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.
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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.”
{"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}
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.
本文旨在恢复美国艺术家唐纳德·埃文斯（1945–1977）的作品，他在概念艺术的边缘运作。埃文斯为想象中的国家创作了邮票，并将其收藏在《世界目录》中。埃文斯的图像系统是在纸上精心绘制并用水彩绘制的，参考了20世纪60年代至70年代的非殖民化世界。通过虚构的国家，如“东方”的阿季达尼州，或卡蒂博和Amis et Amants的前殖民地，这位艺术家捕捉到了他那个时代动荡的国际场景，被殖民遗产的暴力力量撕裂。绘画和编目在他的项目中是齐头并进的，该项目试图——但并不总是成功——通过图像、不同世界观的结构和编目的掠夺性维度来唤起对统治的批判性思考。
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
在过去的十年里，学者们对美国的拘留制度及其在维持定居者殖民主义和种族资本主义中的作用进行了越来越多的研究。Nicole R. Fleetwood的“carceral aesthetics”理论使这种学术研究得以应用于艺术作品的历史和批评。本文以Fleetwood的想法为出发点，考察了Ben Shahn在Rikers岛新监狱(约1935年)的壁画循环计划的背景、准备工作和档案遗产，该计划从未执行。负责拒绝他的素描的市艺术委员会声称，他们这么做是基于这些壁画可能对监禁在那里的人产生“不良心理影响”。Shahn和他的合作者Lou Block对这一说法提出了质疑。对该项目的重新评估认为，对心理适宜性的担忧是值得的，壁画可能会参与意识形态，最终将赖克斯岛变成今天臭名昭着的不人道机构。
{"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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