I was struck that contemporary viewers of Weber’s painting apparently did not mind the vagueness of the image’s relation to the American land it was thought to depict. . . . Weber was thought to ably capture a quintessential national identity through nature, even if he appeared unwilling to brand his work as a glorification of a strictly American spirit.
By depicting a celebrated African site singled out by African Americans at an 1843 state convention in Michigan as proof that “we are worthy of the name of American citizens,” as asserted by Committee Chairman William Lambert, Duncanson was expressing race pride and alliance with African Americans seeking enfranchisement.
This resource also offers a model for sharing the background research that is often too detailed, wide-ranging, and extraneous to be published in a conventional format, as well as too inaccessible in museum archives or scholars’ homes for general use.
Taking cues from the critique of institutional racism sharpened by the Black Lives Matter movement and from more recent scholarship, I consider here how Hopper’s work was promoted in a time of cultural nationalism, as well as how his art should be reassessed in the light of today’s attention to cultural diversity.
“Did you know Peale’s mastodon is in Germany?!,” I asked in emails and in a post on social media. No one seemed to have known, with responses generally disbelieving.
The choice of Wyeth—not Pollock, not Warhol—to represent the kind of American art that the publishers wished to highlight in the magazines to their burgeoning [Taiwanese] readership, almost three decades after the end of WWII, was indeed curious. Why Wyeth, in the early 1970s?
I have looked at hundreds of colonial portraits, and the most intriguing figure that I have seen is unnamed, barely visible, only about five inches tall, and whose face is largely obscured. This figure is an African groom—who I can now argue is the first known representation of a person of African descent in a British North American painting.
This research note reflects on the ways in which portraits function as complex indicators of racial, cultural, and regional identities and histories. It argues that the flexibility of meaning for such paintings lies not only with the artist and the sitter, but is equally shaped by audiences and historians.
In finding out more information about Banks’s life, might I somehow redress the bodily and archival violence that rendered her an unnamed figure in a museum display? Moreover, how could I tell Banks’s story—or, a story of racialized violence—without committing further violence in my own act of narration?
The existence of these drawings among O’Keeffe’s papers raises a number of questions: first, why did [architect Peter van der Meulen] Smith create them in the first place? Second, how did they come to be in O’Keeffe’s possession? And third, did the drawings influence [Maria] Chabot’s design for the separate studio building at Abiquiu?