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"Art and society-United States"
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Citizen Spectator
In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration
of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion
investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual
deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their
understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity
between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale
family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other
Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered
in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art
exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, \"Invisible
Ladies,\" and other spectacles of deception.
Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art
and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions
doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary
culture troubled by the social and political consequences of
deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting
illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science,
print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator
demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to
cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the
equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its
changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between
early American art, culture, and citizenship.
eBook
Entitled : discriminating tastes and the expansion of the arts
\"This book examines the process by which the American arts expanded, over the course of more than a century, to include not just \"classical\" arts like opera and portraiture, but forms of folk, vernacular, and popular culture\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Things American
American art museums of the Gilded Age were established as civic institutions intended to provide civilizing influences to an urban public, but the parochial worldview of their founders limited their democratic potential. Instead, critics have derided nineteenth-century museums as temples of spiritual uplift far removed from the daily experiences and concerns of common people. But in the early twentieth century, a new generation of cultural leaders revolutionized ideas about art institutions by insisting that their collections and galleries serve the general public.
Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Eratells the story of the civic reformers and arts professionals who brought museums from the realm of exclusivity into the progressive fold of libraries, schools, and settlement houses. Jeffrey Trask's history focuses on New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which stood at the center of this movement to preserve artifacts from the American past for social change and Americanization. Metropolitan trustee Robert de Forest and pioneering museum professional Henry Watson Kent influenced a wide network of fellow reformers and cultural institutions. Drawing on the teachings of John Dewey and close study of museum developments in Germany and Great Britain, they expanded audiences, changed access policies, and broadened the scope of what museums collect and display. They believed that tasteful urban and domestic environments contributed to good citizenship and recognized the economic advantages of improving American industrial production through design education. Trask follows the influence of these people and ideas through the 1920s and 1930s as the Met opened its innovative American Wing while simultaneously promoting modern industrial art.
Things Americanis not only the first critical history of the Metropolitan Museum. The book also places museums in the context of the cultural politics of the progressive movement-illustrating the limits of progressive ideas of democratic reform as well as the boldness of vision about cultural capital promoted by museums and other cultural institutions.
eBook
Teachable monuments : using public art to spark dialogue and confront controversy
\"Monuments around the country have become the focus of intense and sustained discussions, activism, vandalism, and removal. Since the convulsive events of 2015 and 2017, during which white supremacists committed violence in the shadow of Confederate symbols, and the 2020 nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, protestors and politicians across the country have removed Confederate monuments, as well as monuments to historical figures like Christopher Columbus and Dr. J. Marion Sims, questioning their legitimacy as present-day heroes that their place in the public sphere reinforces. The essays included in this anthology offer guidelines and case studies tailored for students and teachers to demonstrate how monuments can be used to deepen civic and historical engagement and social dialogue. Essays analyze specific controversies throughout North America with various outcomes as well as examples of monuments that convey outdated or unwelcome value systems without prompting debate\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Antitheatricality and the Body Public
Situating the theater as a site of broad cultural movements and conflicts, Lisa A. Freeman asserts that antitheatrical incidents from the English Renaissance to present-day America provide us with occasions to trace major struggles over the nature and balance of power and political authority. In studies of William Prynne's Histrio-mastix (1633), Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), John Home's Douglas (1757), the burning of the theater at Richmond (1811), and the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998) Freeman engages in a careful examination of the political, religious, philosophical, literary, and dramatic contexts in which challenges to theatricality unfold. In so doing, she demonstrates that however differently \"the public\" might be defined in each epoch, what lies at the heart of antitheatrical disputes is a struggle over the character of the body politic that governs a nation and the bodies public that could be said to represent that nation.By situating antitheatrical incidents as rich and interpretable cultural performances, Freeman seeks to account fully for the significance of these particular historical conflicts. She delineates when, why, and how anxieties about representation manifest themselves, and traces the actual politics that govern such ostensibly aesthetic and moral debates even today.
eBook
Not Native American Art
The faking of Native American art objects has proliferated as
their commercial value has increased, but even a century ago
experts were warning that the faking of objects ranging from
catlinite pipes to Chumash sculpture was rampant. Through a series
of historical and contemporary case studies, Janet Catherine Berlo
engages with troubling and sometimes confusing categories of
inauthenticity.
Based on decades of research as well as interviews with
curators, collectors, restorers, replica makers, reenactors, and
Native artists and cultural specialists, Not Native American Art
examines the historical and social contexts within which people
make replicas and fakes or even invent new objects that then become
\"traditional.\" Berlo follows the unexpected trajectories of such
objects, including Northwest Coast carvings, \"Navajo\" rugs made in
Mexico, Zuni mask replicas, Lakota-style quillwork, and Mimbres
bowl forgeries. With engaging anecdotes, the book offers a rich and
nuanced understanding of a surprisingly wide range of practices
that makers have used to produce objects that are \"not Native
American art.\"
eBook
The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art
The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices-from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments-often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the \"whole.\" Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of \"form\" that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.
eBook