Online Talk | Mei Mei Rado on Chinoiserie Textile Designs
From the Cooper Hewitt:
Mei Mei Rado | Chinoiserie Designs in Textiles
Online, 8 July 2026, 1pm (ET)
Curtain, 1774–1811, after Jean-Baptiste Pillement, printed by Bromley Hall, copperplate printed cotton plain weave (New York: Cooper Hewitt, American Textile History Museum Collection, 2016-35-101).
Join Cooper Hewitt for an illustrated talk exploring a selection of chinoiserie (Chinese-inspired) designs used in works on paper and textiles from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection.
During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, innovative chinoiserie designs in European textiles vividly reflected the cross-cultural exchanges fostered by global networks of trade, Jesuit missions, diplomatic contacts, and colonial expansions. Print sources, including illustrated travel accounts and decorative vignettes by artists such as François Boucher and Jean Pillement, provided major inspirations for the chinoiserie motifs across various textiles mediums, ranging from tapestry and silk, to embroidery and printed cotton. Used for furnishings or fashionable dress, these textiles offered Europeans visual knowledge and imaginative engagements with a distant land and foreign culture. Meanwhile, European chinoiserie textiles also travelled back to China, where they sparked a very different set of perceptions and imagination of the West. This is the third and final program of our recent series exploring the connections between Chinese and Western art and design from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.
Registration is available here»
Mei Mei Rado is Assistant Professor at Bard Graduate Center, New York. Her research focuses on the history of textiles, dress, and decorative arts in China and France from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Previously Dr Rado served as Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her recent monograph The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, 2025) was the winner of the 2026 Louis Gottschalk book prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and a finalist for the 2026 Charles Rufus Morey book award of the College Art Association.
Jamie Kwan is the Assistant Curator of Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt. Before her time at Cooper Hewitt, Kwan served as the Associate Curator at the Wende Museum, an institution focused on the Cold War in Culver City, California. She has also held positions at the Morgan Library & Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Huntington Library, and Getty Research Institute.
New Book | Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Maria Cosway
From Unicorn Publishing Group:
Diane Boucher, Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Maria Cosway (Lewes: Unicorn Publishing, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1916846784, £28.
The beautiful Anglo-Italian artist Maria Cosway was one of the most talented and dynamic women active in Regency England, but one whose achievements have been largely overlooked. Born in Florence in 1760, she was acclaimed at an early age as both a painter and a musician. She exhibited forty-one paintings at the Royal Academy summer exhibition between 1781 and 1801 and hosted regular musical soirées at the Pall Mall house she shared with her husband, Richard Cosway. They were attended by the political and cultural elite of London.
Maria’s extraordinary network of connections to the great and the good of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, included friendships with, among others, Thomas Jefferson, the Prince of Wales, Pasquale Paoli, the artist Jacques-Louis David, the opera singer Luigi Marchesi, the Duchess of Devonshire, the actress and writer Mary Robinson, and members of the Bonaparte family. Estranged from her husband by 1801, Maria Cosway largely gave up painting and reinvented herself as a progressive educator, founding schools for young women: first in Lyon, later in Lodi, Italy. In recognition of her achievements at Lodi, the Emperor of Austria made her a baroness.
Diane Boucher was born in London and has an MA in History of Art from University College London. From 1998 until 2002, she was Research Director for the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. In the United States, she worked at the Crab Tree Collection of American and British Arts and Crafts and at the Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia. She has published magazine articles and books on the arts and interior design. She lives in London and Suffolk with her husband.
Conference | 2026 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife
From Historic Deerfield:
Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come
2026 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife
Online and in-person, Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 26–27 June 2026
In-person registration closes June 22 at noon. Virtual registration will stay open through the event. All registrants receive access to recordings of the event for one month.
In 2026, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will mark its 50th anniversary by looking both backwards and ahead. As this year’s seminar looks forward to its own future, we will contemplate ways residents of the region (broadly construed) have envisioned, foretold, and worked to shape various futures over the region’s long history. Events will include reflection on, and celebration of, the Seminar’s fifty years as a source of scholarship and publication on the everyday life, work, and culture of New England’s past.
f r i d a y , 2 6 j u n e
Ruthy Rogers (1778–1812), Needlework Picture, Marblehead, Massachusetts, ca. 1789, silk on linen, 27 × 23 cm (New York: American Folk Art Museum, gift of Ralph Esmerian, 2005.8.53).
10.00 Optional Morning Activity
Tours at Bellamy House and remarks from the Director, Chicopee Falls, MA (Pre-registration is required: $12 per person)
12.00 Registration opens at Historic Deerfield
1.20 Virtual sign-in opens for online attendees
1.30 Welcome — Marla Miller (Distinguished Professor of History, UMass Amherst, and President, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife)
1.45 Panel 1 | Planned Communities
Moderator: Christian Goodwillie (Director and Curator of Special Collections, Hamilton College, Burke Library)
• Carl Guarneri (Professor Emeritus of History, Saint Mary’s College of California, and Research Scholar, Colgate University) — Brook Farm: Boston ‘Combined Households’, and the Utopian Origins of Urban Communal Housing, 1846–1851
• CJ Martin (Visiting Assistant Professor, College of the Holy Cross) — Black Millerites
• Diana Lempel (Scholar/Practitioner of Folk History) — The Blessing of the Attic: Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping Society and Family Memory Keeping
3.15 Break with refreshments
3.30 Tribute to Founders
3:45 Futurecasting: A Roundtable on the Past, Present, and Future of New England Studies
Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Public History Program and Historic Northampton
Moderator: J. Ritchie Garrison (Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Delaware)
• Emelie Gevalt (Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, American Folk Art Museum)
• Thomas Guiler (Director of Museum Affairs, Oneida Community Mansion House)
• Philippe Halbert (Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
5.00 Reception
Sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the Boston University Program in American Studies
Join us for a celebratory reception marking the 50th anniversary of the Dublin Seminar. Enjoy heavy hors d’oeuvres and assorted beverages in the company of the Dublin Seminar membership and your colleagues for this festive occasion. (Pre-registration is $25)
7.00 Keynote Address
• Holly Jackson (Chair of American Studies and Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston) — The Ends of the World in Antebellum New England
s a t u r d a y , 2 7 j u n e
8.30 Deerfield Community Center opens. In-person attendees may pick up name badges and information packets.
8:50 Virtual sign-in for online attendees
9.00 Panel 2 | Imagined Futures in Literature
Moderator: Barbara Matthews (Independent Historical Consultant)
• Megan Pickett (The Winchendon School) — ‘Where to Go Next’: Utopian Immediacy in Total Loss Farm
• Ella Koston (PhD student at Boston University’s American Studies Program) — Afrofuturist Vision: Pauline Hopkins
10.30 Break
10.45 Panel 3 | Imagined Futures in Material Culture
Moderator: Erika Gasser (Director of Academic Programs, Historic Deerfield)
• Elizabeth Eager (Assistant Professor, Southern Methodist University) — Futurity Imagined through Women’s Needlework
• Victoria Kenyon (Curatorial Track doctoral candidate, Art History, University of Delaware) — Magical Flowers: Fortune-Telling Objects from New England
• Brece Honeycutt (Independent Scholar/Multimedia Artist) — Building Harmony / Constructing Color
12.15 Lunch (buffet provided at the Deerfield Inn)
1.45 Panel 4 | Limits of Progressivism: Sexual Politics
Moderator: Erica Lome (Curator of Collections, Historic New England)
• Hunter Moskowitz (Researcher at American Ancestors, Boston) — Factory as Utopia: Imaginations of Sexuality in Early Lowell
• Catherine Terelak (Interpreter at Historic New England’s Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House) — An Intentional Community: Gloucester’s Dabsville
• Stephen Paterwic (Trustee of the Shaker Library and Museum, Sabbathday Lake, Maine) — Shakers and the Second Gathering
3.15 Break
3.30 Panel 5 | Forecasting Future Ecologies
Moderator: Nan Wolverton (Vice President for Academic and Public Programs, American Antiquarian Society)
• Meghan Freeman (Fellowship and Internship Program Director, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) — Bird Day, Now and Forever: Mabel Osgood Wright and the Future of New England Bird-Life
• Li-hsin Hsu (Professor of English, National Chengchi University, Taiwan) — Silk Culture, Utopian Experiment, and Anthropocene Imagination in Mid-19th-Century New England
• Dan McKanan (Emerson Senior Lecturer, Harvard Divinity School) — Imagining the Future Forest
5.00 Closing Remarks — John Davis (President, Historic Deerfield, Inc)
Enfilade Turns 17
From the Editor
Juneteenth! Father’s Day! The summer solstice! And Enfilade turns 17! You all know the ropes: buy an art book to celebrate. It’s also a fine time to renew (or begin) your HECAA membership. Thanks so much for another year.
Best for a good summer!
Craig Hanson
Call for Papers | Drawing as Knowledge: Practice, Theory, and History
From the Call for Papers:
Drawing as Knowledge: Practice, Theory, and History
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 16–17 September 2026
Proposals due by 13 July 2026
Later this year, the Paul Mellon Centre will be able to announce the completion of the cataloguing of the archive of Deanna Petherbridge (1939–2024). Petherbridge was an artist, writer, curator, and educator, known above all for her artistic practice in and writing on drawing. To mark this moment, the Centre will also be showing a display of materials from her archive, accompanied by a number of Petherbridge’s artworks from private collections (29 July to 30 October 2026).
This follows closely on the heels of the publication in 2026 of the new Thames & Hudson edition of her landmark book, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (first published in 2010). Petherbridge completed the revised edition as an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute, which also holds her celebrated ink-drawn triptych, The Destruction of Palmyra (2017).
Held in collaboration with the Warburg Institute, this conference will explore Petherbridge’s concept of “drawing as visual thinking” within the context of British art history. We are seeking proposals for 20-minute papers that engage with British drawing, in any period, and in its most diverse and international contexts.
We invite proposals on any topic, but are particularly interested in the following themes:
• the purposes and functions of drawing practice
• the significations of line, particularly, but also tone and colour
• issues of power and control in drawing as a means of knowledge formation. This could include the colonial gaze, for example, or the dynamics of the life class
• drawing as a means of knowing the human body
• the role of drawing in understanding people, including the drawing of portraits within social gatherings, for example, or caricature and satire
• the role of drawing in understanding and interpreting the natural world, from the molecular to the celestial
• drawing as a prominent technology in interpreting landscapes, through topographical practice
• drawing as a means of knowing the built environment
• the role of drawing in understanding the imagination, creativity and expression
We welcome contributions from across disciplines and professional fields, as long as the proposal is focused on drawing within artistic practice, as a means of knowledge formation.
Please submit the following to events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk with the subject line “CFP Drawing as Knowledge”:
• An abstract (450 word maximum) describing your proposed contribution
• A 250-word biography
Please combine your abstract and biography into a single Word document and send it as an email attachment before Monday, 13 July 2026, 11.59pm (BST). Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered. Successful contributors will receive a speaker’s fee of £200, and reasonable travel and accommodation costs will be covered. If you have any access requirements, please let us know.
New Book | Picture Democracy
As previously noted here at Enfilade, Wolf Burchard co-curated the exhibition Revolution! now on view at The Met. He also has just published this small book, from Thornwillow Press:
Wolf Burchard, Picture Democracy (Newburgh, New York: Thornwillow Press, 2026), 80 pages, $65.
What did power look like before 1776? This is the question Wolf Burchard asks in Picture Democracy. His answer unfolds through three iconic portraits of George III, Louis XVI, and George Washington and reveals just how radical the American experiment truly was. If kings had long been portrayed through the established language of majesty, inherited authority, and divine right, how was one to portray the leader of a republic?
At the center of the book is Gilbert Stuart’s great Lansdowne portrait of Washington, a painting that helped invent a new visual language for democratic leadership. But how do you portray a president? Washington was the first of his kind, so there was no established formula comparable to that employed in the depictions of other heads of state, kings, queens, emperors, and popes. Picture Democracy is about such people of power, and how some of the supreme artistic exponents of their time tried to convey that power through portraiture. It tells the story of three likenesses of three men—George III, Louis XVI, and George Washington—who never met in person, but who for decades had almost daily interactions with one another, or were, at the very least, on each other’s minds.
Wolf Burchard is Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he joined the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts in 2019, after holding curatorial positions at the British Royal Collection and the National Trust. Much of his work focuses on the relationship between art and power. In 2026, he co-curated Revolution! at The Met, an exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and The Rediscovered Treasure of the Sun King, at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also co-organized the exhibition The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy, 1714–1760, shown at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace to mark the tercentenary of the Hanoverian succession in 2014, and published The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (2016).
New Book | Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia
From Bloomsbury:
Ekaterina Heath, Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia: Empress Maria Feodorovna’s Pavlovsk Park (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1350544505, £45 / $62.
How does a woman with no formal political authority influence the politics of an empire? Through her garden.
In the hierarchies of the late 18th- and early 19th-century Russian imperial court, a consort held no direct access to power. Yet Empress Maria Feodorovna, wife of Paul I and later Dowager Empress during the reign of Alexander I, influenced the politics of her era through the cultivation of Pavlovsk Park near St Petersburg. Women, Gardens, and Agency in Imperial Russia draws on the rich historical record of the Russian royal court to recover the evidence of her agency. Heath traces Maria Feodorovna’s strategies for maintaining access to power under Catherine II and Paul I, and examines how, widowed and formally sidelined, she used Pavlovsk to consolidate influence during her son’s reign, turning a garden into a panopticon, a memorial, and a vehicle for rewriting history.
Ekaterina Heath is a Research Associate at the University of Sydney, specialising in garden studies and Russian history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her earlier work includes essays on Grand Tour memory at Pavlovsk and on plants as diplomatic gifts in British-Russian relations.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 Imperial Family: Building Bridges
2 Plants in the Garden: Growing the Power Base
3 Diplomacy: Weaving the Networks of Power
4 Grief: Turning Defeat into Victory
5 Pavlovsk Panopticon: Arguing against Abolishing Serfdom
6 Charity: Creating Legacy through Rewriting History
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Conference | Theatricality and Garden Art
From ArtHist.net:
Theatralität und Gartenkunst: Vom 17. bis ins frühe 19. Jahrhundert
Weimar, 25–27 June 2026
Internationale und interdisziplinäre Tagung vom 25. bis 27. Juni 2026 im Vortragssaal des Goethe- und Schiller-Archivs und Festsaal des Goethe-Nationalmuseums, Weimar
Veranstaltungen im Rahmen der Tagung
• Goethes und Schröters Die Fischerin. Eine Promenade in Tiefurt, 26. Juni 2026, 16 Uhr (Park Tiefurt bei Weimar)
• Konzert: Kammermusik aus der Epoche der Empfindsamkeit, am Freitag 26. Juni 2026, 19.30 Uhr, Festsaal im Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar
In Kooperation mit der Klassik Stiftung Weimar und der Goethe-Gesellschaft Weimar. Gefördert durch Daimler und Benz-Stiftung und DFG
Organisation und Kontakt
Anna Axtner-Borsutzky, a.axtner-borsutzky@lmu.de
Helena Langewitz, helena.langewitz@uni-mainz.de
d o n n e r s t a g , 2 5 j u n i
13.30 Anna Axtner-Borsutzky und Helena Langewitz — Begrüßung
13.45 Gartenanlagen von Versailles bis Wörlitz
Moderation: Astrid Dröse und Anna Axtner-Borsutzky
• Stefan Schweizer (Düsseldorf) — Zur Praxis des Wassertheaters. Von der Villa Aldobrandini über das Wassertheater in Versailles bis zur Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel
• Hendrik Ziegler (Marburg) — Versailles in Wörlitz. Barocke Theatralität im Garten der Aufklärung
• Natalie Gutgesell (Lichtenfels/Berlin) — Zum Luisenkloster in Weimar
16.30 Franziska Rieland (Klassik Stiftung) — Der Tiefurter und der Herzogliche Park in Weimar: schöner Effekt, dichterische Vision und inszenierte Natur — Mit Führung im Ilmpark
f r e i t a g , 2 6 j u n i
9.30 Gartenanlagen von Weimar und Umgebung
Moderation: Helena Langewitz und Klaus Pietschmann
• Anna Axtner-Borsutzky (München) — Kulissen aus Kisten und Worten. Gartentheorie und -praxis auf der Bühne um 1800
• Anna Ananieva (Weimar) — Gartenräume als Spielräume. August von Kotzebue und die Theatralität des Gartens um 1800
• Antonia Weiss (Amsterdam) — The Right to Look: Gender in the Visual Regime of Berlin‘s Tiergarten, 1740–1830
• Jana Kittelmann (Dessau-Wörlitz) — Vulkane, Venus, Warnaltar. Zur Inszenierung von Natur und Kunst in den Wörlitzer Anlagen
13.00 Mittagspause und tagungsinterner Transfer nach Tiefurt
15.00 Angelika Schneider (Klassik Stiftung Weimar) — Führung in Tiefurt
16.00 Promenade mit Goethes und Corona Schroeters Die Fischerin im Park
19.30 Musikalische Abendveranstaltung im Goethe-Nationalmuseum
Moderation: Helena Langewitz und Anna Axtner-Borsutzky
• „Gewitternacht“ — Konzert mit Gunta Smirnova (Gesang) und Mikayel Balyan (Klavier)
s a m s t a g , 2 7 j u n i
9.30 Musik, Theater, Virtual Reality
Moderation: Sunna Kroy und Amelie Fenske
• Joachim Kremer (Stuttgart) — Außerhalb des Protokolls? Garten und Natur bei Hasse, Paisiello und Haydn
• Helena Langewitz (Mainz) — Deutsche Gärten auf der Opernbühne? Zur Konstruktion national konnotierter Gartenszenen in Günther von Schwarzburg (1776) und Rosamunde (1780)
• Esma Cerkovnik (Zürich) — Gärten der Täuschung. Zur Gartenszenerie in der Musik um 1800
• Alisa Winkens (Stuttgart) — Schauplatz Gartentheater. Molières Bühne für La Princesse d‘Élide (1664) in Versailles und in Virtual Reality
• Leonie Matt (Mainz) — Zwischen Théâtre d‘eau, Théâtre de fleurs und Théâtre pour jouer la Comédie. Theatrale Gartenschauplätze in der Gartentheorie des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts
• Hartmut Troll (Bundesgärten AT) — Theatrum terrae. Aspekte der Gartenkunst der Aufklärung am Beispiel der Schlossgärten Schwetzingen und Schönbrunn
Colloquium | Visualizing Antiquity: The Copy of the Copy
From ArtHist.net:
Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints V:
The Copy of the Copy … of the Copy: Techniques of Pictorial Reception of
Antiquity in the Early Modern Period
Online and in-person, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3 July 2026
Organized by Elisabeth Décultot, Arnold Nesselrath, Cristina Ruggero, and Timo Strauch
Various early modern depictions of Harpocrates (the Greek form of the Egyptian child-god Horus).
In virtually all areas of human creativity, the outcomes—whether intentional or not—are subject to the principle of repetition. Likewise, in the history of acquisition of knowledge about antiquity, what has once been recorded in writing or in images regularly becomes the starting point for reproduction. The information gathered at the beginning of the line of transmission is henceforth copied and disseminated for as long as there is a need for it, with the copies themselves often becoming multipliers through replication. In this context, copies by no means function merely as duplicates in a subordinate hierarchical relationship to the ‘original’. In chains of transmission that are usually preserved only in fragments, and often in the absence of the lost ‘original’, copies are rather a standard of transmission and thus offer crucial insights into historical processes, illustrate methodological strategies and promote epistemic understanding by making visible the continuous engagement with ancient models. The fifth colloquium in the series, Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints focuses on diverse processes of copying in the graphic arts and examines the role of copies as powerful resources of knowledge in the context of the preservation, transmission and creative transformation of concepts of antiquity.
Admission is free, with the required registration available here. Online access will be available here.
p r o g r a m m e
12.30 Welcome and Introduction — Elisabeth Décultot (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) and Cristina Ruggero (BBAW)
12.45 On the Theories of Copies
Chair: Elisabeth Décultot (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
• Arianna Farina (Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples), Reproducing Art: the Copy as an Epistemic Device
1.15 Antiquities in Academic Contexts
Chair: Tommaso Gristina (Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome)
• Lorenzo Giammattei (Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome), Learning Antiquity through Copies: Vincenzo Camuccini and the Transmission of Classical Models in Private Roman Academies
• Susanne Müller-Bechtel (Munich/Würzburg), Das akademische Aktstudium – ein wichtiger Multiplikator der bildlichen Antikenrezeption
Coffee Break
2.45 (Mis-)Interpretations of Antiquity
Chair: Timo Strauch (BBAW)
• Anna Carrarini (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich), Copy or Creature? Die druckgraphische Verfremdung der Kapitolinischen Wölfin
• Ana Sofia Pinto (Marta Rocha Moreira / CENP, FAUP, Porto), Around the ‘tripode’: The Roman Meal, Revisited
• Norbert Franken (Berlin), Fallstudien: Stiche und Zeichnungen verschollener Altertümer im kritischen Vergleich
Coffee Break
4.45 Antique Architecture in Copy Chains in Drawing and Print
Chair: Arnold Nesselrath (Rome)
• Elena Efimova (Lomonossow University, Moscow), Les copies des dessins de la Renaissance par les maîtres du cercle de Cassiano dal Pozzo dans un album du XVIIe siècle à Saint-Pétersbourg
• Ruggero De Blasi (Università degli Studi di Genova, Genoa), Representing Obelisks in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Roman Prints: Practices of Copying and Reconfiguration
• Ana Šverko (Cvito Fisković Centre and University, Split), The Copy of a Transformed Original. The Temple of Jupiter in Split and a Case of Graphic Transmission
6.15 Closing Discussion
New Book | What Was America?
Coming this fall from Yale UP:
Elise Armani and Katy Siegel, What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0300284430, $65.
In 1976 the United States celebrated its two hundredth year with festivals, exhibitions, works of art, and historical initiatives. Over a decade, planning for the Bicentennial spanned postwar prosperity, political activism, and, toward the end, fear of national decline. The social alchemy of these conditions produced a national investment in shared cultural experience never matched before or since. Across wildly disparate venues, demographics, interests, presidencies, and geographies, Bicentennial cultural production contended with community, the environment, immigration, heritage, technology, and what it meant to be American. This outpouring of projects both reflected and drove national debates, eliciting mass participation in negotiating US history and imagining the nation’s future.
What Was America? offers a prismatic view of American art and culture in the years leading up to 1976. Ten fascinating case studies examine the individual efforts of artists such as Benny Andrews; blockbuster exhibitions, including A Nation of Nations at the Smithsonian; and popular community projects such as protest quilts and time capsules. The authors consider issues that remain highly relevant today and offer new perspectives on the possibilities for art’s social role, exploring its use in defining the nation’s past and future, its purpose and its people.
Elise Armani is assistant curator of twentieth-century art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. Katy Siegel is the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art at Stony Brook University.
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