alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, the book shatters entrenched understandings of the group as disinterested in contemporary events and unseats conceptions of its prints as icons of modernist purity. Instead, Politics Unseen argues the politics of f.64's photographs become visible when interwar ideas about "purity" in the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately, Politics Unseen alters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.
Introduction : "Within a few steps of the spot" : art in an age of racial capitalism -- Grasping images : antislavery and the sculptural -- "The mute language of the marble" : slavery and Hiram Powers' Greek slave -- Sentiment, manufactured : John Bell and the abolitionist image under empire -- Relief work : Edmonia Lewis and the poetics of plaster -- Between liberty and emancipation : Francesco Pezzicar's The Abolition of slavery -- Coda : "Sculptured dream of liberty".
"Cézanne, Murder and Modern Life changes the way we think about—and see—Cézanne’s entire oeuvre. Dombrowski’s arguments are convincing and bold, especially on the theme of murder as a vehicle for representation. Modern Olympia has never before been so satisfactorily analyzed." Susan Sidlauskus, Rutgers University, author of Cezanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense “Exciting and intelligent, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life will be important for modernists, and essential for scholars of Cézanne, early Impressionism, and painting in the 1860s. Dombrowski shows us a Cézanne we did not know.” Nancy Locke, author of Manet and the Family Romance
Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko's photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin's Soviet Union Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova revises the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) was a highly versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism's founders. His photographic work between 1928, when Stalin rose to power, and the late 1930s reveals a wide-ranging search for a different pictorial language in the context of the extreme tran...
Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over ...
In modern Syria, a contested territory at the intersection of differing regimes of political representation, artists ventured to develop strikingly new kinds of painting to link their images to life forces and agitated energies. Examining the works of artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres, Beautiful Agitation explores how painters in Syria activated the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world. Drawing on archival materials in Syria and beyond, Anneka Lenssen reveals new trajectories of painterly practice in a twentieth century defined by shifting media technologies, moving populations, and the imposition of violently enforced nation-state borders. The result is a study of Arab modernism that foregrounds rather than occludes efforts to agitate against imposed identities and intersubjective relations.