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Artist-explorer John Mix Stanley (1814–1872), one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the American West in his time, was in a sense a victim of his own success. So highly regarded was his work that more than two hundred of his paintings were held at the Smithsonian Institution—where in 1865 a fire destroyed all but seven of them. This volume, featuring a comprehensive collection of Stanley’s extant art, reproduced in full color, offers an opportunity—and ample reason—to rediscover the remarkable accomplishments of this outsize figure of nineteenth-century American culture. Originally from New York State, Stanley journeyed west in 1842 to paint Indian life. During the U.S.-Mexican...
Daniel Patterson and Eric Russell present a groundbreaking case for considering John James Audubon's and John Bachman's quadruped essays as worthy of literary analysis and redefine the role of Bachman, the perpetually overlooked coauthor of the essays. After completing The Birds of America (1826-38), Audubon began developing his work on the mammals. The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America volumes show an antebellum view of nature as fundamentally dynamic and simultaneously grotesque and awe-inspiring. The quadruped essays are rich with good stories about these mammals and the humans who observe, pursue, and admire them. For help with the science and the essays, Audubon enlisted the Revere...
Ornately decorated objects created by Dakota women -- cradleboards, clothing, animal skin containers -- served more than a utilitarian function. They tell the story of colonization, genocide, and survival. Colette Hyman traces the changes in the lives of Dakota women, starting before the arrival of whites and covering the fur trade years, the years of treaties and shrinking lands, the brutal time of removal, starvation, and shattered families after 1862, and then the transition to reservation life, when missionaries and government agents worked to turn the Dakota into Christian farmers. The decorative work of Dakota women reflected all of this: native organic dyes and quillwork gave way to beading and needlework, items traditionally decorated for family gifts were also produced to sell to tourists and white collectors, work on cradleboards and animal skin bags shifted to the ornamenting of hymnals and the creation of star quilts.
The definitive retrospective on Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874-1960), one of the founders of the Taos Society of Artists and perhaps the most accomplished of all the painters associated with that organization. Reproducing masterworks from a new exhibit along with additional works and historical photographs, this volume forms the most comprehensive assemblage of his paintings ever published.
For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict—sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families—enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments. In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth c...
When the Blackfoot Indians were confined to reservations in the late nineteenth century, their pictographic representations of warfare kept alive the rituals associated with war, which were essential facets of Blackfoot culture. Their war ethic served as a unifying force among the four tribes of the Blackfoot nation—Siksika, Blood, and North and South Piegan. In this visually stunning survey, L. James Dempsey, a member of the Blood tribe, plumbs the breadth and depth of warrior representational art. He has mined archival resources and museum collections and interviewed many tribal members to provide a uniquely Native perspective on the importance of warrior art in Blackfoot history and cul...
For nearly half a century, celebrated historian Ron Tyler has researched, interpreted, and exhibited western American art. This splendid volume, gleaned from Tyler’s extensive career of connoisseurship, brings together eight of the author’s most notable essays, reworked especially for this volume. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 images, Western Art, Western History tells the stories of key artists, both famous and obscure, whose provocative pictures document the people and places of the nineteenth-century American West. The artists depicted in these pages represent a variety of personalities and artistic styles. According to Tyler, each of them responded in unique ways to the ...
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