Tag: American Studies
I immediately recognized that the instruments of his labor—brushes and a bucket of whitewash, used to brighten the walls of soot-filled homes—were often the stuff of racial satire and caricature in the nineteenth century. Was this a sympathetic portrayal of an African American or something much more complicated?
Susan Rather
New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 2016; 316 pp.; 100 color illus.; 80 b/w illus.; ISBN: 978-0-300-21461; Hardcover: $75.00
Reviewed by: Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, Winterthur, Del.
Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman, editors, with contributions by Emily Mann, Carl Lounsbury, Anna O. Marley, Peter Guillery, Peter Benes, Alison Stanley, Christopher DeCorse, Louis P. Nelson, Kenneth Morgan, Stephen Hague, Bernard L. Herman, Lee Morrissey, and Daniel Maudlin
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016; 352 pp.; 6 illus.; 74 b/w illus.; ISBN: 9781469626826; Paperback: $39.95
Reviewed by: Whitney Martinko, Assistant Professor of History, Villanova University
Recent American art publications and exhibitions increasingly have engaged multimedia projects that dissolve many previous constraints on mingling painting and sculpture with popular art and visual culture. Coney Island, New York City’s “playground of the people,” serves as the perfect subject for such a study.
