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.
Yakuglas' legacy Hawker, Ronald William; James, Charlie
Yakuglas' legacy,
2016, 20161207, 2016, 2016-12-07, 2017-01-06
eBook
"Charlie James (1867-1937) was a premier carver and painter from the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nation of British Columbia. Also known by his ceremonial name Yakuglas, he was hawker a prolific artist and ...activist during a period of severe oppression for First Nations people in Canada."--
"Yakuglas' Legacy examines the life of Charlie James. During the early part of his career, James created works primarily for ritual use within Kwakwaka'wakw society. However, in the 1920s, his art found a broader audience as he produced more miniatures and paintings. Through a balanced reading of the historical period and James' artistic production, Ronald W. Hawker argues that James' shift to contemporary art forms allowed the artist to make a critical statement about the vitality of Kwakwaka'wakw culture. Yakuglas' Legacy, aided by the inclusion of 123 illustrations, is at once a beautiful and poignant book about the impact of the Canadian project on Aboriginal people and their artistic response."--
Carving a Professional Identity: The occupational epigraphy of
the Roman Latin West presents the results of long-term
research into the occupational epigraphy from the Latin-language
provinces of the ...Roman Empire. It catalogues stone epigraphs of
independent professionals (thus excluding state workers, imperial
slaves, freedmen and military personnel), comprising some 690
people, providing quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of
the raw data. A glossary translating the occupational titles is
also included. The book reveals a very lively work market, where
specialisation responded to demand and brought social and economic
status to the worker. The coherence of epigraphic habits and
manifestations within a professional group, along with all the
other existing clues for a rather unitary use of symbols, endorse
once more the existence of a Roman provincial, commercial, middle
class.
Louisville-born and nationally renowned sculptor Enid Yandell (1869--1934) was ahead of her time. She began her career when sculpture was considered too physical, too messy, and too masculine for ...women. Yandell challenged the gender norms of early-twentieth-century artistic practice and became an award-winning sculptor, independent artist, and activist for women's suffrage.
This study examines Yandell's life and work: how she grew from a young, Southern dilettante -- the daughter of a Confederate medical officer -- into a mature, gifted artist who ran in circles with more established male artists in New York and Paris, such as Frederick MacMonnies and Auguste Rodin. At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, she was one of a select group of women sculptors, known as the White Rabbits, who sculpted the statues and architectural embellishments of the fair. As a result of her success in Chicago, Yandell was commissioned to create a twenty-five foot figure of Pallas Athena for Nashville's Centennial Exposition in 1897. Newspapers hailed it as the largest statue ever created by a woman. Yandell's command of classical subject matter was matched by her abilities with large-scale, figurative works such as the Daniel Boone statue in Cherokee Park, Louisville. In 1898 Yandell was among the first women to be selected for membership in the National Sculpture Society, the first organization of professional sculptors formed in the United States.
Presented to coincide with the 150th anniversary of her birth, this study demonstrates the ways in which Yandell was a pioneer and draws attention to her legacy.
Angela Gregory is considered by many the doyenne of Louisiana sculpture and is a notable twentieth century American sculptor. In A Dream and a Chisel, Angela Gregory and Nancy Penrose explore ...Gregory’s desire, even as a teenager, to learn the art of cutting stone and to become a sculptor. Through sheer grit and persistence, Gregory achieved her dream of studying with French artist Antoine Bourdelle, one of Auguste Rodin’s most trusted assistants and described by critics of the era as France’s greatest living sculptor. In Bourdelle’s Paris studio, Gregory learned not only sculpting techniques but also how to live life as an artist. Her experiences in Paris inspired a prolific sixty-year career in a field dominated by men. After returning to New Orleans from Paris, Gregory established her own studio in 1928 and began working in earnest. She created bas-relief profiles for the Louisiana State Capitol built in 1932 and sculpted the Bienville Monument, a bronze statue honoring the founder of New Orleans, in the 1950s. Her works also include two other monuments, sculptures incorporated into buildings, portrait busts, medallions, and other forms that appear in museums and public spaces throughout the state. She was the first Louisiana woman sculptor to achieve international recognition, and, at the age of thirty-five, became one of the few women recognized as a fellow of the National Sculpture Society. Gregory’s work appeared in group shows at many prestigious museums and in exhibitions, including the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the National Collection of Fine Arts in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This memoir is based on Penrose’s oral history interviews with Gregory, as well as letters and diaries compiled before Gregory’s death in 1990. A Dream and a Chisel demonstrates the importance of mentorships, offers a glimpse into the realities of an artist’s life and studio, and captures the vital early years of an extraordinary woman who carved a place for herself in Louisiana’s history.
Dreaming with Animals Dunn, L. Kerr; Wyrick, Monica; Salmon, Robin R
2017, 2017-10-03
eBook
The story of the extraordinary life and art of a renowned female sculptor of realistic animal statues Dreaming with Animals is the first children's biography of celebrated sculptor and Brookgreen ...Gardens cofounder Anna Hyatt Huntington. Her remarkable life serves as an inspiration not only because of the greatness of her art but also because of her courage and perseverance. L. Kerr Dunn highlights how Anna overcame society's expectations of women and survived a life-threatening illness to become a prolific sculptor and an important benefactor of art and wildlife until her death at age ninety-seven. As a young woman, Anna moved to New York City at a time when American women of her class rarely lived alone or worked outside the home. Although she studied briefly under famous sculptors, she soon felt restless and left art school and began to teach herself to sculpt animals by watching them closely, trying to see the animal's true spirit and then representing that spirit in her work. Over time Anna established herself as an important animalier, an artist specializing in realistic portrayals of animals. By 1915 she was one of only ten American women artists earning enough money from the sales of her art to support herself. Later, with her husband, Archer Huntington, Anna founded South Carolina sculpture garden and wildlife preserve Brookgreen Gardens, the country's first public sculpture garden and the world's largest collection of figurative sculpture by American artists in an outdoor setting. This biography provides engaging details of Anna's life, such as her tendency as a child to lie in pastures studying horses; her travels around the country with her husband in a trailer full of monkeys, dogs, and birds; and the couple's purchase of a zoo. In Dreaming with Animals, Dunn has provided us with an affecting portrait of a strong, capable, talented, and innovative woman Robin R. Salmon, vice president for collections and curator of sculpture at Brookgreen Gardens, provides a foreword.
Harry Bertoia, Sculptor Kompass Nelson, June
Wayne State University Press eBooks,
2018, 2018-02-05
eBook
Odprti dostop
Harry Bertoia, Sculptor is devoted to the life and work of a twentieth-century Italian-born American artist whose important commissions are located in twenty-five American cities from New York to ...Seattle and from Minneapolis to Miami. It traces the development of Bertoia's versatile career from his youth in Detroit, beginning with drawings, paintings, and monoprints, then jewelry and furniture designs, to his abstract sculptures in metals, many of architectural proportions. The book includes a biography of the man and detailed descriptions of his methods of working. Many major sculptures and some minor ones are described in detail. They are critically analyzed for their aesthetic components and the ideas they were intended to express. A large number of photographs supplements the descriptions and analyses. Two appendixes give chronologies of the artist's life and of his architectural commissions, the latter virtually a catalog of Bertoia's major works. Based on several extensive interviews with the artist, as well as on research into his earlier writings, the book includes Bertoia's thoughts on aesthetics and various phases of the art processes he uses. His work is categorized into four major aesthetic explorations that interested him most of his life.
Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908) was celebrated as one of the country's most respected artists, credited with opening the field of sculpture to women and cited as a model of female ability and American ...refinement. In this biographical study, Kate Culkin explores Hosmer's life and work and places her in the context of a notable group of expatriate writers and artists who gathered in Rome in the midnineteenth century. In 1852 Hosmer moved from Boston to Rome, where she shared a house with actress Charlotte Cushman and soon formed close friendships with such prominent expatriates as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and fellow sculptors John Gibson, Emma Stebbins, and William Wetmore Story. References to Hosmer or characters inspired by her appear in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Kate Field among others. Culkin argues that Hosmer's success was made possible by her extensive network of supporters, including her famous friends, boosters of American gentility, and women's rights advocates. This unlikely coalition, along with her talent, ambition, and careful maintenance of her public profile, ultimately brought her great acclaim. Culkin also addresses Hosmer's critique of women's position in nineteenthcentury culture through her sculpture, women's rights advocates' use of high art to promote their cause, the role Hosmer's relationships with women played in her life and success, and the complex position a female artist occupied within a country increasingly interested in proving its gentility.
Environmental art or 'ecoart' is a burgeoning field and includes a wide variety of practices, some of which are exemplified in this collection: from sculptures or installations made from discarded ...rubbish to intimate ephemeral artworks placed in the natural environment, or from theatrical presentations incorporated into environmental education programs to socially critical paintings. In some cases, the artworks aim to create indignation in the viewer, sometimes to educate, sometimes to create a feeling of empathy for the natural environment, or sometimes they are built into community building projects. This timely book examines various roles of the arts in building ecological sustainability. A wide range of practitioners is represented, including visual and performing artists, scientists, social researchers, environmental educators and research students. They are all united in this text in their belief that the arts are vital in the building of sustainability - in the way that they are practiced, but also the connections they make to ecology, science and indigenous culture.
