Enfilade

Renee Cox, The Signing, 2018, inkjet print, 122 × 213 cm
(Princeton University Art Museum)

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From Princeton University Art Museum:

Object Lessons in American Art: Selections from the Princeton University Art Museum
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, 4 February — 14 May 14 2023
Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut, 3 June — 10 September 2023
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, 29 September 2023 — 7 January 2024

Curated by Karl Kusserow

Henry Inman, O-Chee-Na-Shink-Ka a, 1832–33, oil on canvas, 78 × 645 cm (Promised gift from a Private Collection, member of Class of 1982).

Object Lessons in American Art features four centuries of works from the Princeton University Art Museum that collectively explore American history, culture, and society. Inspired by the concept of the object lesson—the study of a material thing to communicate a larger idea—the exhibition brings groups of objects together to ask fundamental questions about artistic significance, materials, and how meaning changes across time and contexts. With a focus on race, gender, and the environment, these pairings demonstrate the value of juxtaposing diverse objects to generate new understanding. Object Lessons presents Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from contemporary perspectives, illustrating how fresh investigations can inform and enrich its meaning, affording new insights into the American past and present. Curated by Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Curator of American Art.

Karl Kusserow, ed., with contributions by: Horace Ballard , Kirsten Pai Buick , Ellery Foutch , Karl Kusserow , Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, and Rebecca Zorach, Object Lessons in American Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 200 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0691978857, £35 / $40.

Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University’s venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword
Preface and Acknowledgments

• Introduction — Lenticular: Subject and Object in American Art — Karl Kusserow
• ‘Race’ as Object Lesson: Objects of Rebellion — Kirsten Pai Buick
• Looking Back and Looking Forward: A Feminist Lens on a Collection of American Art — Ellery E. Foutch
• Oblique Assemblies: Toward Queer Ecologies in American Art — Horace D. Ballard
• Intimations of Ecology: Varieties of Environmental Experience in American Art — Karl Kusserow
• Material Echoes, Traumatic Histories, and Liquid Transformations: The Romance of the Sea in American Art — Rebecca Zorach
• Learning from Object Lessons: Toward a Curatorial Pedagogy of Unfixing and Defamiliarizing the Past — Jeffrey Richmond-Moll

Contributors
Index
Photography Credits

Left: Peter Brathwaite’s restaged version of The Virgin of Guadalupe. Right: Unknown painter, The Virgin of Guadalupe, oil painting, 1745 (London: Wellcome Collection), cropped from original and colour saturated.

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From the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery:

Peter Brathwaite: Rediscovering Black Portraiture
King’s College London, Strand Campus, October 2021 — February 2022
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, 14 April — 3 September 2023

During the first lockdown in 2020, with all his performances cancelled, baritone, artist, broadcaster, and writer Peter Brathwaite began researching and reimagining more than 100 artworks. These artworks featured portraits of Black sitters, as part of the online #GettyMuseumChallenge to use household objects to restage famous paintings. He called the photographic series Rediscovering Black Portraiture. Alongside this project he also intensified his research into his dual heritage Barbadian roots, uncovering a wealth of detail about his enslaved and enslaver ancestors and their history, including an uprising of enslaved people in 1816 and songs of resistance they sang. Three years on, with a London exhibition behind him and a book out with Getty Publications, Peter Brathwaite brings his whole practice to the history of Georgian House Museum and the collections of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. New interventions and sound installations reveal the Black presence hidden at the heart of our spaces and objects. The exhibition opened to coincide with the anniversary of the Barbados insurrection, 14 April 1816.

Left: Marie-Victoire Lemoine, Portrait of a Youth in Embroidered Vest, 1785, oil on canvas, 68 × 50 cm (Jacksonville, Florida: Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens). Right: Peter Brathwaite’s restaged version of a Youth in Embroidered Vest.

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From The Getty:

Peter Brathwaite, with contributions by Cheryl Finley, Temi Odumosu, and Mark Sealy, Rediscovering Black Portraiture (Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2023), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1606068168, $40.

Join Peter Brathwaite on an extraordinary journey through representations of Black subjects in Western art, from medieval Europe through the present day. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Brathwaite has thoughtfully researched and reimagined more than one hundred artworks featuring portraits of Black sitters—all posted to social media with the caption “Rediscovering #blackportraiture through #gettymuseumchallenge.”

Rediscovering Black Portraiture collects more than fifty of Brathwaite’s most intriguing re-creations. Introduced by the author and framed by contributions from experts in art history and visual culture, this fascinating book offers a nuanced look at the complexities and challenges of building identity within the African diaspora and how such forces have informed Black portraits over time. Artworks featured include The Adoration of the Magi by Georges Trubert, Portrait of an Unknown Man by Jan Mostaert, Rice n Peas by Sonia Boyce, Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, and many more. This volume also invites readers behind the scenes, offering a glimpse of the elegant artifice of Brathwaite’s props, setup, and process. An urgent and compelling exploration of embodiment, representation, and agency, Rediscovering Black Portraiture serves to remind us that Black subjects have been portrayed in art for nearly a millennium and that their stories demand to be told.

Peter Brathwaite is an acclaimed baritone who performs in operas and concerts throughout Europe. He is a presenter on BBC Radio 3 and has been shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. Cheryl Finley is inaugural distinguished visiting director of the Atlanta University Center Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective and the author of Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (2018). Temi Odumosu is an art historian, curator, and assistant professor at University of Washington Information School and the author of Africans in English Caricature 1769–1819: Black Jokes, White Humour (2017). Mark Sealy is director of Autograph and professor of photography, race, and human rights at University of the Arts London. His numerous publications include Different (2001), coauthored with Stuart Hall; Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (2019); and Photography: Race, Rights, and Representation (2022).