Augusta Savage intended to build monuments. In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Harlem-based sculptor envisioned memorials to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the vaudeville star Florence Mills, the World War I service of the “Harlem Hellfighters,” and the writer and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson. None of these proposed works was erected, and they have not been included in scholarship examining Savage’s work and career. This essay considers Savage’s thwarted efforts as critical reminders that material absence does not connote a lack of vision, intention, or labor. I argue that Savage’s unbuilt monuments reveal her ambition to intervene in the Whiteness and maleness of the American memorial landscape and claim monuments as sites where Black lives and concerns can be represented. Engaging critical approaches to archival absence and the power of monuments, I explore the space these unbuilt monuments would have taken up in the world.
{"title":"Monumental Absence","authors":"Tess Korobkin","doi":"10.1086/727549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727549","url":null,"abstract":"Augusta Savage intended to build monuments. In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Harlem-based sculptor envisioned memorials to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the vaudeville star Florence Mills, the World War I service of the “Harlem Hellfighters,” and the writer and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson. None of these proposed works was erected, and they have not been included in scholarship examining Savage’s work and career. This essay considers Savage’s thwarted efforts as critical reminders that material absence does not connote a lack of vision, intention, or labor. I argue that Savage’s unbuilt monuments reveal her ambition to intervene in the Whiteness and maleness of the American memorial landscape and claim monuments as sites where Black lives and concerns can be represented. Engaging critical approaches to archival absence and the power of monuments, I explore the space these unbuilt monuments would have taken up in the world.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139346184","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}
The “Seattle Pole” is a Taantʼa ḵwáan G̱aanax̱.ádi Tlingit totem pole that Seattle businessmen stole from Alaska in 1899 and that still stands in replica in Seattleʼs Pioneer Square today. Although the history of its heist is well-known on the Northwest Coast, the efforts of Indigenous people to reclaim it are not well-documented. This essay considers a little-known newspaper statement of a Tlingit woman named Anisa̱lag̱a (Mary Ebbets Hunt) who claimed the pole based on Tlingit copyright law for at.óow and other crest objects. In Tlingit culture, the commissioning clan (and not the artist) has the right to display and commission at.óow and tell their associated stories. The paper considers Tlingit copyright law in relationship to Western patrilineal inheritance laws that Tlingit people like Anisa̱lag̱a had to negotiate in seeking settlement for the theft of clan at.óow.
{"title":"Anisa̱lag̱a’s Claim to the “Seattle Pole”","authors":"Emily L. Moore","doi":"10.1086/727542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727542","url":null,"abstract":"The “Seattle Pole” is a Taantʼa ḵwáan G̱aanax̱.ádi Tlingit totem pole that Seattle businessmen stole from Alaska in 1899 and that still stands in replica in Seattleʼs Pioneer Square today. Although the history of its heist is well-known on the Northwest Coast, the efforts of Indigenous people to reclaim it are not well-documented. This essay considers a little-known newspaper statement of a Tlingit woman named Anisa̱lag̱a (Mary Ebbets Hunt) who claimed the pole based on Tlingit copyright law for at.óow and other crest objects. In Tlingit culture, the commissioning clan (and not the artist) has the right to display and commission at.óow and tell their associated stories. The paper considers Tlingit copyright law in relationship to Western patrilineal inheritance laws that Tlingit people like Anisa̱lag̱a had to negotiate in seeking settlement for the theft of clan at.óow.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343590","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}
This article offers the first sustained exploration of a group of transfer drawings made by Robert Rauschenberg in 1958, a crucial moment in the artist’s long and influential career. The discussion is grounded in the discovery of Rauschenberg’s newspaper source material, which points to striking yet undisclosed patterns of reference within the works, enabling new interpretations and richer forms of connection to the historical moment of their production. Perhaps more important, they also reveal a striking temporal compression: in one drawing, for example, every transfer was made from newspapers published on a single day. This aligns the drawings not just with the legible content of the newspaper but also with its temporal logic. The article explores Rauschenberg’s embrace of contingency, his appeal to and subversion of reading habits proper to the papers, and the role of intermittence and fragmentation in the work, alongside his motivated engagement with specific political themes.
{"title":"Drawing in the Daily News","authors":"Ed Krčma","doi":"10.1086/727551","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727551","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers the first sustained exploration of a group of transfer drawings made by Robert Rauschenberg in 1958, a crucial moment in the artist’s long and influential career. The discussion is grounded in the discovery of Rauschenberg’s newspaper source material, which points to striking yet undisclosed patterns of reference within the works, enabling new interpretations and richer forms of connection to the historical moment of their production. Perhaps more important, they also reveal a striking temporal compression: in one drawing, for example, every transfer was made from newspapers published on a single day. This aligns the drawings not just with the legible content of the newspaper but also with its temporal logic. The article explores Rauschenberg’s embrace of contingency, his appeal to and subversion of reading habits proper to the papers, and the role of intermittence and fragmentation in the work, alongside his motivated engagement with specific political themes.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139346360","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}
This article examines how statutory copyright protection initially proved a doubled-edged sword for painters in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the 1870 Copyright Act granted them greater control over the reproduction of their work, an advantageous economic privilege. However, it also subjected paintings to a range of rules that threatened the visual integrity and status of their work. Chief among these was the notification requirement, which obliged artists to inscribe their works with a standard notice that included the name of the rights holder and the date (e.g., “Copyright 2023 Katherine Mintie”). Through an examination of cases regarding the applicability of the notification requirement to paintings, this article shows how the law came to accommodate the growing appreciation, both cultural and economic, of paintings in the early twentieth century and contributed to attitudes about cultural hierarchies that persist to this day.
{"title":"Copyright and Creative Practice","authors":"A. Goodyear","doi":"10.1086/727545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727545","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how statutory copyright protection initially proved a doubled-edged sword for painters in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the 1870 Copyright Act granted them greater control over the reproduction of their work, an advantageous economic privilege. However, it also subjected paintings to a range of rules that threatened the visual integrity and status of their work. Chief among these was the notification requirement, which obliged artists to inscribe their works with a standard notice that included the name of the rights holder and the date (e.g., “Copyright 2023 Katherine Mintie”). Through an examination of cases regarding the applicability of the notification requirement to paintings, this article shows how the law came to accommodate the growing appreciation, both cultural and economic, of paintings in the early twentieth century and contributed to attitudes about cultural hierarchies that persist to this day.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139344493","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}
Nationwide media coverage of the massive cut glass bowl gifted to President McKinley in 1898 extended the vessel’s audience from one man to the masses. In this essay, I show how the artifact and its fanfare offered a political service and, perhaps, disservice to the politician’s public image, especially as it pertained to his advocacy for laborers like those foregrounded in many reports of the bowl. Though not commissioned by McKinley or his administration, the bowl celebrated the president as a defender of American industries, like glassmaking, through protective tariffs. Accounts of the gifting and other primary sources support this interpretation. But the bowl could also undercut McKinley’s posturing as the “full dinner pail” candidate for workers in the wake of the 1893 depression. This interpretation requires a more speculative approach attentive to how the object’s materiality intersected with wider discourses around the president, luxury, and labor during the period.
{"title":"The McKinley Bowl’s Services and Disservices, 1898–1901","authors":"Joseph H. Larnerd","doi":"10.1086/725904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725904","url":null,"abstract":"Nationwide media coverage of the massive cut glass bowl gifted to President McKinley in 1898 extended the vessel’s audience from one man to the masses. In this essay, I show how the artifact and its fanfare offered a political service and, perhaps, disservice to the politician’s public image, especially as it pertained to his advocacy for laborers like those foregrounded in many reports of the bowl. Though not commissioned by McKinley or his administration, the bowl celebrated the president as a defender of American industries, like glassmaking, through protective tariffs. Accounts of the gifting and other primary sources support this interpretation. But the bowl could also undercut McKinley’s posturing as the “full dinner pail” candidate for workers in the wake of the 1893 depression. This interpretation requires a more speculative approach attentive to how the object’s materiality intersected with wider discourses around the president, luxury, and labor during the period.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43272666","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}
This essay examines the video work UNKNOWN BORICUA STREAMING: A Nuyorican State of Mind (2011) by the Brooklyn-born Nuyorican artist Juan Sánchez. The video is a digital collage that incorporates photographs of Puerto Rican migrants reposited in the archive of the Migration Division at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños), along with materials mined from Sánchez’s own archive. The images are set against a flickering, multicolored grid and accompanied by a transnational soundtrack of musical and vocal clips. Given Sánchez’s fracturing of the grid, I interpret the video as a counter-archive that interrogates his community’s encounter, both stateside and in Puerto Rico, with U.S. neocolonialism. Moreover, as a Black “AmeRícan” (a concept borrowed from poet Tato Laviera), Sánchez’s collage renders visible how his community’s struggle is inexorably connected to other civil rights struggles in the United States, and to global human rights movements.
{"title":"Juan Sánchez’s Counter-Archive","authors":"A. Zavala","doi":"10.1086/725902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725902","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the video work UNKNOWN BORICUA STREAMING: A Nuyorican State of Mind (2011) by the Brooklyn-born Nuyorican artist Juan Sánchez. The video is a digital collage that incorporates photographs of Puerto Rican migrants reposited in the archive of the Migration Division at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños), along with materials mined from Sánchez’s own archive. The images are set against a flickering, multicolored grid and accompanied by a transnational soundtrack of musical and vocal clips. Given Sánchez’s fracturing of the grid, I interpret the video as a counter-archive that interrogates his community’s encounter, both stateside and in Puerto Rico, with U.S. neocolonialism. Moreover, as a Black “AmeRícan” (a concept borrowed from poet Tato Laviera), Sánchez’s collage renders visible how his community’s struggle is inexorably connected to other civil rights struggles in the United States, and to global human rights movements.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47842806","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}
The Hodinöhsö:ni’ Sky World is the realm that gave life to Turtle Island (North America). In contrast, the holy sky exalting U.S.-American landscape art suggests a land created for White settlers. This essay pursues several artists whose engagements with skies provide insights into how worldviews rooted in land shape Indigenous and settler perception: Caroline Parker (Tonawanda Seneca), Shelley Niro (Bay of Quinte Mohawk), Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians), and Alfred Stieglitz. Where a sense of entitlement to Indigenous land guides settlers’ interpretation of the visual world, Hodinöhsö:ni’ women’s visual sovereignty supplies decolonial perceptual alternatives to colonial vision. I also consider the implications of this approach to the study of American art. By discerning the role non-Indigenous American arts play in naturalizing the ongoing theft of land, together with recognizing the unbroken legitimacy of Indigenous Title informing Native artworks, arts discourses might contribute to (re)imagining U.S.-American space as Indigenous space.
{"title":"Indigenous Space","authors":"J. Reznick","doi":"10.1086/725903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725903","url":null,"abstract":"The Hodinöhsö:ni’ Sky World is the realm that gave life to Turtle Island (North America). In contrast, the holy sky exalting U.S.-American landscape art suggests a land created for White settlers. This essay pursues several artists whose engagements with skies provide insights into how worldviews rooted in land shape Indigenous and settler perception: Caroline Parker (Tonawanda Seneca), Shelley Niro (Bay of Quinte Mohawk), Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians), and Alfred Stieglitz. Where a sense of entitlement to Indigenous land guides settlers’ interpretation of the visual world, Hodinöhsö:ni’ women’s visual sovereignty supplies decolonial perceptual alternatives to colonial vision. I also consider the implications of this approach to the study of American art. By discerning the role non-Indigenous American arts play in naturalizing the ongoing theft of land, together with recognizing the unbroken legitimacy of Indigenous Title informing Native artworks, arts discourses might contribute to (re)imagining U.S.-American space as Indigenous space.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41956832","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}
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.
{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
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