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The Newberry Seminar in American Art
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2010-2011 Call for Papers |
Elbridge Burbank, Edward Everett Ayer, 1897, oil on canvas 25 x 32 in. The Newberry Library. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
October 16, 2009
Performing Progress as Art and History at the Pageant of Illinois (1909)
Annelise K. Madsen, Stanford University
At Northwestern University in 1909, hundreds of area residents staged a theatrical performance called a pageant, enacting a history of the state through episodes that combined fine art, drama, dancing, and costuming. This paper examines the Pageant of Illinois to show how civic artists became Progressive reformers. Pageant leaders shaped contemporary debates on citizenship, Americanism, and education through monumental pictures of a local, shared past. While pageant participants vitalized a narrative of white male triumph, they also disrupted this official vision through their playacting. Focusing on the pageant’s visual culture, I recover how Evanston’s communities negotiated Progressivism in aesthetic terms.
"Founder's Statues, Indian Wars, and Contested Public Spaces: Augustus Saint-Gaudens's The Puritan and Anger's Memory in Springfield, Massachusetts." Dedicated in 1887 in Springfield, Massachusetts, The Puritan is an oversized bronze statue of a stern and even menacing figure clutching a huge Bible. Commissioned as a memorial to Deacon Samuel Chapin (1595-1675), one of Springfield's founding fathers, The Puritan was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and erected in a small urban park. In 1899, however, after repeated instances of vandalism, the statue was moved "uphill" to Springfield's cultural quadrangle. Contextualizing The Puritan's public reception, this paper further examines Saint-Gaudens's sense of the moralizing contradictions and devastating consequences of American historical memory, and the similarly conflicted circumstances of his personal life.
Erika Doss, University of Notre Dame
Commentator: Sarah Burns, Indiana University
December 4, 2009
Disentanglement: Baroque Furniture and the Self
Ethan W. Lasser, The Chipstone Foundation
An unusual group of small-scale side chairs rose to the height of fashion in Boston and London around 1700. Feather-light, with stick-like turned or sawn legs that appear to be placed under rather anchored into the seat, the chairs were notoriously weak, and prone to rock and wobble under the sitter.
Past scholars have considered the connections between the chairs and the broader histories of labor and consumerism. My essay proposes that the objects are closely connected to a set of broader philosophical debates about the relationship between people and things. The chairs show that objects could cultivate a sense of differentiation—a sense that the self was set apart from things—as effectively as any text.
Reconsidering a Familiar Face: John Singeton Copley's Portrait of Paul Revere
Rebecca Zurier, University of Michigan
Copley’s Paul Revere (1768) gazes out from so many history textbooks that we have trouble seeing it as a constructed work of art. It has become a national icon because of the apparent “directness” seen in its democratic subject--an artisan at work--its straightforward presentation, its compellingly realist technique. Yet a closer examination brings these supposedly American characteristics into question. Reconsidering Paul Revere provides an opportunity to rethink the fiction of realism and the construction of national identity.
Commentator: Jennifer Way, University of North Texas
February 26, 2010
Adolphus Busch's Lager Landscape
Paula Lupkin, Washington University St. Louis
At the turn of the twentieth century brewer Adolphus Busch built an industrial empire on his famous lager beer: Budweiser. Its center was the mammoth redbrick brewery on the south side of St. Louis but its boundaries encompassed a wider web of industrial, commercial, and recreational spaces: railroads, depots, hotels, office buildings, saloons, and amusement parks. Built, owned, or controlled by Busch, these elements map the dynamic spatial and architectural relationship between industry and ethnic culture, and between production and consumption at the turn of the twentieth century. This paper presents Busch’s lager landscape as a complex architectural phenomenon designed to promote and legitimize the consumption of beer in the years before Prohibition.
Burlesquing the Beast: William Holbrook Beard and the Museum Movement
Jennifer Greenhill, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In 1869, the humorous animal painter William Holbrook Beard attempted to revise his reputation for jocularity by designing a mammoth sculptural complex, which he hoped would be built beneath Central Park. These underground galleries would have linked the park and the art museum New Yorkers planned to build above ground, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Beard’s scheme never made it past the planning phase. This chapter considers what kind of intervention Beard’s complex would have made in an art world developing its first monumental public museums. What would it have said about those institutions? And where, in relation to these edifices, would it have situated Beard’s humorous aesthetic?
Commentator: Sarah Dreller, University of Illinois at Chicago
March 26, 2010
Matters of Style: Art and Fidelity in Wood Engraving in Postbellum America
Stephen P. Rice, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Wood engraving—which was the chief means for illustrating books and periodicals through most of the nineteenth century—has received increased attention in recent years with the rise of visual culture studies. Yet studies of wood engraving generally concentrate on the treatment of subject and lack the attention to style that is often given to other visual forms. This paper, which focuses on the rise of the so-called “new school” of wood engraving and on the work of Timothy Cole and Elbridge Kingsley, considers how matters of style were of great importance to American commercial wood engravers in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and it suggests how stylistic changes may have addressed broader social concerns.
Equipment in the Picture: Looking at Political Image-Making
Elisabeth Ross, Northwestern University
American press photographs increasingly include cameras, microphones, screens and other equipment in the picture, which suggests that the hunting and capturing of images is itself a subject of the media and public culture. This paper examines the trope of showing equipment in the picture, focusing on press coverage of presidential politics, but also looking at equipment images in popular culture texts. Showing equipment in the picture does significant work in fracturing the boundaries of production and circulation of press images. The presence of cameras and other instruments within the frame suggests highly mediated looking at public events, and this visual layering raises new questions as we examine the storytelling practices of American political culture.
Commentator: Peter John Brownlee, Terra Foundation For American Art
For more information about this seminar, please contact one of the coordinators: Sarah Burns (burnss@indiana.edu), Diane Dillon (dillond@newberry.org), and Gregory Foster-Rice (gfoster-rice@colum.edu).
We will pre-circulate papers to those planning to attend. If you cannot attend and want to read a paper, please contact the author directly. E-mail scholl[at]newberry.org,or call (312) 255-3524 to receive a copy of the paper. Papers are available for request two weeks prior to the seminar date. Please include your e-mail address in all correspondence.
The seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essays in advance, and that all those requesting the paper will attend the seminar. Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend. We encourage faculty members to call the seminar to the attention of graduate students.