Browsing by Subject "American art"

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Agent for change : catalyzing the subject in Adrian Piper’s Catalysis VII
(2021-05-10) Madera, Arin Frances; Smith, Cherise, 1969-
The subject of this thesis is American artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s 1971 performance Catalysis VII, one of eight performances in her Catalysis series conducted between 1970 to 1971 in various public and semipublic spaces in New York City. In Catalysis VII, Piper made plastic and nonfunctional alterations to her body and presence. She walked through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Before Cortés exhibition, chewing and blowing an unusually large amount of bubble gum and allowing it to adhere to her face and clothes. She traversed the city carrying a purse filled with ketchup and keys, a wallet, a comb, and other items, occasionally opening and digging through the bag. On public transportation, she rummaged through the purse for change and fetched a mirror to check her face. Inside a women’s restroom at Macy’s department store, she combed ketchup through her hair. Finally, she coated her hands with rubber cement and browsed a newspaper stand. In this thesis, I explore Piper’s use of the medium of performance and the ways in which she engaged her physical presence in meaning-making in her art. Through an analysis of the series and other works by Piper, I examine how Catalysis VII potentially functioned as an agent for change for the external subject, or the people in her shared social space, and the internal subject, or Piper herself.
Br(others) only : Rashid Johnson, class, and the fraternal orders of Afrofuturism
(2012-08) Richardson, Jared C. 1988-; Smith, Cherise, 1969-
Br(others) Only conceptualizes the wall sculptures of Rashid Johnson as free-standing “altars” that play with different and sometimes divergent brands of black masculinity and classed homosociality. Primarily, I analyze three of Johnson’s sculptures from the late 2000s: I Who Have Nothing (2008); I’m Still in Love with You (2008); and Souls of Black Folk (2010). I argue that, by invoking the history of black renaissance men, gentlemen scholars, and entertainers, Johnson’s work plays with various kinds of black masculinity and homosociality that simultaneously straddle the past and future. By doing so, his art not only enacts a racialized temporality, but it also chips away at monolithic notions of black masculinity by fabricating contradictory amalgams of race, class, and gender. For my analysis of Johnson’s artworks, I utilize Cassandra Jackson’s Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (2010) as the chief framework for conceptualizing the waxy coats of Johnson’s sculptures as wounded bodies in an effort to “flesh out” the vulnerability of black men. Theorizing the putrescent surfaces of Johnson’s sculptures as violable bodies allows me to consider the ruptures between seemingly impenetrable black masculinity and the always-present vulnerability of the black male body to violence.
Experimentation, diversity, and feeling : Adolph Gottlieb’s career in painting reconsidered
(2013-08) Katzin, Jeffrey James; Shiff, Richard
Adolph Gottlieb’s (1903–1974) mature career in abstract painting has been described in previous scholarship in terms of three phases: the time of his Pictograph paintings, beginning in 1941; a period of transition primarily involving his Imaginary Landscape paintings, beginning in 1951; and the time of his Burst paintings, from 1956 until his death. Dividing the artist’s career into early, transitional, and late periods has provided scholars with a clear and tidy narrative as a basis for interpretations of his work. However, in this thesis I argue that this schematization, created in hindsight, has obscured the character of Gottlieb’s working process as it occurred in real time. By nature, Gottlieb would not have been content to produce only a few narrow varieties of painting over a thirty-year period. I thus advance a new conception of Gottlieb as an inventive and constantly adventurous artist. ----- To make these claims, I examine Gottlieb’s written and spoken statements in order to define his central terminology (words like “feeling” and “self-discovery”) and to investigate his interests in myth and alchemy. I find that his work in painting was deeply intuitive and literally experimental—Gottlieb could not predict whether a painting would succeed until he had completed it, and so his career was an iterative process of painting, observing the results, and then painting again. I go on to consider Gottlieb’s paintings themselves as a record of how this experimental process functioned in practice. By presenting his diverse body of work in its full breadth, I demonstrate that the artist was not limited by his major styles, and indeed that he always presented himself with multiple possibilities. I conclude that Gottlieb’s work remains vital because he worked without an end goal or predetermined outcome in mind, and instead gave himself over to a continuous process of creativity and discovery.
“Now exhibiting” : Charles Bird King’s picture gallery, fashioning American taste and nation 1824-1861
(2012-12) Dasch, Rowena Houghton; Rather, Susan; Charlesworth, Michael; Kamil, Neil; Neff, Emily; Smith, Jeffrey
This dissertation is an exploration of Charles Bird King’s Gallery of Paintings. The Gallery opened in 1824 and, aside from a brief hiatus in the mid-1840s, was open to the public through the end of the antebellum era. King, who trained in London at the Royal Academy and under the supervision of Benjamin West, presented to his visitors a diverse display that encompassed portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, trompe l’oeils and history paintings. Though the majority of the paintings on display were his original works across these various genres, at least one third of the collection was made up of copies after the works of European masters as well as after the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. This study is divided into four chapters. In the first, I explore late-colonial and early-republic public displays of the visual arts. My analysis demonstrates that King’s Gallery was in step with a tradition of viewing that stretched back to John Smibert’s Boston studio in the mid-eighteenth century and created a visual continuity into the mid-nineteenth century. In a second chapter, focused on portraiture, I examine what it meant to King and to his visitors to be “American.” The group of men and women King displayed in his Gallery was far more diverse than typical for the time period. King included many prominent politicians, but no American President after John Quincy Adams (whom King had painted before Adams’ election). Instead he featured portraits of many men of commerce as well as prominent women and numerous American Indians. In the third chapter, I look at a group of King’s original compositions, genre paintings. King’s style in this category was clearly indebted to seventeenth-century Dutch tradition as filtered through an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British lens, in particular the works of Sir David Wilkie. My final chapter continues the exploration of Dutch influences over King’s work. These paintings draw together the themes of King’s sense of humor, his attitudes towards patronage and his methods of circumventing inadequate patronage through the establishment of the Gallery. Finally, they prompt us to reconsider the importance of European precedents in our understanding of how artists and viewers worked together to establish an American visual cultural dialogue.
A revolutionary idea : Gilbert Stuart paints Sarah Morton as the first woman of ideas in American art
(2008-05) Shoultz, Amy Elizabeth; Rather, Susan
In 1800, Gilbert Stuart began three paintings of his friend, republican writer, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton--the Worcester, Winterthur, and Boston portraits. While Morton has been remembered more for a tragic personal family scandal than for her literary endeavors, Stuart's provocative images acknowledged her as both a poet and an intellect. His portraits presented a progressive and potentially controversial interpretation of his sitter--the lovely and learned Morton--by prioritizing the writer's life of the mind rather than her socially prescribed life in the world. This study reconstructs the circumstances by which Stuart composed the group of Morton paintings that culminate in his unorthodox Worcester rendering through which he ultimately depicted Morton as the first woman of ideas in American art. Supported by close readings of her work, this dissertation illuminates both the course and depth of the exceptional personal and professional relationship between Morton and Stuart. The paths of the two republican figures crossed at several historic junctures and is highlighted by the interconnectivity of their work. Most significantly, the Stuart portraits represent an ideal lens through which to view Morton's life and work as well as to follow the Boston native's transformation into one of America's earliest women of ideas.