Emerging Scholars Symposium: “Rethinking America: Contemporary Contemplations on American Art”

The 2023 Emerging Scholars Symposium will showcase research by current graduate students and other emerging scholars related to themes of rethinking and reimagining the history of Euro-American, Native American and African American art and material culture through new perspectives. The symposium accompanies the exhibition “Object Lessons in American Art: Selections from the Princeton University Art Museum,” on view February 4 – May 14, 2023, at the Georgia Museum of Art. “Object Lessons” features four centuries of objects from the Princeton University Museum that challenge and explore the traditions and perspectives of American history, society, art and culture. This symposium is presented in partnership with UGA’s Association of Graduate Art Students.

Schedule

Thursday, March 23, 2023, 5:30 p.m.

Keynote Lecture: Nika Elder: “Early American Portraiture and the Value of Flesh”

Addressing works in the collections and exhibitions of the Georgia Museum of Art as well as related works elsewhere, this talk explains how and why early American portraiture has served as a means to negotiate racial identities in both the past and the present. Elder is assistant professor of art history at American University, where she specializes in North American art from the colonial period to the present, including African American art and the history of photography. Her current research and courses examine the mutually constitutive relationship between art and race throughout modern American history. This lecture is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Friday, March 24, 2023

Graduate Student Sessions

8:30 a.m. Coffee

9 a.m. Welcome

9:15 a.m. Session 1: Nature and Environment

“A Rose by a Modern Name: H.D. and Georgia O’Keeffe as Reimaginers of the Rose” — Isabel Doss, University of Georgia

This paper examines the notable thematic resonances between O’Keeffe’s visual art and H.D.’s poetry. Like many of their contemporaries, both artist and poet engaged in modernist reinterpretations of traditional artistic subjects. This project takes up O’Keeffe’s celebrated flower paintings and H.D.’s poetry collection “Sea Garden,” paying particular attention to their portrayals of the rose. Works such as O’Keeffe’s “Abstraction White Rose” (1927) and H.D.’s poem “Garden” present unique roses void of Western art’s conventional floral symbolism. H.D.’s imagist poetics, which reject “flowery” language and embrace precise and clear word choice, are echoed visually in many of O’Keeffe’s works, which depict flowers in sharp definition, sans traditionally feminine, “florid” softness and delicacy. Further, both H.D. and O’Keeffe envision the rose as a force of nature, connecting their floral subjects to weather systems both powerful and destructive. In these reappraisals of the traditional rose of the Western literary and artistic canon, H.D. and O’Keeffe suggest a new, shared vision of femininity: a powerful state of being that carries the potential to refigure the artistic landscape of early-20th-century America.

“Asher Brown Durand’s Landscapes of Enclosure” — Elizabeth Keto, Yale University

A landscape, wrote Asher Brown Durand, should “take possession” of its viewer. This paper investigates the relationship between painting and possession, between the visual conventions of American landscape in the mid-19th century and settler colonial conceptions of land ownership. In particular, I examine Durand’s use of framing elements in these landscapes, arguing for a resonance between compositional and ideological processes of boundary-making. The leaning tree trunks and arched branches that surround his sylvan scenes, such as the Princeton University Art Museum’s “Landscape” (1859) and his iconic “Kindred Spirits” (1849), are typical examples of repoussoir, a compositional device that brackets a landscape view. In this paper, I suggest that Durand’s attention to the framing of his paintings resonates with the legal and conceptual importance of land boundaries under North American settler colonialism, itself influenced by a longer genealogy of British land enclosures. Though Durand was adamant that landscape painting lay beyond the reach of the market, his enclosed landscapes replicate and naturalize land’s transformation into private property. The embrace of shady trees also renders his landscapes private in a deeper sense, transforming them into intimate spaces of individual thought and feeling. Critics at the time connected Durand’s landscapes, despite their outdoor subjects, with interiority: as one writer observed, “We like to hang them upon the walls in rooms where we live.” While valuable scholarship on Durand and his contemporaries has focused on the ideological implications of landscape’s expansiveness, grand vistas and invocations of forward progress, here I focus on the resonance of enclosure — of acts of pictorial bounding, delimiting and interiorizing — in relation to settler colonialism. Informed by an ecocritical attention to human-environment relationships and drawing on a growing body of scholarship on art and North American empire, my paper argues that Durand’s framing devices render landscape both private and privatized.

10:15 a.m. Break

10:30 a.m. Session 2: Exhibiting American Art

“Date, Okubo, Alvarez, Macdonald-Wright: Four Early L.A. Modernists and the Contours of Asian American” — Lily Allen, University of California, Riverside

One of Los Angeles’ first modern art styles emerged in the late 1920s and was used by at least twenty artists associated with the Art Students League of Los Angeles, a modernist group headquartered downtown. Colorful, fantastical, and apparently drawing on Asian and Western aesthetics, the unnamed style fascinated Angelinos of the era.

Scholarship on the novel mode of painting largely aligns with conventional Western discourse on modern art, and this discourse’s eliding of people and history that do not support notions of individual artistic genius (often that of white men), and linear modernism emanating from Europe. One scholar calls the style “Asian fusion,” suggesting a timeless, monolithic Asian art merged with an implied Western modernism. They and others credit the director of the Art Students League, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, a prominent Euro American modernist, as “inventor,” while other practitioners are “followers.” My dissertation rewrites the story of the style, centering three additional League artists — Hideo Date, an issei, Benji Okubo, a nisei, and Spanish American Mabel Alvarez — and showing how the movement developed through collaboration between these painters with diverse social identities, backgrounds and experiences.

Inspired by scholars of Asian American art history illuminating the artistic contributions of Asian Californians in the interwar years, my presentation theorizes a pan-Pacific milieu in Los Angeles that brought the artists together and catalyzed their eclectic, synthetic images. Using a trans-Pacific lens, I demonstrate artistic networking went beyond L.A. and around the Pacific, challenging understandings of California as peripheral to early-20th-century modernism and revealing Los Angeles as a crucible where formal innovation came as much from modernist movements in Asia as from New York and Europe. Based on these interventions, I recommend recasting “Asian fusion” as L.A. Pacific modernism. Macdonald-Wright maintained L.A. Pacific modernism was Art for Art’s sake; however, influenced by critical race theory, I argue the paintings of all four artists troubled ethno-centric U.S. nationalism, as well as contemporaneous modernist searches for “pure” American types and expression. Moreover, I propose the pictures reflected and responded to nascent notions of Asian American as identity, social affiliation and cultural force that were pressing in the 1920s and 1930s, though they did not become fully articulable until the Civil Rights and Asian American Movement.

“Whose Victory? Myth behind Art and Politics of American Contemporary Art and Exhibitions (1953 – 1968)” — Claudia Jingjing Shi, Peking University

In the Cold War era, the United States focused on the external promotion of abstract expressionism as a powerful weapon to defeat the USSR and elevated its cultural impact in field of arts. Speaking from the reasons that this art movement was valued by America over half a century ago, foreign policy of the United States and its shift in strategy in the Cold War era played a crucial role in promoting abstract expressionism apart from its artistic advantage and radical development.

The observation of the movement and the promotion draws to the conclusion that the prosperity of the market of abstract expressionism provides an indispensable resource for the target of the outward promotion and implementation of foreign cultural policy of the United States. Meanwhile, the enforcement of the foreign policy during the cultural Cold War also strengthens the international impact of the art movement. This paper discusses the reason for the success of abstract expressionism on the basis of first-hand literature and history as well as official documents, applying methods including history analysis and case study as a manner to acquire better comprehension of the history from the perspective of foreign policy.

In addition, the politics of belonging, especially when referring to American contemporary art and art museum activities in the 1950s and 1960s is significantly shaped and enacted, also even negotiated through visual exhibitions and circulars of artifacts under certain designed categories. The research tries to unravel how artists, individuals, governmental and private sectors went hand in hand in subconscious or deliberated ways to sever connections through art and politics under the context of the Cold War aesthetics, with a full and detailed command of firsthand documents, archives and history studies. As an essay crossing the field of art history, political science and cultural study, it endeavors to answer how groups in art fields in the early Cold War’s American contemporary art market collaborated to find a shelter and home for the art, even though it might not exist at all. Furthermore, the motives behind it are also carefully investigated throughout the article.

11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. Lunch Break
(Catered lunch by invitation only)

1 p.m. Session 3: Masculinity and Whiteness

“Heart of Whiteness: Racial Privilege and the History of U.S. Art” — James Denison, University of Michigan

Propelled by the belief that art and the institutions surrounding it have long been used by social elites to articulate and perpetuate their status, but that art historians have far too often actively or passively played into this problem rather than looking askance at and critiquing it, this paper seeks to answer the question of why U.S. art studies remains a field whose practitioners largely continue to fail to engage with issues of whiteness, especially in its more quotidian forms. Using the case of the Stieglitz Circle artists as an example, it demonstrates a few of the ways in which a critical whiteness studies perspective can be used to cut through layers of past interpretation of canonical artists and re-frame them as products of their times and places. With the help of works by Arthur Dove, John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, it argues for the importance of looking beyond works by artists of color and works by white artists that clearly picture people of color when looking for race in the history of U.S. art. It then analyzes several of the most important factors underlying the historical lack of attention to the racial stakes of the Stieglitz artists’ works and considers how these factors relate to broader historiographical pressures and institutional barriers that have prevented widespread reinterpretation of canonical U.S. artists and the history of the history of American art through the lens of whiteness. These include the nationalistic character of much 20th-century writing on the history of U.S. art, the difficulty of subverting canonical narratives and some of the particular pressures affecting museum scholars. It concludes by suggesting that applying a critical whiteness studies lens to canonical objects and the history of the discipline should be considered a central challenge for the field moving forward.

“Guns, Hunting and Masculinity in George Catlin’s Firearms Series” — Francesca Soriano, Boston University

Between 1854 and 1858, North American artist, George Catlin painted 12 paintings depicting himself hunting wild animals in South America and the American West for the Colt Patent Firearms Company. In all the paintings, Catlin depicts himself hunting panthers, boar, flamingoes and buffalo with a Colt Firearms rifle or revolver. Six lithographs were produced from Catlin’s paintings and circulated widely in newspapers and magazines as advertisement for the firearms company. In this paper, I examine the paintings and lithographs Catlin made as examples of corporate sponsorship that was linked to the representation of wild animals and highlight how it advanced hunting and gun cultures of the period. The sale of firearms was encouraged through the commercialization of hunting. Catlin was not only advertising the effectiveness of Colt weapons as a tool for hunting and self-defense but in addition, by depicting himself hunting in South America and the American West, was visualizing a Euro-American dominance over landscapes, animals and people. Hunting reinforced a white male mastery over nature and enforced colonial authority through the domination of Western technologies such as guns. I argue that Catlin’s depictions of hunting wild animals in South America and the American West not only advertised Colt Firearms by depicting them in action but also by visualizing gun ownership as a way to control, preserve and collect the “unsettled” regions of the Western Hemisphere. This paper is informed by frameworks from the fields of animal studies and hemispheric studies to rethink Catlin’s impact in the 19th century and shed light on how artistic projects played a role in underwriting U.S. imperialism.

2 p.m. Break

2:15 p.m. Session 4: Women and Gender

“Sentiments of Place in Mid-Century Mexico: Two Self-Portraits by Rosa Rolanda” — Julie Weber, University of Alabama

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, female artists in Mexico used their work to differentiate themselves from the male artists and muralists who dominated public imagination, and they were committed to promoting art as a socially conscious and collective practice. Many of these talented women, including Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and the lesser-known multidisciplinary artist Rosa Rolanda, used surrealism to liberate themselves, at least visually, from oppressive societal norms and cultural expectations. Although Rolanda often gets lumped in with surrealist artists working in Mexico, she did not always paint using the imagined realities and mythic style common to the movement. Analyzing two self-portraits, I argue that Rolanda used surrealism selectively as a tool at different points in her career to express her lived experiences in Mexico City. Further study of Rolanda and deeper analysis of her paintings must be conducted to fully understand not only the varied female artistic production in post-Revolutionary Mexico, but also the artist herself. The artist gathered inspiration from Mexican culture and the artists living and working around her, and she also significantly influenced artistic production in the region during the mid-20th century. By examining Rolanda’s contributions to the surrealist movement in Mexico, the complex identities and varied experiences of 20th-century American artists across the globe can be more fully understood. This scholarship furthers the field of art history by considering, interpreting and, most important, foregrounding the different regions, ethnicities and genders that comprise American art.

“Gwendolyn Bennett’s 1926 Opportunity Cover: Projecting Black Beauty” — Alaine Lambertson, University of Georgia

After a breakthrough performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1925, Josephine Baker materialized as a stereotyped, primitivized and sexualized woman in prints, photographs and popular publications. Baker had very little control over the production of her image, but some artists, like Gwendolyn Bennett, produced prints that highlighted Baker’s role as a model for Black female selfhood rather than as a primitive “Other.” Bennett’s cover of Opportunity magazine in 1926 presented a “Bakeresque” figure, topless and wearing her famous banana skirt. This print inserts Baker into the conversation on the New Negro Woman, specifically with Black beauty, sexuality and art deco aesthetics. Bennett, a Black American poet, author and visual artist, recasts the primitive and promiscuous representation of Black female bodies, like Baker’s, to assert a more empowering model of New Negro Womanhood. The literature on the Harlem Renaissance has addressed the New Negro Woman extensively, but few scholars discuss Baker, an American transplant in Paris, as an example of this new ideal. Scholarship has focused on Baker’s reliance on humor and parody in creating and contesting stereotypes of Blackness but has not synthesized this parody with the New Negro Woman, especially in images completed by such Black female artists as Bennett. Furthermore, scholarship has focused on Baker’s manipulation of European primitivism and enactment of the persona of the Black exotic within the context of a white society but has not investigated those implications further to examine the visual outcomes of these traditions. I argue that Bennett employed European exotic symbolism and imagery to create an alternative to Black fetishization and stereotype; she projected an image of Black beauty.

3:15 p.m. Closing Remarks

Parking

Parking for the Georgia Museum of Art is available in the Performing Arts Center (PAC) parking deck, which is located at the rear of lot E11 off River Road. The deck is managed by UGA Parking Services. There is parking in the small lot located directly below the museum (accessible from Carlton Street) for visitors with disabilities.