While in Rome, many American expatriate artists remained engaged with the politics of race in the United States. Informed by the political struggles they witnessed on the Italian peninsula, Anne ...Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and Harriet Hosmer addressed issues of emancipation (freedom, citizenship, and suffrage) and Reconstruction (the potential for a new multiracial society) in their sculptural imagery. They looked to the work of William Wetmore Story, who, although a permanent resident of Rome, was quite vocal about his progressive politics. Throughout the 1850s, he maintained close friendships with a host of famous abolitionists, such as the writer and activist Lydia
The Boston-Rome Nexus MELISSA DABAKIS
A Sisterhood of Sculptors,
05/2020
Book Chapter
Boston’s community of reform-minded professional women created a fertile environment for female accomplishment in the mid–nineteenth century. They developed their voices as political activists and ...served as accomplished mentors and models for a younger generation of ambitious female artists like Harriet (Hatty) Hosmer (fig. 1). It was these women whom the young sculptor sought out, gravitating toward such pioneering figures as the writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and later the successful thespian Charlotte Cushman. Child was an active member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, one of the most influential of the antebellum women’s associations that established the
With great fanfare, Vinnie Ream’s life-size sculpture of Abraham Lincoln was unveiled on January 25, 1871, in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda (fig. 84). In attendance were all manner of dignitaries, from ...President Ulysses S. Grant and General William Tecumseh Sherman to senators, congressmen, judges, and the general public. The large crowd assembled in the Rotunda to hear the many speeches and to see the young twenty-four-year-old sculptor, who appeared on the podium with her mother. “Could it be,” a reporter for the Washington Evening Star wrote, “that the fragile youthful figure standing there, pale and anxious, and rendered more child-like
Discusses recent feminist research into American women artists of the 19th and early 20th century. The author considers the exhibition A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870-1940 at the ...Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2001), highlights how the Boston School women painters differed from the male artists in the way they portrayed women, and examines the exhibition Candace Wheeler: the Art and Enterprise of American design, 1875-1900 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2001). She describes how Wheeler encouraged women to practise the applied arts professionally, and highlights the importance of study in Europe for American women artists.
Introduction Melissa Dabakis; Paul H. D. Kaplan
Republics and empires,
08/2021
Book Chapter
Italy and the United States have long enjoyed a fruitful cultural relationship, beginning with Benjamin West’s first trip to Italy in 1760, where he communed with the cosmopolitan neoclassical circle ...in Rome, and continuing to the more recent collaborations between Italian and American artists, critics, and gallerists in the post-World War II era. Making apparent the influential web of cultural connections that has existed between the two countries, Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840–1970 incorporates papers originally delivered at two international conferences held in Rome in October 2016 and Washington, D.C. in October 2017.
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