Full Description
A Companion to American Art presents 35 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars that explore the methodology, historiography, and current state of the field of American art history.
Features contributions from a balance of established and emerging scholars, art and architectural historians, and other specialists
Includes several paired essays to emphasize dialogue and debate between scholars on important contemporary issues in American art history
Examines topics such as the methodological stakes in the writing of American art history, changing ideas about what constitutes "Americanness," and the relationship of art to public culture
Offers a fascinating portrait of the evolution and current state of the field of American art history and suggests future directions of scholarship
Contents
List of Figures xi
Notes on Contributors xvii
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction: American Art History Now: A Snapshot 1
John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain
Part I Writing American Art History 13
Dialogue 15
1 A Conversation Missed: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Americanist/Modernist Divide 17
Joshua Shannon and Jason Weems
2 Response: Setting the Roundtable, or, Prospects for Dialogue between Americanists and Modernists 34
Jennifer L. Roberts
3 A Time and a Place: Rethinking Race in American Art History 49
Tanya Sheehan
Dialogue 69
4 On the Social History of American Art 71
Alan Wallach
5 Response: Our Cause Is What? 85
Robin Kelsey
6 The Maker's Share: Tools for the Study of Process in American Art 95
Ethan W. Lasser
Dialogue 111
7 The Problem with Close Looking 113
Martin A. Berger
8 Response: Look Away 128
Jennifer A. Greenhill
9 Looking for Thomas Eakins: The Lure of the Archive and the Object 146
Kathleen A. Foster
Dialogue 165
10 The Challenge of Contemporaneity, or, Thoughts on Art as Culture 167
Rachael Z. DeLue
11 Response: Writing History, Reading Art 183
Bryan Wolf
Part II Geographies: Rethinking Americanness 191
12 Teaching Across the Borders of North American Art History 193
Wendy Bellion and Mónica Domínguez Torres
13 An American Architecture? 211
Dell Upton
14 The Pacific World and American Art History 228
J.M. Mancini
15 "Home" and "Homeless" in Art between the Wars 246
Angela Miller
16 Pueblo Painting in 1932: Folding Narratives of Native Art into American Art History 264
Jessica L. Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo
17 US American Art in the Americas 281
Mary K. Coffey
18 Geography Lessons: Canadian Notes on American Art History 299
Frances K. Pohl
19 Only in America: Exceptionalism, Nationalism, Provincialism 317
John Davis
20 Monolingualism, Multilingualism, and the Study of American Art 336
Jason D. LaFountain
Part III Subjectivities 357
21 Painters and Status in Colony and Early Nation 359
Susan Rather
22 Pantaloons vs. Petticoats: Gender and Artistic Identity in Antebellum America 378
Sarah Burns
23 Male or Man?: The Politics of Emancipation in the Neoclassical Imaginary 395
Charmaine A. Nelson
24 Drawing Boundaries, Crossing Borders: Trespassing and Identity in American Art 414
Randall R. Griffey
25 Lookout: On Queer American Art and History 433
Richard Meyer
26 From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art History 447
Alan C. Braddock
27 Art History as Collage: A Personal Approach 468
David M. Lubin
Part IV Art and Public Culture 487
28 Material Religion in Early America 489
Louis P. Nelson
29 Issues in Early Mass Visual Culture 507
Michael Leja
30 Patrons, Collectors, and Markets 525
John Ott
31 Historicism in the American Built Environment 544
Kevin D. Murphy
32 The Painting of Urban Life, 1880-1930 562
David Peters Corbett
33 Photography and Opium in a Nineteenth-Century Port City 581
Anthony W. Lee
34 Value in the Vernacular 599
Leo G. Mazow
35 Realism under Duress: The 1930s 617
Andrew Hemingway
Index 637
