The Grapevine
Watts Towers Q&A with Artist Dominique Moody
Last year, LACMA began a partnership with the City of Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs to work toward the long-term preservation of Watts Towers. Lucas Casso, an intern with LACMA’s Department of Curatorial Planning has been conducting interviews with artists and others who have been involved in or influenced by the Towers.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, I traveled to Watts to interview assemblage artist Dominique Moody. Dominique is currently the R Cloud Artist in Residence and works on East 107th Street, only a stone’s throw from the Watts Towers. Moody’s work was recently featured in a yearlong solo exhibition at the Watts Towers Art Center and can be seen on her website.
Moody and I first walked around the property on which she lives and works, including the installation version of her NOMAD project, the final product of which will give her a traveling studio and living…
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Totem Pole Art Preserves Native American Culture
NAZIS, AND GREMLINS, AND SPANDULES, OH MY! WWII CARTOON CHARACTERS AT THE WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY
In thinking about some of the Wolfsonian library materials that might be of interest to the Florida International University students taking my America & Movies history class on wartime propaganda this semester, I first thought of the numerous children’s propaganda books in our collection. Many of these children’s books were donated to the library by Pamela K. Harer.
Cartoon characters, of course, were enlisted in the fight against the Axis during the war years, and some of our most cherished and popular cartoon heroes were featured in animated films and printed pamphlets, sheet music covers, and children’s books. A couple of popular Sunday newspaper comic strip characters appeared as well in a wartime alphabet book published for young children. In addition to teaching youngsters their ABCs, Blondie and Dagwood, instructed these children (and parental readers) in proper patriotic behavior.
GIFT OF FRANCIS XAVIER LUCA & CLARA PALACIO-DE LUCA
While younger audiences may not know…
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Art Exhibition: “Afrolatinos”
CFP: African American Artists in the Midwest @ MACAA 2012
Call for Papers (Deadline April 10, 2012)
African American Artists in the Midwest
Session Chair: Julia R. Myers Ph.D., Eastern Michigan University
Email: jmyers@emich.edu
While American art history tends to be fairly parochial with its emphasis on East Coast artists, African American art history seems to suffer even more strongly from this bias. This session will be devoted to African-American artists or art institutions in the Midwest. The Great Migration from 1913-1949 brought hundreds of thousands of black Americans to Midwest industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. And some of these people and their descendents made art. Indeed on a trip to Detroit in 1964, Langston Hughes said, “Harlem used to be the Negro cultural center of America. If Detroit has not already become so, it is well on its way to becoming it.” Literary historians have frequently taken up the topic of Midwestern African-American writers, but this is far less true in the case of black visual artists. In line with the conference’s content session of Community and Collaboration, papers treating African American mural projects in the Midwest are especially encouraged, as are papers dealing with the educational outreach activities of artists and art institutions. However, all papers dealing with Midwestern African-American art from all time periods, colonial to the present, are welcomed for consideration.
CFP: Between the Literary and the Visual: Inter-Artistic Approaches to African-American Art History @ MACAA 2012
Call for Papers (Deadline April 10, 2012)
Between the Literary and the Visual: Inter-Artistic Approaches to African-American Art History
Session Chair: Jennifer J. Marshall, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Email: marsh590@umn.edu
A stubborn truism vexes African-American art history: the canon of black American literature is viewed as more established and robust than that of black American visual arts. This misconception has more to do with conventional disciplinary divisions, than it does with either the quantity or quality of black visual expression. Segregating the “literary” from the “visual”–and assigning these to English and Art History departments, respectively–has obscured the originally inter-artistic nature of much black cultural expression as well as the terms of its early reception and critique.
African-American artists have repeatedly worked in black literary contexts–from Aaron Douglas’s illustrations for Alain Locke’s The New Negro to Glenn Ligon’s painted excerpts from Ralph Ellison and Richard Pryor. At the same time, many (nonblack) literary critics have been enthusiastic interpreters of black visual arts. Theater critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten promoted the painters of the Harlem Renaissance; Sidney Hirsch, one of Vanderbilt University’s influential literary modernists, “discovered” black folk sculptor William Edmondson; and French poststructuralist Roland Barthes famously used a photograph by James Van Der Zee to explain his concept of the photographic punctum.
This panel seeks papers that take stock of this prodigious overlap between the literary and the visual arts. Participants are invited to address how literature and literary criticism may productively inform African-American art history, to recount the specific historical circumstances that compel this approach, and to consider broadly how attention to inter-artistic histories might helpfully reform both approaches to and canons of black cultural expression.
2011 Annual General Meeting of the Museums Association of the Caribbean
As I mentioned in my post on Thinking About the Country House, there has been a great deal of interest in this subject area over the last two years or so. Present excitement is reflected in television shows like Downton Abbey which portray upstairs/downstairs divides and socio-economic themes of Britain in the early twentieth century. Such is public interest in these elements of country house living, that many houses open to the public feel the need to show their ‘secret’ rooms and dark domestic quarters for a short time each year.
There has also been a flourish of interest in the grander apartments, perhaps to counterbalance the austere or the uncharacteristic calm of the kitchens, pantries and nurseries. Restored pieces of furniture are celebrated and entire rooms have been in receipt of funding in order to return them to a key moment in their history. This sort of activity has eventually led a few British academic institutions to consider the thought processes of country house owners in creating their homes. This has in turn prompted debate on the wider position of the country house, in Britain particularly, through themes of trade, politics and even military presence.
The University of Warwick’s three year project on The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 is one of these resulting debates. The main purpose of the project is to explore the significance of the country house in an imperial and global context by uniting relevant houses, families, and material culture by means of one detailed study. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Professor Margot Finn, in the Department of History at Warwick, the project ‘seeks to work in collaboration with family and local historians, curators, academics and other researchers to illuminate Britain’s global material culture from the eighteenth century to the present.’
It has become quite a large undertaking, and so far the project team have amassed a great deal of material to present on their website. Arguably, some of it is rather more general country house reference material, but nonetheless, for anyone interested in British country houses, this is a must-see.
The project has five main objectives:
i) to produce a series of interlinked case studies,
ii) to situate the Asian goods that furnished Georgian and Victorian homes,
iii) to illuminate the ways in which material culture helped to mediate wider historical processes,
iv) to assess the ways in which Asian luxuries incorporated within British country houses expressed regional, national and global identities,
v) and to integrate academic and museum-based research on the global genealogies of British country house interiors.
It does sound very long-winded for anyone outside academic study, or with a general interest. What the website for the project can do, however, is provide a platform for further reading. For example, over the term of the project there will be a series of published studies on individual houses. The first ‘went live’ this week – Swallowfield Park, Berkshire. With separate sections to leaf through, and a full PDF of the case study to download, there is plenty to get into. Crucially, the study is comprehensive enough to include histories of architecture, family, design, and fine art. There are several pages to navigate through, and the illustrations are wonderful! Especially as the house is now owned by Sunley Heritage, a company which converts country houses into luxury apartments.
Clearly there are a lot of minds working on this project, and a lot of thought has gone into making this fully accessible. It may be academic, but this has not made it exclusive or entirely high-brow. I would even suggest that many more academic institutions could take heed of this method of promoting similar research, as it would definitely benefit those hungry to discover more about specialist areas of heritage study.
Links:
East India Company at Home (full link) http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/research/eicah/about/
The East India Company today http://www.theeastindiacompany.com/
Swallowfield Park on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallowfield_Park
Sunley Heritage – Swallowfield Park http://www.sunleyheritage.co.uk/SP_index.cfm
Geffrye Museum, London. The Histories of Home and the Warwick project http://historiesofhomessn.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/the-east-india-company-at-home-1757-1857/
SYMP: POLO S: Reorienting the Visual Culture of the Early Americas @ UPenn
SAVE THE DATE:
POLO S: Reorienting the Visual Culture of the Early Americas
Friday & Saturday, April 13-14, 2012
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies
University of Pennsylvania 3355 Woodland Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104
Organized by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, History of Art, University of
Pennsylvania.
In 1936 and 1943, the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres García made
two related drawings both of which depict the continent of South America
from a southern perspective. With the cardinal direction of “Polo S”
written across the top of the continent, the artist implored his
modernist contemporaries in the Southern Cone to reconsider their
perspective on the geographic location of the contemporary avant garde
impulse. By invoking Torres García’s radical move, this international and
interdisciplinary conference takes as its mission an exploration of the
theoretical, regional, methodological, and subjective problems encountered
by scholars who are currently working on the “early” visual and material
culture of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and South America. It
is therefore an attempt to identify the shared challenges that researching
and writing about objects produced in these locations prior to 1850 might
present in a moment of de-centered intellectual discourse, not unlike the
one that Torres García critiqued in the middle of the last century.
Keynote:
Marcus Wood, University of Sussex
Participants:
Amanda Bagneris, Tulane University
Dennis Carr, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Mónica Domínguez Torres, University of Delaware
Maurie McInnis, University of Virginia
Charmaine Nelson, McGill University
Regina Root, College of William & Mary
Tamara J. Walker, University of Pennsylvania
The symposium is funded by grants from the University of Pennsylvania’s
Mellon Initiative for Cross-Cultural Contacts and the Terra Foundation for
American Art, and is supported by the History of Art Department, Africana
Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Arthur Ross Gallery.
CIVIL RIGHTS DISPLAY FOR BROWNSVILLE STUDENT VISITORS
This Friday morning, thirty-four Brownsville Middle School students came to the Wolfsonian with their social studies teacher for tours of our galleries and a library presentation. As the students were studying civil rights, we had laid out a wide variety of materials of the subject in advance of their arrival. When queried about what they knew about the civil rights movement in this country, most of the students quite naturally talked about the struggle in the 1960s and mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King. My own presentation and display of materials was intended to introduce them to the earlier struggles and much longer history of civil rights agitation in America set against the background of the First and Second World Wars.
Although we might have begun earlier, our own discussions of civil rights began with the First World War and the campaign to recruit African Americans as soldiers. Woodrow Wilson’s administration…
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ACRAH 