Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture

Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture PDF Author: Melissa Dabakis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521461474
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This book focuses on representations of work in American sculpture, from the decade in which the American Federation of Labor was formed, to the inauguration of the federal works project that subsidized American artists during the Great Depression. Restoring a group of important monuments to the history of labor, gender studies and American art history, this book analyzes key monuments and small-scale works in which labor was often constituted as "manly" and where the work ethic mediated both production and reception.

Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture

Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture PDF Author: Melissa Dabakis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521461474
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book focuses on representations of work in American sculpture, from the decade in which the American Federation of Labor was formed, to the inauguration of the federal works project that subsidized American artists during the Great Depression. Restoring a group of important monuments to the history of labor, gender studies and American art history, this book analyzes key monuments and small-scale works in which labor was often constituted as "manly" and where the work ethic mediated both production and reception.

Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition

Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition PDF Author: Lena Hill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107041589
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This study examines how black writers use visual tropes as literary devices to challenge readers' conceptions of black identity. Lena Hill charts two hundred years of African American literary history, from Phillis Wheatley to Ralph Ellison, and engages with a variety of canonical and lesser-known writers.

American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A catalogue of works by artists born between 1865 and 1885

American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A catalogue of works by artists born between 1865 and 1885 PDF Author: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 0870999230
Category : Sculpture
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Volume One: This volume catalogues the distinguished and comprehensive collection of approximately 400 works of American sculpture by artists born before 1865. This publication includes an introduction on the history of the collection's formation, particularly in the context of the Museum's early years of acquisitions, and discusses the outstanding personalities involved. --Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Labor’s Canvas

Labor’s Canvas PDF Author: Laura Hapke
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443808512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
At an unprecedented and probably unique American moment, laboring people were indivisible from the art of the 1930s. By far the most recognizable New Deal art employed an endless frieze of white or racially ambiguous machine proletarians, from solo drillers to identical assembly line toilers. Even today such paintings, particularly those with work themes, are almost instantly recognizable. Happening on a Depression-era picture, one can see from a distance the often simplified figures, the intense or bold colors, the frozen motion or flattened perspective, and the uniformity of laboring bodies within an often naive realism or naturalism of treatment. In a kind of Social Realist dance, the FAP’s imagined drillers, haulers, construction workers, welders, miners, and steel mill workers make up a rugged industrial army. In an unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor’s Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success. Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor’s Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal’s artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves.

Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine

Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine PDF Author: Rachel Schreiber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351565982
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Interweaving nuanced discussions of politics, visuality, and gender, Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine uncovers the complex ways that gender figures into the graphic satire created by artists for the New York City-based socialist journal, the Masses. This exceptional magazine was published between 1911 and 1917, during an unusually radical decade in American history, and featured cartoons drawn by artists of the Ashcan School and others, addressing questions of politics, gender, labor and class. Rather than viewing art from the Masses primarily in terms of its critical social stances or aesthetic choices, however, this study uses these images to open up new ways of understanding the complexity of early 20th-century viewpoints. By focusing on the activist images found in the Masses and studying their unique perspective on American modernity, Rachel Schreiber also returns these often-ignored images to their rightful place in the scholarship on American modernism. This book demonstrates that the centrality of the Masses artists' commitments to gender and class equality is itself a characterization of the importance of these issues for American moderns. Despite their alarmingly regular reliance on gender stereotypes?and regardless of any assessment of the efficacy of the artists' activism?the graphic satire of the Masses offers invaluable insights into the workings of gender and the role of images in activist practices at the beginning of the last century.

Working Backstage

Working Backstage PDF Author: Christin Essin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054961
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Places backstage workers in the spotlight to acknowledge their essential roles in creating Broadway magic

The Jewish Metropolis

The Jewish Metropolis PDF Author: Daniel Soyer
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN: 1644694913
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th to the 21st Century covers the entire sweep of the history of the largest Jewish community of all time. It provides an introduction to many facets of that history, including the ways in which waves of immigration shaped New York’s Jewish community; Jewish cultural production in English, Yiddish, Ladino, and German; New York’s contribution to the development of American Judaism; Jewish interaction with other ethnic and religious groups; and Jewish participation in the politics and culture of the city as a whole. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, and includes a bibliography for further reading. The Jewish Metropolis captures the diversity of the Jewish experience in New York.

Looking Askance

Looking Askance PDF Author: Michael Leja
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520249967
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
"Beautifully written in an engaging style, this book provides a new perspective on turn-of-the-century American culture that nuances and complicates our vision of that historical moment. I have no doubt that it will become a classic text in American studies, the history of American art, and the study of visual culture."—Kathleen Pyne, author of Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America "Michael Leja, one of our most original and acute historians of American art, has written an indispensable and lively study of what we might call the modern anxiety of seeing. He traces our inherently skeptical view of the world back to the turn of the last century, a golden age of hucksters, swindlers, quacks, humbugs, rascals, cheats, and confidence men, and shows how artists as diverse as Eakins and Duchamp fit into this new culture of suspicion. Leja's book breathes fresh life into the period."—Michael Kimmelman "Bringing together the strangest of bedfellows-paintings by Thomas Eakins, spirit photographs, William Harnett's still lifes, occult philosophies, Duchamp readymades-Leja uncovers a deep culture of suspicion and skepticism in America around 1900. As Americans grappled with the complexities of modern life, 'seeing was not believing,' he argues in this deeply researched and brilliantly provocative study."—Wanda M. Corn, author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935

Sculpting Doughboys

Sculpting Doughboys PDF Author: Jennifer Wingate
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351549758
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Redressing the neglect of World War I memorials in art history scholarship and memory studies, Sculpting Doughboys considers the hundreds of sculptures of American soldiers that dominated the nation's sculptural commemorative landscape after World War I. To better understand these 'doughboys', the name given to both members of the American Expeditionary Forces and the memorials erected in their image, this volume also considers their sculptural alternatives, including depictions of motherhood, nude male allegories, and expressions of anti-militarism. It addresses why doughboy sculptures came to occupy such a significant presence in interwar commemoration, even though art critics objected to their unrefined realism, by considering the social upheavals of the Red Scare, America's burgeoning consumer and popular culture, and the ambitions and idiosyncrasies of artists and communities across the country. In doing so, this study also highlights the social and cultural tensions of the period as debates grew over art's changing role in society and as more women and immigrant sculptors vied for a place and a voice in America's public sphere. Finally, Sculpting Doughboys addresses the fate of these memorials nearly a century after they were dedicated and poses questions for reframing our relationship with war memorials today.

Edward W. Redfield

Edward W. Redfield PDF Author: Constance Kimmerle
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812238433
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
In this definitive study of Pennsylvania impressionism's leading artist, Constance Kimmerle offers both an accessible biographical study of Edward Redfield (1869-1965) as well as a rich discussion of his role in the changes that swept the American art world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.