New Book | Image, Identity, and John Wesley
From Routledge:
Peter Forsaith, Image, Identity, and John Wesley: A Study in Portraiture (London: Routledge, 2018), 210 pages, ISBN: 9781138207899, $140.
The face of John Wesley (1703–1791), the Methodist leader, became one of the most familiar images in the English-speaking and transatlantic worlds through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the dozen or so painted portraits made during his lifetime came numbers of posthumous portraits and moralising ‘scene paintings’, and hundreds of variations of prints. It was calculated that six million copies were produced of one print alone—an 1827 portrait by John Jackson R.A. as frontispiece for a hymn book.
Illustrated by nearly one hundred images, many in colour, with a comprehensive appendix listing known Wesley images, this book offers a much-needed comprehensive and critical survey of one of the most influential religious and public figures of eighteenth-century Britain. Besides chapters on portraits from the life and after, scene paintings and prints, it explores aspects of Wesley’s (and Methodism’s) attitudes to art and the personality cult which gathered around Wesley as Methodism expanded globally.
Peter S. Forsaith is a historian of religion, culture and society in eighteenth-century Britain. He is Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University, UK, and has written and lectured on many aspects of Methodist history. He gained his Ph.D. in 2003 for a scholarly edition of Rev. John Fletcher’s letters to Rev. Charles Wesley, later expanded and published as Unexampled Labours (2008). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 ‘A Far Greater Genius than Sir Joshua’: Some Issues and Complexities around the Portraiture
2 ‘This Melancholy Employment’: Portraits from the Life to 1780
3 ‘I Yielded to Importunity’: Portraits from the Life, 1781–91
4 Prints and Posthumous Portraits: Spreading and Selling the Image
5 Scene Paintings
6 Pottery and Sculpture: A Note
7 No Striking Likeness? Images and Ambiguities
8 ‘The Pious Preacher’: Satire
9 ‘Of Pictures I Do Not Pretend To Be a Judge’: John Wesley and Art
10 Image, Identity, and Institution: Constructing a Canon
11 Conclusions: Visualising Mr. Wesley
Plates
Appendix A: Iconography of Principal Paintings of John Wesley, with Selected Prints
Appendix B: References in John Wesley’s Journal and Diaries to Portraits and Painters
Exhibition | Zurbarán’s Jacob and His Twelve Sons
I’m late with this posting, having only recently come to understand that the eighteenth-century provenance of the paintings (of which we have no knowledge until they appeared at auction in England in the 1720s) makes the series potentially relevant for issues of collecting and the South Sea Company, Jewish civil rights in the eighteenth century, and, of course, the reception of the Spanish Golden Age. –CH
From The Frick:
Zurbarán’s Jacob and His Twelve Sons: Paintings from Auckland Castle
The Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas, 17 September 2017 — 7 January 2018
The Frick Collection, New York, 31 January — 22 April 2018
Curated by Susan Grace Galassi, Mark Roglán, Amanda Dotseth, and Edward Payne
In collaboration with the Meadows Museum, Dallas, Texas, and The Auckland Project, County Durham, England, The Frick Collection has organized an exhibition of Jacob and His Twelve Sons, an ambitious series of thirteen paintings that depict over life-size figures from the Old Testament. On loan from Auckland Castle, the works by the Spanish Golden Age master Francisco de Zurbaran (1598–1664) have never before traveled to the United States. They were first presented at the Meadows Museum in the fall of 2017, and are on view at The Frick Collection from January 31 through April 22, 2018. In preparation for this American tour, these important seventeenth-century Spanish paintings, dating from the 1640s, have undergone a year-long in-depth technical analysis in the conservation department at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, the most extensive study of the series to date.
The iconography of Zurbarán’s remarkable series is derived from the ‘Blessings of Jacob’ in Chapter 49 of the Book of Genesis, a poem that has significance for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. On his deathbed, Jacob called together his sons, who would become the founders of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. He bestowed on each a blessing, which foretold their destinies and those of their tribes. Jacob’s prophecies provide the basis for the manner in which the figures are represented in Zurbarán’s series. For his compositions, the artist drew inspiration from northern European prints.
The series was likely intended for export to the New World. In seventeenth-century Spain, it was commonly believed that indigenous peoples of the Americas were descended from the so-called ‘lost tribes of Israel’. The paintings, however, did not come to light until the 1720s in England when they appeared at auction and were purchased by a Jewish merchant. In 1756 they were acquired by Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durham, a supporter of Jewish rights. Trevor hung them in the dining room at Auckland Castle, where they have remained for over 250 years. A two-year restoration of Auckland Castle presents this extraordinary study and exhibition opportunity.
Comments Frick Director Ian Wardropper, “We are thrilled to collaborate with Auckland Castle and the Meadows Museum on the first North American showing of Francisco de Zurbarán’s extraordinary series Jacob and His Twelve Sons. The technical analysis carried out at the Kimbell has greatly enriched our understanding of the master’s methods, while catalogue essays commissioned for the show explore the works in historical, cultural, and religious contexts. The sheer visual power and rich narrative content of this series will draw visitors in and will be beautifully complemented by the Frick’s strong holdings in Spanish art, which include paintings by Velázquez and Murillo—Zurbarán’s Sevillian contemporaries—as well as by El Greco and Goya.”
Zurbarán’s Jacob and His Twelve Sons: Paintings from Auckland Castle has been organized by Susan Grace Galassi, Senior Curator, The Frick Collection; Mark A. Roglan, Director of the Meadows Museum; Amanda Dotseth, Meadows/Mellon/Prado Fellow at the Meadows Museum; and Edward Payne, Senior Curator, Spanish Art, The Auckland Project, County Durham, England.
Susan Grace Galassi, Edward Payne, and Mark Roglán, eds., Zurbarán: Jacob and His Twelve Sons, Paintings from Auckland Castle (Seattle: Lucia Marquand, 2017), 136 pages, ISBN: 978 0998093024, $45.
The Burlington Magazine, March 2018
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 160 (March 2018)
Portrait of a Consul, identified by Lucy Whitaker as a portrait of Joseph Smith, pencil and watercolour on paper, 28.6 × 20 cm; page from Giovanni Grevembroch: Gli abiti de’ veneziani di quasi ogni età con diligenza raccoliti e dipinti nel secolo XVIII (Venice: Biblioteca del Museo Correr, MS Gradenigo-Dolfin 49, II, fol.125.2).
A R T I C L E S
• Lucy Whitaker, “A Portrait of Consul Smith,” pp. 214–16. A watercolour in Giovanni Grevembroch’s Gli abiti de’ veneziani, compiled ca. 1754–59, can probably be identified as the only surviving portrait of the celebrated art collector and art dealer Joseph Smith, British consul in Venice from 1744 to 1760.
• Esmé Whittaker, “‘Almost Her Creation’: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the Decoration of Chiswick House,” pp. 217–25. Letters, inventories and contemporary prints and drawings help paint a clearer picture of the extensions made to Chiswick House, London, in 1790–92 and the role that Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, played in their execution and furnishing.
R E V I E W S
• Duncan Robinson, Review of the exhibition Casanova: The Seduction of Europe (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 2017; The Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 2018; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018), pp. 241–43.
• David Pullins, Review of the exhibition Shockingly Mad: Henry Fuseli and the Art of Drawing (Art Institute of Chicago, 2018), pp. 243–44.
Redesigned ‘Dictionary of Art Historians’ Unveiled
As announced by the team behind the Dictionary of Art Historians (21 March 2018). . . And as noted toward the end of the announcement, the DAH continues to accept contributions, including new entries.
A thirty-year-old resource emerged today as a modern reference tool for art history. The Dictionary of Art Historians announces a new interface, data structure, and user options, the product of a year-long redesign. The original tool, a website since 1996, was developed privately by Lee Sorensen, the art and visual studies librarian at Duke University. Duke’s Wired! Lab for digital art history & visual culture sponsored the project beginning in 2016. The new DAH offers searchable data on over 2400 art historians, museum directors, and art-writers of western art from all time periods. Over 200 academic websites have linked to the project; the tool has been called one of the core tools of art historiography and cited in books and journal articles.
Begun pre-internet in 1986 as a card file, the project addressed a lack of information on the intellectual heritage that art historians created or used in writing art histories. “Before the DAH, it was impossible to discover even simple things like an art historian’s scholarly reputation, his/her core writings or even under whom they studied,” Sorensen said. “These things are important when reading a text or trying to understand the errors of past research.”
“The project’s redesign recognizes twenty-first-century scholars’ need to access information in the DAH using multiple digital research methods,” said Hannah Jacobs, Wired!’s digital humanities specialist responsible for the redesign, “It redefines the project content as data that can be mined at both micro and macro levels. By standardizing the data and developing new ways to access the data, we are making methods such as text mining, data analysis, and data visualization possible for our audiences.”
The new Dictionary of Art Historians site will continue to be developed over the coming year. New features to be released include
• Additional filtering capabilities on the ‘Explore’ page
• Ability to export filtered entries in open data formats
• Additional resources for citation management
• New data fields
• New and updated entries
The Dictionary of Art Historians continues to accept contributions. Please submit feedback about the project, new entries, or edits to existing entries to contact@arthistorians.info.
New Book | Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon
From Oxford UP:
Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire, eds., Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 480 pages, ISBN: 978-0198802228, $110.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing first published Laokoon, oder uber die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laocoon, or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) in 1766. Over the last 250 years, Lessing’s essay has exerted an incalculable influence on western critical thinking. Not only has it directed the history of post-Enlightenment aesthetics, it has also shaped the very practices of ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’ in a myriad of different ways.
In this anthology of specially commissioned chapters—comprising the first ever edited book on the Laocoon in English—a range of leading critical voices has been brought together to reassess Lessing’s essay on its 250th anniversary. Combining perspectives from multiple disciplines (including classics, intellectual history, philosophy, aesthetics, media studies, comparative literature, and art history), the book explores the Laocoon from a plethora of critical angles. Chapters discuss Lessing’s interpretation of ancient art and poetry, the cultural backdrops of the eighteenth century, and the validity of the Laocoon‘s observations in the fields of aesthetics, semiotics, and philosophy. The volume shows how the Laocoon exploits Greek and Roman models to sketch the proper spatial and temporal ‘limits’ (Grenzen) of what Lessing called ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’; at the same time it demonstrates how Lessing’s essay is embedded within Enlightenment theories of art, perception, and historical interpretation, as well as within nascent eighteenth-century ideas about the ‘scientific’ study of Classical antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft). To engage critically with the Laocoon, and to make sense of its legacy over the last 250 years, consequently involves excavating various ‘classical presences’: by looking back to the Graeco-Roman past, the volume demonstrates, Lessing forged a whole new tradition of modern aesthetics.
Avi Lifschitz is Associate Professor of European History and Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Among his publications are Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century and the edited volumes Engaging with Rousseau and Epicurus in the Enlightenment (the latter co-edited with Neven Leddy). Michael Squire is Reader in Classical Art at King’s College London. His books include The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae and The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy.
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Note on Laocoon Editions
Foreword: Why Lessing’s Laocoon Still Matters, W. J. T. Mitchell
1 Introduction: Rethinking Lessings Laocoon from across the Humanities, Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire
2 Laocoon Today: On the Conceptual Infrastructure of Lessing’s Treatise, David Wellbery
3 Laocoon among the Gods, or: On the Theological Limits of Lessing’s Grenzen, Michael Squire
4 Lessing’s Laocoon as Analytical Instrument: The Perspectives of a Classical Archaeologist, Luca Giuliani
5 Sympathy, Tragedy, and the Morality of Sentiment in Lessing’s Laocoon, Katherine Harloe
6 Mendelssohn’s Critique of Lessing’s Laocoon, Frederick Beiser
7 Naturalizing the Arbitrary: Lessing’s Laocoon and Enlightenment Semiotics, Avi Lifschitz
8 Temporalizationa Lessing’s Laocoon and the Problem of Narration in Eighteenth-Century Historiography, Daniel Fulda, translated from the German by Steven Tester
9 Criticism as Poetry? Lessing’s Laocoon and the Limits of Critique, Élisabeth Décultot, translated from the German by Steven Tester
10 Suffering in Art: Laocoon between Lessing and Goethe, Ritchie Robertson
11 Transparency and Imaginative Engagement: Material as Medium in Lessing’s Laocoon, Jason Gaiger
12 Lessing’s Laocoon and the ‘As-If’ of Aesthetic Experience, Jonas Grethlein
13 Art and Necessity: Rethinking Lessing’s Critical Practice, Paul Kottman
14 Image and Text in Lessing’s Laocoon: From Friendly Semiotic Neighbours to Articulatory Twins, Jurgen Trabant
15 Envoi: The Two-Fold Liminality of Lessing’s Laocoon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
Chatsworth Reopens after £33m Restoration
Before and after restoration at Chatsworth, from Treasure House of England.
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Press release, via Art Daily (24 March 2018) . . .
Chatsworth Renewed: The House Past, Present, and Future
Chatsworth, 24 March — 21 October 2018
With its gold leaf and pale yellow stonework glinting in the spring sunshine, Chatsworth reopens on 24 March 2018 following the biggest restoration and conservation of the house, garden, and park since the 1820s. The 10-year long programme, costing more than £32m, sees Chatsworth restored to its full glory, inside and out. The Chatsworth Renewed exhibition, running between March and October, highlights the work of those involved in the restoration process. From rebuilding the Belvedere turrets to replacing vast tracts of lead on the roof, carving the tiniest details in stone using dentistry tools to replacing huge blocks in the walls, careful restoration of priceless artworks to the renovation of famous water features in the garden, over the last decade Chatsworth has been fully restored and made ready for the next century.
The Duke of Devonshire: “The level of forensic research, expertise, and craftsmanship applied by so many people has been absolutely inspiring. It has always been a thrilling moment to see the house come into view as you drive across the park and now that view has been made even more magical. With the years of blackened grime now removed from the stone, it looks truly magnificent.”
In 1981, the charitable Chatsworth House Trust was set up by the 11th Duke to ensure the long-term survival of the house and collection. Since 1949 the entrance money paid by more than 25 million visitors has made a vital contribution to the maintenance of the house and garden, and it is this income, rather than any public funding, that has enabled the current restoration works to be completed.
Visitors will also be able to see the artwork of Linder Sterling, artist-in-residence at Chatsworth and a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award winning artist.
Linder Sterling, Eidothea (left), 2017, and Latona, 2018 (right).
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Her Grace Land by Linder Sterling
Chatsworth, 24 March — 21 October 2018
Award-winning artist Linder Sterling (b. 1954) spent several months over winter 2017 immersing herself in the life of the Chatsworth Estate as the inaugural artist-in-residence. As well as creating a new image bank for future photo montages to take Chatsworth ‘out into the world’, some of the pieces created during her residency will go on display at Chatsworth. Her Grace Land features four installations exploring the female voice at Chatsworth in the centenary year of the Act of Representation.
N.B. — At the risk of puncturing the joke with an explanation, I would note that the former Duchess of Devonshire, Deborah Cavendish nee Mitford (1920–2014), was an ardent Elvis fan. –CH
Exhibition | Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination
Press release (9 March 2018) from The Met:
Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Met Cloisters, New York, 10 May — 8 October 2018
Curated by Andrew Bolton, with C. Griffith Mann, Barbara Drake Boehm, Helen Evans, and Melanie Holcomb
The Costume Institute’s spring 2018 exhibition, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, on view from May 10 through October 8, 2018 (preceded on May 7 by The Costume Institute Benefit) will be presented in two Metropolitan Museum of Art locations: at The Met Fifth Avenue—in the medieval galleries, Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art, part of The Robert Lehman Wing, and the Anna Wintour Costume Center—and uptown at The Met Cloisters. The thematic exhibition will feature a dialogue between fashion and masterworks of medieval art in The Met collection to examine fashion’s ongoing engagement with the devotional practices and traditions of Catholicism. A group of papal robes and accessories from the Vatican will travel to the United States to serve as the cornerstone of the exhibition, highlighting the enduring influence of liturgical vestments on designers.
“The Catholic imagination is rooted in and sustained by artistic practice, and fashion’s embrace of sacred images, objects, and customs continues the ever-evolving relationship between art and religion,” said Daniel H. Weiss, President and CEO of The Met. “The Museum’s collection of Byzantine and western medieval art, in combination with the architecture and galleries that house these collections at The Met, provide the perfect context for these remarkable fashions.”
In celebration of the opening, the Museum’s Costume Institute Benefit, also known as The Met Gala, will take place on Monday, May 7, 2018. The evening’s co-chairs will be Amal Clooney, Rihanna, Donatella Versace, and Anna Wintour. Christine and Stephen A. Schwarzman will serve as Honorary Chairs. The event is The Costume Institute’s main source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and capital improvements.
“Fashion and religion have long been intertwined, mutually inspiring and informing one another,” said Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. “Although this relationship has been complex and sometimes contested, it has produced some of the most inventive and innovative creations in the history of fashion.”
The exhibition will feature approximately 40 ecclesiastical masterworks from the Sistine Chapel sacristy, many of which have never been seen outside the Vatican. These will be on view in the Anna Wintour Costume Center galleries and will include papal vestments and accessories, such as rings and tiaras, from the 18th to the early 21st century, encompassing more than 15 papacies. The last time the Vatican sent a loan of this magnitude to The Met was in 1983, for The Vatican Collections exhibition, which is the Museum’s third most-visited show.
In addition, more than 150 ensembles, primarily womenswear, from the early 20th century to the present will be shown in the Byzantine and medieval galleries, part of the Robert Lehman Wing, and at The Met Cloisters alongside medieval art from The Met collection, providing an interpretative context for fashion’s engagement with Catholicism. The presentation situates these designs within the broader context of religious artistic production to analyze their connection to the historiography of material Christianity and their contribution to the construction of the Catholic imagination.
Designers in the exhibition will include A.F.Vandevorst, Azzedine Alaïa, Cristobal Balenciaga, Geoffrey Beene, Marc Bohan (for House of Dior), Thom Browne, Roberto Capucci, Jean Charles de Castelbajac, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, Ann Demeulemeester, Sorelle Fontana, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana (for Dolce & Gabbana), John Galliano (for House of Dior), Gattinoni, Jean Paul Gaultier, Craig Green, Madame Grès (Alix Barton), Demna Gvasalia (for Balenciaga), Rosella Jardini (for Moschino), Stephen Jones, Christopher Kane, Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld (for House of Chanel), Jeanne Lanvin, Shaun Leane, Claire McCardell, Mariuccia Mandelli (for Krizia), Laura and Kate Mulleavy (for Rodarte), Thierry Mugler, Rick Owens, Carli Pearson (for Cimone), Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli (for Valentino), Pierpaolo Piccioli (for Valentino), Stefano Pilati (for Saint Laurent), Gareth Pugh, Simone Rocha, Yves Saint Laurent, Elsa Schiaparelli, Raf Simons (for his own label and House of Dior), Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (for Viktor & Rolf), Olivier Theyskens, Josephus Thimister, Riccardo Tisci, Jun Takahashi (for Undercover), Philip Treacy, Donatella Versace (for Versace), Gianni Versace, Valentina, and Madeleine Vionnet.
The exhibition—a collaboration between The Costume Institute and the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters—is organized by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, working together with colleagues in The Met’s Medieval department: C. Griffith Mann, Michel David-Weill Curator in Charge of the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters; Barbara Drake Boehm, Paul and Jill Ruddock Senior Curator for The Met Cloisters; Helen C. Evans, Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine Art; and Melanie Holcomb, Curator. The interdisciplinary architecture and design firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) will create the exhibition design with The Met’s Design Department. Raul Avila will produce the gala décor, which he has done since 2007.
A publication by Andrew Bolton will accompany the exhibition and will include texts by Barbara Drake Boehm, Marzia Cataldi Gallo, C. Griffith Mann, David Morgan, Gianfranco Cardinal Ravasi, and David Tracy in addition to new images by Katerina Jebb. It will be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
Andrew Bolton, ed., Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 336 pages, ISBN: 978 1588396457, $65.
Exhibition | UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light
Ken Gonzales-Day, 13 Plasters [Row 3], 2014 (printed 2017), Chromogenic print / Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.
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From the press release (8 March 2018) for the exhibition:
UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light: Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., 23 March 2018 — 6 January 2019
Curated by Taína Caragol and Asma Naeem
As the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery marks its 50th anniversary, it will not only honor the past with special exhibitions but also shape the museum’s next chapter. The first contemporary exhibition of the museum’s anniversary season, UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light: Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar examines how people of color are missing in historical portraiture and how their contributions to the nation’s past were rendered equally invisible. Focused around two contemporary artists, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar, the exhibition brings to the forefront African Americans, Native Americans, and Latino Americans to amend America’s historical narrative. Reworking traditional art presentations, Gonzales-Day and Kaphar aim to expose mainstream cultural biases and social constructions of race.
This exhibition continues the National Portrait Gallery’s Portraiture Now series and is curated by the museum’s Curator of Latino Art and History Taina Caragol and Curator of Prints, Drawing and Media Arts Asma Naeem.
“The history of early American portraiture favored white men who owned land, and it defined American identity in ways that excluded women and people of color from our nation’s visual record,” said National Portrait Gallery Director, Kim Sajet. “UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light presents the perspectives of two leading contemporary artists who create powerful works of art that re-frame history.”
Titus Kaphar, Behind the Myth of Benevolence, 2014, oil on canvas, Guillermo Nicolas and Jim Foster.
While obtaining his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, the New Haven-based artist Titus Kaphar (b. 1976) realized how Euro-American colonial paintings, specifically the genre of portraiture, coded racial difference. His work is included in the collections of major museums, including Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle; Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. In this exhibition of 17 paintings and one sculpture by the artist—the largest exhibition of his work to date—Kaphar invites viewers to reflect on the absence of race in traditional representations of America’s history by recreating well-known paintings to include those traditionally left out. Kaphar smears tar, erases with white paint, shreds the canvas into strips, and peels it back to reveal another story. His portion of the exhibition is divided into three sections: ‘Darkened National Histories’, ‘Deconstructed Portraits’, and ‘Disappearing Bloodlines’. All of Kaphar’s examples point to how portraiture in the 18th and 19th centuries aggrandized people in power while ignoring the powerless.
Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964) will present works across three themes: ‘Absence’, ‘Distance’, and ‘Naming’. His work has been widely exhibited at major institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; LAXART, Los Angeles; The New Museum, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Tamayo Museum, Mexico City. Recipient of a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute, a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California in Irvine, and a master’s in art history from Hunter College, City University of New York, Gonzales-Day explores how ideas of racial difference, otherness, and national identity have taken shape historically and visually. This artistic investigation has yielded two bodies of work. Erased Lynchings grew out of Gonzales-Day’s archival research into lynching in the American West and the recovery of little-known histories of racial violence against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. In parallel, his series Profiled examines how race and ideal beauty have been represented in sculpture, by photographing the collections of international museums and creating compositions that look comparatively at the representation of white bodies and bodies of color. Gonzales-Day’s juxtapositions prompt the question: “Who is recognized and remembered in the national history, and why?” The National Portrait Gallery’s presentation features work from both of these series.
Exhibition | John Goto’s ‘High Summer’
From the YCBA:
Art in Focus: John Goto’s ‘High Summer’
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 6 April — 19 August 2018
John Goto, High Summer: Society, 2000–01, digital print (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art).
In his series High Summer (2000–2001), a portfolio of fifteen digital prints, the photographer John Goto creates composite scenes in which contemporary figures disrupt the landscape gardens of eighteenth-century British country estates. These intrusive arrangements of people complicate the carefully contrived gardens with their seemingly natural planting and emblematic classical buildings. Goto’s integration of contemporary characters into historic landscape gardens encourages the viewer to think critically about nature and culture both past and present, and the politics of these gardens then and now.
This student-curated exhibition will explore the historical sites that Goto references in eight of his photographs. Drawing on eighteenth-century views of the gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire and Stourhead in Wiltshire from the Center’s collection, Goto’s work will be contextualized to highlight the ways in which these picturesque landscapes have been created, adapted, and represented over time to serve particular and sometimes competing ideologies.
Art in Focus is an annual initiative for members of the Center’s Student Guide Program, providing Yale undergraduates with curatorial experience and an introduction to all aspects of exhibition practice. The student guide curators for Art in Focus: John Goto’s ‘High Summer’ are Kelly Fu, DC ’19; Matthew Klineman, BK ’19; Jordan Schmolka, BK ’20; and Jackson Willis, BK ’19. In researching and presenting the exhibition the students are led by Linda Friedlaender, Senior Curator of Education; Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, Curator of Education and Academic Outreach; and Courtney Skipton Long, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Art Collections.
This exhibition and the accompanying brochure, which will be available in the gallery and online, have been generously supported by the Dr. Carolyn M. Kaelin Memorial Fund and the Marlene Burston Fund.
Exhibition | World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean
Frederick de Wit, Portolan Chart Indiarum Orientalum, from Harmonia macrocosmica, plate 56 (Amsterdam, 1708).
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Press release (9 March 2018) from The Smithsonian (also see the “Curators’ Notes,” which includes helpful installation photographs, from Journal18, published in October 2017). . .
World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 31 August 2017 — 24 March 2018
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 9 May — 3 September 2018
Fowler Museum, University of California at Los Angeles, 21 October 2018 — 10 February 2019
Curated by Allyson Purpura and Prita Meier
World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean opens at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art May 9. The exhibition, on view through September 3 in the International Gallery, reveals the diverse interchanges that break down barriers between Africa and Asia in a space that physically connects the Smithsonian’s African and Asian art museums.
The Swahili coast, where East Africa meets the Indian Ocean, has long been a significant cultural, diplomatic, and commercial intersection for Africa, Asia, and Europe for millennia. World on the Horizon offers audiences an unprecedented opportunity to view over 160 artworks brought together from public and private collections from four continents. The artworks, through an intricate network of trade and diplomacy, have historically deep and enduring connections to eastern and central Africa, the port towns of the western Indian Ocean, Europe, and the eastern seaboard of the United States. One-of-a-kind objects loaned from the National Museums of Kenya and the Bait Al Zubair Museum in Oman will make their debut to North American audiences. The exhibition is thematically organized and features objects and images recognized for not only their artistic excellence, but also how they visualize wide-reaching networks of mobility and encounter. Ranging from intimate pieces of jewelry to impressive architectural elements, the exhibition includes exquisitely illuminated Qur’ans, carved doorposts, furniture, maps, and other works.
Door frame, detail, Kenya, Pate Island, Siyu, ca. 18th–19th century, African mahogany wood (Lamu Museum, National Museums of Kenya; photo: chrisbrownphoto.com).
“The arts of Africa are truly global, inspiring artists across the world,” said National Museum of African Art Director Gus Casely-Hayford. “But that inspiration also moves in multiple directions, and it includes African artists’ awareness and reflection of the aesthetic vision of other cultures. As the stunning and surprising works on view in this exhibition reveal, the seemingly rigid frontiers that have come to define places like Africa and Asia are in fact remarkably fluid, connected through the intersections of art, commerce, and culture.”
Swahili objects embody multiple cultural histories and aesthetic trends that are themselves itinerant and open to interpretation. World on the Horizon demonstrates how the Swahili coast is a vibrant site of global cultural convergence and to Africa’s contributions to the artistic vocabulary of the wider Indian Ocean world.
The exhibition is curated by Allyson Purpura, senior curator and curator of Global African Art at Krannert Art Museum in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, and Prita Meier, assistant professor of art history at New York University, and overseen in Washington by Kevin Dumouchelle, curator at the National Museum of African Art. The exhibition opened at the Krannert in August 2017, and following its showing at the National Museum of African Art, it will travel to the Fowler Museum at UCLA in fall 2018.
“World on the Horizon is the exciting realization of years of research, collaboration and relationship building in the Swahili coast,” Dumouchelle said. “Loans secured from public and private collections in Kenya, Tanzania, Oman, Europe and the United States represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our audiences to see these artworks together in conversation.”
Allyson Purpura is senior curator and curator of Global African Art at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research on the politics of Islamic knowledge practices in Zanzibar led to her current interest in the broader connections between knowledge and power, particularly as they play out in the representational practices of museums. In addition to her teaching and curatorial practice, Purpura has published on a range of topics, including Islamic charisma and piety in Zanzibar, script and image in African art, ‘undisciplined’ knowledge, ephemeral art, and the politics of exhibiting African art. She has a Ph.D. from CUNY Graduate Center.
Prita S. Meier is assistant professor of art history at New York University. Her research focuses on the arts and architectures of east African port cities and the histories of transcontinental exchange and conflict. She is the author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press, 2016). Meier is working on a new book about the social and aesthetic history of photography in Zanzibar and Mombasa. She is currently the William C. Seitz Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). Meier has a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Kevin D. Dumouchelle has served as curator at the National Museum of African Art since October 2016. He was the lead curator for Visionary: Viewpoints on Africa’s Arts (2017), the museum’s most recent, comprehensive presentation of its permanent collection. From 2007 to 2016, he was the Brooklyn Museum’s curator in charge of its African and Pacific Islands collections. At Brooklyn, he conceived two award-winning reinstallations of the African collection: African Innovations (2014) and Double Take: African Innovations (2014). He has written books and articles and curated a range of exhibitions on contemporary and historical African art, including Power Incarnate: Allan Stone’s Collection of Sculpture from the Congo (2011) at the Bruce Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum presentations of Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui (2013) and Disguise: Masks and Global African Art (2016). Dumouchelle has a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
The catalogue is distributed by the University of Washington Press:
Prita Meier and Allyson Purpura, eds., World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 368 pages, ISBN: 9781883015497, $50.
With contributions by Edward A. Alpers, Heike Behrend, Ann Biersteker, Fahad Bishara, Allan deSouza, Jeffrey Fleisher, Athman Hussein, Paola Ivanov, Sarah Longair, Pedro Machado, Rebecca Gearhart Mafazy, Nidhi Mahajan, Janet McIntosh, Jeremy Prestholdt, Allen F. Roberts, Stephen J. Rockel, MacKenzie Moon Ryan, and Nancy Um
Accompanying the World on the Horizon exhibition organized by Krannert Art Museum, this book is the first interdisciplinary study of Swahili visual arts and their historically deep and enduring connections to eastern and central Africa, the port towns of the western Indian Ocean, Europe, and the United States. At once exhibition catalogue and scholarly inquiry, the publication features eighteen essays in a mix of formats—personal reflections, object biographies, as well as more in-depth critical treatments—and includes never before published images of works from the National Museums of Kenya and Bait Al Zubair Museum in Oman. By approaching the east African coast as a vibrant arena of global cultural convergence, these essays offer compelling new perspectives on the situated yet mobile and deeply networked social lives of Swahili objects. Moving between the broader structural relations of political economic change to more intimate narratives through which such change is experienced, the essays throw light on the ways in which the material fabric of the arts structure Swahili people’s sense of self and community in an ever-changing world of oceanic and terrestrial movement.
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