Enfilade

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

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

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