Issue 4.2
Welcome to Panorama, issue 4.2! We hope you like our new look, the result of a yearlong effort and consultation with our new publisher, University of Minnesota (UMN) Libraries Publishing. In addition to a clean, fresh design, we think you will appreciate the improved navigability, more varied imagery, and better clarity in the review processes and policies. We are now publishing under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, which brings us into line with high-quality open access academic journals worldwide. With this change, we will now be eligible for indexing by the Directory of Open Access Journals, making it easier for scholars to find our articles and reviews. The University of Minnesota Libraries preserves the content of Panorama using standard methodologies and preservation technologies, which means material published on our digital pages is unlikely to disappear in the future. Many thanks to UMN Director of Content Services Kate McCready, UMN Publishing Services Coordinator Laureen Boutang, and UMN Publishing Services Lead Developer John Barneson, as well as to founding Panorama editor Jennifer Marshall and Panorama managing editor Jessica Skwire Routhier, all of whom contributed countless hours to make this transition happen.
Issue 4.2 delves into the racial politics of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed 291 gallery and into the early history of oral gossip and newspaper scandal. You will also find new interpretations, new paintings, and new ways of performing research on lost collage works in Research Notes, as well as a veritable cornucopia of Book and Exhibition Reviews. Panorama depends on the volunteer labor of our excellent section editors, and two of these editors—Exhibition Reviews editor Mishoe Brennecke and Research Notes editor Sally Webster—come to the end of their terms with this issue. Sally and Mishoe have been with us since our founding, and the success of these sections is due in large part to the visionary work they have performed on behalf of our field.
With this issue, we are likewise pleased to introduce a new feature, In the Round, a concept that has actually been with us for a while. By formalizing In the Round as a stand-alone section, we now have greater flexibility for the inclusion of multiple scholarly voices. Originally conceived to accommodate suites of articles drawn from conferences or symposia, you will find in this issue an eye-opening behind-the-scenes museum interview conducted by William L. Coleman with Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer, the curators of Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings. In the Round can also accommodate related essays on themed topics, so let us know if you have an idea.
Also in this issue, guest editor Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse takes over the Bully Pulpit to ask an esteemed group of curators of Native American art a critical question about the methods of art history: How might technology restore the connections between the tangible and the intangible that text-based art-historical practices and their often singular focus on the visual have damaged or elided? You may be surprised by their responses.
At the AHAA Biennial Symposium of this last year, we shared our commitment to decolonizing the museum and the academy by using the digital format of our journal in ways that break down old hierarchies and, at the same time, avoid creating new ones in the research and publishing of American art. The CAA Consortium on Online Journals, an informal network of individuals engaged in conceptualizing this emerging field, has identified three streams of digital work: 1) scholarly research that is published online; 2) research that uses digitally enhanced tools to expand the presentation and types of media considered; and 3) data-rich research that incorporates digital technologies into its methodology and requires those technologies for the presentation of that research. We do not see these as steps on a progressivist hierarchy, but are instead committed to publishing all three types of scholarship. Material objects need to be seen, heard, and felt “in the flesh”; digital technology is expensive and constantly changing; and systemic worldwide inequities make the expertise and resource needs for both content producers and consumers of content out of reach for some. Imagine the dial-up internet trying to watch one of our embedded videos.
The question we grapple with is the following: How does our all-digital format support but also hamper our desire for a truly open-access platform? We ask ourselves this question regularly as we look for ways to overcome the digital divide.
Cite this article: M. Elizabeth Boone, John Bowles, and Lauren Lessing, “Editors’ Welcome,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 4, no. 2 (Fall 2018), https://journalpanorama.org/article/editors-welcome-4-2-2.
PDF: Editors’ Welcome 4.2
About the Author(s): M. Elizabeth Boone, John P. Bowles, and Lauren Lessing are the Executive Editors of Panorama.