Summer 2017 (3.1)
Articles
The Thiele Family Monument: Vision of a Heavenly Future
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.
Marmorean Ballplayer: Sheriff John McNamee of Brooklyn and His Sculptural Career in Florence
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.
In the Round
State of the Field: American Sculpture
In this suite of short essays, three specialists in the history of American sculpture consider the history of its formation and the direction of its future course: Roberta K. Tarbell, "Fifty Years of the History of American Sculpture"; Elise Madeleine Ciregna, "Cemeteries and Ideal Sculpture"; and Jennifer Wingate, "Sculpture and Lived Space."
Bully Pulpit
Long before I met an art historian and long before I trained to become one, I knew that museums were sources and resources and that they were sites of social and cultural capital. I also did not expect museums to connect with me, and I did not care much if they did.
Responses
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York City
Tuliza Fleming, Museum Curator, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution
Jonathan Frederick Walz, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of American Art, The Columbus Museum, Georgia
Neal Benezra, Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Blake Shell, Executive Director, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, Oregon
Research Notes
Looking through the Skiascope: Benjamin Ives Gilman and the Invention of the Modern Museum Gallery
Benjamin Ives Gilman invented the skiascope to ensure that museum visitors saw art as he thought best—without distraction. Unfortunately, as far as I was able to determine, no skiascope survives. And so I built one.
“It’s in My Mind”: William Merritt Chase and the Imagination
Trying to square oddball works against thoroughly convincing interpretations of the rest of the oeuvre can be a fruitless exercise. At the Huntington, there is one such painting by William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), "The Inner Studio, Tenth Street," which offers a counter narrative to prevailing interpretations of his work.
A Portrait of Samuel Finley Attributed to John Hesselius
Through extensive primary source research, I was able to uncover evidence that strongly supports the attribution to Hesselius and assembled a more complete history of the picture and the family who owned it for almost two centuries before donating it to the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1962. I have also unraveled the relationship between this portrait and an 1870
