This project is made possible through support from the Terra
Foundation for American Art.
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned the Declaration of Sentiments
for the first women's rights convention, ...held in Seneca Falls, New
York, in 1848, she unleashed a powerful force in American society.
In A Sisterhood of Sculptors , Melissa Dabakis outlines the
conditions under which a group of American women artists adopted
this egalitarian view of society and negotiated the gendered
terrain of artistic production at home and abroad.
Between 1850 and 1876, a community of talented women sought
creative refuge in Rome and developed successful professional
careers as sculptors. Some of these women have become well known in
art-historical circles: Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne
Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. The reputations of others have remained,
until now, buried in the historical record: Emma Stebbins, Margaret
Foley, Sarah Fisher Ames, and Louisa Lander. At midcentury, they
were among the first women artists to attain professional stature
in the American art world while achieving international fame in
Rome, London, and other cosmopolitan European cities. In their
invention of modern womanhood, they served as models for a younger
generation of women who adopted artistic careers in unprecedented
numbers in the years following the Civil War.
At its core, A Sisterhood of Sculptors is concerned
with the gendered nature of creativity and expatriation. Taking
guidance from feminist theory, cultural geography, and expatriate
and postcolonial studies, Dabakis provides a detailed investigation
of the historical phenomenon of women's artistic lives in Rome in
the mid-nineteenth century. As an interdisciplinary examination of
femininity and creativity, it provides models for viewing and
interpreting nineteenth-century sculpture and for analyzing the
gendered status of the artistic profession.
This project is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned the Declaration of Sentiments for the first women’s rights ...convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, she unleashed a powerful force in American society. In A Sisterhood of Sculptors , Melissa Dabakis outlines the conditions under which a group of American women artists adopted this egalitarian view of society and negotiated the gendered terrain of artistic production at home and abroad.
Between 1850 and 1876, a community of talented women sought creative refuge in Rome and developed successful professional careers as sculptors. Some of these women have become well known in art-historical circles: Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. The reputations of others have remained, until now, buried in the historical record: Emma Stebbins, Margaret Foley, Sarah Fisher Ames, and Louisa Lander. At midcentury, they were among the first women artists to attain professional stature in the American art world while achieving international fame in Rome, London, and other cosmopolitan European cities. In their invention of modern womanhood, they served as models for a younger generation of women who adopted artistic careers in unprecedented numbers in the years following the Civil War.
At its core, A Sisterhood of Sculptors is concerned with the gendered nature of creativity and expatriation. Taking guidance from feminist theory, cultural geography, and expatriate and postcolonial studies, Dabakis provides a detailed investigation of the historical phenomenon of women’s artistic lives in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. As an interdisciplinary examination of femininity and creativity, it provides models for viewing and interpreting nineteenth-century sculpture and for analyzing the gendered status of the artistic profession.
Republics and empires provides transnational perspectives
on the significance of Italy to American art and visual culture and
the impact of the United States on Italian art and popular culture.
...Covering the period from the Risorgimento to the Cold War,
it reveals the complexity of the visual discourses that bound two
relatively new nations together. It also gives substantial
attention to literary and critical texts that addressed the
evolving cultural relationship between Italy and the United States.
While American art history has tended to privilege French, British
and German ties, these chapters highlight a rich body of
contemporary research by Italian and American scholars that moves
beyond a discussion of influence as a one-way directive towards a
deeper understanding of cultural transactions that profoundly
affected the artistic expression of both nations.
Sculpting Lincoln Dabakis, Melissa
American art,
03/2008, Letnik:
22, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Within the turbulent world of post-Civil War America, Sarah Fisher Ames and Vinnie Ream (Hoxie) were the first sculptors to produce official images of the martyred president for the United State ...Capitol. Ames sculpted a marble Bust of Lincoln for the Senate in 1866; Ream's standing figure of Lincoln, commissioned in 1866, was unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda in 1871. At stake was not only the memory of the beloved president, but also the visualization of the progressive principles that undergirded this newly united nation.
Ames and Ream produced their sculptures within the fleetingly reformist (even perhaps utopian) political environment of Reconstruction—the building of a new civil society in which all citizens were to participate freely and equally. Entering the public arena of monument-making, they attracted the attention of women's rights activists, such as Victoria Woodhull, Jane Grey Swisshelm, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This essay explores the ways in which these artists negotiated the intersecting terrains of Reconstruction-era politics, the suffrage debates, and their public role in the commemoration process.
On 3 November 1860, the New York Illustrated News published an image of their ‘Special Artist’ Thomas Nast in a red shirt, baggy trousers, and cocked hat (Figure 3.1). Posing as one of Giuseppe ...Garibaldi’s devoted soldiers, known as I Mille (The Thousand), Nast joined the general’s forces in Palermo, Sicily on 21 June 1860. Travelling with the troops, comprised of Italians as well as an international corps of volunteers (many of whom were writers, poets, and artists), he made his way across the Straits of Messina to Calabria, and north to Naples.¹ In this studio portrait, engraved from a
