American ArtPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1086/725901
Lee Ann Custer
{"title":"The Clean, Open Air of John Sloan’s Tenement Paintings","authors":"Lee Ann Custer","doi":"10.1086/725901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725901","url":null,"abstract":"In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York, open-air spaces between or above buildings became contested zones. Motivated by concerns about public health, Progressive Era reformers advocated for legislation that preserved and, in some cases, created these spaces. This objectification marked these spaces as newly valuable: they provided access to salutary sunlight and fresh air, and became central to the reformers’ vision for a cleaner, more spacious, and ultimately whiter city. The Ashcan artist John Sloan frequently depicted these spaces and the labor and leisure that they fostered. Drawing on urban and environmental history, this article returns to the original locations of Sloan’s scenes, unpacking the gendered, classed, and racialized experiences of urban air that were encoded but not always overtly pictured. By rendering the environment bright, airy, and relatively decongested, Sloan’s art reified the reformers’ aims, presenting the city scrubbed of sights—and people—he did not wish to see.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":"37 1","pages":"28 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47407430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American ArtPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1086/725900
M. Coffey
{"title":"Feeling Brown or Acting White?","authors":"M. Coffey","doi":"10.1086/725900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725900","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay I undertake a speculative reading of two lithographic prints made by the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco during his second and longest stay in the United States, between 1928 and 1934. The first and last prints he made during this sojourn both represent spectacles of performance and pain associated with the public life of Blackness. Using affect theory to read the formal and iconographic cues in these prints, I suggest that they reflect the artist’s complex relation with the U.S.-American “color line.” Rather than assuming Orozco’s images reflect a White subject position, I explore the ways they intimate what the performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz theorized as a “sense of brown.”","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":"37 1","pages":"2 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44376387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American ArtPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1086/724507
Sophie Cras
{"title":"Donald Evans","authors":"Sophie Cras","doi":"10.1086/724507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724507","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to recover the work of American artist Donald Evans (1945–1977), who operated on the fringes of conceptual art. Evans created postage stamps for imaginary nations, which he collected in his Catalogue of the World. Evans’s system of images, painstakingly drawn on paper and painted with watercolors, references the decolonizing world of the 1960s–70s. Through fictional countries like the “Oriental” state of Adjudani, or the former colonies of Katibo and Amis et Amants, the artist captured the volatile international scene of his day, torn by the violent forces of colonial heritage. Painting and cataloging went hand in hand in his project, which attempted—not always successfully—to arouse critical thinking about domination through images, the structuration of different worldviews, and the predatory dimension of cataloging.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":"37 1","pages":"126 - 143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43950148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American ArtPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1086/724508
Mary Shelley Trent
{"title":"Visualizing Freedom","authors":"Mary Shelley Trent","doi":"10.1086/724508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724508","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is the first study of the formerly enslaved woman Ellen Craft’s nineteenth-century photograph album and its contents, and the first study linking Craft’s album to one owned by another nineteenth-century African American woman, Arabella Chapman. Examining Craft’s album and its connections offers an opportunity to consider how African American women employed domestic photograph albums to record their experience of freedom. Past scholarship on photographs of famous formerly enslaved men and women has emphasized how these “self-made” individuals used photography to assert their autonomy in freedom. And, Craft herself participated in this convention when posing for her famous portrait disguised as the White man “William Johnson,” whose identity she passed through in order to obtain her freedom. Yet, this scholarship has not yet engaged the issue of family in photographs of the famous formerly enslaved. My study introduces Craft’s album as visualizing freedom differently through the linkage of photographs of family and friends across pages and under an album’s tight bindings. The book joins photographs together as material representations of Black familial and community bonds that had faced ever-present threats of violation and rupture under slavery. It visualizes freedom not so much in autonomous identity, but via cultivated connections between family and friends in respectable domestic space. Today, the mnemonic notations, fingerprints and smudges on its pages from the hands of four generations of female descendants after Craft reveal the album’s long legacy of preserving affirmative, embodied memories of attachment amongst African American women.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":"37 1","pages":"58 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48059529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American ArtPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1086/724505
Camara Dia Holloway
{"title":"Dark Stars","authors":"Camara Dia Holloway","doi":"10.1086/724505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724505","url":null,"abstract":"Carl Van Vechten created a set of portraits of African American entertainers who knew each other through an interracial New York—London circuit during the interwar period. Less studied than the New York—Paris axis, this network offers rich insights for those interested in this important moment in modernist and African American cultural histories. Best known for the controversial racial views promulgated in his infamous novel Nigger Heaven (1926), Van Vechten, in his photographic practice, reveals a different approach to race. An analysis of his photographs reveals that he and this cohort refashioned Blackness in their own terms. Blackness was displaced to expressive shadow, becoming a malleable sign divorced from the body that allowed them to negotiate racial identities that were distinguished from inherited stereotypes. The acknowledgment that race was a social construct opened up new possibilities for living unfettered by traditional constraints on African American lives.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":"37 1","pages":"2 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45460662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American ArtPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1086/724509
S. Parsons
{"title":"Domesticating Jefferson Davis","authors":"S. Parsons","doi":"10.1086/724509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724509","url":null,"abstract":"Days after his release from prison in 1867, Jefferson Davis arrived in Montreal with his wife, Varina, to join their children and extended family. Soon after, the Davis clan presented themselves to William Notman, Canada’s foremost photographer. The resulting portraits deftly reframed the failed leader as a dedicated family man and sought sympathy and kinship through his children. This article examines the production and circulation of Notman’s images of the Davis family to flesh out the visual history of the Lost Cause. I argue that the project of historical revisionism began much sooner than commonly assumed and relied on the most innocuous of forms, family photographs. The portraits encapsulate a vision of the family that Varina had been actively cultivating and point toward the role of women in leveraging the political power of family photography. From a contemporary perspective, these portraits also disrupt Canada’s progressive self-presentation in the context of U.S. slavery and direct attention to the continental imprint of White supremacy.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":"37 1","pages":"82 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47744633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American ArtPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1086/724506
Davida Fernández-Barkan
{"title":"Of Murals and Men","authors":"Davida Fernández-Barkan","doi":"10.1086/724506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724506","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decade, scholars have contributed to a growing body of work interrogating the carceral system in the United States and its role in the maintenance of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Nicole R. Fleetwood’s theory of “carceral aesthetics” allows this scholarship to be applied to the history and criticism of works of art. Using Fleetwood’s ideas as a point of departure, this article examines the context, preparatory work, and archival legacy Ben Shahn’s plans for a mural cycle at the new jail on Rikers Island (ca. 1935), which were never executed. The Municipal Art Commission responsible for the rejection of his sketches claimed that it had done so based on the “bad psychological effect” that the murals might have on the men incarcerated there. Shahn and his collaborator, Lou Block, contested this claim. This reassessment of the project argues that concerns about psychological appropriateness were merited and that the murals would have participated in the ideology that has ultimately turned Rikers Island into the notoriously inhumane institution it is today.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":"37 1","pages":"32 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45960499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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