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
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
John Davis is Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art at Smith College. His most recent book (co-authored with Sarah Burns) is American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (2009). Jennifer A. Greenhill is Associate Professor of Art History, Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (2012). Jason D. LaFountain is Instructor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Reviews for A Companion to American Art
"""Art historians will greet this stimulating series of companions to art history, of which this volume is the eighth, with enthusiasm."" (Reference Reviews, May 2016)"
