American Art 

About: American Art is an academic journal published by University of Chicago Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Painting & Visual art of the United States. It has an ISSN identifier of 1073-9300. Over the lifetime, 870 publications have been published receiving 3028 citations. The journal is also known as: AmArt.

Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes

Abstract: \"Renty, Congo. Plantation of B. F. Taylor, Esq.\" Daguerreotype taken by J. T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., March 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University Recent discussions of multiculturalism, ethnicity, identity, and race have raised many new questions about the nature of cultural difference. Some critics have derided \"political correctness\" and challenges to Western canons of culture, while others have struggled to trace the genealogies of cultural oppression and to challenge normative structures of identity formation. In its methodology, this second group of critics has shifted the analysis away from essentialist or biological versions of race by trying to determine how fluctuant ethnic roles are constructed and articulated through a variety of positions, languages, institutions, and apparatuses. When race has been subjected to the critical gaze of these practices, it has inevitably been reinscribed as a complex and discursive category that cannot be separated from other formative components of identity. In other words, these debates have made clear that \"race\" is a political issue, a product of subjective choices made around issues of power, a function less of physical repression than of constructions of knowledge. Who determines what counts as knowledge? Who represents and who is represented? Whose voice will be heard? Whose stories will be remembered? Such questions go to the heart of how history is written and validated by society-through negotiations fraught with silent conflicts and profound implications. For this reason, it is important to historicize not only the concept of race but also the institutions and powerknowledge conjunctions that have fostered it. Museums are central to the ways our culture is constructed. Despite the attention they now pay to spectacle and display, museums-like libraries, historical societies, and archives-are principally concerned with sorting and classifying knowledge. It is significant, then, that over the past few decades a great seachange has swept over all these institutions. In the wake of the photography boom of the 1970s, information once stored in the form of photographs and photographically illustrated books has been wrenched from its previous organizational and institutional contexts and reclassified according to its medium. As critic Rosalind Krauss has noted, the effect of this change has been \"to dismantle the photographic archive-the set of practices, institutions, and relationships to which nineteenth-century photography belonged-and to reassemble it within the categories previously constituted by art and its history.\"' Thus, in recent museum exhibitions of daguerreotypes, images once intended for

Imagining a More Expansive Narrative of American Art

Abstract: The study of U.S. Latino art history is at an incipient stage.1 We have begun laying the groundwork, but much more needs to be done. There are 38 million Latinos in the United States. But this growing number, this almost unfathomable reality of Latin America having seeped into the United States, is hardly acknowledged in the art-historical literature and in the academy. Texts and materials about Latino visual art for high school and even college teachers still do not exist. The books written in the last ten years about American art barely nod toward these alternative stories, these other visions of American art. There are still only a handful of places in the United States where scholars can earn a PhD in Latin American art history, and none where you can earn a graduate degree focused on Latino art. At the same time, some things are starting to happen that, from my perspective as a veteran scholar of Chicano studies and a collector of cultural artifacts, offer considerable hope. We have the beginning of a crucial archival base. We have the inception of a collecting culture. Also, a number of books are being produced that are not just catalogues but actual analyses of different movements and periods of Latino art.2 There is a new generation of Latino art historians. They are well trained, and they are beginning to historicize Latino cultural production. For example, they go back to the European baroque and ask, How is the European baroque related to the Latin American baroque during the colonial period? How is that spirit of the baroque related to the barrio and contemporary expression?3 This expansion and thinking in a broader historical terrain is significant. In addition, some Chicano art historians are going back and historicizing artistic production in a regional way, looking at New Mexico in the nineteenth century or Texas when it was still a part of Mexico.4 These attempts to lay the ground for Mexican American art will help to show its dimensions, depth, and historical trajectory. Chicano art historians are recovering historical figures, genres, and artists. They are beginning to talk about the work of certain artists like Javier Martinez, a Californian who was a part of American art of the early twentieth century and yet had Mexican roots and was related to modernism in Paris. Scholars are beginning to uncover regional figures, such as Consuelo “Chelo” Gonzalez Amezcua from Texas or Martin Ramirez from California, who are rapidly gaining fame as so-called outsider artists. This complicates the situation. Art historians are researching the contributions of artists who were not part of the “Chicano movement” but were Mexican American and belong in the history of contemporary American art. California artists like Manuel Neri, Robert Graham, and many others were never directly involved in the Chicano movement but are certainly significant figures in contemporary American art. It is a wonderful moment for historicizing, recuperating, and investigating the sweep of Latino art through its Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and other variants. Were there Luis Jimenez, Man on Fire, 1969. Molded fiberglass, 106 1⁄4 x 80 1⁄4 x 29 1⁄2 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of Philip Morris Inc.

Archives of Reality

Abstract: understanding of Latino visual art—the emergence in a number of cities of major archives that seek to document the creative expressions of the U.S. Latino community. Archival projects in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston, among other urban centers, have begun working to counter the effects of decades of disinterest. Several factors have stimulated the new sense of urgency embodied in these multiple efforts—many begun in the 1990s—to collect and preserve often-fragile and ephemeral materials that capture the dynamic spirit and philosophical foundations of the diverse art production of Latinos. Foremost is the steady rise in the Latino population in the United States since the 1980s. The 2003 census reported that for the first time “Hispanics” are the largest minority in the nation. With increasing social, economic, and political power, Latinos now constitute a major component of the American social fabric, and both public and private institutions must finally acknowledge their importance as a cultural force. As a result, Latino culture in general is more visible and is proving to be highly marketable. Although they are often perceived as elite institutions, museums, archives, and academic programs are not immune to the power of popular culture and the marketplace. No one can neglect the impact that such entertainment and commercial icons as J. Lo and Ricky Martin, TacoBell and Burritoville—and perhaps also artist Frida Kahlo—have had in constructing Latino identity as something hot and desirable. Latin celebrities, music, food, and fashion are an increasingly welcome aspect of mainstream culture. The push for greater documentation of Latino artistic production has also come about as the result of the still small but increasing number of Latinos in the academy and on the staffs of cultural institutions. Many of these professionals are secondand third-generation U.S.-born Latinos. Having experienced the flourishing of the Nuyorican and Chicano movements in the 1960s and 1970s, they recognize the role Latinos played in developing the nation’s contemporary culture and in creating community-based art. These contributions have often gone unacknowledged owing to a lack of historical evidence. Thus some art professionals and academics studying Latino art are making it their mission to rescue existing records for posterity. This is, however, a relatively new phenomenon. Various socioeconomic, demographic, and cultural reasons can be offered to try to explain the underrepresentation of art produced by Latinos across generations and styles in art history. As Tomás Ybarra-Frausto discusses in his accompanying commentary, these Taína B. Caragol Commentaries

The Fair Women

Abstract: The World's Columbian Exposition included amazing exhibits of the results of women's activities-in the arts, industry, science, politics and philanthropy. Most of these were housed in the Woman's Building, which was designed, decorated and administered entirely by women.