Although Ukeles is known for her public and environmental “maintenance art” from the 1970s and 1980s, her focus on religion during this same period is not well known. By focusing on Mikva Dreams and her other mikvah projects, this article contextualizes and makes better visible Ukeles’s contribution to contemporary American art and its feminist discourses.
This essay explores Kruse’s use of humor in his art criticism and self-representation, considers how and why both aspects of his work relate to America’s enthusiasm for caricature during the interwar years, and examines how an artist adept with mass media and speaking to broad audiences engaged caricature and publicity to combat his fraught status in the art world.
A focused examination of the artist’s portrayals of the shop girl, alongside an understanding of what that role represented in the early twentieth century, offers a more complicated picture of the working woman and the association of middle-class consumers with her.
This essay suggests that the interactions that took shape within the physical boundaries of [Stieglitz’s gallery] open insights into the broader dynamics of cultural discrimination and privilege.
The nostalgic painting of provincial oral gossip is haunted by allusions to the rapid mass production and nationalization of newspaper scandal in the 1870s and 1880s.
This essay touches on continuities between Thiebaud’s food paintings and his landscape paintings, and on the ways his landscapes broach the seemingly irreconcilable differences between abstraction and representation. Centrally, it engages the ways in which his landscape paintings, focusing on the ecologies of California, engage major human concerns about place, space, and habitation.
Discourses of health, hygiene, and progress—visual and textual—provide the primary metric with which to recalibrate thinking about the Panama Canal enterprise and zone as an ecology located at the nexus of intersecting discourses.
Tracing the movement of Stettheimer’s works brings into view a variety of previously unexamined venues in which art and commerce converged. . . . This essay reveals the previously overlooked diversity of Stettheimer’s exhibition practices and argues that the period’s lack of rigid boundaries between art and commercial culture resulted in nuanced class and gender-based mingling and sorting, not democratic equivalence, within the spaces of early twentieth-century American modernism.
For over one hundred years a granite lady-angel has stood beside a life-size seated granite businessman while gazing at a carved cherub below. For a century passers-by have pondered this unusual family, immortalized in stone on a Wisconsin cemetery plot.
In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, both baseball and sculpture could serve as markers of and conduits for ascending class and cultural identity, and the remarkable career of John McNamee (c. 1827–1895) brings these two realms together in an unfamiliar but revealing fashion.