One of my aims, to bring art to my people in the museums, galleries or other centers, can be realized through prints. They are easy to transport and can be seen in numerous places at the same time. For me print-making is the real public art that can be taken easily to so many people.¹

—Elizabeth Catlett

Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) centered her printmaking practice on social and political responsibility and a deep commitment to connection and communication with her audiences. More than any other medium, prints offer the advantage of increased visibility through the creation of multiples: Many impressions can be made from the same block or print, resulting in artwork that is much more widely available and affordable than a single painting or drawing. Certainly, Catlett intended that her prints reach a broad public and be meaningful to both the art world and everyday audiences: “I am inspired by black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. Neither the masses of black people nor Mexican people have the time or the money to develop formal aesthetic appreciation. And so I try to reach them intuitively because they have an intuitive appreciation.”² Equally a sculptor and a printmaker, Catlett herself sometimes described her prints as sociopolitical and her sculpture as focused on form.³ Yet a sculpture such as Political Prisoner (1971) or a print such as Girls (1982; see fig. 13) complicate a strict dichotomy and invite a more nuanced interpretation.⁴

As a printmaker, Catlett worked masterfully in linocut, lithography, and screenprint, and these techniques guided her artistry in progressive ways that might be easy to overlook because she chose to “reach [her audiences] intuitively” through overt figuration.⁵ But print processes, strategies, and techniques were in fact the beating heart of her two-dimensional work and essential to her artistry. Printmaking processes, with repetition as their linchpin, offered Catlett the magic and the means by which she empowered her figures, animated her compositions, and furthered her activist and feminist vision.

Repetition, Multiplicity, and the Matrix

Printmaking involves the creation of a reusable matrix—a plate, stone, screen, or block that can be inked and printed multiple times—and Catlett took full advantage of this repeatability and the resulting capacity for producing multiple originals. Most important, it was as a printmaker and through print processes that Catlett asserted the expressive force of repetition as an artistic strategy.

In linocut, arguably her signature technique, Catlett employed a masterful versatility of mark making carved into a linoleum surface, with form and texture emerging from grooves and gouges, strokes and scrapes, that are variously delicate, aggressive, sinuous, or staccato. The act of carving a linocut block is sculptural in its own way, yet all printmaking processes require a certain amount of dimensional thinking on the part of the artist. The making of a print often involves building a composition in stages, with individual elements printed in layered succession from multiple matrices. Reversals, too, are intrinsic to most print processes, including linocut. Throughout the process of carving the image on the linoleum block, the artist must anticipate the effect of the reversal on the final printed image. In addition, linocut is a relief process, with the carved-out areas holding no ink and presenting as white when the block is printed. Thus, to produce the block, the artist must manipulate the negative space, another form of reversal. But in the end, the linocut technique yields a relatively inexpensive and easily printed matrix, which certainly remains part of its appeal. Once carved, linocut blocks provide great flexibility in the number of impressions made and can be conveniently reprinted days, weeks, or even years after the initial carving. In Catlett’s hands, linocut blocks were often repurposed, with new work created from previously carved blocks bearing witness to a valuable printed past.

Printmaking is unlike any other art form in its capacity for controlled multiplicity, but Catlett was not particularly vested in creating fixed numbers of impressions in limited editions, as many printmakers do. In practice, her editions, both large and small, numbered and unnumbered, were frequently open ended, sometimes printed at intervals over many years. Often her decision to reprint provided a new opportunity to explore color variation. A vivid example is the portrait of a guitarist titled I have given the world my songs (1946/47), which was initially printed in black and blue but for which there are also a small number of blood-red proofs (fig. 1). Her later experimentation with color indicated an effort to visually and metaphorically amplify the implied subject of the guitarist’s song, namely the racial violence depicted in the background. In her final reprint of the linocut in 1989, however, she retained its original blue tonality, perhaps itself a reference to Blues music. This is but one example of the opportunities for experimentation and discovery that print processes facilitate. The repeatedly printable matrix created a framework through which Catlett could explore a variety of aesthetic possibilities.

Setting the Course

Catlett’s engagement with prints and printmaking began with her education at Howard University in Washington, DC, where she studied with James L. Wells (1902–1993) and was exposed to print history, including Japanese woodblock prints, and techniques, such as woodcut and linocut relief processes, which do not require a press for printing.⁶ But as Catlett told the artist Camille Billops (1933–2019), “With Mr. Wells I learned about elementary printmaking. I learned a lot more about printmaking at the Art Students League along with Bob Blackburn (1920–2003).”⁷ By the time Catlett studied lithography at the Art Students League in New York in October of 1945, she was fully engaged with the undertaking for which she received a Julius Rosenwald fellowship.⁸ In this groundbreaking project, focused on African American women, lithographs were an essential component, inextricably linked to her belief in the value of art as a cultural force that could be amplified by the portability of prints. In her 1945 fellowship application, Catlett expressed her goal of reaching wide audiences with a strong narrative centered on Black women, stating: “It is my earnest desire to portray this history of Negro womanhood in lithography, painting and sculpture, and to send these portrayals to Negro and white colleges so that young men and women, especially in the south, can get some idea of the contributions of Negro American women.”⁹

When she submitted her renewal application to the Rosenwald Fund in 1946, prints played an even greater role as she envisioned an additional, concomitant set of lithographs. The ability of prints to circulate widely remained their key appeal. She wrote:

In addition to circulating one exhibition of sculpture, painting, and lithographs, I would like to do a complete unit of lithographs alone. In this way I could reach people in many places where there are not facilities for handling the original exhibit. Churches, libraries, YW and YMCA’s could hang a show of prints that would be seen by many more average Americans. These are the people that are so often denied the art of contemporary America.¹⁰

The prints in the series, initially titled Negro Woman, were in the end executed as linocuts.¹¹ The Rosenwald fellowship was transformative because, as Catlett later said, “It was a great opportunity for me to do that series on black women; it sort of set me on the whole idea of working with that subject.”¹² The project also incentivized Catlett to begin a serious engagement with printmaking, while the fellowship provided the funds for her to travel to Mexico in 1946. At that time, the print workshop Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) in Mexico City was at the height of activity with Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana. Published in 1947, this ambitious portfolio of eighty-five prints by sixteen artists provided a rich retelling of Mexican history and the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). A project of such momentous scope surely played a role in inspiring Catlett’s thinking about her own historic print series, yet it is noteworthy that she had come to Mexico with the seeds for her groundbreaking project already sown, as evidenced by her statements in the Rosenwald applications.

At the TGP, Catlett executed lithographs at first but soon discovered the expressive potential of linocut as practiced by the workshop’s master printmakers. Particularly inspired by virtuoso TGP cofounder Leopoldo Méndez and fueled by the additional technical guidance offered by Ignacio Aguirre and Francisco Mora, she quickly perfected the linocut technique for which she is now best known.¹³ The fifteen linocuts of the Black Woman series, produced in 1946/47 in Mexico for her Rosenwald project, are the foundational underpinning of Catlett’s career as a printmaker.

Her first one-woman exhibition at the Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington, DC, in December 1947, introduced the completed project, and as the exhibition brochure confirms, the full body of work included painting, sculpture, and prints.¹⁴ But the print series is arguably the project’s backbone, representing the lived experience of Black women as inextricably interwoven into the fabric of American history and life. In 1947 Catlett’s prioritization of this subject matter was unprecedented.¹⁵ It unfolded poetically as well as visually through the series’ interweaving of the literary and visual arts.¹⁶

When taken as a whole, the series entwines text and image into visual poetry.¹⁷ Arranged in order, the titles of the individual prints relay a narrative of Black women’s lives in poetic cadence:

I am the Negro woman
I have always worked hard in America . . .
. . . In the fields [see fig. 3c]
. . . In other folks’ homes
I have given the world my songs
In Sojourner Truth I fought for the rights of women as well as Negroes [see fig. 3a]
In Harriet Tubman I helped hundreds to freedom [see fig. 3b]
In Phillis Wheatley I proved intellectual equality in the midst of slavery
My Role has been important in the struggle to organize the unorganized
I have studied in ever increasing numbers
My reward has been bars between me and the rest of the land
I have special reservations—
. . . Special houses
. . . And a special fear for my loved ones
My right is a future of equality with other Americans

“Language they will not ignore”

Catlett’s “Report of Progress and Plan of Work,” which she submitted in 1946 as part of her renewal application for the Rosenwald fellowship, revealed an evolving clarity of purpose. It is worth quoting at some length:

As I began work on the project I became very concerned with the effectiveness of my way of working in reaching my audiences. I found that I was following trends in modern art appreciated by an intellectual minority; and that millions of Americans, both Negro and white, were being offered and had grown to accept art of the Norman Rockwell–Saturday Evening Post variety. These millions contain the people I would like most to reach. If my work on this project was to have the desired effect, then it must be stated in language they will not ignore.¹⁸

Catlett was attuned to the growing influence of mass-media culture, as indicated by her specific mention of the Saturday Evening Post, and as a result, she identified an expressive tension between form and figuration in her painting, which was at the time her primary work in two dimensions:

I was trying to arrive at a means of expression that would reach the people for whom I was painting. My eventual (and partial) solution was not to adopt the naturalistic, sentimental approach of Norman Rockwell, but to try to combine elements of form recognizable to the majority of people, with principles of form based on the modern approach to art, and in which I firmly believe. I feel that my greatest contribution as a Negro artist must be made in terms that are the most effective.¹⁹

One of the means Catlett used to connect with community and “reach [her audiences] intuitively” was the appropriation of images from common literary sources, including books and magazines.²⁰ This stuff of everyday life, “recognizable to the majority of people,” provided her with that indispensable gateway for communication. Familiar imagery offered both connection to community and an essential throughline to Black history.

Portrait engravings published as frontispieces in historic volumes (figs. 2a–c) were the visual source for Catlett’s representations of all three of the named heroines in  the Black Woman series: Sojourner Truth (fig. 3a), Phillis Wheatley, and Harriet Tubman (fig. 3b). These Black women forerunners were the fulcrum of the Black Woman series, and Catlett purposefully based the image of each heroine on a recognizable literary reference. The series was a crystallization of Catlett’s belief in the importance of identifying and remembering the rich history of Black women’s work, activism, leadership, and artistry.

Harriet Tubman was a heroine of supreme importance to Catlett, and there may have been an additional literary volume on Catlett’s radar. In 1943, three years before Catlett made the Black Woman series, a new Tubman biography by Earl Conrad was published to much acclaim by Associated Publishers in Washington, DC (fig. 2d). The book played a critical role in the revitalization of Tubman’s legacy, which had been gradually fading from American memory even before her death in 1913. Tubman’s pointing gesture in Catlett’s portrayal is similar to the pose on the vintage jacket illustration for Conrad’s book, and if it had indeed served as a visual reference, then it would be another example of literary resonances in Catlett’s prints.²¹

Catlett portrayed Tubman in linocut twice after the Rosenwald project: in 1953, as part of a print series by numerous artists of the TGP known as Against Discrimination in the United States, and again in 1975 (figs. 4–5). The use of linocut itself provides a throughline, connecting each portrayal of Tubman to the others, as well as to the revered Mexican printmaking legacy. In all three versions of the Tubman portrait, echoes of book illustration provide another throughline. Tubman’s facial features, dress, headscarf, and satchel in Catlett’s 1953 version most closely reflect the historic engraving (see fig. 2c). In the 1975 version, Tubman again holds the rifle that had been missing in the 1946/47 version, but the more dynamic forward-pointing gesture of the earliest print returns, along with the denser throng of followers, including the mother and babe.²² These elements establish a clear conversation between Catlett’s earliest depiction in the Black Woman series and this last one, carved nearly thirty years later. In each of the three iterations, resonances with book illustration reaffirm the importance of safeguarding that literary record, irrevocably claiming for Tubman the fullness of her historical narrative.

Through the intentional preservation of visual resonances with her earlier prints—self-appropriation—Catlett created another kind of continuum, augmenting meaning and summoning history by linking past and present through reverberating visual connections. The culmination came in 1975, at the peak of the Black Power movement, with Tubman as a supremely forceful affirmation of Black female power and a reminder of the need to persist. Through appropriation, the vitality of Black history, literature, and poetry—and the importance of preserving and propagating this legacy—are interwoven into Catlett’s imagery, serving as both an expression of resilience and a force for resistance.

Catlett’s literature-based representations of her heroines, which first appeared in the Black Woman series and were echoed in the two Harriet Tubman linocuts that followed, reflect a commitment to support, identify, and collect Black print culture that had been gaining both urgency and momentum in the early twentieth century, when Catlett was coming of age.²³ Black print culture played a vital role in community self-education, irrefutably demonstrating Black accomplishment in literature and the arts and acting as a force for recognizing Black history as a cornerstone of American history.

Catlett was nurtured in a household that valued literacy and education, growing up in the 1920s, a period marked by an expanding American print culture empowered by advancements in technologies, such as photomechanical offset printing.²⁴ Her early childhood was influenced by the rise of an increasingly pictorial press, which included a growing number of mass-market magazines. She recalls:

I remember as a child I was very good at drawing paper dolls. The ones you used to get out of the Ladies Home Journal. The ones that I drew were those little fat ones with curly hair. We kept them in cigar boxes. People would pay me [to make] them.²⁵

Unsurprisingly, books also played a central part in Catlett’s childhood:

We always got books for Christmas. . . . But my mother . . . she gave us the “Book of Knowledge” and I remember I sat and read all the stories first and then I read all the poems. Then I read all the history. . . . She always gave us books for Christmas, and they were nice books to read. We read a lot.²⁶

Each volume of the Book of Knowledge, a children’s encyclopedia, contained an abundance of photomechanical illustrations, interspersing graphics and photographs with texts in a variety of forms, including poetry, prose, short stories, printed music, craft and how-to activities, photo-essays, and more, designed to captivate childhood imagination and curiosity on topics exploring history and legend, nature and science, adventure and discovery. This dynamic relationship of imagery and text was boosted by new publishing capabilities and strategies that were reshaping modern visual storytelling.

Black print culture, too, was burgeoning, and Catlett’s hometown played a central role in the growth of Black publishers and publications that blended visual illustration and text, promoting both in the exchange of ideas that furthered the advancement of Black history and culture.²⁷ It was in Washington, DC, where, in 1921, Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) established Associated Publishers in the service of these goals. The press provided opportunities for Black writers and artists to have their work recognized, among them Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998) and James L. Wells, two of Catlett’s professors at Howard. As a student at Howard, Catlett chose to be a member of the Stylus Literary Society as well as the Dauber’s Art Club.²⁸ And two decades after her 1935 graduation, Catlett would select Woodson as one of the Black heroes for her collaborative Against Discrimination series of 1953/54, for which she had produced her second Tubman linocut. The series itself is a testament to the strength of Catlett’s belief in the power of print culture.

The Power of Print Culture: Recognition and Remembering

In preparing for the Against Discrimination project, which she organized as a member of the TGP collective, Catlett researched and gathered photographic materials for TGP artists to consult as they created printed portraits of prominent Black Americans. This series was intended to be a monthly feature in Paul Robeson’s Freedom magazine.²⁹ Photography and photojournalism routinely provided critical source material for the TGP, where artists regularly made use of published images of political leaders and events that would be easily recognized by the masses.³⁰ But photographic imagery was also freely resourced by artists in Catlett’s circle for reasons outside of history and politics. David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974), for example, appropriated a 1920s photograph by Hugo Brehme (1882–1954) for his painting Niña Madre (1936; Private collection). In a further layering of photography, painting, and printmaking, Catlett masterfully executed a lithograph based on Siqueiros’s painting in collaboration with Siqueiros and TGP printer José Sánchez (1921–?) in 1956.³¹

Catlett’s use of photography as a visual resource and a tool, in concert with the use of appropriated imagery for context and association, were practices with roots in her days of graduate study with Grant Wood (1891–1942). Catlett earned her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1940. In 2002 she noted how Wood unapologetically borrowed Gilbert Stuart’s (1755–1828) 1796 portrait of George Washington, which is likely best known as a print since it served as the source for the engraved portrait on the face of the one-dollar bill.³² Wood employed the image as an identifiable anachronism in order to ensure instant recognition of the cherry-tree chopping youth in his work Parson Weems’ Fable (1939; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX). This painting was in progress while Catlett was a student at the University of Iowa. It was first exhibited in July 1940 during the university’s Fine Arts Festival, in which graduate student work, including Catlett’s, was also shown.³³

Wood likewise taught the use of photography as a compositional tool, which Catlett described in 2002:

First, you picked something that . . . you know the most about. . . . you got an idea . . . and you took a photograph. . . . Well, I took a photograph of a girl ironing because my grandmother in the summers . . . taught me how to iron. . . . So I picked a girl ironing and I got a girl and took a picture of her. . . . then you did a dynamic symmetry plan which was a grid, . . . And, over the grid, . . . you did a drawing from the photograph and then you did a line drawing, then you worked it out over the grid so that you would have what [Wood] called dynamic symmetry . . . we made a tracing of the drawing . . . then transferred it to the Masonite.³⁴

In 1946, in her groundbreaking Black Woman series, Catlett, for the first time, put into practice a fully realized strategy of employing the intentional appropriation of recognizable images to broaden meaning. In addition to literary sources for the series’ heroines, Catlett used published photography as obvious points of departure for other linocuts, mining the rich, publicly owned trove of photographic images funded by the US government through the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information (FSA/OWI). These photographs were frequently reproduced in publications such as Chandler Owen’s Negros and the War and Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices. Dorothea Lange’s (1895–1965) work was included in both publications (figs. 6a–b) and her photographs provided a visual reference for Catlett’s linocut In the Fields, in the Black Women series (fig. 3c).³⁵ These Lange photographs were not only familiar, but the fact of their publication and inclusion in official government records also provided a public affirmation of the vital presence of Black women in American life. Catlett’s appropriation of Lange’s well-known images was meant to be recognized, so that the associations and history they evoke could be woven  into the intended narrative of her own work.

Lange’s photography continued to resonate with Catlett as late as 1983, when the latter carved her linocut Survivor, unambiguously based on Lange’s 1938 photograph titled Formerly Enslaved Woman, Alabama, also known as Ex-Slave with a Long Memory, Alabama (fig. 6c).³⁶ Catlett’s sensitive appropriation both respects and transforms her source. The linocut image is a reversal of the photograph, a flip that occurs when the relief carving on the block is printed. But Catlett minimizes the background and, through the vigor of her carved line, creates textures that emphasize her subject’s tenacity and endurance—from the firm set of her jaw and her powerful grip to the halo-like highlights that define her form. Catlett, herself a descendant of formerly enslaved grandparents, channels the pride and triumph of being a survivor into her work. Her choice of linocut links Survivor to the twin TGP legacies of technical excellence and sociopolitical exigency, while its resonance with the linocuts of the Black Women series is equally clear.

In Survivor, and similarly in her lithograph On the Subway (1986), based on a 1940s photograph by Joe Schwarz,³⁷ Catlett’s appropriated images reclaim the dignity and identity of the Black women who served as subjects for white photographers. In both cases, Catlett’s appropriation was surgical, focusing only on the person, extracting her from the weight of her surroundings, thereby undermining the ability of that environment to define her while simultaneously accentuating her individuality, making her visible. “That’s what gave me some direction in art,” Catlett once said, “when I decided that I was going to work with the problems of Black women, when I was going to try to make people see them as beautiful, dignified, strong people instead of as Ralph Ellison says, invisible.”³⁸

For Catlett, photography—or any visual resource appropriated with intentionality—was a means for shaping and amplifying her own unique perspective. Catlett strategically drew on print culture in many forms, from photojournalism in newspapers and magazines to engraved portraits or photographs reproduced as book illustration. When Catlett chose to appropriate, she relied on the familiarity of the images she adapted to carry resonances and associative meanings.

The power of appropriation in Catlett’s work is particularly potent in her lithograph The Torture of Mothers (fig. 7).³⁹ While the subject of a mother and child is often dismissed as sentimental, it was never so for Catlett, as this print makes clear. The work earned Catlett an award for travel and study in Germany at the Intergrafik 70 exhibition, which opened in Berlin in December 1970.⁴⁰ The theme of the show is summarized in its catalogue preface: “The INTERGRAFIK 70 is an eloquent expression of the growing number of artists participating in the social and national liberation struggle, in the democratic movements of their peoples.”⁴¹ Catlett mentioned the award in an interview in which she identified the literary source from which the title was taken:

The prize was for a lithograph that I did after reading a little booklet called “The Torture of Mothers” by Truman Nelson. It’s about an incident in Harlem. I did a head of a black woman with a dead child inside. After reading the book I felt that black women in the ghetto, their kids go out into the street and they don’t know what’s going to happen to them.⁴²

Sensitively drawn with lithographic crayon, with the red hand-coloring added after printing, Torture of Mothers is a graphic and painful image of a youthful victim of racial violence that asserts the all-consuming grief of the mother. The photographic source for Catlett’s lithograph was the July 28, 1967, cover of Life magazine, which showed a seriously wounded Black youth lying on pavement in a fetal position, a victim of racial violence on gruesome display for millions of people.⁴³ Catlett places this image of the fallen body of twelve-year-old Joe Bass Jr. into the confines of an Olmec-inspired female head, where he is embraced by the tight space that envelops him. As she often did with her most powerful images, this lithograph, originally printed in 1970, was reprinted in 2003 with the Mexican printer Raul Cabello.⁴⁴

The Torture of Mothers was on view at Intergrafik 70 along with four other prints by Catlett, their titles given in German in the exhibition catalogue: Malcolm X spricht für uns, Die schwarzen Panther sprechen für uns, Schwarz ist schön, and Watts-Detroit-Washington-Newark (figs. 8–11).⁴⁵  These five prints had been shown together a few months earlier in Catlett’s solo exhibition of sculpture and prints titled Experiencia Negra at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, which went on view in July 1970. Shown in two consecutive, politically oriented exhibitions, this group of five prints, all produced in 1969/70, might be considered an informal series, and they are firmly situated at the heart of Catlett’s activism in printmaking.

Experiencia Negra affirmed the Black liberation movement in the United States and was the opportunity for Catlett, as she was quoted in Raquel Tibol’s introduction in the exhibition’s brochure, “to show the public in Mexico how black people seek dignity and self-respect . . . to show my black experience in Mexico.”⁴⁶ Developed by Catlett around this unified theme, the exhibition featured twelve prints and included the same core group of five, identified by their Spanish titles in the brochure: Tortura de madres, Malcolm X habla por nosotros, Los Panteras Negras hablan por nosotros, Negro es Bello, and Watts/Detroit/Washington/Harlem/Newark.⁴⁷ Among Catlett’s most overtly political prints, they constitute a powerful expression of solidarity with the Civil Rights Movement in America.

In each of these two lithographs and three linocuts, Catlett engaged with appropriation that was reflective of the lived experience of Black people in the United States. The 1967 issue of Life magazine, with the cover photograph that inspired The Torture of Mothers, also included numerous other images of racial violence in Newark; these photos likely provided the source for the figures of the heavily armed police and at least one of the felled figures in Watts/ Detroit/ Washington/ Harlem/ Newark (see fig. 11).⁴⁸ The rigid lines and sharp edges of the linocut carving deliver rawness, especially when augmented with the grain of woodblock, inked to create the scarring effect across the surface of the print. The textural grittiness is intensified by the dominant blood-red color, making the brutality of the scene even more visceral. The positioning of the four felled figures in womblike enclosures creates additional visual resonance with the maternal anguish of The Torture of Mothers.

Photographs of activists Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Malcolm X were frequently in the mass media of the 1960s and 1970s, and Catlett made use of them and their recognizability in Homage to the Panthers (Los Panteras Negras) and Malcolm X Speaks for Us (Malcolm X habla por nosotros) (see figs. 8–9). The rifle and the raised fist in Homage to the Panthers, symbols of Black unity and power, appeared often in Black print culture, including in Panther Party newspapers, as did the Black is Beautiful / Panther button of Negro es Bello (fig. 10), where Catlett repeated them in measured multiplicity to both emphasize their popularity and amplify their messaging.⁴⁹

The Power of Repetition

Catlett leveraged the possibilities that printmaking techniques provided for the calculated reiteration of compositional elements: from the stenciled Panther buttons in the lithograph Negro es Bello to the raised fist reprinted twice from the same linocut block in Homage to the Panthers (Los Panteras Negras) or the painstaking registration (alignment of the paper with the matrices) required for the repeated printing of the blocks in Malcolm X Speaks for Us (Malcolm X habla por nosotros). These prints are among Catlett’s most complex productions and consequently were originally printed in extremely small numbers. Only a handful of proofs of Negro es Bello (probably shown in Experiencia Negra with the inscribed title Negro es Bello II) were printed in Mexico with José Sánchez before the matrix failed, resulting in no formal edition until it was printed by Joseph Kleineman and Maureen Turci in New Jersey in 2001, using new matrices.⁵⁰ Homage to the Panthers, originally a linocut, was also reprinted in 1993 by Kleineman and Turci using new lithographic matrices. It is unclear how many of the early linocut impressions of Homage to the Panthers were printed.⁵¹ Malcolm X Speaks for Us was reprinted in a new edition with color variation by Kleineman and Turci in 2004. The fact that Catlett chose to reprint four of these five core civil rights prints—a form of repetition that in each case further extended the reach of the multiple original—speaks to their fundamental place in her oeuvre.

Malcolm X Speaks for Us (see fig. 8) was first shown in 1969 at the Sálon de Grabado in Mexico City, where it was awarded a purchase prize. It is an ambitiously executed linocut that involved a challenging process of registration, combining a collagraph matrix for the clothlike elements with a set of linocut blocks, repeated to create the emphatic and rhythmic reiteration of female heads surrounding the head of Malcolm X. Significantly, Catlett reprinted the linocut block for I Am the Black Woman from her pioneering Black Woman series of 1946/47, placing it seven times across the top of the composition, thereby appropriating her own iconic work. Masterfully employing repetition and appropriation in an emblematic composition, equally a feminist statement and a civil rights declaration, Malcolm X Speaks for Us was regarded by Catlett as one of her most important prints.⁵²

Catlett stated that in Malcolm X Speaks for Us she “used repetition to strengthen the idea.”⁵³ Her reuse of linocut blocks, sometimes decades after carving them, enabled self-citation in a way that was particularly direct and effective. Central America Says No! (1986) is another example. Here Catlett repurposed linocut blocks first printed in 1980/82 as a statement of opposition to US government intervention in Chile and combined them with a block first printed at the TGP in 1954 as a statement against CIA intervention in Guatemala. Thus, Catlett linked these political histories in a new, powerfully rescaled composition that was perhaps her most emphatic anti-neocolonialist declaration.⁵⁴

In Angela Libré (1972) Catlett compellingly reemployed the studied use of repetition and appropriation that characterized and empowered the political prints shown in Experiencia Negra. Angela Libré is an homage to activist Angela Davis, of whom Catlett was a fierce supporter, participating in the global movement to free Davis following her unjust imprisonment in 1970.⁵⁵

Although Angela Libré was ultimately executed as a screenprint, Catlett began with a linocut block, which she used to create the template for the six repetitions of Davis’s image.⁵⁶ Richard Powell succinctly states the importance of Angela Libré in his narrative of contemporary American art:

Catlett’s conversion/conversation with pop art in Angela Libré and that movement’s pre-occupation with image repetition in mass media is apparent, but there’s more than an homage to Andy Warhol’s Marilyn here, in the primary and secondary colors’ interactions with the silver foil creating a didactic and vibrating color theory primer from the silhouette and visage of an African American cultural icon.⁵⁷

As Powell suggests, the vibrance and variety of Catlett’s color, as it pulsates against the shimmering foil paper on which it is printed, is beautifully contrapuntal to the beat of the repeating image. The processes of printmaking, both linocut and screenprint, enable and shape the color play and the repetition.

Catlett’s Angela invites an obvious comparison with, as well as a decided contrast to, Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) images of Marilyn Monroe. Both artists appropriated press photos of cultural icons but to very different effect. Warhol’s images of the film star appear decidedly two-dimensional and artificial, her features flattened through harsh, misaligned color. And when relentlessly repeated in works such as Marilyn x 100 (1962), she is, perhaps counterintuitively, further diminished.⁵⁸ Repetitiveness, in this case, is a device through which Warhol exposes the shallowness of celebrity and the dehumanization that is the byproduct of the recurring mass-media images that both defined and promoted Monroe’s star power. Catlett’s Davis, in deliberate and forceful contrast, is a compelling homage to the woman and the activist, rendered in strong, solid hues and empowered by emphatic but measured repetition.⁵⁹

This distinctive compositional choreography of repetition and coloration is a mainspring of Catlett’s printmaking. There Is a Woman in Every Color (fig. 12), executed in different variations beginning in 1975, offers another key example. The print explores repetition through the black/white reversal of the dominant female head, likely created with the aid of a stencil.⁶⁰ In addition, Catlett repeats a linocut female figure eleven times, aligned vertically along the right side of the composition and printed in rainbow colors. The colors vary somewhat in different versions of the print, but in all versions, the rainbow effect is preserved.⁶¹

There are multiple ways of interpreting the concept of a rainbow of women, which is likely the point. It may even include a metaphorical reference to the legacy of the Black Panther Fred Hampton, whose Rainbow Coalition was founded in 1969. But a more important touchstone might be that in 1975, the year of the first version of There Is a Woman in Every Color, Catlett was named art honoree of the year by Rainbow Sign, Berkeley, California’s dynamic center for Black culture in the 1970s.⁶² Significantly, the female figures she employs here are appropriated from the artistic traditions of the Otomi in Mexico, which included handmade bark paper originally produced from amate, a wild fig tree.⁶³ Catlett’s figures evoke pre-Hispanic Mexico, when bark-paper figures (muñecos) were cut by a shaman to create spiritual presences used in rituals for healing, securing the harvest, or driving away evil. Beginning in the 1960s, this papermaking practice was adapted for folk-art painting for the tourist market, and by the 1970s, the cut figures produced by folk artists had become widely known. Catlett would later use similar figures in Magic People, a unique linocut print she made for a youth group affiliated with the Cleveland Museum of Art. She identified the ritualistic origins of these figures to curator Jane Glaubinger, stating that the female figure specifically blessed the tomato harvest.⁶⁴

“I used repetition to strengthen the idea.”

“For Picasso,” scholar Timothy Anglin Burgard suggests, “appropriation was not merely an artistic exercise in which he critiqued the Modernist reverence for originality and explored his relationship to great art and artists. Indeed, the artist perceived appropriation as a magical transference of power that could be applied to both historical and contemporary art and to objects and people.”⁶⁵ Similarly for Catlett, the use and reuse of the muñecos in There Is a Woman in Every Color and Magic People also allude to a “transference of power” and point directly to the overarching intention behind all of her appropriations. Enhanced and reconfigured from purposefully recognizable sources, and often boldly self-referential, Catlett’s appropriations are charged by the resonances of multiple histories and associative meanings and are made more powerful with every repetition.

The vibrant multiplicity of color and the rhythmic repetition of the faces in Girls (1982; fig. 13) offer a compositional conversation as well as a form of reprise with the muñecos in There Is a Woman in Every Color, while also echoing the messaging of that title. In Girls—a screenprint, although the face, emphatically repeated here thirteen times in multiple colors, was originally created as a linocut—Catlett capitalizes on the ability of printmaking processes to facilitate both repetition and color play.

Catlett hailed printmaking as the most democratic of art forms, stating that “with one print it is possible to reach thousands of people.”⁶⁶ Her artistry as a printmaker, however, did not involve maximizing quantity. For Catlett, repetition was the extraordinary power fundamental to printmaking, offering the unique opportunity for experimentation and reinvention through the magic of a repeatable matrix. This repeatability offered a kind of immortality, the siren song for many artist printmakers, as suggested by Jasper Johns (b. 1930), who stated: “In printmaking, I think it would be perfectly reasonable never to destroy the images on the plates and stones, and always to have them available for use in new works, new combinations.”⁶⁷ For Catlett, the reusability and repeatability of the print matrix—particularly, the linocut block—facilitated the reinventions, repetitions, and resonances that would become her most essential narrative tools. In comments about her working process for Malcom X Speaks for Us (see fig. 8), one of her most political prints, Catlett said: “I experimented with the heads in different ways—repeated one that I had already printed someplace else. And I used repetition to strengthen the idea. I think that this kind of experimentation is important in remaining creatively and esthetically productive.”⁶⁸

Appropriation and repetition were synergistic forces in Catlett’s printmaking. Appropriation is also, in its own way, a form of repetition. When she chose to appropriate, Catlett reconstructed identifiable imagery but preserved recognizability, associative meanings, and sociohistorical context. Appropriation and repetition became the means through which she traversed the tension between form and figuration—the “principles of form based on the modern approach to art” and the “elements of form recognizable to the majority of people”—that she first identified in 1946. More than just a means for creating multiple originals and reaching a large audience, printmaking processes and techniques intrinsically offered countless opportunities for experimentation and discovery. Printmaking provided the strategies that powered the appropriation and repetition that shaped Catlett’s print practice and through which she successfully connected with, and inspired, her “two peoples.”

Cite this article: Mary Lee Corlett, “Repetition, Resistance, and Remembering in the Prints of Elizabeth Catlett,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20828.

Notes

Prior to my retirement from the National Gallery of Art in 2023, I was one of the three organizing curators, with Dalila Scruggs and Catherine Morris, of the major retrospective Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist, which was on view at the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024–2025. This article is an extension of my research for that exhibition and includes references to the essay I prepared for the accompanying catalogue (University of Chicago Press, 2024). I am grateful for the unwavering support of the organizing institutions for hosting the exhibition, and most especially for their role in facilitating the critical archival research conducted by my colleagues and myself in preparation for this exhibition and catalogue. In addition, for this essay I particularly want to thank Ruth Fine and Melanie Herzog, who enthusiastically shared their invaluable expertise while offering much-appreciated encouragement and support. Finally, I am eternally grateful for the generosity of the Mora-Catlett family, who so graciously allowed me access to the many Catlett prints held by the estate, while patiently sharing their knowledge and their memories, without which this essay could not have been written.

Welcome to our Spring issue of Panorama, which is invested in thinking carefully about museums, collection histories, and artists who act as disruptors, either in the present or the past!

In Mary Lee Corlett’s Feature Article, “Repetition, Resistance, and Remembering in the Prints of Elizabeth Catlett,” the artist is positioned as a democratizing force in her own printmaking practice. Catlett straddled historic binaries as a Black, United States–born, Mexican artist who challenged establishment histories in not just her content and thinking but strategically: in her use of the print medium to disseminate her prints widely, and in multiples, without regard to print runs and image management. Further, Catlett was an important mentor and teacher to Dr. Samella Lewis, whom Aja Roache writes about in her contribution to this issues’s Colloquium, as a way of thinking critically about the stewardship of HBCU gallery spaces and museums.

This issue is anchored by two major contributions in-house. In the Round, which is cleverly renamed In the Galleries to coincide with this Museum-themed issue, is led by Co-Executive Editor Liz McGoey and scholar Sara Picard. The section takes readers into nineteen museums across the United States through images and commentary on permanent collection hangs. Contributors examine the ways in which American art, as a category and a collection, delineates, activates, or breaks boundaries, responds to pressing social concerns, and reflects on, or mirrors back, our nation’s own self-image through its heritage of artistic production, reception, and consumption ahead of the approaching 250th anniversary of our nation.

This issue’s Colloquium is helmed by Panorama’s DEI/Digital Art History Manager Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Exhibition Reviews Editor Frederica Simmons and acts as an internal institutional critique, as well as a call to the field of American Art at large. Six contributors center Black voices and histories as a way to enact critical engagement in a moment when diversity initiatives have been strongly curtailed, abandoned, or otherwise prohibited federally and within many state legislatures. As they write, “To mark this anniversary is to read between the lines: to ask not only what has been written into the history of American art, but what has been flattened, folded, and assimilated into a story that was never constructed to be malleable enough to carry our multiplicities.” They introduce or examine a wide spectrum of viewpoints on current exhibition practice, funding cuts, and the forms of resistance undertaken by Black scholars across the United States

Three Research Notes in this issue illuminate how spatial, political, and social landscapes shape artistic identity and reception. In “New Archival Evidence on Robert Duncanson,” recently discovered nineteenth-century court transcripts reveal the Black landscape painter’s deep, lifelong ties to Underground Railroad leaders and his complex financial relationship with his enslaver father-in-law. Similarly tracking changing environments, “Drive By or Fly Over: Alexander Calder in the Age of Aerial Art” examines how the postwar rise of skyscrapers, interstates, and aviation shifted public spectatorship, prompting Calder to design vibrant sculptures and murals calibrated for mobile, high-rise, and aerial viewpoints. Finally, “Queer Localities: Space, Class, and Desire in Thomas Painter’s Visual Archive” uncovers a rare midcentury record of non-elite queer culture, demonstrating how an upper-middle-class documentarian constructed an ideal of working-class masculinity across shifting public and private terrains, despite the unequal economic transactions inherent in his gaze.

Four Book Reviews in this issue examine how artists, critics, and institutions navigate the powerful intersections of space, politics, and power to shape visual culture. Caitlin Frances Bruce’s Voices in Aerosol offers a rhetorical ethnography of graffiti in León, Mexico, analyzing how the state co-opted subcultural practices through “institutional attunement.” In Hidden in Plain Sight, Rachel Stephens provides an expansive look at how antebellum Southern visual culture used idealization and concealment to normalize slavery and white supremacy. Jennifer Sichel’s Criticism without Authority reframes the careers and personal “disintegration” of critics Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston as a radical form of queer practice that challenged the boundaries of traditional modernist criticism. Finally, Forms of Persuasion by Alex J. Taylor complicates 1960s art history by detailing the overt financial entanglements between artists and corporations, demonstrating how commercial interests actively shaped the era’s artistic production.

Exhibition Reviews offers critical insights into three monographic projects and one group exhibition. Susan H. Edwards takes readers into Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity and highlights the continued relevance of an artist committed to social justice across his diverse artistic practice. Manon Gaudet turns a spotlight on Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk, whose work across media engages community and expresses the “triumphant power of art to build and sustain human connection.” Artist Alice Adams’s architectonic sculptures exhibited at Zürcher Gallery are the subject of Mark L. Hanin’s review, which reasserts her place within the American Minimalism movement. And Melissa Racleff unpacks a multi-artist project inspired and defined by art historian Meyer Schapiro’s vibrant and varied artistic circles.

In keeping with our commitment to being a force for a range of voices in scholarship, our editorial board is pleased to announce some staff changes to our masthead. Kaylee Alexander-Leunissen has been named our new Digital Dialogues editor and will work alongside DEI/Digital Art History Manager Keidra Navaroli Daniels to offer perspectives on digital initiatives, content, and communication. We extend a grateful farewell to Oliver O’Donnell from Research Notes, with a new call for participation for those interested in helping steer this vital section of the journal. This issue also marks the end of Jenni Sorkin’s tenure as Executive Editor, during which she has supported strong content including the state-of-the-field questionnaire for the journal’s 10th anniversary and introduced In Memoriam as a dedicated space within the journal for celebrating the lives of those who have shaped our field. Jenni has also been an advocate for the journal’s financial health, securing funding to support staff and contributor stipends, and we are grateful that this is not a full goodbye as she will continue to support this work alongside Finance and Grants Manager Keri Watson.

On a final note, many of the authors in this issue, as well as Panorama’s editors, address the power of art and artists to forge strong communities and affect change. The topic of the at-risk Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building is addressed across essays, as is an invitation to seek out works of art in person. No matter the path, we hope this issue galvanizes readers into action beyond the virtual pages of the journal.

Cite this article: Jenni Sorkin, Cyle Metzger, and Elizabeth McGoey, “Editors’ Welcome,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20868.

Introduction

Contributors

Michaela R. Haffner, Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, TX
Sofia Ortega-Guerrero, Art Institute of Chicago
Virginia M. G. Anderson, Baltimore Museum of Art
Caroline Culp, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Austen Barron Bailly, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK
Emma Acker, de Young Museum, San Francisco
Katherine Jentleson and Anni A. Pullagura, High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Nandini Makrandi and Lauren Nye, Hunter Museum, Chattanooga, TN
Adrienne Spinozzi and Sylvia Yount, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, Milwaukee Art Museum
Elizabeth Driscoll Smith, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Kaylin H. Weber and Christine Gervais, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Petra Slinkard, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Kathleen A. Foster and Julia Hamer-Light, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Melissa Wolfe and Amy Torbert, Saint Louis Art Museum
Theresa Papanikolas, Seattle Art Museum
Siera Hyte and Leo Mazow, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Erin Monroe and Katherine Tycz, The Wadsworth, Hartford, CT
Karen Sherry, Worcester Art Museum, MA

Soon after the US sesquicentennial was celebrated in 1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator William Mills Ivins mused about the function of art museums. In a notebook now in the Archives of American Art, he wrote, “Each period picks out of the past the things that appeal to it and ignores the rest.” He then clarified with his characteristic sardonic edge that “the ‘selective’ collection [is] merely a reflection of the taste of its own time” (fig. 1).¹ Thus, almost a century ago, Ivins argued that curatorial decisions were informed by cultural impulses, establishing the museum as a mirror of societal values.

This special issue of “In the Round,” reconceptualized as “In the Galleries,” branches out from Ivins’s private considerations of curatorial practice by offering a platform for museum teams to articulate the goals, stakes, and circumstances of creating displays of American art in public museums today. Our aim is to capture the work being done in displays of collections of American art that explore and expand narratives of artistic innovation, national identity, and more. By no means a comprehensive survey, “In the Galleries” invites readers into nineteen museums with ongoing exhibitions of American art drawn from their permanent collections.² The selections presented in this issue welcome a range of geographies, architectural footprints, and collection scope from museums coast to coast.

Curatorial practices and strategies are rarely articulated to the public. When such strategies are communicated, permanent collection displays are seldom the main subject. Special exhibitions get the most attention. Installation shots, catalogues, reviews, marketing, digital media, and tributes in historiographies create lasting documents of a vernissage open for six to twelve months. This is certainly the case within the digital pages of Panorama, which has always featured exhibition reviews. Yet installations of permanent collections of American art rarely receive critical attention beyond the institution: outside scholarly evaluation, media attention, or publications are rare, and if they do occur, it often happens after high-profile reinstallations.³

There is recent evidence, however, of more attention being paid to this central part of curatorial practice and museum display. A recent contribution is Michael Hartman and Jami Powell’s edited volume, Reenvisioning Histories of American Art: Transforming Museum Practice. In addition, the New York Times just initiated a special section about art museums that explores how “artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.”⁴ As these accounts reveal, permanent collection work, which can often be better understood as semipermanent, or rotating, displays from institutional holdings, has the potential to shape, reflect, and refract the zeitgeist.

To be sure, there are archival traces of museum operations and applications for reinstallation funding that shed light on macro views of strategy. For example, flashes of the curatorial philosophy in recent National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) public grants show that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, wanted “to tell the story of the birth of the United States” (2005), the Baltimore Museum of Art planned to “tell the story of American art within an international context” (2012), the Philadelphia Museum of Art proposed to display both local and national art with attention to social justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (2018), and the Brooklyn Museum of Art intended to, in their words, “elevate and amplify the voices of those traditionally underrepresented in major museum installations” (2021).⁵ Often formulated in an aspirational phase, rarely do these documents provide frame- or pedestal-level choices.

We hope that these virtual postcards from “In the Galleries” lead to conversations about curatorial decision-making in ongoing installations of American art. What epistemological knowledge guides these practices? How can uncovering the intellectual and political process of curatorial work in permanent collections benefit engagement and discourse about their display? What do the patterns across multiple ongoing exhibitions of permanent collections tell us about what “appeals” (as Ivins wrote) and what that attraction reflects about individual and/or shared values? How do objects contribute to history, and how is history used to interpret objects in ways that respond to a historically exclusive canon?

The dynamic curatorial perspectives offered here do not attempt to answer these questions, but they provide a constellation of display and interpretive practices from our present moment. These records, which we hope to see more of in Panorama as a public humanities forum, allow current and future curators, scholars, and art lovers to engage in real-time and retrospective discourse about the process of knowledge production in public collections of American art. The study of diverse artistic production within and beyond the constructed geographies of what is now the United States continues to lay bare the construction of national identity.

As such, there is thought-provoking variety in each peek from the nineteen contributors. The collections discussed, as a whole, span millennia. Geographically, some are hemispheric and others local. There are paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, maps, decorative arts, domestic and sacred objects, textiles, and multimedia images. Many of the display strategies articulated in the reflections juxtapose works across long-held boundaries, integrate a range of media, and rely on thematic organization as opposed to strictly chronological and geographic approaches. New models of curatorial decision-making and community collaboration have shaped these installations. Universally, these reflections emphasize goals of complicating and expanding the definition and presentation of American art by addressing long-standing patterns of gender, cultural, ethnic, and religious disparities.⁶

Certainly, what emerges from this survey is awareness that inclusion and expansion are at the fore of current curatorial work, evident in the range of artists and artworks represented as well as the voices that help shape interpretation and gallery narratives. In this year of the semiquincentennial, as the United States of America reflects on its foundation and history—and reckons with administrations (governmental as well as academic) that are hostile to diversity, inclusion, equity, and the arts—the work being done to display permanent collections of American art emphasizes that there is no single definition or story of American art, just as there no one way to understand what it means to be American. Indeed, being American is not always the defining idea of the objects in American galleries.

We hope that this medley from curators actively shaping contemporary spaces and interpreting diverse collections serves both as notes from the field and as a lure to experience these efforts—and importantly, these artworks—in person.

Cite this article: Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, “Introduction,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20868.

Notes

Introduction

Contributors

Alexandra Nicome, Confluence: Situating New Beginnings in the Work of Seitu K. Jones
Matthew Villar Miranda, With Unvarnished Eyes: Indexing Radical Pedagogy in Stephanie Syjuco’s Present Tense (Roll Call) at BAMPFA
Ashleigh Dior Coren, Museum Studies Pedagogy as Noncompliance in an Era of Federal Censorship
Aja Roache, HBCU Art Survival in the Wake of Federal Cuts
Zoe Hume, Navigating Archival Silences Through Art
Kamau Pope, The #CharlestonStrong Machine

As we critically imagine new ways to think and write about visual art, as we make spaces for dialogue across boundaries, we engage a process of cultural transformation that will ultimately create a revolution in vision.

—bell hooks, Art on My Mind

This Colloquium poses an opportunity to be candid with both Panorama’s editors and one another—to ask not just “why” but “how” decisions are made regarding the validation of American art scholarship during a decade of increased sociopolitical individualism, systemic delusion, and Western solipsism. Who draws the boundaries on the field’s production, consumption, and marketing? Is Panorama an informed force for change or is it part of a larger system still plagued by inequity? For two years, we have served Panorama as the Manager of DEI / Digital Art History and as the Section Editor for Exhibition Reviews, respectively. During our tenure, we have been inspired by the work of our colleagues but also challenged by the field’s latent, and sometimes explicit, hierarchies. As Black scholars whose personal and professional experiences have been shaped by exclusion, we consider how researchers can productively engage with discomfort. Specifically, how can we use this moment of national reflection to lean into issues of fragmentation, alienation, pessimism, and unease? How can exploring uncomfortable subjects—historic silences, lingering distortions, and present realities—better position scholarship for an informed and inclusive future?

Revolution, whether in nation building or within the walls of cultural institutions, is complex, contentious, and transformative. Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we find ourselves lingering—suspended between commemoration and critique, between the official story and the lives that official narratives have never quite managed to absorb. To mark this anniversary is to read between the lines: to ask not only what has been written into the history of American art, but what has been flattened, folded, and assimilated into a story that was never constructed to be malleable enough to carry our multiplicities.

The language of national celebration has always demanded a kind of consolidation. To belong, one must cohere. To be legible within the dominant narrative of American identity, communities, traditions, and histories have long been pressured—both covertly and violently—to surrender their particularity at the door. Assimilation, in this sense, is not simply a social process; it is an aesthetic and institutional one. It shapes what enters the museum, what gets written into the archive, what is deemed worthy of scholarly attention, and what quietly disappears. The result is a visual culture that reflects not the plurality of American experience but the myopia of the institutions entrusted to maintain and preserve it.

That myopia is self-reinforcing. When tradition mistakes its own limitations for standards of excellence, it produces a kind of reward for stagnation—a system that valorizes the familiar, marginalizes the dissonant, and calls that process objectivity. For scholars working across communities that historically have been collected rather than consulted, represented rather than centered, the demand to establish oneself through expertise carries a particular irony. Connoisseurship, as it has been practiced within predominantly white institutions, has often functioned less as a measure of knowledge than as a mechanism of exclusion—determining not only whose objects matter but whose ways of knowing are permitted to matter alongside them.

Planar Mountain

Richard Hunt was the single-most prolific American public artist of the twentieth century, with more than 160 public sculptures completed over the course of his seven-decade career. In 1955, a then-nineteen-year-old Hunt attended the funeral of Emmett Till, looked into the open casket, and witnessed the face of a child from his community, five years his junior, distorted beyond recognition. The distortion and mutilation he witnessed that day, the horror of the afterlife of the American Antebellum, so deeply impacted Hunt that he taught himself how to weld metal that summer and began his abstractive sculpture practice. Planar Mountain is a site-specific work at Tufts University’s lower campus in Somerville, a city directly northwest of Boston that was colonized in the mid-1600s by European settlers. Less than a half mile away is present-day Powder House Square, cited as a location of one of the first British hostilities of the Revolutionary War. In the year 2026, as federal propaganda pressures communities to “celebrate” 250 years of America, public art installed on land that will always predate the nation serves as both reminder and encouragement to recognize the gravity of place on our lives. As centuries of memories condense upon themselves, this Colloquium charges our editors, contributors, and readers alike with the obligation to recognize our temporal placement within the landscape of the fictitiously dominant American identity. 

This is where the question of collectivity becomes most urgent, and most fraught. American art history has frequently approached marginalized communities through the lens of the group: as movements, traditions, or demographic categories rather than as constellations of irreducibly individual voices. In the effort to recover what has been excluded, scholarship risks reproducing the very flattening it seeks to undo—assimilating difference into legibility, particularity into representation. How do we hold space for the individual within narratives of collectivity? How do we honor the specificity of a body, a practice, a local history, without conscripting it into a symbol that serves the story we already need to tell?

These questions do not resolve neatly, and this Colloquium does not ask them to. We are interested instead in the spaces between—between the individual and the collective, between assimilation and resistance, between the archive’s silences and the knowledge that survived outside it. To sit with those spaces, to resist the pressure to consolidate them into comfortable conclusions, is itself a critical act.

As guest editors for this Colloquium, we asked contributors, scholars of color from a variety of professional backgrounds, to personally and critically engage with themes of uncertainty, hybridity, and resistance in American art. Alexandra Nicome and Matthew Villar Miranda interrogate the installations of contemporary artists Seitu K. Jones and Stephanie Syjuco, respectively, drawing connections to environmental and institutional decay and severing assumptions associated with art making for public spaces. Focusing on pedagogical practice, Ashleigh Coren questions the role of museum studies curricula in an age of increased institutional scrutiny, and Aja Roache situates the history of an HBCU (Historically Black College/University) currently under threat by legislative restructuring. In her contribution, Zoe Hume details how interpreting historical archives can serve as a model for addressing Black erasure in local communities. Finally, Kamau Pope provides an activist-centered call to action for performance-based practice in the regional South.

These essays reflect lived experiences, embodied knowledges, and, in some instances, internalized frustrations. We are grateful to the contributors for their willingness to share these vulnerabilities and to Panorama for the opportunity to present these complex dialogues across both the spring and fall 2026 colloquia. It is essential that Panorama continues to allow scholars and practitioners to ask the proverbial tough questions and constructively agitate—within the discipline and the journal itself—the fragmented lenses of visual culture.

Cite this article: Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Frederica Simmons, introduction to “Call and Response: DEIA Tensions in Scholarship, Practice, and National Identity,” Colloquium, edited by Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Frederica Simmons, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20989.

The discovery of two nineteenth-century lawsuits has yielded substantial new archival information relating to the landscape painter Robert Seldon Duncanson (c. 1821–1872) (fig. 1). Both lawsuits are related to the artist’s father-in-law from his second marriage: a Kentucky enslaver named Milton Taylor (1794–1869).

Through these two cases, we learn that Duncanson was both personally and professionally connected with Cincinnati’s best-known white abolitionist, Levi Coffin (1798–1877). Coffin was known as the “president of the Underground Railroad.”¹ This connection between Coffin and Duncanson solidifies the artist’s relationship with Cincinnati abolitionists and expands our understanding of his local community.²

These cases shed light on Duncanson’s family life, which has, until this point, been almost entirely unknown. In more than seven hundred pages of transcripts, there are intimate details about Duncanson’s wife, her family, his relationships in and out of the family, his children, his travels, and his connections to famous abolitionists. The only previously known source that touches on Duncanson’s familial relationships is a contentious letter dated June 29, 1871, that he wrote to his son from his first marriage, Reuben (1844–1875), sharply rebuking his son’s accusation that he was content to pass for white.³

These discoveries about Duncanson’s abolitionist ties and his family life come at a crucial time. The Black landscape painter has experienced a resurgence of both popular and scholarly interest over the past three decades, especially after Dr. Jill Biden chose Landscape with Rainbow (1859) to be President Biden’s inauguration painting in 2021. Several museums are also planning major exhibitions of Duncanson’s works in the next three years. While scholars are increasingly writing about Duncanson’s work, many questions have remained unanswered about the artist’s life, his family history, and his involvement in the abolitionist movement or the presence of encoded antislavery messages in his paintings.⁴

Duncanson collaborated with daguerreotypist J. P. Ball on his massive work Antislavery Panorama and gave two of his major paintings to abolitionists (Ellen’s Isle to Senator Charles Sumner and Garden of Eden to the Reverend Charles Avery). Our archival discoveries strengthen Theresa Leininger-Miller’s argument that Duncanson’s recently discovered View of Carthage has strong abolitionist undertones and can be connected with the Colored Conventions being held nearby.⁵ The artist also painted numerous portraits of Cincinnati abolitionists, which Naurice Frank Woods Jr. details in depth. The court cases discussed here bolster Woods’s argument that these relationships were essential to Duncanson’s success and that he retained lifelong connections with his patrons.⁶

In the first case, which began in Kentucky in 1858, a woman named Catharine Amelia Shay petitioned to receive alimony from Milton Taylor, her estranged partner, although the two were never legally married. Shay was seeking support for herself and their two young boys, who were half-siblings of Duncanson’s second wife, Phoebe Ann Taylor Duncanson (1835–1905) (fig. 2).⁷ The second lawsuit reached the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1872 and was filed by Phoebe and her brother, John James Taylor (1829–1900). They were seeking a portion of their late father’s estate, which had been awarded exclusively to their youngest sister, Mary Ann Jane Rogers (b. 1842).⁸

This essay presents a brief summary of these two voluminous, multiyear cases. The excerpts from these court transcripts provide an intimate view into Duncanson’s life, his family relationships, and the Midwest abolitionist movement in the mid-nineteenth century.

“Taylor vs. Taylor” (1859)

In 1858, Duncanson first appears in records of his father-in-law’s legal troubles. Shay (going by Catharine Taylor) filed a petition to receive alimony from Taylor after the dissolution of their relationship. Shay was a white woman with Irish heritage whom Taylor had met in New Orleans. On October 24, 1857, Taylor posted a notice stating: “All persons are hereby cautioned and forewarned from trusting Catharine Amelia Shay, Alias Mrs. Catharine Lilly, assuming to be my wife, but who is not, on my account.”⁹

While the case was being litigated, Taylor took his and Shay’s two young boys, Milton Jr. (five years old) and William Henry Taylor (two years, ten months old) to Cincinnati without Shay’s permission. Taylor justified this decision by saying that Shay was abusing the children and planning to take them to Buffalo, New York, where Taylor could not protect them from their mother’s mistreatment.

Once in Cincinnati, Taylor asked Coffin to send the boys to be boarded and educated with abolitionist Quakers in Indiana. Coffin previously sent John James, Phoebe, and Mary Jane to live or work with Indiana Quakers.¹⁰ However, Coffin offered instead to place the boys with Martha Ann and Ransleur Johnson, two formerly enslaved people whom Coffin had helped escape from Louisiana. Coffin describes Johnson as his “agent,” implying that Johnson may have been involved in assisting self-emancipating people who were heading North. Duncanson and Phoebe (the two were not yet married) escorted the children to the Johnson household. There is an extraordinary irony in this: an enslaver working with a known leader of the Underground Railroad to help shelter his white children by placing them with a formerly enslaved couple.

However, the case took a tragic turn: Milton Jr. and William Henry died suddenly about a week after their arrival in Ohio. According to an autopsy conducted on June 9, 1858, both boys died from encephalomalacia or “softening of the brain,” which can be caused by severe head trauma. Witnesses who testified in this suit claimed these deaths were the result of abuse by their mother.¹¹ The boys died while exhibiting spasmodic convulsions for over six hours; Duncanson was present for William Henry’s death.

Coffin testified that Duncanson and Phoebe were “with the children from the time they came to my house, till they were put in the vault.”¹² Johnson’s testimony corroborated Coffin’s statement: “Duncanson and Phoebe manifested the greatest anxiety for [the boys’] welfare.” He continues, “[Duncanson] was as kind to the children as any brother could be to his own brother,” adding that he “evinced a great deal of feeling when William Harry died.”¹³ We can speculate that this traumatic family event affected Duncanson in 1858, perhaps encouraging him to paint his elegiac work Landscape with Family by Lake (fig. 3), which includes two young children.

Prior to moving to Cincinnati, Coffin had relocated from North Carolina to Fountain City (formerly called Newport), Indiana, in 1826. He was a farmer, merchant, business leader, and a major investor in the Second State Bank of Indiana. This financial success allowed him to help others through his business activity and as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.

Coffin ran a private boarding house, and this constant influx of traffic was a useful cover for helping enslaved people come and go from his home. In his autobiography, he writes, “Our house was large and well adapted for secreting fugitives. Very often slaves would lie concealed in upper chambers for weeks without the boarders or frequent visitors at the house knowing anything about it. . . . Even the intimate friends of the family did not know when there were slaves hidden in the house, unless they were directly informed.”¹⁴

In 1847 Coffin moved to Cincinnati. In addition to running a private boarding house, Coffin also ran a warehouse that sold “free-labor goods” not made with slave labor. This may be how Duncanson met Coffin: The artist made fruit and flower still-life paintings in the late 1840s for some of Cincinnati’s leading horticulturalists (including his preeminent patron, Nicholas Longworth) who supported the “Free Produce” movement. Connecting Duncanson to Coffin also supports Shana Klein’s reading of Duncanson’s still-life paintings as intimately tied with the abolitionist-led Free Produce faction.¹⁵

Through Duncanson’s testimony and other witnesses’ descriptions of him, we learn an extraordinary amount about the artist. This case confirms that Duncanson was intimately networked with Cincinnati abolitionists—white and Black—while ensuring that his white brothers-in-law would be placed in a safe home. Coffin also knew Duncanson intimately enough to confirm his community standing: “His character is good.”¹⁶ Coffin would not have made a comment like this without having a sufficient relationship with Duncanson, whom, by 1858, he had known for nearly ten years.

Duncanson later testified in the second Taylor trial that he first met John James Taylor in 1850, when John James was boarding with Coffin.¹⁷ He later met Phoebe and Mary Ann in 1852 and began courting Phoebe in either 1854 or 1855, while she was living with Coffin. Duncanson also first met Milton Taylor in 1856 at Coffin’s house (42). These many meetings show that Duncanson was a frequent visitor to the abolitionist’s home.

While Coffin stated that many of his boarders were unaware of his Underground Railroad activities, it is likely that all three of Taylor’s formerly enslaved and biracial children were aware of and potentially assisted Coffin’s work. The Taylor children had been boarding with radical abolitionists since at least 1843. This includes John Rankin, one of the most active and open abolitionists in the Underground Railroad, and Daniel Parker, who founded the first integrated school in Ohio.¹⁸ Furthermore, Coffin testified that “we have never had anybody to live with us who conducted themselves more respectfully than [Phoebe].” This statement solidifies Phoebe’s status as not just a “boarder” but someone Coffin respected. From the Taylor children’s education history, their close relationship with Coffin, and the fact that they lived with the Coffins for close to a decade, we are led to believe that they were let into the abolitionist’s close circle of confidants and collaborators.

Coffin also mentions the Taylor children in his 1876 autobiography, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin. Coffin describes the children without naming them outright: “At another time, three slave children, from the State of Kentucky, were emancipated by their white father and placed under our care while they were obtaining an education. They attended school for several years, making our house their home during the intervals. They were nearly white, and were unusually bright and handsome children. They obtained a good education, grew up, and married respectably.”¹⁹ This is undoubtedly a reference to Taylor’s children and Phoebe’s marriage to Duncanson.

Finally, much like Coffin described Phoebe as “nearly white,” he identified Duncanson as “an artist, at least 7/8ths white.”²⁰ Though this passing remark simply identified Duncanson to the court, the detail illustrates the inconsistent and flexible conditions in which Duncanson was interpreted as Black or white. For example, in the summer of 1850 (around the time he met John James Taylor), Duncanson traveled to North Carolina, which had laws on the books to expel or detain free Black Americans who entered the state.²¹ It seems that Southerners thought Duncanson was entirely white. However, in another testimony from this same case, Ransleur Johnson stated, “Duncanson is not a white man.”²² Together, these two statements illustrate the fraught and delicate context of describing “race” in the nineteenth century. The issues of colorism and passing are weighty topics, yet we point out these two descriptions to situate Duncanson within a landscape of racialization, where being labeled “white,” “Negro,” or “Mulatto” depended on subjective whims and ever-shifting language.

“Succession of Milton Taylor” (1872, 1876)

In 1869 Duncanson’s father-in-law, Milton Taylor, died in Cincinnati. Taylor was an enslaver, merchant, and owner of a rope-making facility (called a rope walk) who owned sizeable real estate holdings in Kentucky, Indiana, and Louisiana. Upon his death, these assets were awarded to Mary Ann on the grounds that she was Taylor’s only true child. All of Taylor’s adult children, however, were the product of a domestic partnership between their father and Anna Evans (died c. 1844), an enslaved Black woman whom he never married.²³ Phoebe and John James filed a lawsuit against their sister to claim their inheritance and establish their legitimacy as Taylor’s children. After years of litigating this case in the Louisiana State Supreme Court and drawing on dozens of letters Taylor sent to his children throughout their lives, Phoebe and John James successfully proved themselves as his children.²⁴

Through this case, we learn an astonishing amount of detail about Duncanson’s family life and his wife’s family. According to Coffin’s testimonial, Taylor emancipated his children and sent them to Ohio for schooling, yet their previous status of enslavement complicated their claims to their father’s estate.²⁵ When Taylor died, he left behind multiple wills with competing dispensations for his children. In an unregistered memorandum to the will, Taylor wrote that Phoebe’s true father was a local saddler (or that saddler’s brother); Phoebe alleged that her father wrote this memorandum to insult her after one of their frequent “bitter quarrels” (29).

Through these trials, Duncanson’s father-in-law emerges as a polarizing and caustic figure. He fathered at least six children with Anna Evans and two with Catherine Shay. Known as a cad and a womanizer, he is described as having a notable sexual appetite. Duncanson testified in the case, “His mind was constantly running upon lecherous & lustful subjects, and he would continually talk about women & sexual intercourse with them” (45). He amassed land holdings worth about forty thousand dollars at the time of his death yet was often borrowing money. Taylor was consistently tangled up in lawsuits, tax liens, and local scandals.²⁶ His Kentucky properties were also burned at least three times.²⁷ In a criminal case in 1863, Taylor was charged and convicted of keeping a disorderly house and of “harboring free negroes.”²⁸

Taylor also enslaved people throughout his adult life. In 1827 he acquired an enslaved sixteen-year-old child named Butler, as well as an enslaved man the next year, named Isaac (“aged about twenty one years”), and another child, Alfred (“aged about twelve years”).²⁹ In one of the versions of his will that disinherits Phoebe and Duncanson, Taylor bequeaths one hundred dollars each to two of his “former slaves”: George Washington Evans (also Anna Evans’s son, but fathered by a Black man) and Henry Coleman. He writes, “They assisted me in acquiring my little property. I think it right to give a part of it back to them. They are to receive it semiannually” (103–4). He stipulates, however, “Shepherd and Liz, also my former slaves, I leave no bequests to, as they besides the trouble they gave me, stole from me, more than their shares would amount to” (104).

Duncanson described his father-in-law as often “peevish, irritable, & sullen,” and the cases relating to his slander and alimony payments paint him as a philanderer with erratic behavior. Phoebe testified, “He used to often to [sic] liken himself to [indecipherable] as having every man’s hand against him & would often say in ordinary conversation with us children that as soon as he had has plans matured he would kill, kill, kill, kill” (emphasis original) (22).

At the same time, Taylor’s letters show him as having surprisingly tender and supportive relationships with his biracial children. Dozens of letters included in the case file reveal him to be a devoted father who was eagerly inquiring after “my dear daughters,” buying them jewelry and silk dresses, asking after their studies ranging from philosophy to needlework, signing his letters “your affectionate father,” and sending them money, trinkets, and tender letters about life at home. While it is not unusual that Taylor fathered children with an enslaved woman, his decision to educate his daughters under the supervision of prominent abolitionists in Ohio is both unique and puzzling.³⁰ Why did a man who enslaved people throughout his life choose to educate his biracial children in a free state and to send his daughters to school in a time when women’s education was exceedingly rare? This decision to send Phoebe to school in Ohio opened the door for her to meet Duncanson, who was fresh from his European Grand Tour.

Duncanson testified that he met Taylor in 1856 in Cincinnati: “I approached him in [Spencer House] & entered into conversation with him, in regard to marrying his daughter” (43). This is an important moment to highlight in Duncanson’s testimony: a Black man asking a white slaveholder for his biracial daughter’s hand in marriage. He married Phoebe on August 19, 1858. In his future correspondence with Duncanson, Taylor addressed Duncanson as “Esquire” when writing him, indicating deep respect and social equality.

In Duncanson’s 1871 deposition, he testified:

From that time Milton Taylor used to stop at my house whenever he came to the city. Part of the time after my return from Europe in 1866, I lived in the same family with Milton Taylor & Mary Ann Jane Taylor at the request of Milton Taylor. After he broke up housekeeping, he gave me his furniture. Milton Taylor treated all his children with kindness and I saw no difference in his treatment of them and I do not know that anyone received more benefit than the others. He held these his children out to the world as his. He used to address the sisters as “my daughters,” in ordinary intercourse with them (43).

Taylor and Duncanson developed a close friendship after their families were united by marriage. Phoebe testified that during their frequent conflicts, her father would cease writing her but always kept up his correspondence with her husband, “to whom he wrote constantly, as often as twice a week always & sometimes much oftener” (26). John James testified that, although his father quarreled with Phoebe, “he was always on good terms with Mr. Duncanson” (14). Taylor often sent his son-in-law money, offered him gifts and furniture, and visited his studio almost daily. Duncanson testified: “He was a constant visitor to my studio when he was in Cincinnati and always solicitous of my welfare & success” (44). William Wiswell, Cincinnati’s premier gilder and owner of a gallery below Duncanson’s studio, confirmed this in his testimony: “I knew Phoebe Ann after she married Mr. Duncanson not before. I did not know any of them before that time. Mr. Duncanson is an artist & has an office & studio in my building, & I have seen his wife & her father—Brother & sister in his studio as well as in my store very many times. I have seen Milton Taylor go to Mr. Duncanson’s studio twenty times to his coming into the store once” (55).

Through Phoebe’s deposition, we learn that she accompanied her husband to Canada between 1863 and 1865: “From the time of my marriage up to the year 1863 at which I moved to Canada” (39). When Duncanson left for the United Kingdom in 1865, she returned to Cincinnati and lived “on Ochler Street in Cincinnati” (39). She also testified that her father financed Duncanson’s second transatlantic voyage from Montreal to Londonderry in 1865: “He being then on the way to the World’s Fair in Dublin, where he had pictures on Exhibition sent over by the Canadian Government” (33). An 1865 newspaper article confirmed Duncanson’s journey and listed him as a “Canadian” artist in the Dublin exhibition, but this case underscores the fact that Duncanson was officially exhibiting under the sponsorship of the Province of Canada.³¹ Phoebe also testified that Duncanson returned on July 4, 1866.

Duncanson testified that Taylor’s mental state began to decline while he was abroad in 1865:

My wife wrote me when I was in Europe that the conduct of her father toward his children had changed. That it seemed his mind was affected but there was no change in his treatment towards me upon my return. He always treated me kindly & cordially. But I could see a change in his conduct towards his children. . . . More than once I heard him say that the left lobe of his brain was gone. He sometimes used to talk to himself in my studio. . . . He would at such times seem to be unconscious of the presence of anyone. And he would repeat the same & similar expressions over & over again (44, 46).

In one of Taylor’s unregistered wills, written in the 1860s, he disparages his daughter and son-in-law: “I give and divide to Phoebe Ann T. Duncanson, care out of R. S. Duncanson artist both of Cincinnati Ohio, the sum of one cent also. . . . I give her the said cent as a token of regard for her, and that I have not forgotten her in this my will, neither have I forgotten her most undutiful conduct towards me when I laid sick in bed in Fulton totally unable to help myself” (97–98).

In the same will, however, he leaves his grandson Milton a substantial sum, while simultaneously insulting him: “I give and devise to Milton Taylor Duncanson . . . who is about nine years old, the sum of one thousand dollars . . . because he is naturally inclined to be an artist, and as I think naturally too, will make a helpless sort of man, and besides, being one of the very best boys in the world, or at least that I ever was acquainted with” (98). Does this aside imply that Taylor believed an artist like his son-in-law to be “a helpless sort of man”? Although some of Duncanson’s paintings were valued in newspapers at up to $1,500, we know that he sold an oil painting to a Canadian collector named John Carpenter Baker in 1865 for eighty dollars.³² Phoebe’s testimony also confirms that their family boarded with “my brother’s on Hopkins Street” and then moved to “stay with [my father] and my sister so as to save Mr. Duncanson expense of boarding us” (27). Such recollections demonstrate that the Duncanson family was willing to live with the Taylors to save money.

Duncanson saw himself as an equal claimant in the case: “About a month ago John James Taylor, my wife, & myself joined in making a Power of Attorney to W. W. Handlin of New Orleans to act for us in the matter of our claims in the succession of Milton Taylor giving him full power to represent us & act in our behalf” (emphasis added). Duncanson also paid the cost of the court proceedings (58).

This case provides precious insight into Duncanson’s family life, which we have only obliquely glimpsed through census records and paperwork such as marriage certificates. Such archives were not intended to preserve traces of Black life or articulate the fullness of Black Americans’ lived experiences; in fact, such records often sought to dehumanize Black subjects. The “Succession of Milton Taylor” file fills in some of the gaps around Duncanson’s family life, but there are still many questions left to pursue, such as how he met Phoebe, whether he visited his father-in-law’s plantations in Kentucky, and whether his relationship with the Taylor family strained an already-tense relationship with his son Reuben.

Conclusion

Our focus here is on Duncanson and the new information that these cases reveal, although the case transcripts are full of more details. They contain many interwoven threads that we hope future scholars will unspool. For example, the transcripts include valuable details about integrated and coeducational schools in the Ohio River Valley, the costs of such education, which topics girls were expected to study in school, the logistics of steamboat travel, histories of arson and deliberate property destruction, considerations of sexual morals and standards of propriety, and parent–child dynamics in an upper-class and mixed-race family, and much more.

These cases also raise intriguing questions about friendships between radical abolitionists and enslavers that merit future study. Why did an enslaver reach out to several antislavery activists on the other side of the Ohio River on behalf of his mixed-race children, and why did he later elect to board and educate his “mulatto” daughters with the “president of the Underground Railroad” for over a decade? Coffin and Taylor were close friends for more than twenty years, and Coffin was at Taylor’s bedside as he died (391). Furthermore, how did a modest Quaker with strong antislavery feelings maintain a friendship with a sexually promiscuous enslaver who was constantly embroiled in Kentucky scandals?

Few Duncanson scholars have researched Phoebe’s life and family, which is why these cases have gone unexamined for 150 years. This discovery of the court transcripts demonstrates that scholars researching nineteenth-century artists have often focused too much on the men in these stories and not enough on their families’ lives, where precious data has been lying in plain sight. Researching all parts of an artist’s community, especially their female family members’ stories, can yield invaluable new information.

It took nearly seventy-five years after Duncanson’s death for a scholar to earnestly study him—James Porter published the first major essay on Duncanson in the mid-1940s—which means that during this intervening period, much information about the artist was lost or deliberately erased.³³ Scholarly and institutional interest in Duncanson’s paintings has risen substantially in the past twenty years, yet the work was hampered by a profound lack of archival information. The discovery of these cases substantially increases what we know about Duncanson’s life and work and provides fodder for future investigations into his portrait commissions, his relationships with Cincinnati gallerists and abolitionists, and his financial affairs.

Cite this article: Katherine Gregory and Chris DeBow, “New Archival Evidence on Robert Duncanson from Two Lawsuits: “Taylor vs. Taylor” (1859) and “Succession of Milton Taylor” (1872, 1876),” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20882.

Notes

Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture

by Rachel Stephens

University of Arkansas Press, 2023. 340 pp.; 164 color illus. Hardcover: $60.00 (978-1-68226-233-7)

Rachel Stephens’s second book, Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture, is an ambitious account that documents the visual record of slavery in the antebellum United States. With more than 160 color illustrations printed over 276 pages, Hidden in Plain Sight examines imagery that was produced across the South “to promote, justify, and deny the violence of the Southern plantation system” (14). Stephens studies ephemera and fine art objects, drawing examples from Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Maryland, and Virginia to demonstrate how the governing class manipulated all registers of visual media to uphold white supremacy. In her account of what she calls “proslavery art and visual culture,” she argues that Southern artists and patrons promoted idealized representations of enslaved people, erased visual references to institutionalized anti-Black violence, and physically destroyed material that alluded to the inherent cruelty of racialized chattel slavery (38). To address this program of “visual concealment” and assess its impact on historical narratives about the South, Stephens applies the “words of enslavers” to her formal analysis, introducing new archival material to the literature on nineteenth-century American art (3, 15). The result is an expansive tome that successfully establishes antebellum visual culture as the precedent to the romantic “Lost Cause” representations of the South that emerged after the Civil War.

Animating Hidden in Plain Sight, as is the case for all art-historical scholarship on slavery, is the issue of representing violence. All nineteenth-century enslavers and their sympathizers relied on violence to enforce the racialized subjugation and exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants, but these perspectives are often omitted in historical records. However, as Stephens establishes, enslavers were also silent on the topic, reluctant to admit their cruelties even in private correspondence. Instead, white enslavers promoted representations of slavery they knew to contradict its violent realities, leaving art historians to grapple with what is absent, what is unseen.

Stephens addresses this dilemma and surfaces hidden proslavery messaging by interpreting the work of Southern artists in comparison to contemporaneous abolitionist media, which was far more likely to delineate slavery’s graphic horrors. She argues that Southern art and visual culture can be understood as a response to antislavery propaganda, offering “falsified” impressions of slavery or “counteroffensive” depictions that demonized Black people and abolitionists (29). Hidden in Plain Sight is an apt title for this iconographic effort, reflecting how visible aspects of Southern culture will yield deeper meaning when read against the nineteenth-century dialectic of abolition and slavery.

The first and third chapters best showcase Stephens’s method, with chapter 1 guiding readers through a “wide ranging and divergent” set of examples—extending from watercolor sketches to midcentury plantation landscape paintings and Confederate banknotes—that paralleled the “multitudinous ways that slavery apologists” defended themselves against abolitionist rhetoric (29). Quoting Kirk Savage, who explains that by the mid-nineteenth century, the “traditional imagery of slavery had already been appropriated by abolitionists,” Stephens recontextualizes Southern artists’ treatment of African and African American figures, tracing how depictions of enslaved people were carefully drawn to avoid evoking antislavery connotations (38). Some creators simply inverted the assumption that enslaved people were victims, casting them instead as inherently villainous. Other images, specifically landscapes of plantations, delivered more subtle responses. At the beginning of the century, landscape painters “tended to ignore enslaved people all together,” but as abolitionism and the corresponding slavery justification movement grew, Stephens argues that artists started incorporating enslaved figures to romanticize and justify the racial caste system on plantations (58). At least a dozen Black figures appear in Charles Giroux’s Cotton Plantation (c. 1850), but they occupy the space with ease, strolling in languid groups under a hazy sunset, in stark contrast to abolitionist characterizations of plantations. Although Giroux’s canvas is one of three examples of plantation landscape paintings, the reader is left to infer the standard audience of this genre and how it relates to the other evidence throughout the chapter—does it matter, for instance, that the visual villainization of abolitionists and enslaved people appeared more often in print than paint? Regardless, Stephens convincingly exposes the different motives at play behind the figuration of Africans and African Americans by white creators in the South. Approached in dialogue with abolitionist imagery, these representations plot a history of “enslavers covering their tracks and idealizing enslavement” that began long before Union victory (71).

In chapter 3, Stephens focuses on satirical prints to surface how rules of decorum shaped both proslavery and antislavery depictions of slavery. She argues that Northerners, less encumbered by codes of decency, “often applied a sarcastic indictment of southerners’ concepts of these traditions, which manifested in a variety of forms of concealment as related to enslavement” (106). Most of the chapter considers political cartoons and Union ephemera that juxtapose the projected gentility of the slave-owning class against their cruelty. Working within their own definitions of propriety, David Claypoole Johnston and other Northern cartoonists exposed the hypocrisy of wealthy enslavers with images like The Early Development of Southern Chivalry (c. 1861), which depicts a young gentleman in a tasteful parlor whipping a feminine Black doll tied to a chair. In this context, elite Southern portraits assume a more sinister edge. The white children’s finery and decorous expressions in Four Children in a Louisiana Landscape (1837), attributed to Jacques Amans (1801–1888) and used as the book’s cover image, belied the system of violence that enslaved the Black child. The same rules of decorum probably led to the enslaved child being painted over, effacing the family’s connection to slavery until a conservator restored the canvas generations later. To conclude, Stephens demonstrates that the proslavery weaponization of decency continued through the war, with artists like Adalbert Volck (1828–1912) using prints to associate patrician etiquette with the South in general, thereby reframing the indecorous operations of battle as a targeted assault on Southern culture and the Confederate mission as a defense of family values rather than slavery. The chapter is missing a clear explanation of exactly what “traditions” and codes of conduct enslavers followed, but Stephens draws important connections between social norms and ruling interests, pointing out how ritualized and classed elements of culture can conceal threats to the status quo.

Throughout the book, Stephens lays out examples of how artists, by refusing to explicitly refer to the violence of slavery, made a visual case for the racialized, hierarchical Southern social structure ruled by white landowners. Her research pushes back against flattering self-portraits of the South, providing readers with an overview of the various—and often contradictory—logics that enslavers employed across states and generations. The thematic organization of this material is sometimes unpredictable and often produces redundancies, but the message is clear: All justifications for slavery were ultimately predicated on the racial inferiority of the enslaved and, by extension, the racial superiority of the enslavers. This belief unified different geographies of slavery in the United States and offered the antebellum foundation for later “Lost Cause” revisionist histories. As Hidden in Plain Sight effectively argues, the erasure of anti-Black violence normalized the different logics of white supremacy and enabled Southerners to reframe the Confederate cause as a hopeless war between honorable agrarians and the industrialized North. To address such a wide array of material, Stephens divides the overarching strategy of “visual concealment” into “examples of idealization, destruction, concealment, and secrecy” (3, 21). By the end of the book, the reader is empowered to name the use of concealment as itself a “brutal form of violence” (276).

Unfortunately, Stephen’s intention “to locate and acknowledge the absences in the visual record” drives a narrow definition of concealment as the negation of something else, which limits the analytical efficacy of the other named tactics (15). Chapter 2 focuses on the destruction—both imaged and literal—of abolitionist and proslavery visual culture; chapter 4 is another study on idealization, focusing on daguerreotype portraits of enslaved caretakers with their white charges; chapter 5 applies the context of wartime secrecy and suspicion to Adalbert Volck’s oeuvre; and chapter 6 considers how a group of Virginia-based white artists idealized the relationships between enslavers and the people they enslaved. The impulse to define all these approaches under “concealment,” however, forecloses the opportunity to confront white supremacy as a visually generative process. For example, in the fourth chapter, Stephens describes portraits of white children sitting with the Black women enslaved to raise them as images that “cover over the true nature of enslavement and present a façade of comfort” (143). Regarding the artistic strategies that constructed this façade, the author identifies some Marian imagery and discusses some technical strategies for photographing skin color, but most of the chapter is spent proving the façade exists, detailing the differences between the daguerreotypes and the households they pictured rather than the visual strategies employed by photographers. Similarly, in her account of Volck, Stephens introduces his prints as direct rebuttals to Union illustrations, issued by an “intransigent and secretive artist” (182). However, the extensive archival evidence of this claim—including information about Volck’s role as a Confederate smuggler during trade blockades—is left out of formal analysis, despite the implicit invitation to read the visual economy of his Flaxman-like drawings as a style born from wartime austerity and secrecy. As an art historian, I wonder if explicitly naming the creation of fiction, in tandem with the concealment of truth, as two sides to the same process of suppression would grant Stephens the space to formally integrate her exciting archival finds.

In general, Hidden in Plain Sight prioritizes quantity of examples over formal analysis. The result is an accessible compendium of primary-source data from the Filson Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, and other rich archives, synthesized in relation to a diverse array of visual sources, including objects that have rarely, if ever, been reproduced at this scale.

A word of caution, however: Much of this material, despite the book’s focus on slavery’s absence, consists of graphic depictions of anti-Black violence and racist stereotypes. Produced by both antislavery and proslavery interests, these are upsetting images, and Stephens missed an opportunity here to discuss how the reproduction of these images participates in the long and complicated history of violence that this project documents.

Furthermore, the scope of the book necessitates the clarification of key terms. Stephens lumps together “art” and “visual culture” without defining the parameters or examining how different media from different aesthetic registers informed one another. The terms “proslavery” and “anti-abolitionist” also seem interchangeable, variously applied to describe art made in the South. While these differences might seem minor, specificity is required to discuss images of slavery from the nineteenth century, when aesthetic hierarchies assumed classed distinctions and the regulation of enslavement varied across different states.

Despite these limitations, Hidden in Plain Sight offers a productive resource for scholars interested in exploring how the fine arts and popular media of the nineteenth century were conscripted in the ongoing project of white supremacy. In addition to her introduction of valuable archival material and her inclusion of examples from across the South, Stephens raises critical questions and insights regarding the ways class, religion, and gender were enforced to naturalize slavery. Her analysis demonstrates how visual culture can be approached simultaneously as a passive record and active agent of insidious ideologies. This is important work that feels more relevant than ever. As the federal government of the United States turns increasingly toward white nationalism, it is necessary to remain sensitive to the ways imagery indoctrinates and conceals. Stephens offers a model for this practice, and I found her first-person reflections in the preface, introduction, and conclusion particularly instructive for scholars grappling with their responsibility regarding uncomfortable histories. As Stephens reminds her readers, history is “the project of learning,” conducted in the present tense in service of a better future (19).

Editors’ note: Panorama’s Managing Editor, Jessica Skwire Routhier, performed developmental editing on this book.

Cite this article: Rachel Burke, review of Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture by Rachel Stephens, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20888.

Introduction

The Space Race at the close of the 1960s is well known to have proliferated a new fascination with celestial bodies, but the rise of skyscrapers, air travel, and satellite imagery also generated renewed attention to the surface of the Earth. In 1974, the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, responded to the increasingly aerial view of the planet’s surface by commissioning a bold red, black, and white mural by Alexander Calder (1898–1976) for the rooftop of a government office building, popularly known as the Calder-on-the-Roof (fig. 1). Despite the monumental painting’s geographic closeness to the artist’s popular modernist sculpture in the plaza, La Grande vitesse (1969), the mural remains little discussed in Calder scholarship.

This essay places Calder’s commissions within the context of a transformation of vision in postwar America. As downtown interstates, high-rise offices, and jetliner travel became routine in the 1960s and 1970s, the surface of the Earth and the public art on it became literally framed by the windshields of cars, the plate glass of skyscrapers, and the oval windows of planes. In three interrelated public commissions, including his painted fuselages for Braniff International Airways, Calder inserted the “flyover” city of Grand Rapids into national discourse about expanding fields for public art amid new frameworks of vision shaped by automobile travel, skyscraper views, and passenger aviation in the United States.

From the Automobile

In front of the fourteen-story Grand Rapids City Hall, La Grande vitesse sits at a favorable location to be viewed from a car driving down the street. Five years after the sculpture’s red steel legitimized modernist abstract art for public spaces, funded by public money, the Calder-on-the-Roof transformed a county office building into an exploration of new visual vocabularies shaped by skyscrapers and air travel.

Both Calder’s sculpture and his mural came to be in Grand Rapids through the efforts of Nancy Mulnix Tweddale (1939–2025), a local arts volunteer whose meticulously maintained archive attests to the civic labor required to bring modernist abstraction to a Midwestern city.¹ Mulnix Tweddale was charged with organizing the Women’s Committee annual exhibition at the Grand Rapids Art Museum.² Critical to the growth of small regional museums from the 1950s to the 1980s, Women’s Committees and similar volunteer groups operated gift shops and arranged special events at museums. In many cases, as in Grand Rapids, the women independently organized their own exhibitions in museum galleries, supervised annual arts competitions, and administered gift shops for fundraising.

For the 1967 annual exhibition, the Women’s Committee planned the exhibition 20th Century American Painting, based on a monumental survey organized two years prior by curator Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The women volunteers took Geldzahler’s catalogue, American Painting in the Twentieth Century, “as a bible” and sought to build a checklist that demonstrated the modernist impulses of Michigan’s regional artists.³

When the day came for Geldzahler’s keynote lecture in Grand Rapids, Mulnix Tweddale picked the curator up from the airport and drove him through the recently redeveloped downtown, a product of a 1960s urban renewal plan that razed more than 120 buildings.⁴ The urban renewal of Grand Rapids was one of many nationwide plans that destroyed historic neighborhoods to make way for cities organized around interstates, car parks, and centralized offices. The government services center in Grand Rapids, called Vandenberg Plaza, featured International Style offices arranged around a six-acre plaza. Underneath a grid of light brown pavers, a hidden underground parking deck supports the city’s economic realignment away from its nineteenth-century furniture industry to the orbit of automobile manufacturers headquartered in Detroit. While looking at the plaza through the windshield of the car, a mode of vision rapidly naturalized through urban sprawl, Geldzahler made an offhand suggestion that the plaza should have a sculpture. Mulnix Tweddale jumped at the suggestion—in her recollections, she shouted, “YES, and how do we get one?”⁵

Geldzahler was soon to be named the first chair of the Visual Art Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the support of Vice President Gerald Ford (a native of Grand Rapids) ensured that the nascent Art in Public Places program of the NEA would support the endeavor. Calder, who had been Mulnix Tweddale’s favorite artist since girlhood, was approved for the commission by an NEA panel even before the details of the program were finalized; in most of Mulnix Tweddale’s correspondence, she can only refer to the as-yet-named grant as a “special program.”⁶ Mulnix Tweddale then began a massive campaign for local foundations, citizens, and businesses to match the money offered by the NEA.

When the Calder was installed in Vandenberg Plaza, detractors of the work were swallowed by the crowd of supporters who visited the plaza over its dedication weekend. La Grande vitesse’s dancing red curves interrupt the stolid regularity of the plaza, introducing a moment of exuberance. Furthermore, as the first sculpture funded by the Art in Public Places program of the NEA, La Grande vitesse legitimized modernist and nonfigurative art for public commissions. Since it was erected without any cost to the Grand Rapids government, even those who disliked the striking forty-two-ton red form grew to appreciate it. Ford, who as a senator was initially against the formation of the NEA, later said of La Grande vitesse, “I didn’t care for it at first, but now I wouldn’t be without it.”⁷ To this day, a graphic rendition of the sculpture by local artist Joseph Kinnebrew (b. 1942, Tacoma, Washington) officially signifies the city government on letterhead, street signs, and city fleet vehicles (fig. 2). Grand Rapids’ ready embrace of the red monument signaled a critical acceptance of modern art for public and civic identity, an acceptance primed by the framework of the car windshield as the sculpture became part of downtown’s daily visual field.

From the Skyscraper

While La Grande vitesse was calibrated for viewers at street level, the Calder-on-the-Roof addressed the newly emergent visual framework of high-rise office towers. Calder’s largest painting features black and red ovals floating in a white background, framed on one side by a diagonal red border. A wavy black line curves around the red sphere, bouncing like the blades of La Grande vitesse. The forms’ outlines are jagged, spilling off the roof and bringing vibrant red curves to the linear geometry of the plaza. Seen from the upper floors of the surrounding towers, the mural flattens Calder’s adjacent biomorphic sculpture into a graphic field calibrated for viewing at a distance (see fig. 1).

The design originated from a painting that Calder completed over a black-and-white photograph of the plaza taken from the windows of the University Club, a restaurant that occupies the fifth floor of an office building in Vandenberg Plaza. Given Calder’s advanced age and struggles with Parkinson’s, it is likely that another person used trigonometry to translate Calder’s original sketch onto a grid system for mapping the shapes on the actual roof.⁸

It is unclear from the archives who proposed that the roof of the Kent County building be painted, but Mulnix Tweddale was still in close communication with Calder by the fifth anniversary of La Grande vitesse. Some employees in the City Hall tower complained that the tar roof of the Kent Building distracted from the view of La Grande vitesse.⁹ Irregularly dotted with mechanical pipes, the lower roof dominates the view from the nearby slab towers.

Previously, urban renewal efforts in Chicago confronted similar challenges from the bald, flat rooftops filling the field of view of high-rise towers. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s (1886–1969) design for the Chicago Federal Center in 1960 addressed the vista of employees in Kluczynski Tower by aligning the rooftop tiles of the low post office pavilion with the mullions of the slab building.¹⁰ In a further step, the General Services Administration commissioned Calder to add a pop of color to the plaza. His arced Flamingo, the same size and color as La Grande vitesse, was unveiled in 1974.

For many rural and suburban Americans in the 1970s, vision of the landscape from an aerial viewpoint played an increasingly critical role in shaping their identity. In Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest, art historian Jason D. Weems argues that federal oversight of agricultural efficiency in the first half of the twentieth century homogenized the rural farmland of the United States’ interior. Aerial photographs produced to survey the gridding of the prairie landscape into homogeneous fields reflected the collapsing of middle America into a superregional identity, one united by the indifferent geometry of megafarms and interstate highways.¹¹ The destruction of Grand Rapids’ historic downtown, its replacement with a modernist grid, and the movement of businesses to elevated, detached upper floors similarly forced urban life into compliance and modularity.

When Calder learned of the complaints that building occupants had about their view of the unsightly roof, he offered his design free of charge to the Kent County Building rooftop: “I think of you people very often because I am still trying to produce a few objects which will be as successful as yours (GR) is (apparently).”¹² Mulnix Tweddale acted quickly to secure funding for what promised to be the biggest painting ever completed by Calder. She successfully canvassed the banks and businesses occupying the upper stories of the slab buildings around the plaza to fund the cost of specialty paint for the roof. Once again, with no local taxpayer monies being spent, naysayers had little grounds for complaint about the mural’s intervention into the concrete landscape.¹³

The painting of the Calder-on-the-Roof celebrated the fifth anniversary of La Grande vitesse, which was programmed in conjunction with the city’s annual Festival of Arts. Largely a civic program of the past, municipal festivals of the arts constituted major annual events from the 1960s to 1980s in regional cities like Grand Rapids and Birmingham, Alabama. These weeks-long affairs, with music, theater, cuisine, visual arts, and even opera, were massive undertakings, entailing programming contributions from virtually all arts organizations in a city.

In 1974 the central nexus of the Grand Rapids Festival of Arts was the Vandenberg Plaza. The mural was painted over the course of the 1974 festival, and City Hall reserved two elevators to run express to its ninth floor for the public to watch the emergence of the work.¹⁴ More than one hundred thousand people attended during its apex event days. The roof was first coated with neoprene to prevent the tar from leeching through to the paint, and then an emulsion latex paint produced by a local industrial chemical company was applied.¹⁵

Over the next decades, the local commitment to the maintenance and repair of the sculpture and mural reveals the community’s embrace of abstract public art.¹⁶ In the mid-1980s, the material integrity of both works came under threat due to city budget reductions. In 1983 the city cut the annual forty-nine-gallon coat of Calder red for La Grande vitesse until the local Polish Heritage Society volunteered $1,200 to cover the cost. A further six businesses and organizations offered to fund the project.¹⁷ Four years later, the asphalt roof of the Kent County Administrative Building needed replacement, and businesses in offices from which the design could be seen provided the money to repaint the mural.¹⁸ In 2016 the county building’s asphalt roof needed to be replaced with a synthetic rubber membrane system, so the mural required total repainting. Local roofing company Great Lakes Systems took aerial photographs of the existing painting and digitally rendered the design.¹⁹

Each painting of the rooftop mural shifts the outlines of the forms slightly.²⁰ From Calder’s initial sketches to a grid, then to the roof, and later to a digital rendering, these iterations shift the contours of the forms but mark the contributions of the Grand Rapids community members who have repeatedly brought the mural into being. Considered within the new era of vertical vision shaped by skyscraper floors and commercial air travel, the Calder-on-the-Roof erupts as a dazzling gem out of the concrete of downtown, marking the city as a unique space for both creativity and production.

From the Airplane

Excited locals would make the bold claim that such an unusual work, viewable from the sky, had never been attempted “in the entire history of art,” but precedent had been set in 1955, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.²¹ Sculptor Theodore Roszak (1907–1981) created a steel belltower for the rooftop of the MIT Chapel, designed by Eero Saarinen (1910–1961). Sitting on the nonsectarian chapel roof, Roszak’s arched quadruped soars above the circular brick building (fig. 3). Friezes of cast biomorphic forms span the planes of the tower’s legs. Hidden by the chapel’s parapet, the forms appear to be little more than an undulating texture. They cannot be seen from ground, nor from adjacent buildings or passing planes. The spire is, in the artist’s own words, for “God.”²² During World War II, Roszak worked as an aviation welder and instructor for Brewster Aircraft Corporation, a defense contractor focusing on naval aircraft. The tedious process of welding would have given him ample time to contemplate what an aerial, godlike view of the earth might be.²³ Ten years after Roszak imagined a viewer beyond human sight, Calder addressed the aerial vision as a new condition of American life.

Calder’s engagement with aerial vision diverged from another important experiment with an aerial spectator of sculpture in the late 1960s. Robert Smithson (1938–1973) began to experiment with monumental art inside the dead landscape between airport terminal tarmacs. He was commissioned to be an “artist-consultant” to the architectural firm Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton (TAMS), which was developing a bid for a modular terminal design for the new Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in Texas.²⁴ A transportation hub for the future, the massive project had to accommodate the expected jumbo jets of the 1970s as well as new attitudes toward emergent public–private spaces. The hiring of Smithson to be an “artist-consultant” indicates an early response from the architectural firm to the growing passage of percent-for-the-arts ordinances, or laws that require new construction projects to earmark funds for public art. In 1963 the federal-level Art in Architecture program of the General Services Administration included international airports. The architecture firm perhaps hoped that their patronage of Smithson would enhance their bid and prepare the design team to meet federal requirements.

Between flights to Dallas, Smithson frequently organized road trips from Manhattan to mines, quarries, and abandoned air strips in New Jersey and Connecticut.²⁵ Travelogues and recollections about day trips with Smithson and his wife, Nancy Holt, became a corpus in their own right.²⁶ In Smithson’s first mainstream essay, “The Crystal Land,” published in Harper’s Bazaar, he describes the view of a cigarette-stuffed dashboard passing through the New Jersey Turnpike as he, Holt, Donald Judd, and Julie Finch traveled to hunt for minerals in quarries. This text precedes Tony Smith’s better-known description of nighttime on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike, in which he recounts speeding down the unadorned asphalt, feeling in the monotonous experience “a reality there which had not had any expression in art,” momentum-bound beyond the dialectics of painting, architecture, and sculpture.²⁷ These reflections on experience and viewing, framed by the edges of the highway pavement, prepared Smithson for a condition of spectatorship structured by the runway rather than the windshield.

Near the end of his contract with the architectural firm, Smithson requested that Robert Morris (1931–2018), Carl Andre (1935–2024), and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) submit handwritten proposals for “plans for landmarks” that would accompany his own on the grounds of the redesigned airport. The artists all responded with handwritten proposals, none illustrated by drawing.²⁸ Morris envisioned a monumental earthen ring, while Andre proposed a crater produced by the deployment of a one-ton bomb or a field of bluebonnets, the state flower of Texas.²⁹ LeWitt, by contrast, refused to create a spectacle and instead wanted to place an unknown object in a six-inch wooden cube, encase it within another eighteen-inch block of cement, and then bury this block unmarked in the clear-zone grass.³⁰ The work would deny any aesthetic distraction for bored travelers.

In his essay on the project, Smithson focused on the new field of vision enabled by passenger air travel. He argued that, within the fuselage of a plane, viewing is repositioned from the Renaissance tradition of human-height verticality to the downward view of the aerial. Yet, the scale of aerial vision is profoundly different from the flatbed picture plane of tabletop-like neo-pop combines or Cubist café scenes, and it insists on a reorientation of the spectator’s body in relationship to the ground.³¹ Smithson emphasized the dislocating effects of this shift, but Calder would respond by activating the downward gaze through bright color and form as skyscrapers and air travel increased in the 1970s.

Around the same time, the now-defunct Braniff International Airways responded to this new frame of vision by commissioning Calder to paint the exterior of two new two-hundred-passenger planes.³² The airline company was expanding its routes from the United States into South America with these Douglas-DC 8-62 wide-body jetliners. The planes would continue Braniff’s branding campaign, “The End of the Plain Plane,” which featured a fleet painted not only in orange, blue, and beige but also ocher, lemon, and turquoise, with seven matching interior designs.³³

For the first commission in 1973, Calder painted eight designs on 1:25-scale models of the planes, which were translated to the fuselage using a grid method. The chosen design, titled Flying Colors of South America, featured swirls and waves of red, yellow, and blue (fig. 4). A slogan approved by marketing—“We’ll get you there with Flying Colors!”—accompanied photographs of the Calder plane in newspapers and postcards. The Braniff aircraft translated Calder’s biomorphic vocabulary to the curve of the fuselage, wrapping the surface in waves of primary color. Taxiing or airborne, the white negative space on the wings and engines reinforces the sense that color itself is hurtling forward in space. If the Calder-on-the-Roof invites a downward gaze from a controlled architectural height, then the Braniff plane offers a transient spectacle, a flash of color moving as quickly as the passenger-viewer.

As in Grand Rapids, Braniff’s selection of Calder turned out to be especially welcome on two fronts: His colorful designs were popular and recognizable, and he was known to be easy to work with as an artist. The popularity of the first plane prompted Braniff to commission a second plane from Calder for the country’s bicentennial anniversary. Flying Colors of the United States wrapped a second Douglas plane in patriotic red and blue streaks, rolling like a flag in the wind. Evidencing his popularity with corporate and public patronage, Calder readily painted over line-drawn creature motifs on two wing turbine pod covers when Braniff disliked their red eyes and smoking jaws.³⁴ Braniff’s publicity materials emphasized that the final design lacked its own corporate branding, but Calder did paint fourteen-foot signatures in bold contrast above both planes’ primary boarding doors.

Of the Calder plane, Braniff Board Chairman Harding Lawrence claimed, “More people will see this particular work of art in its original form than any other in the history of man.”³⁵ He forecasted that millions of people would see the planes. By the mid-1970s, many Americans were experienced commercial passengers, industry employees, or lived under contrail-marked skies. The painted aircraft would be glimpsed through the glass curtain walls of terminal waiting areas or through the oval port window of a fuselage. Sometimes, visits from the Flying Colors planes made front page news at smaller towns with international airports.³⁶

In promotional postcards sold at airports, Flying Colors jumps out as a colorful bolt against an undifferentiated field of farmland or monochromatic sky. Seen on the tarmac, in flight, or in reproduction, Calder’s planes redirected the newly elevated gaze back to the surface of the earth. Across monuments, murals, and painted aircraft, his work brought vibrant identity to the increasingly regulated and transitionary landscape of postwar America, meeting audiences who gaze out of the upper floors of skyscrapers, through the windows of jetliners, or, perhaps in the future, the ports of spaceships.

Cite this article: Shannon Bewley, “Drive By or Fly Over: Alexander Calder in the Age of Aerial Art,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21085.

Notes

Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices

By Jennifer Sichel

University of Chicago Press, 2025. 192pp.; 63 halftone illus. Paperback: $30.00 (ISBN: 9780226842844)

In a 1950 review of T. S. Eliot’s prose, Clement Greenberg claims that the critic “has to lay down the law.”¹ Setting aside whether Eliot would have put the matter quite so bluntly, Greenberg’s remark encapsulates a certain ethos of modernist criticism that is no longer widely shared. It might be said that for several decades we have lived through an age of “criticism without authority.” But what does that entail? A short answer, which we might take from Jennifer Sichel’s lively account, is that it looks pretty untidy. However, this does not deter the author. In Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices, she regards this untidiness as a necessary virtue. Sichel frames her study around the entwined lives and careers of critics (and friends) Gene Swenson (1934–69) and Jill Johnston (1929–2010). What Sichel characterizes as the “disintegration” of their personal lives and activities provides the impetus for a compelling account of queer practice and criticism. While Sichel’s account sets itself against critical “authority,” it is not Greenberg who is the main antagonist but rather Michael Fried, who, in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” attempted to police the boundaries that Johnston and Swenson destabilized. The terms impure and situation, both explicitly opposed by modernist critics, are set up by Sichel as positive values (13). Sichel is not the first to reverse Fried’s terms in such a way, but she puts this reversal in the service of a novel claim for those two overlooked figures as exemplars of queer practice and criticism.

Swenson’s career as a critic and curator was tragically cut short by a car accident. By this point, he had become disillusioned with the art world. In February 1968, he picketed the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) at lunchtime each day, holding a Plexiglas question mark above his head. Sichel borrows the term quiticism from Gregory Battcock to describe Swenson’s attitude, but she also applies the term to Johnston, who outlived Swenson by more than forty years. Johnston’s column in the Village Voice influenced a range of figures who have blurred the boundaries between criticism, memoir, and fiction: among them Hilton Als, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, and David Wojnarowicz (139).

Sichel marshals the messiness of her material into a fluent and well-formed narrative that provides a valuable recontextualization of the cultural history of the late 1960s and 1970s. On the face of it, her queer history may appear distinct from standard accounts, but in many ways, it complements existing histoires to build a fuller and more complex picture of the period. Although they appear to be marginal figures, Johnston and Swenson were indicative of, and embedded within, wider cultural and sociopolitical trends. While they were dealing with personal breakdowns, the culture of modernism was undergoing a crisis of its own. Mel Ramsden pithily described Conceptual art as “modernism’s nervous breakdown,” a formulation that makes explicit the connection between the personal and the cultural.² The 1960s may be remembered as heady days of liberation, but it was a period of fear and uncertainty as the social order faced new threats. This fear was not the preserve of conservatives. As T. J. Clark has recently remarked of the UK context, these were also difficult times for those on the left.³

Sichel’s first chapter deals primarily with Swenson. Seen as a rising star in the mid-1960s, he was an advocate of Pop Art early in the decade. He curated The Other Tradition in 1966 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The show’s Surrealist inclination paralleled the famous Artforum issue on the subject. It included work by Paul Thek, Joseph Raffaele, and Michael Todd. For Swenson, those three artists embodied a “post-Freudian” situation, where repression gives way to the more explicit embrace of sexuality. Swenson’s extensive catalogue essay reveals him to be an astute and well-informed commentator. He broached the demise of formalist orthodoxy and made the case for new critical vocabularies. In this sense, the text and its accompanying show anticipated Leo Steinberg’s better-known essay “Other Criteria,” originally published in 1968. Unfortunately, Swenson’s life soon went into a downward spiral. A combination of professional disappointments and personal problems left him an embittered and isolated figure. When he picketed MoMA, the museum guards refused to admit him, while former colleagues kept their distance. More problematically, he penned anti-Semitic tirades against the art establishment. Sichel, correctly, makes no excuses for this (65).

Sichel also engages with Swenson’s interview with Andy Warhol in a 1963 issue of Art News, titled “What Is Pop Art?” As Sichel notes, the published interview was heavily redacted. It is not entirely clear how the edits transpired, although in a footnote Sichel suggests that editor Thomas Hess was most likely responsible (28). The original interview contained discussions around homosexuality that sometimes veered into disturbing territory, such as Swenson’s account of his ambivalent fascination/horror at seeing a man being savagely beaten. The unredacted Warhol interview provides Sichel with the grounds to argue for a different definition of Pop: one that is more explicitly queer but with a much darker undercurrent, already glimpsed in Warhol’s Disaster series. Nonetheless, the informality of the interview makes it difficult to gauge the extent to which a broader theory can be extrapolated from it.

Chapter 2 focuses largely, though not exclusively, on Johnston. Sichel deals with the “disintegration” of the critic, which has a double-edged significance. On the one hand, the term can be taken to signify a broader loss of authority in the figure of the critic in general; however, the disintegration was also personal. Both Swenson and Johnston were institutionalized several times at the psychiatric ward in New York’s Bellevue Hospital during the 1960s. Johnston’s 1969 public panel, “Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston,” brought together her personal crises with the demise of criticism. In a press release, Johnston, in Sichel’s words, “offer[ed] herself up as a version of Artaud’s martyr” (78). Further, Johnston’s column in the Village Voice underwent a transformation, becoming “a space to shatter and disorganise language, to subvert literary codes, and to assemble experiential codes of expression” (79). Sichel stresses Johnston’s understanding of the instability of selfhood, later a staple of postmodernism. The remark calls to mind Bob Dylan’s contemporaneous album Self Portrait (1970), which confused listeners with the inclusion of cover versions and indifferent live recordings. Robert Slifkin’s study of Philip Guston argued that this formed part of Dylan’s deconstruction of his own myth: in some respects quite different from Johnston but each indicative of a broader crisis of the self.⁴

Johnston’s panel, which Warhol published as transcript, descended into chaos. Subsequent accounts by Battcock, John Perrault, and Lil Picard were effusive in their praise for Johnston, although, as Sichel admits, the panel had “no easy upshot” (88). The chapter closes by turning back to Swenson, whom Johnston reflected on in a moving Village Voice column in 1972. Here, Johnston revealed details of her own breakdown and incarceration. Johnston drew upon R. D. Laing’s notion of psychosis not as a pathology but, as he put it, as something “a person invents in order to live in an unliveable world” (89). Sichel contends that Johnston reframed what Laing called the “queer” (that is, strange) experiences of the psychotic as a means to account for her own, and Swenson’s, queer desires in a repressive society.

Chapter 3, titled “lesbianlesbianlesbianlesbianlesbianlesbianlesbianlesbian,” focuses on Johnston’s “lesbian solutions.” As the title of the chapter indicates, Johnston had plenty of proposals, among them an unsuccessful attempt to convert all women to lesbianism. Sichel describes Johnston’s manifesto Lesbian Nation (1973) as a “bad object” redolent of the “excesses of second-wave feminism” (97). She adds that other writers have tended to avoid engaging with Johnston in this regard, passing off her arguments as a problem to be dealt with by other disciplines. For instance, Sally Banes claims that when Johnston came out in July 1972, she simply abandoned art criticism to pursue “political ideology.” Sichel counters this by asserting that Johnston’s “feminist solutions . . . belong to the history of art and performance” (97). Here, she places Johnston in explicit opposition to Fried, valorizing his notion of “theatre” and championing the very dissolution of boundaries that he claimed were essential to aesthetic value (101). This goes hand in hand with destabilized notions of identity and selfhood. As Johnston put it, “The solution to identity is: get lost” (109).

Johnston was the feature of a special issue of Les Levine’s publication Culture Hero in 1970, with a cover that mimicked the infamous photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz in 1963. The issue included a large number of testimonies about Johnston. The only one to express disapproval was from Barbara Rose. While Rose claimed to have previously read Johnston’s column “religiously,’” she now asked, “Did you really finally decide criticism was hopeless, or meaningless or impossible? Or did you just begin to think you were more interesting than what you were looking at?” (116). Rose’s criticism is indicative of her conservative turn during that decade. Similar criticisms of “autofiction” have emerged in recent years, accusing the form of self-indulgence or “oversharing.”⁵

In the conclusion, Sichel makes a claim for the broader stakes of her argument. She contends that Johnston and Swenson “used criticism as a method to figure out how to be queer in a world that did not want them to be” (137). Criticism, then, is a way of being in the world rather than “laying down the law.” Sichel expands on this, asserting that through criticism, critics engage in “a process of writing themselves into being over and over again.” Further, Sichel argues for the pair’s “queer practices as art practices” (138). This claim complements Sichel’s advocacy for disintegrating boundaries, whether in art or in life. The reader might reflect here on two such instances. The first is chapter 3’s account of Johnston’s appearance at “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” in New York in 1971. Here, Johnston gave a speech as her colleagues rushed the stage to cavort with her, much to the irritation of the chair, Norman Mailer. What was this event? A Happening? A performance? Did it count as an act of criticism or as an act of protest against a panel on women’s liberation chaired by a notorious misogynist? Johnston herself termed it an “episode.” Sichel adds that this “ambiguous word . . . signals a state of animated suspension, a period of time in which something is happening” (124). The assertion “queer practices as art practices” also recalls Swenson protesting outside MoMA, his question mark held in the air. His gesture encapsulates the ambiguous provocations that lie at the heart of Sichel’s account. Those do not offer us any easy or comforting solutions, but despite Johnston’s and Swenson’s own failures, Sichel argues that their practices nonetheless continue to “vibrate with the possibilities of new intimacies, new lives, and new worlds” (139).

Cite this article: Stephen Moonie, review of Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices by Jennifer Sichel, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20974.

Notes

In a preparatory sketch for Confluence, a mural designed by Minnesota-based artist Seitu Ken Jones, we see the surface and structural layers of a large-scale environmental portrait. Part of the drawing delineates the “mural framework,” a series of hidden supports Seitu would place at regular intervals along the two-hundred-foot wall (fig. 1). He then sketched the image he planned to install on top of the supports: an abstract arrangement of sharply cut, tightly woven timbers that portray the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. For his primary material, Seitu used reclaimed wood from a decommissioned railway bridge that once spanned the Mississippi at Lambert’s Landing in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the urban site where he methodically installed the mural during the summer of 1986.¹ When it was completed, Confluence filled the peripheral vision of viewers in ships, on bikes, and in cars, whizzing past the industrial waterfront of downtown Saint Paul (fig. 2). The Department of Planning and Economic Development, a city agency that supported the project, celebrated Seitu’s mural for “capturing the diversity of the river, both past and to come” (fig. 3).²

I open with a description of the mural’s preparatory drawing because Seitu’s technical sketch and the documents that rehearse the process of permitting, funding, and installing the mural—archival materials—constitute the only remaining forms in which we can see Confluence. The mural itself no longer exists. Seitu ceremonially disassembled the timbers and two-by-fours in September 2025, because, in the decades after it was installed, the work had fallen into disrepair (fig. 4). During a site visit with the artist in 2024, I saw wires from the above railway drooping across the surface of the mural. Vegetation in front of the wall had grown tall and wide, obscuring nearly every angle from which a passerby might view the work. Some pieces of the historic timber were marked with graffiti, while others had been stripped from the wall and carried away. Seitu hopes to mount a new work in place of his original vision, but a chronic lack of funding for the arts leaves the future of the site uncertain. Since 2020 I have been in dialogue with the artist and archivist Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski as we construct a physical and intellectual system for the manuscripts, administrative records, photographic documentation, and preparatory works that chart Seitu’s experience as a Black artist in the Midwest.

Decades of environmental exposure and administrative neglect deteriorated the surface of Confluence and compromised its structure, so for Seitu, the current president’s policies have only accelerated a process of erasure that was already underway. Archival practices ground his most recent strategy to counter violence against nondominant cultural heritage; Seitu hopes these preservation methods are durable enough to keep the memory of his work alive.

Born in 1951 and raised in Minneapolis, Seitu has produced public art and socially engaged projects from his Twin Cities home base for over fifty years. Speaking to a local news reporter just before Confluence was completed, Jones explained that he was committed to making art for civic spaces because “there are a great number of people inhibited by museums and galleries. . . . there’s an audience that’s not being reached.”³ While Jones did show his work at museums and galleries, he was primarily focused on bringing art to public spaces, where he could reach people in the course of everyday life. But the fate of Confluence reveals that while civic spaces may be more accessible venues for art than the rarified white cube, they can become unreliable and inaccessible over time. And while we are building an archive to keep the memory and documentary evidence of Seitu’s work, our efforts pour into a provisional, community-based archival space. We are describing and arranging documents in a rented room, and our records are surrogates for works of art that are at demonstrated risk of destruction and loss. Our archive is not permanent.

The convergence of the two rivers that Seitu depicted in his environmental portrait is called Bdote, which, as Indigenous scholar Waziyatawin Angela Wilson explains, “literally means the joining or juncture of two bodies of water. . . . It is sacred because it is here that the Bdwakantunwan Dakota creation story places the origins of our first people.”⁴ The United States government has subjected Bdote to generations of humanitarian, environmental, and narrative attacks; Confluence—the artwork and its fate—mirror that violence in the conceptual junctures of its structure, surface, and surrogates and in its history.

Seitu’s inherently unstable records do not repair or prevent structural harm. Instead, his archives—housed in Rondo, a historically Black neighborhood in Saint Paul—arrange and describe his relationship to violence and provision our communities with narratives through which we can strategize, rehearse, and perform our survival.

Cite this article: Alexandra Nicome, “Confluence: Situating New Beginnings in the Work of Seitu K. Jones,” in “Call and Response: DEIA Tensions in Scholarship, Practice, and National Identity,” Colloquium, edited by Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Frederica Simmons, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20939.

Notes

Posted: June 16, 2026

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Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art is seeking submissions for the Research Notes section. Panorama publishes original research on all periods of American art and visual culture, broadly defined.

Research Notes are shorter and more informal than traditional feature articles and foreground significant engagement with archival and/or visual materials, creative methodologies, or projects in development (curatorial, academic, and/or digital). Please consider submitting your work-in-progress as a Research Note!

Research Notes should demonstrate significant engagement with an image, art object, or archival find through detailed visual analysis and attention to the scholarly context. Essays should clearly explain the significance of the discovery, analyzing and speculating on how it fits within (or is adjacent to) the context of a larger research agenda, contributes to the field, and/or suggests new directions for exploration. Past essays have discussed new acquisitions or re-attributions, discoveries from museum storage or archival collections, re-installations or experiments in museum practice, new methodological approaches, and other topics relevant to the field.

Research Notes are usually around 2,500-4,500 words long; they should include footnotes and may include one to five illustrations.

Submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis and Panorama is published online twice a year. We particularly encourage submissions from early career scholars and museum colleagues.

For more information, please see our Submissions page and/or contact one of our Research Notes editors:

• Vanessa Schulman, George Mason University, vschulma@gmu.edu
• Corey Piper, Virginia Museum of History & Culture, cspiper@gmail.com

Standing over eight feet tall and six feet wide, a large-scale print by Sandow Birk, White Out: A Monumental Arch to American History (2021; fig. 1), towers over the nineteenth-century galleries in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. The direct gravure adopts the form of the triumphal arch to reframe US history through the contributions and achievements of Americans of color. From aviator Bessie Coleman to the architect Maya Lin, people and episodes of American history appear intricately carved into every surface of the arch.

At the Carter, White Out is installed alongside other works first conceived as public sculpture: Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s small-scale cast for Liberty Enlightening the World (Statue of Liberty) and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s tabletop Diana of the Tower. Placed in dialogue with this larger history of American monuments, Birk’s print presents a new form of public monument. Its massive scale captures both the expansive chronology—over two millennia—and the magnitude of the achievements represented. As a print, it also offers a model for a transportable “paper monument,” its message transferrable to many contexts and conveyable to many viewers.

White Out’s installation at the Carter forms part of a broader institutional initiative to reframe and expand the narratives of American art in our permanent collection. In a rotating exhibition program called Re/Framed, we integrate new works on paper and photographs throughout the permanent collection, exploring a different theme across the entire museum every six months. The program not only enables us to tap into our deep paper and photo holdings with light-level limitations, but it is also an ongoing curatorial exercise in rethinking our permanent collection and making new connections with recent acquisitions. As a large portion of the Carter’s audience is comprised of loyal and returning visitors, it furthermore refreshes the permanent collection for repeat visitors and allows us to be nimble with making connections to current events like the United States’ Semiquincentennial.

Within a gallery populated with portraits of the Gilded Age elite, White Out prompts us to consider who, and what, has historically been enshrined in our nation’s art. Like the pictured visitors who buy tickets and roam the monument’s grounds in the lower register of the print, the museum visitor to the Carter also becomes a kind of tourist in the galleries by reading, viewing, and questioning our shared American history.

Cite this article: Michaela Haffner, “Paper Monument: Sandow Birk’s White Out at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20877.

How do we as educators, students, and learners reclaim public space for knowledge increasingly under threat?

—Stephanie Syjuco¹

When I was beginning my studies as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, I nearly left campus, convinced I would never return. I had entered intending to study medicine and instead found myself in cavernous lecture halls, one student among thousands, systematically weeded out by pre-med requirements. I felt acutely what bell hooks resists in Teaching to Transgress: a “rote, assembly-line approach to learning.”² Seeking escape, I wandered into Oakland art crawls, indie music shows in hole-in-the-wall venues, and botched dates that turned into meandering self-revelations. Knowledge began to appear elsewhere, in the kinds of moments Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe as “talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering,” what they call an “irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”³

Nearly a decade later, returning to Berkeley as a curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) felt uncanny. In retrospect, it seems fitting that my final exhibition there would be with Stephanie Syjuco, whose work insists that education is a shared and often unruly practice rather than a solitary project.

In 2024, while working as a curatorial associate at BAMPFA, I collaborated with Syjuco on Present Tense (Roll Call), a 63-foot installation that transformed the museum’s massive Crane Forum, an amphitheater used for public events, into a working-classroom archive (fig. 1). In the work, photocopied excerpts from books, manifestos, and essays contributed by more than thirty educators cascade across the sprawling wall in overlapping layers. Staggered across the wall from end to end, the packets hover just beyond arm’s reach. Their stapled pages flutter in the wake of passing visitors, foregrounding their material presence before their textual content. Neither purely image nor document, they invite reading while resisting direct access.

Together, the texts constitute a compendium of strategy, manifesto, and pedagogical reflections that have raised generations of artists and educators. Nayland Blake, Syjuco’s mentor from her days at the recently shuttered San Francisco Art Institute, offers a guide to writing artist statements, flapping beside Young Joon Kwak’s Glitter Mani Festo. Nearby Al-An deSouza’s teaching notes on Achille Mbembe’s “Planetary Entanglement” waft beside enlarged passages from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization Is Not Metaphor,” one of the articles I contributed to the project.⁴ Together, these texts form a collective reader of teaching materials, hundreds of pages that transform private annotations into public declarations of an intellectual lineage.

The title comes from the classroom ritual of attendance. Roll call is bureaucratic and repetitive, yet it also functions as a mechanism of recognition. It determines who is recorded and who is omitted. In conversation with Syjuco, we often returned to what it means to show up for one another when funding disappears and entire fields are cast as suspect. She asked, how do we hold space for knowledge under threat, “ten months [from now] into the future, despite not knowing what art, education, policy, and protest will look like?”⁵ The project could not have landed with the same resonance anywhere but Berkeley, where histories of ethnic studies and student protest continue to reverberate across campus and its surrounding neighborhoods.

At the highest point of the installation, just beneath the forum’s eaves, enlarged index entries from Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader appear in white text on black ground: “abundance,” “academic freedom,” “academics of color,” and “academic-military-industrial complex.” Their adjacency produces uneasy friction between aspirational and oppositional terms, educational hopes met with structural realities. The index—typically a neutral navigational tool—becomes a deliberate structuring of antithetical ideas. The graphic inversion reverses the page’s visual hierarchy and turns an apparatus of reference into a site of confrontation. Claire Bishop, building on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s ideas of antagonism, writes that “a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased.”⁶ The index thus operates as a para-archival gesture. It registers language at the moment it risks erasure, exposing contradictions within interlocking systems of power.

That risk is not hypothetical. Recent reports from PEN America document hundreds of terms flagged or removed from federal documents and public sites, including references to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.⁷ At the same time, universities across the country have begun dismantling or defunding diversity initiatives.⁸ Museums such as BAMPFA have also faced a “war on woke” and federal funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), resulting in nearly a quarter of a million dollars of loss to exhibitions like Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, curated by Elaine Yau, whom I assisted while there.⁹ In this context, Syjuco’s index reads as a defense of pedagogy unraveling in real time.

Two historical anchors from Berkeley’s own past bracket the installation. One end features an oversized spine labeled “Dept. of Ethnic Studies.”. The other reproduces a 1969 progress report from the Third World Liberation Front demanding a Third World College at UC Berkeley (fig. 2). Ethnic studies, Syjuco reminds us, arose from the largest student strike in US history: “Like the Free Speech Movement that was born at UC Berkeley in 1964, students had to protest and force the university to listen to them. This is a reminder that this change, even in incomplete forms, was hard-won and involved arrests, mass demonstrations, and targeted efforts—against the university.”¹⁰ Half a century later, though the college was never formed, the document is a testament to the generative dissent and reorienting power of student activism.

Clusters of terms across the wall expose those contradictions: “multiculturalism,” “ethnic studies association,” “Department of Homeland Security,” and “immigration enforcement” placed alongside “Third World Liberation Front” and “solidarity,” nearly aligned with an electrical outlet. The placement may be incidental, but it strikingly literalizes the people–power ethos of activist movements. Universities often champion diversity rhetorically while failing to protect the students and faculty they have recruited from doxxing campaigns or immigration raids.¹¹ The wall stages these tensions materially. Institutions appear as infrastructures that transmit both care and discipline, support and control.

Syjuco’s strategies of unalignment and distortion visualize this dynamic. Books buckle under their own weight. Fanned-out pages segment edge-printed stamps. Words stutter across seams. One highlighted passage from Legacy Russell reads, “A glitch is an error, a mistake, a failure to function.” I was reminded of artist Ashley Hunt’s question, posed while organizing Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration: “What does it look like when systems break down in attempts to contain the totality of information?”¹² Syjuco answers visually. The installation piles up texts until the illusion of total knowledge begins to falter. What at first appears as flat begins to protrude and jut, demanding depth and excess. Some fragments are sharpened while others dissolve into partial legibility, exposing the unstable processes through which knowledge is preserved and contested.

A distinct haptic register runs through the installation. Large printed pillows slouch near the words “Transgender Rage” from the Critical Transgender Studies Reader. Visitors lean into them, resting against theory. Here, Frantz Fanon’s reflections on racialized embodiment take on literal form: the word “Skin,” from Black Skin, White Masks, becomes both a physical and cerebral encounter (fig. 3). The words “gendered embodiment” tumble near excerpts from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble; the word “intimacy” sags near entries from Edward Said’s Orientalism. They no longer simply describe positionality; they enact it, pressing viewers into contact with broader bodies of knowledge. Touch returns the reader to earlier forms of intuitive learning.

Two figurative images interrupt the sea of text. One is the logo of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School, which declared, “The World Is Our Classroom” (fig. 4). Founded in 1973, the school pioneered a holistic model of education that combined free meals with social services and health care. This approach nurtured both body and mind and later informed the development of full-service community schools across California.¹³ Within Syjuco’s installation, the image reflects how some of the most transformative pedagogical experiments emerged from the ingenuity of grassroots organizing.

Writing about the Panthers’ educational vision, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe the “surrounds” of study as a form of collective life grounded in obligation rather than correction, urging that “we owe each other everything.”¹⁴ Their formulation resonates with the Philippine concept of utang na loob, translated as a “debt of inner self,” an ethical sense of duty that binds people through reciprocal care and responsibility.¹⁵ Read together, these ideas suggest that pedagogy relies on mutual interdependence.

The second image forms a portrait of the Japanese American painter and teacher Chiura Obata, pieced together from photocopied pages (fig. 5). Obata continued teaching while incarcerated at the Tanforan and Topaz detention centers during World War II, relying on the generosity of former Bay Area students who sent art supplies for his classes in the camps.¹⁶ During the exhibition’s opening, Syjuco met Obata’s granddaughter Kimi Kodani Hill. She brought Fred Shinoda, now ninety-two years old, who had appeared as a child in the foreground of a historic photograph of Obata teaching at the Tanforan camp art school. As Hill recounted, Fred was eight years old when his family was forcibly removed from their home and detained behind barbed wire in the sunscorched Utah desert.¹⁷ Seeing himself again on the wall decades later, Shinoda encountered his own image, once buried within the shadow of a carceral archive and now reassembled before him.

As the United States approaches its semiquincentennial, and as museums face renewed pressure to celebrate unity and exceptionalism, Present Tense (Roll Call) offers another path. Amid ongoing book bans and defunding in education, Syjuco insists on the enduring value of collective knowledge and radical pedagogy. Berkeley’s motto is Fiat Lux, “Let there be light.” Syjuco’s thirteen years of teaching help us see, with “unvarnished eyes,” that light is never singular.²² It appears instead as a shared incandescence, refracted through teachers, students, artists, and organizers whose relations extend beyond the institutions meant to dim them.

Cite this article: Matthew Villar Miranda, “With Unvarnished Eyes: Indexing Radical Pedagogy in Stephanie Syjuco’s Present Tense (Roll Call) at BAMPFA,” in “Call and Response: DEIA Tensions in Scholarship, Practice, and National Identity,” Colloquium, edited by Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Frederica Simmons, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20915.

Notes

In a column-lined corridor of the Art Institute of Chicago, an earthenware Storyteller from first-millennium Jalisco, Mexico, calls to visitors with a diaphragmatic breath and emphatic gesture (fig. 1). Similar ceramic figures were made and used by the societies of ancient West Mexico, interred as offerings in shaft tombs, and, in the mid-twentieth century, often unearthed to meet the demands of collectors in the United States. Today, the Storyteller continues to recount these transitions while presiding over another.

Since 2020 the Art Institute of Chicago has taken a hemispheric approach to the interwoven histories of the arts of the Americas, with gallery reinstallations that advance a line of collective questioning: How do objects reveal the relational networks of their makers? How do we reconcile contextual specificities with integrative displays that resonate across medium, time, and place? How do we begin to tell more complete stories of the Americas in the making?

The Storyteller responds through parted lips of clay, stirring dialogue across sightlines in the Sculpture Court (Gallery 161). Woman with a Birdcage, a 1941 painting by Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991), faces the animated sculpture and seems to listen attentively. Rendered in oils, this figure even mirrors the masklike features of her West Mexican counterpart—a testament to Tamayo’s artistic influences and collecting practices alike.

Behind the Storyteller, we encounter a grouping of histories and myths narrated in bronze. From left to right, Frederic Remington’s (1861–1909) The Bronco Buster (modeled 1895, cast 1899) bucks away from Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s (1848–1907) The Puritan (modeled 1883–86, cast after 1899), whose strident pose is outmatched by Daniel Chester French’s (1850–1931) contemplative Abraham Lincoln (modeled 1912, cast after 1912). These figures were forged to preside over public spaces and domestic interiors as icons of United States history. But in what ways do these objects tell only partial stories? The platform labels invite visitors to interrogate such artistic, historical, and mythological narrations.

Finally, a burnished, blackware storage vessel (around 1900) by Sara Fina Tafoya (1863–1949) punctuates our sightline. Tafoya, a Tewa ceramist from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico, became well known for such pots in the early twentieth century. The motif of two bear paws that she impressed on this example recall the storytelling gesticulation of our opening sculpture from West Mexico. Tafoya welcomes the visitor to the Sculpture Court in clay and in chorus: David Drake’s (c. 1800–c. 1870s) storage jar from Edgefield, South Carolina, is just adjacent (behind the pictured column). Inscribed in 1857—when enslaved people, like Drake, faced systemic violence for reading and writing—this ceramic body continues to enunciate its maker’s name.

These objects are only a few of nearly five thousand North, Central, and South American works, made between 5000 BCE and the present, that are now stewarded by the Art Institute. As the Arts of the Americas department embarks on a full-scale reinstallation, slated to open in 2028/29, the Sculpture Court paves the way for a hemispheric reenvisioning of this extensive collection. Like the Storyteller, our curatorial work begins with an inhale, as we strive to articulate the artistic multiplicities of the Americas.

Cite this article: Sofia Ortega-Guerrero, “Americas in the Making,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21042.

The following essay contains artistic depictions of sexual activity.

Thomas Painter (1905–1978) was a key informant for the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey and a prolific yet largely overlooked documentarian of mid-twentieth-century queer life. Beginning in the 1930s, he turned his benevolent interest toward New York’s urban proletariat, forming relationships with men whose laboring bodies and straightforward manner he idealized. Across thousands of photographs, drawings, journals, and autobiographical writings produced between the 1930s and 1970s, Painter assembled an extensive visual and written record of encounters with working-class men in New York, San Francisco, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere.¹ Preserved today at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University Bloomington, his archive offers a rare view of queer social worlds that left few conventional documentary traces.

Painter’s archive was not an incidental accumulation of personal materials. His practice of documentation developed into a sustained and highly structured project, shaped in part through his relationship with Kinsey. While Painter had already begun recording his experiences before their collaboration, Kinsey encouraged him to produce and record detailed accounts of his sexual life, and Painter came to understand his work as a form of contribution to scientific research.² He positioned himself as an unofficial collaborator and amateur ethnographer, documenting not only his experiences but also the environments and social types he encountered. Painter’s images and writings thus occupy an ambiguous space between personal record, erotic production, and quasi-scientific observation. Although there is no evidence that these writings and images were publicly or widely exhibited, they circulated within a research context at the Kinsey Institute and were understood by Painter as empirical material for the study of sexuality.³ Taken together, Painter’s archive suggests a deliberate effort to document, organize, and preserve a world of queer social relations for future study and interpretation, one that he understood to be ephemeral and at risk of disappearance.

Rather than providing a representative portrait of gay life, however, Painter’s work reveals how queer desire was structured through encounters shaped by class difference, spatial contingency, and unequal conditions of visibility. His work documents the spaces in which working-class male bodies became visible and accessible while also exposing the eroticized fantasies through which an upper-middle-class observer interpreted those encounters. Painter’s encounters with working-class men were often structured by economic exchange, and his control over the camera and the archive positioned him as both observer and author of their representation. The resulting images and records must therefore be read not solely as documentation but also as products of asymmetrical relationships that shaped what could be recorded and remembered.

The scarcity of sources like Painter’s archive reflects broader patterns of exclusion in how queer history has been preserved. As the public historian Hugh Ryan demonstrates in When Brooklyn Was Queer, working-class and racialized queer communities rarely produced the kinds of materials (namely published writing, preserved correspondence, organizational records) from which conventional archives are built.⁴ Economic precarity, movement, and the simple lack of storage space meant that the everyday lives and sexual cultures of these populations left few documentary traces. This archival gap obscures the existence and organization of working-class queer worlds. As scholars such as Ryan show, these worlds operated through spatial practices rather than stable institutions and through fleeting connections rather than documented associations.⁵ Painter’s obsessive documentation of working-class bodies and sexual encounters thus constitutes one of the few sustained visual records of non-elite queer culture from this period. This is not because such culture was rare but because it was seldom preserved.

Painter’s archive has received limited scholarly attention. Yuriy Zikratyy’s 2013 dissertation, “Cross-Class Escape and the Erotics of ‘Proletarian’ Masculinity in Thomas Painter’s Sexual Record and Visual Archive,” remains one of the few extended treatments of Painter’s work. Zikratyy focuses extensively on Painter’s sexual records and the dynamics of cross-class desire, analyzing how Painter’s middle-class subjectivity was constructed and challenged through eroticized encounters with working-class men.⁶ My research builds from Zikratyy’s foundational work to foreground the spatial and geographic dimensions of Painter’s practice and situate his visual work within art-historical traditions of representing the male body. Where Zikratyy examines Painter’s textual and visual construction of class difference, I trace how Painter’s understanding of masculinity, labor, and desire were shaped by a sequence of spatial encounters. In doing this, I posit that his work participated in established visual strategies for representing same-sex desire while adapting them to document and fantasize about working-class masculinity.

In this essay, I argue that Painter constructed an ideal of working-class masculinity as authentically “natural” through three interconnected spatial practices that each reworked his understanding of masculinity, leisure, and desire. Unlike the more widely recognized homoerotic productions of figures such as Tom of Finland (1920–1991) or Bob Mizer (1922–1992), which often relied on stylized or studio-based representations of the male body, Painter’s work emerged from sustained engagement with specific social environments.⁷ Beginning with his experiences at Coney Island, where he encountered working-class and immigrant men in a densely populated site of public leisure, Painter learned to associate masculine authenticity with laboring bodies temporarily freed from work and clothing. He translated these experiences into drawings and watercolors set in imagined Arcadian landscapes, where the constraints of class, surveillance, and negotiation also appeared to dissolve altogether. Finally, he sought to restage these encounters through private leisure photography, using rivers and outdoor excursions to produce scenes of masculine ease under more controlled conditions. Together, these three localities illuminate how one upper-middle-class gay man imagined the spatial dimensions of queer desire while documenting what he called the “urban proletariat.”⁸ Yet they also reveal a major contradiction: Painter idealized working-class masculinity as natural and authentic precisely because it resulted from labor, even as his fantasies depended on imagining these men freed from the very conditions that produced their bodies. Tracing this progression reveals both the documentary value of Painter’s archive and its participation in class-inflected fantasies about masculine authenticity.

Coney Island and the Discovery of Working-Class Masculinity

Coney Island occupies a foundational place in Painter’s visual and written record, not only as a recurring site but also as the location where he first articulated a connection between working-class masculinity, leisure, and erotic possibility. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Painter visited the beach almost every summer weekend, with his camera in hand, drawn by what he described as its “atmosphere of sex, delinquency, sex, sordidness, and sex.”⁹ Coney Island was not simply a backdrop for cruising. It was a historically specific environment in which laboring bodies became publicly visible under conditions that temporarily loosened social constraint.

Recent scholarship on New York’s queer geography helps clarify why this space mattered. As Ryan shows, Coney Island functioned as a shifting site of queer connection, whose meaning changed across decades shaped by transit, immigration, and patterns of leisure rather than by fixed neighborhood identity.¹⁰ He documents how Coney Island attracted working-class immigrants (particularly Italian, Irish, and later Puerto Rican populations) whose presence created density, anonymity, and erotic possibility. The beach became a regular site of queer encounter not through organization but through accessibility via cheap subway fares, physical exposure through swimsuits and minimal clothing, and a carnivalesque atmosphere.¹¹ Painter’s photographs record moments of contact made possible by these conditions—the spectacle of exposed bodies and the loosening of surveillance that came with crowds. His encounters here should be understood not as evidence of an absence of queer worlds but as participation in a dispersed and often ephemeral form of queer sociality that left few conventional archival traces.

The photographs Painter took at Coney Island between 1945 and 1960 reveal his fascination with what he termed “sartorial emancipation.”¹² He used this phrase to describe the adoption of a dress style that facilitated cross-class identification, enabling individuals to distance themselves from bourgeois norms and embody alternative, often working-class, forms of gender and sexual expression. Young men in tight swimsuits, shirtless laborers, and groups of Italian and Puerto Rican immigrants reclining on towels appear repeatedly throughout the archive and best embody this notion. In the left-hand image with the number 4 (fig. 1), a young man in a fitted swimsuit stands in profile, leaning forward against a railing. His posture is relaxed but self-aware, with his hips angled, shoulders forward, and gaze directed off frame. The background suggests a boardwalk, with other figures receding into the distance. In the middle image with the number 5 (see fig. 1), we observe a densely packed beach scene from a slightly elevated angle. Men in swimsuits dominate the foreground; towels, folding chairs, umbrellas, and bare sand create a textured, almost chaotic pattern. The photograph feels energetic and sensual: bodies overlap, brush past one another, and move in proximity, creating a visual field of figural abundance. In the third image of this trio, labeled with the number 6 (see fig. 1), Painter represents a wide beach view with groups of men standing, walking, or reclining on towels. Several muscular figures stand upright, their poses casual yet performative, as if aware of being seen. Across all three photographs, the male body is central—not idealized in a studio sense but observed in a lived and public space.¹³ Figures overlap and crowd the frame, producing a sense of abundance that is both social and erotic. Painter’s attention to posture, musculature, and bodily ease suggests desire, yet the camera maintains observational distance.

What made Coney Island significant was its character as the “slum New York transported to the sea front,” according to one contemporary observer.¹⁴ Here was a democratic space where, as an Italian immigrant put it in 1925, “the garments of Puritanism are given a kick that sends them flying before the winds.”¹⁵ The proximity of nearly naked bodies, the mixing of ethnic groups, and the carnivalesque atmosphere all contributed to what Painter experienced as a liberation from middle-class conventions about propriety and bodily display. The American historian George Chauncey notes that “homosexuals frequented and occasionally made sexual contacts at most of the baths at Coney Island, including one where professional male models, bodybuilders, and their admirers gathered in the 1930s, and another where gay men could do little more than enjoy the company of ‘tough’ working-class boys and young men.”¹⁶ Yet this was also a space of risk: There are documented instances where Painter was rebuffed, threatened, and physically attacked when his propositions were unwelcome, reminding us that the beach and the city was never simply free and liberatory but remained a contested terrain where class and sexual difference intersected unpredictably.¹⁷

Painter’s relationship to this space was largely voyeuristic. Coming from an affluent background yet largely depending on his own finances throughout adulthood created an awkwardness surrounding the question of which social spaces made him feel comfortable or accepted. Despite his recurring fantasy of becoming “an accepted buddy and peer,” he primarily operated as an observer.¹⁸ The “sneak snaps” he took with his portable Ansco camera captured men unaware, turning them into objects of study and desire.¹⁹ These images share formal qualities with ethnographic documentation in their attention to bodily type and behavior, yet Painter’s intent diverged sharply from reformist traditions of social photography. Where Progressive-era photographers documented raggedness as evidence of poverty requiring intervention, Painter eroticized bodily visibility as a sign of vitality and authenticity. From this perspective, his photographic practice shares similarities with the history of street photography and individuals like Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) who produced prolific series of photos documenting quick, everyday moments in postwar American life.²⁰ For photographers like Painter working around the mid-twentieth century, Coney Island offered a rare environment where same-gender looking could happen openly, even if it remained coded. His camera, furthermore, enabled prolonged looking without direct engagement, producing an archive structured by desire but limited by distance.

Arcadian Fantasy and the Naturalization of Masculinity

If Coney Island represented the reality of urban working-class leisure, the natural settings in Painter’s drawings and sketches function as utopian spaces where men exist free from social constraint. Yet this turn toward idealized nature was hardly unique to Painter. His sketches and watercolors from the 1940s that depict male figures in pastoral and wilderness settings (sailors heading toward mountainous islands, groups of men in Western landscapes, muscular figures posed on hillsides) participate in a long art-historical tradition of Arcadian imagery. Although Painter strangely described these images as representations of “nothing,” they draw on a tradition where idealized natural settings position figures “outside culture” in landscapes untouched by modernity, social hierarchy, or historical specificity.²¹ This Arcadian idyll served as a convention that allowed artists to represent the male nude and male-male intimacy through the formal language of the classical pastoral, using idealized nature as both subject matter and alibi.

This tradition has particular significance for representing same-gender desire. As Jonathan Katz and André Dombrowski demonstrate in their analysis of the images of male bathers by Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), the Arcadian landscape offered queer artists a framework for depicting homosocial and homoerotic content while deflecting attention through classical reference and formal composition.²² In the American context, Swimming (1884–85) by Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) positioned nude male bodies in an idealized natural setting, using the rhetoric of healthy outdoor recreation to justify the display of same-gender desire. Michael Hatt’s analysis of both Eakins and the British painter Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929) shows how turn-of-the-century artists deployed Arcadian conventions to create images of male bodies in nature that could circulate as both respectable art and covert erotica.²³ Photographs of Sicilian youths posed as classical figures in Mediterranean landscapes by Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931) extended this tradition into photography, demonstrating how Arcadian imagery could traverse media. These precedents established a visual vocabulary that Painter would adapt to his particular interest in working-class American masculinity.

In a watercolor by Painter dating from October 1945, we see an example of his experimentation with new mediums and the placement of bodies in classical landscapes or idyllist spaces (fig. 2). Here, two nude male figures are poised on a small, improvised sailing vessel. A billowing white sail, loosely defined with pale washes and spare contour lines, rises behind and between the men, catching the wind. The sail functions almost like a backdrop or stage prop, setting the figures into relief. Both bodies are painted in warm browns and pinks, their nudity matter of fact and unidealized, integrated naturally into the scene rather than staged for display. In the distance, an island with a mountainous silhouette rises from the sea, sketched in muted earth tones and greens. The scene recalls classical idylls while remaining provisional in execution. The bodies are integrated into the landscape rather than isolated as objects of display. Yet nature here does specific work; it plays with the markers of labor, ethnicity, and urban modernity that characterize Painter’s Coney Island photographs, allowing the masculine bodies to appear timeless and unburdened. What had been contingent and observable at Coney Island is here reimagined as natural and inevitable. The move from documentation to fantasy allowed for the creation of a space seemingly liberated from social constraint. Nature operates as an active element in this transformation, functioning not as mere backdrop but as an ideological force that naturalizes same-gender desire by positioning it outside culture and history.

Painter’s friendship with the American artist Edward Melcarth (1914–1973) deepened this turn to nature and Arcadian fantasy. Living together in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the two shared an investment in outdoor life and physical culture as alternatives to bourgeois domesticity. From 1945 to 1952, Painter resided at Melcarth’s studio at 1364 Sixth Avenue in New York, a space he described as operating like “a communal enterprise” where artists, models, sailors, hustlers, and various hangers-on circulated freely.²⁴ Melcarth’s work celebrated working-class male bodies in natural and urban settings, framing laboring masculinity as both an aesthetic and moral value. The shared apartment became a site for weekly drawing sessions where members of their queer artistic circle gathered to sketch and sculpt nude male models. Here, the pretense of artistic practice provided cover for sexual possibility, and the collective nature of these gatherings normalized the presence of naked working-class men in middle-class homosexual spaces. Under Melcarth’s tutelage, Painter learned to see natural and imagined settings not just as backgrounds but as active elements in the construction of masculine identity.

In a sketch from around 1946 to 1948 (fig. 3), Painter explicitly acknowledges borrowing elements from one of Melcarth’s drawings. The resulting composition is friezelike rather than chaotic. Paired figures occupy the picture plane alongside horses and minimal camping equipment, combining classical compositional logic with American frontier iconography. In describing this work, Painter wrote on the back of it: “More camping. The figure on the extreme left is from one of Edward’s drawings. Horses thanks to the National Geographic again.”²⁵ The tattooed body carries class markers into the supposedly timeless space of Arcadia, revealing that even in fantasy, Painter could not fully extract working-class masculinity from the conditions that produced it.²⁶ The landscape functions as a fantasy space in which laboring bodies can exist outside surveillance and risk, yet the signs of work remain inscribed on their forms. These imagined environments extend Painter’s effort to naturalize a masculinity first encountered at Coney Island by displacing historically situated bodies into scenes of apparent inevitability.

This exploration of specific kinds of natural settings, both observed and imagined, extends Painter’s investigation of spaces where masculine bodies could exist with freedom. If his previous photographs from Coney Island examined the beach as a site where working-class men claimed leisure and physical expression within urban modernity, his nature drawings reveal how wilderness (land separate from human development and activity) functioned as an alternative site of desire. The artist’s move from documentation to fantasy, from camera to pencil, allowed for the creation of spaces liberated from social constraint. Here, in Western plains and pastoral landscapes, men exist in complete nudity, their bodies unmediated by the conventions of beachwear or recreational activity.²⁷ Painter adapts this fantasy to his particular erotics of class, imagining working-class men teaching other working-class men the “mysteries of nature” that upper-middle-class men like himself could only observe.

These natural settings operate as utopian spaces in the fullest sense: places that exist outside the ordinary structures of American life yet are constructed from its iconic imagery. By merging classical aesthetics of the idealized male nude with the mythology of the American frontier, the artist created a visual vocabulary for expressing desires that had no sanctioned place in contemporary culture. The drawings’ status as “nothing,” as Painter himself suggested, speaks to their existence outside conventional frameworks of meaning and purpose. Yet in depicting these scenes of masculine beauty and intimacy set against mountains, water, and open skies, they articulated something else: a vision of male community and freedom that could only be imagined, sketched into being on paper.

Staging Masculinity in the Great Outdoors

Bridging the public spectacle of Coney Island and the utopian fantasies of his drawings, Painter also developed a photographic practice centered on “men in leisure.” Such images document moments when his subjects existed outside the demands of labor or social expectation. In rivers and quiet outdoor settings, Painter’s camera captured bodies at rest, revealing the quality of masculine ease that leisure made possible.

The class dynamics of these excursions are crucial. As Painter acknowledged in his correspondence with Kinsey, most of his photographic subjects (immigrants, merchants, hustlers, day laborers) could not afford the kind of outdoor recreation he organized. Painter would pay men to accompany him on these trips, effectively purchasing both their time and their willingness to be photographed nude or seminude in natural settings.²⁸ This economic transaction structured the images’ production in ways that complicate any reading of them as documenting authentic leisure. This leisure was purchased, staged, and directed by someone whose class position allowed him to organize such excursions. Where Impressionist paintings of bourgeois leisure celebrated a class’s right to recreation (as Paul Smith and Linda Nochlin have shown in their analyses of George Seurat and other painters of modern life), Painter’s photographs document a form of leisure that working-class men performed for an upper-middle-class patron’s camera.²⁹

One set of photographs shows a young man emerging from a lake or river, water still clinging to his skin, standing in white briefs against a natural backdrop (fig. 4). His posture is calculated, with his muscular torso facing the camera on the left-hand side and his arms held up above his head in a godlike pose that emphasizes his physique on the right. What distinguishes these images from Painter’s Coney Island documentation is their intimate scale and the evident relationship between the photographer and the subject. This man knew he was being photographed. He consented to Painter’s presence, accepted his camera as part of the encounter. Yet the image suggests something beyond mere transaction.

The leisure setting in such photographs strip away markers of class and occupation that would have been visible in urban contexts. Without work clothes or city streets to contextualize them, these bodies became what Painter sought: representations of honest and unguarded masculinity. The natural settings allowed him to frame working-class men’s bodies in ways that emphasized their beauty without documentary weight. This pattern reveals how leisure itself became a commodity in Painter’s photographic practice. The beach picnics, river trips, and outdoor adventures represented luxuries made possible by Painter’s middle-class resources. His camera captured moments of ease and pleasure that he had purchased, even if he interpreted them as revealing truths about working-class masculine vitality.

Later in life, Painter had a growing interest in what he considered the real interpretation of male beauty, found not in studied poses but in the unguarded moments between them. Another photograph exemplifies this effort: A nude man reclines on a sandy shore, pipe in mouth, using his clothes as a makeshift towel beneath him (fig. 5). His left leg extends toward the water in a gesture that suggests both relaxation and proprietorship over the space he occupies. The composition emphasizes his comfort in his own nakedness, the ease with which he inhabits the rocky landscape. The reclining smoker seems genuinely absorbed in his moment of leisure, his awareness of the camera not disrupting his repose but incorporated into it. The shot captures what appears to be a private moment while acknowledging the photographer’s role in creating the conditions for that moment to occur.

The resulting images occupy an ambiguous space between documentation and desire. They present themselves as natural, uncontrived records of men at ease, yet their every element was orchestrated by the photographer who selected the location, suggested the activities, and directed the camera’s gaze. The men’s “unguarded” ease was produced through Painter’s careful arrangement of circumstances that would allow such ease to appear. In this sense, the photographs reveal as much about Painter’s fantasy of unmediated access to working-class masculine authenticity as they do about the men themselves.

Still, these images preserve something valuable: evidence of how working-class men in mid-century America negotiated their own relationships to leisure, to their bodies, and to the camera. Some subjects clearly performed for Painter, flexing or posing in ways that demonstrated awareness of the conventions of physique photography (see fig. 4). Others seemed genuinely absorbed in the pleasures of swimming, sunbathing, or smoking. Many photographs suggest a third possibility: that these men found ways to enjoy the excursions and the attention while remaining aware of the transaction that structured them, creating a complex interplay between performance and genuine experience.

Constructing Queer Masculinity through Space

Painter’s visual archive documents a specific historical formation: the construction of working-class masculinity as naturally authentic by an upper-middle-class observer in mid-twentieth-century America. His resulting work—in contexts ranging from Coney Island’s public beach, to Arcadian fantasy, to staged private leisure—reveals the spatial logic of this construction. Yet each spatial practice contained its own contradictions. Coney Island offered observation without engagement. Arcadian fantasy achieved timelessness only through invention. Private leisure required payment and performance, making visible the very transactions it sought to naturalize.

This body of work must be understood in relation to broader shifts in class, immigration, and masculinity at mid-century. The 1940s and 1950s saw massive demographic changes in New York as Puerto Rican migration increased, Italian and Irish immigrant communities consolidated or dispersed, and deindustrialization began to transform the urban economy.³⁰ Painter’s obsessive documentation of working-class and immigrant masculinity coincided with anxieties about these changes, anxieties that manifested in his idealization of laboring bodies as repositories of authentic masculinity threatened by postwar affluence, suburbanization, and shifting gender norms. His fantasy of natural working-class masculinity participated in broader mid-century discourses that positioned working-class men as more genuine, more physical, more essentially masculine than their middle-class counterparts. Yet unlike the social-scientific studies or popular representations that circulated these ideas, Painter’s archive emerged from sustained erotic investment in working-class bodies, establishing personal relationships within the spaces where they became visible.

What distinguishes Painter from artists like Tom of Finland or Bob Mizer is precisely this movement between documentation and fantasy. Tom of Finland created purely invented scenarios of hypermasculine working-class and military men, fantasies untethered from observational basis. Mizer’s Physique Pictorial constructed elaborate alibis (classical poses, athletic documentation, artistic study) for the display of male bodies, but these images rarely claimed to document actual social worlds. Painter, by contrast, began with documentation. His Coney Island photographs record actual working-class leisure at a specific historical site. His drawings then translated these observations into Arcadian fantasy, and his private leisure photographs attempted to restage the documentary within controlled scenarios. This movement from observation to invention and back to staged documentation reveals both the documentary impulse and the fantasy that structured his practice. He needed to believe he was discovering something real (working-class masculinity, a natural ease in laboring bodies), even as his artistic production increasingly depended on invention, payment, and direction.

This raises difficult questions about the archive itself. The photographs, drawings, and writings belong to Painter in the most literal sense: He created them, preserved them, and eventually donated them to the Kinsey Institute. Yet the archive also documents the lives, bodies, and sexual cultures of hundreds of working-class men, most of whom remain anonymous and had no control over how their images would be preserved or interpreted. Painter’s cruising produced encounters that these men may have experienced very differently than he did. For Painter, it created an archive of discovered authenticity, of working-class masculinity revealed through observation and fantasy. For the pictured men themselves, it may have meant quick money, momentary pleasure, unwanted attention, or simply another transaction in lives structured by economic precarity.

We must therefore approach Painter’s archive with careful attention to both its documentary value and its limitations. As one of the few sustained visual records of non-elite queer culture from this period, it provides irreplaceable evidence of how working-class and immigrant men navigated same-gender desire and participated in sexual economies. Yet it also documents the power dynamics inherent in cross-class looking, the fantasies that middle-class gay men projected onto working-class bodies, and the transactions through which images of marginalized populations entered archives. The archive preserves working-class queer life, yet it does so through a gaze structured by class privilege, erotic fantasy, and unequal control over who documents and who is documented. Painter’s work maps a geography of desire that reveals both the possibilities and the limits of cross-class intimacy in mid-twentieth-century America. His localities found in the public beach, imagined landscape, and staged nature traces the spatial forms that queer desire took when it crossed boundaries of class, even as they reveal the fantasies and transactions that crossing required.

Cite this article: Alex Del Dago, “Queer Localities: Space, Class, and Desire in Thomas Painter’s Visual Archive,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20907.

Notes

Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s

By Alex J. Taylor

University of California Press, 2022. 320 pp.; 52 color illus.; 47 b/w illus. Hardcover: $49.95 (ISBN: 9780520383562)

Today, corporations build their identities through seemingly invisible channels, tapping into user data and adapting to their consumers in alarming ways. Art historian Alex J. Taylor’s book Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s delves into a more overt—and often problematic—moment in the 1960s when the corporate world used artworks, artistic commissions, and collaborations to shape public perception.

Taylor is refreshingly unafraid to discuss the financial innerworkings of his case studies and to place artists in the starkness of the era’s growing consumer culture. He explores instances when artists went the commercial route, took sponsored gigs, and found financial support in corporate partners. Taylor complicates art-historical assumptions of the 1960s as a time predominantly occupied with counterculture creativity and expansive material expression. He sees tendencies in some scholarship to demonize commercial involvement in art, which can “too readily romanticize the undiluted and uncorrupted culture of an imaginary past” (8). Instead, he draws parallels between corporations and art-historical patrons dating back to the Italian Renaissance to understand how particular companies impacted artists and their art.

The book is organized into three sections: first, “Repackaging Pop,” on the collisions of fine art and advertising around Pop Art; second, “Abstraction at Work,” looking at fine art in corporate collections and organized environments; and lastly, “Marketing Materials,” considering industrial-steel companies engaging with artists to elevate the status of their material.

In “Repackaging Pop,” Taylor offers three examples of Pop Art’s uneasy intersections with corporate culture and marketing, and he discusses the ambivalence of an art form that both celebrated and criticized commercial consumerism. With chapter 1, he tackles Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) relation to the Campbell Soup Company and the tricky line Warhol walked, both engaging directly with the company—making a tomato soup can painting as a commission for retiring Campbell board chairman Oliver Willits—and responding to the company’s litigious complaints about his continual use of their brand. Taylor captures a transitional stage for Warhol as he was balancing commercial imagery with his tongue-in-cheek approach, engaging Campbell soup as his subject, his patron, and his opponent.

Chapter 2 looks at the corrugated-box producer Container Corporation of America (CCA) that commissioned Warhol and James Rosenquist (1933–2017) to make paintings promoting their products and tried to control the content of their works. Taylor tells a compelling story in which CCA tapped Rosenquist to contribute to the company’s Great Ideas of Western Man series, which used art to promote the cultural contributions of the company. Rosenquist’s resulting shaped canvas depicts a yellow taxi door overlaid with images of spaghetti in red sauce. Initially, Rosenquist included the Super Operating Corporation name on the cab’s door (referencing taxi mogul and art collector Robert Scull) among other company logos. Taylor’s contention is that Rosenquist was critiquing corporate agendas in the painting for CCA—or at the very least making it clear to his viewers that he was operating under the influence of his patrons. CCA requested that Rosenquist remove “Super Operating Corp” from the painting—even though Scull had approved of the use. Rosenquist’s final move was to later name the work The Friction Disappears, a phrase that alludes to the corporate intervention. CCA’s overall collection toured and was eventually gifted in 1984 to the National Museum of American Art, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The third chapter in this section focuses on tobacco giant Philip Morris in the early stages of the company’s long-standing support of the arts. Taylor looks at the company’s commissioned portfolio of pop prints, 11 Pop Artists, organized with support from public relations firm Ruder & Finn. Philip Morris was trying to reinvent its image in the wake of new health research and regulatory policies. Planning for the portfolio began in 1964, coinciding with the Surgeon General’s linking of smoking to cancer, and was finished by 1965, when a warning label became required for cigarette packages. Taylor delves into the entanglements of these prints in the back-and-forth correspondence between the artists, their galleries, the corporation, and its public-relations representative. The case study reveals the company’s increasing inclination toward abstraction to improve corporate perception, moving away from the potential critical underpinning of Pop Art. Taylor writes of Philip Morris’s preference for “the communicative flexibility and ideological openness of abstraction over the realistic representational modes that they had, initially, found so appealing about pop” (89). The 11 Pop Artists portfolio was also gifted to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In the second section, “Abstraction at Work,” Taylor looks at the growth of abstract art in corporate collections through two case studies. Chapter 4 focuses on Chase Manhattan Bank and its collection, which prioritized abstract modernist art to “humanize” the company’s new corporate life, streamlined offices, and visual conformity (103). Chase executive and arts patron David Rockefeller was a driving force toward acquiring abstract art, even with pushback from other administrators. Together with Rockefeller, Chase built a collection with support from a committee of museum professionals, including Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). MoMA’s involvement was multifold. Miller sent works from her historic 16 Americans show to the bank for consideration, and the museum sold eight prints from its collection to the company in 1965: “duplicate material” by artists including Marc Chagall, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Giorgio Morandi, Jean Arp, and Pablo Picasso (114). Miller also organized a rapid-fire event for the bank’s art committee to see works in the office: “In 1965 the committee evaluated 250 works of art in a three-hour, fifteen-minute meeting, and in 1967 it looked at 156 works in a two-hour, fifteen-minute meeting” (266, no. 73).

Taylor concludes the chapter by following Chase’s collecting practices in 1969 as it tried to engage the political moment and support a more diverse group of artists. The company organized a benefit sale for Harlem’s new Studio Museum, committing to purchasing any works that went unsold. That group included Faith Ringgold’s Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die N*gger from 1969, which Chase refused to buy because the last two words of the title are prominently inscribed in the artwork’s composition. In an awkward turn, Ringgold invited Chase executives to choose another work from her studio, and they selected The American Spectrum, a series of six faces in varying skin colors intended to be a reflection of the multiethnic ancestry of African Americans (the work’s first title was Six Shades of Black). The bank chose to frame the work as a representation of American diversity, paying the artist three thousand dollars—her first major sale. For Taylor, this history impacted the reception of the work, but it gave Ringgold the upper hand in her retitling of the piece and her recounting of the event in her memoir: “Her action—especially through its subsequent disclosure—should also be understood to smuggle the politics of her practice into the bank’s collection under the guise of its misperceptions” (132).

The fifth and final chapter in this section turns to the large abstract paintings the corporation commissioned by the Turmac Tobacco Company—the Dutch manufacturer of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes. Turmac developed an art collection that was displayed among their workers as they manufactured cigarettes. The collection also toured internationally, to mixed reviews. The exhibitions promoted the art as beneficial to its workers, even though the employees expressed a disinterest in the largely abstract collection. One stop at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam incorporated wall-sized photographs of the factory and cigarettes in production among the fine art, despite the disconnect between the workers and the corporation. Taylor also includes moments in which artists incorporated Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes into their works, including a 1965 painting by Karel Appel (1921–2006) depicting an abstracted figure made up of the company’s labels.

The last section, “Marketing Materials,” follows three industrial steel companies that engaged artists to elevate the status of their materials through public-relation campaigns meant to garner business and distract from labor-relations issues. Taylor contextualizes the increasing interest in steel among artists while exploring the changing corporate realities as these companies moved away from craftsmanship and toward automation, which, in turn, impacted artists’ use of these resources. I appreciated the material focus in this section, where Taylor recounts how artists navigated the increasingly complicated political dynamics around steel.

Chapter 6 considers artists in residence at Italsider, a steel company that grew during the postwar economic boom in Italy but also had labor issues and an image problem. The company used cultural programming to boost its profile, inviting ten international sculptors in 1962 to work in the factories, including Alexander Calder, Beverly Pepper, David Smith, and Lynn Chadwick. Artists were given labor support and materials. Calder (1898–1976) sent a maquette for a work to be produced, leading to problems behind the creation of his monumental sculpture Teodelapio. David Smith (1906–1965) produced twenty-seven sculptures in thirty days and used materials from the older forging site, which was being replaced by a higher-efficiency factory. The artist’s work engaged with the company’s shift away from specialized labor to a more mechanized system. His connection continued: After leaving Voltri, Italsider sent leftover steel to Smith’s studio in Bolton Landing, New York, which was used in his Voltri-Bolton sculptures.

Taylor focuses on the company US Steel in chapter 7 and its proprietary material alloy Cor-Ten. US Steel was trying to regain its hold in the markets in the 1960s, coming out with Cor-Ten steel as a new material with a rusting exterior. Cor-Ten found interest among architects, and it was used as an exterior surface for the Chicago Civic Center, finished in 1965. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was also commissioned to make a public work in Cor-Ten for the Civic Center’s plaza. The finished artwork—a fifty-foot-high bust—was used to celebrate the new material, bolstering the reach of US Steel. Taylor argues that this early example contributed to Cor-Ten steel’s rise as an important material for artists in subsequent years.

The final case study, in chapter 8, follows Richard Serra (1938–2024) at Kaiser Steel Company in Fontana, California, during his 1969 residency, which was organized by the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Taylor outlines the complicated relationship between the artist and the workers, in the middle of the company’s deterioration. Kaiser was eager for the good press and publicity around this arranged relationship, even though Serra was making experimental and precarious temporary installations with massive amounts of materials on Kaiser’s grounds. The project created friction between Serra and the employees, despite the artist’s cultivated workman persona. The employees saw the project as a reflection of the company’s negligence. Serra later distanced himself from the collaboration—yet another instance of an artist later reacting against their corporate patrons.

In 1969 Grace Glueck, writing for The New York Times, warned against museums’ growing reliance on industrial partners. Reviewing the Milwaukee Art Center’s exhibition A Plastic Presence, which partnered with the Philip Morris corporation and its plastics subsidiary Milprint, Glueck described the show as an effort in “image-building for the plastics industry,” spelling out a troubling future for museum exhibitions.¹ The incursions of corporate sponsorship in the 1960s art world are well known, but they are often simplified or denigrated as transactional realities in histories of the moment. Art history has rarely acknowledged the messiness of corporate sponsorship, particularly in shaping the production and reception of art. In considering the intertwined relationships of artists, institutions, and industrial partners during the 1960s—a precedent that continues today—Taylor brings texture to our understanding of the works that resulted. He offers an expanded and nuanced look at individual, often understudied projects that were “inextricably entangled in the vast machinery” of these corporations and their ambitions (237). Ultimately, Taylor widens scholarship on the 1960s in his approach, revealing the politics around the making of these artworks, the complexities of a company developing its image through fine art, and the trial-and-error realities of corporations trying to boost public perception through cultural patronage.

Cite this article: Danielle O’Steen, review of Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s by Alex J. Taylor, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20978.

Notes

For academic and cultural institutions, the 2026 United States’ semiquincentennial in 2026 arrives with mixed expectations after a year of disruption and peril. The National Endowment for the Humanities calls for projects celebrating the “exceptional achievements of the United States,”¹ and congressional budget battles threaten the very existence of identity-based museums and programming. Against this backdrop, what does it mean to teach museum studies? How do we prepare emerging museum professionals to enter a field where institutional survival increasingly depends on historical amnesia?

In my spring 2025 museum studies seminar, “Museums as Learning Institutions,” students encountered these contradictions head-on. We started the semester examining the Heritage Foundation’s call for museums to “reclaim their civic duty”² alongside the Wall Street Journal’s article regarding the then–national archivist Colleen Shogan’s directive to remove references to Indigenous displacement and Japanese internment from public exhibits.³ We studied the 2010 Hide/Seek exhibition controversy in which a video by artist David Wojnarowicz was removed from the National Portrait Gallery as historical precedent, and then watched it play out again as politicians threaten the nascent National Museum of the American Latino for telling stories deemed too “divisive.” The pattern has revealed itself: Any narrative complicating American exceptionalism is suspect; any institution centering the experiences of historically underrecognized groups is a target.

But here is the tension: My classroom is not the museum. While institutions bend to political pressure, terrified of losing funding or facing congressional inquiry, pedagogical spaces offer something institutions increasingly cannot—the freedom to name what is happening. Students arrived at my class angry and grief-stricken, watching the field they are preparing to enter capitulate in real time. My role is not to offer false comfort but to channel that fury into analysis and strategy. We learned to recognize the architecture of censorship: the euphemistic language (“balanced perspectives,” “celebrating unity”), the strategic removals, the manufactured controversies. We studied how museums have historically served nationalism and then asked: How might we resist it? The pedagogy itself becomes resistance.

When we read texts like Alexandra Letvin’s “How Can Museum Labels Be Antiracist?”⁴ students do not just read theory, but they also learn that ethical storytelling is still possible under political siege, and they practice how to maintain intellectual integrity while navigating institutional climates that demand extreme caution. At the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s exhibition Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond, we examined what it means to build a temporary space for local communities whose histories are often absent from national conversations. Our three site visits, which also included the Hirshhorn Museum (fig. 1) and the People’s House: A White House Experience, became lessons in survival, investigating which institutions found pathways to truth telling, which chose safety, and what their choice cost.

The US Semiquincentennial may produce programming and exhibitions that will disappoint those with a firm grasp on the wider picture of censure. But in museum studies classrooms, we can teach about a different anniversary: 250 years of questions. Who gained independence? At whose expense? Sustained through whose erasure? We can teach students to ask: What gets remembered when exceptionalism becomes mandatory? What possibilities can still emerge when we reject the sanitized script?

This is not pessimism but realism forged through care. Care means refusing to lie to students about the field they are entering. It means teaching them to recognize institutional paralysis without becoming cynical, to maintain ethical commitments in hostile contexts, to build coalitions that transcend individual institutions. It means acknowledging that museums have survived censorship before but have never emerged unchanged—and never without their workers willing to risk something. If we train students only in institutional compliance, who will continue the great work done by museum workers of the past and present? The classroom becomes the space where we model what museums could be: sites of genuine inquiry, uncomfortable truths, and institutions of principled resistance to nationalist mythology. Teaching museum studies in 2026 means teaching that scholarship itself is unflinching and committed to plurality. The United States’ semiquincentennial will test whether American museums can tell complex truths about American history. Our pedagogical responsibility is ensuring that the next generation knows that failure is a choice and that other choices remain possible.

Cite this article: Ashleigh Dior Coren, “Museum Studies Pedagogy as Noncompliance in an Era of Federal Censorship,” in “Call and Response: DEIA Tensions in Scholarship, Practice, and National Identity,” Colloquium, edited by Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Frederica Simmons, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20925.

Notes

An installation of five objects from the permanent American art collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) is centered on war and the violence, social upheaval, and displacement of people that result from it (fig. 1). This focused display is situated within a larger gallery dedicated to American modernism from the period 1900 to 1950, which is organized thematically, capturing through social histories some of the radical changes taking place at the time in the United States in the areas of urbanization, labor and industry, artistic innovation, and American imperialism. Although it has been on view for a couple of years now, the installation continues to feel relevant and spark new ideas for me, particularly as war, immigration policy, and their economic impact dominate current headlines. In this collection of works, we can see how those issues manifested for artists working in the 1930s and ’40s as they synthesized the artistic styles of their time with their own lived experiences.

A signature aspect of our American galleries at the BMA is the integration of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts objects, and to me that material combination really underscores the social themes in play. Isamu Noguchi’s Floating Lunar (c. 1943–52) is a wall sconce made of plaster, with small wooden elements suspended across a cotton thread. Noguchi (1904–1988) drew inspiration from his internment in Arizona as an American citizen of Japanese descent during World War II. His painful memory of the isolation he experienced, as well as the enduring image of moonlight on the desert landscape, are filtered through the formal language of biomorphic surrealism to create this elegant and austere lighting design.

His work is paired with Arshile Gorky’s (1904–1948) The Unattainable (1945), which channels the artist’s ongoing trauma as a refugee from the Armenian genocide and his pain following the death of his mother into thinned, ghostly paint in an abstract Surrealist scene. Horace Pippin’s (1888–1946) Shell Holes and Observation Balloon, Champagne Sector (c. 1931–37) captures the aftermath of a bombing in World War I, in which Pippin had fought as a member of the 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hellfighters. I have often been struck by how the images of the blasted earth in the foreground of Pippin’s painting echo the hovering black forms in Gorky’s work, suggesting that these, too, might reference graves or sites of violence.

These themes and formal qualities all seem to come together in Charles (1907–1978) and Ray Eames’s (1912–1988) Traction Leg Splint (designed 1941, manufactured c. 1942), commissioned by the United States Navy. Undulating organic forms are here put to use in a lightweight plywood leg splint designed to stabilize and transport wounded American soldiers from the battlefields of World War II.

Nearby is a bronze sculpture of a female figure entwined with plantlike forms, The Two Rites (1942), by the Brazilian modernist Maria Martins (1894–1973). Produced during her time in New York, the sculpture draws on Amazonian myths, in keeping with Surrealist interest in Indigenous cultures (often colored by stereotyping ideals). The violence of her imagery resonates within the historical moment, conveying the global scope of the war.

This group of objects centers the artistic production of artists from diverse backgrounds who were all profoundly and personally affected by war and migration, each telling their individual stories through innovative formal styles that place them at the vanguard of the artistic production of their era. My hope is that this installation pays tribute to the complexity of the American experience, conveyed through beautiful and emotionally resonant artworks.

Cite this article: Virginia M. G. Anderson, “Baltimore Museum of Art: War and Its Impact in the American Modernism Galleries,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21007.

Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico

By Caitlin Frances Bruce

University of Texas Press, 2024. 280 pp.; 32 color illus.; 67 b/w illus. Hardcover: $65.00 (ISBN: 9781477327678)

Caitlin Frances Bruce’s Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico is perhaps the first English-language long study of contemporary graffiti in León, a city in Guanajuato, a state in central Mexico. As a scholar in communication studies and rhetoric, Bruce distances herself from the visual analysis usual in art history. She proposes instead to “draw on sonic cultures to understand visual practices” and focus on “attunement,” that is, a series of communication processes by which distinct agents attempt to “tune into each other” (4). In this sense, the book invites us to enrich and adopt new approaches for the analysis of street art in art history and visual culture. While images take a secondary role, testimonies and media come to the fore to account for “institutional attunement,” which Bruce defines as “the ways that cultural practitioners and institutions of various sorts (media, education, government, cultural) navigate and seek to produce frequencies for recognition, shared vibrations, audibility, and attention but also relegate certain voices to noise, static, or interference” (4).

The author deals with three questions in her book around “institutional attunement”: “How do institutions change and young people transform as they tune into each other’s expectations and values? How do these processes of attunement shape what counts as voice and how voice is heard? What happens when the state becomes the primary sponsor for a formerly subcultural practice?” (4). With this aim, Bruce unfolds a rhetorical ethnography—namely, a qualitative research method combining participant interviews and observation with rhetorical analysis of discourses—to study the graffiti writers’ communicative practices.

The period covered spans the mid-1990s to 2018. It corresponds to the years leading up to the consolidation of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) as the most important force in Guanajuato at the time of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through the last year before the arrival of Manuel Pérez Obrador’s leftist and progressive policies at the national level. Moving in chronological order, Bruce presents a continuous increase of “institutional attunement,” according to which we move from policies against graffiti to programs interested in co-opting the youth through nostalgic references and professionalization. The book structures its content through metaphors of attunement, including frisson, noise, harmonization, amplification, and resonance.

In the first chapter, Bruce mainly discusses the gatherings known as Tagger Wednesdays, which began in 2000 as an alternative and collective response to PAN’s Citizen Wednesdays. The latter are recurring municipal programs that aim to bring government closer to the people and address needs directly, from processing paperwork to medical care and low-cost basic food items, and end up “reducing politics to individualized service delivery rather than collective mobilization” (33). For its part, Bruce argues, Tagger Wednesdays, which ended in late 2001, made the “writers” (the term for graffiti artists) visible, offering an “aesthetics of refusal that remapped the city by voicing frisson” (23) and allowed them to meet publicly, “building collective energies and capacities” (51). Tagger Wednesday gatherings imagined a fluid model of voice based on the assumption of graffiti as a collective process.

Surprisingly, this chapter presents a rather pacific, if not homogenous, image and account of the writers, which the following chapters go on to complicate. As scholars of street art know, there are harsh competition and adversarial stances among writers. Ethnographic and visual analysis reveals striking differences in the use and selection of styles, lettering, and messages, as well as different connections and senses of belonging to the sites. An interesting note in this chapter is the recognition of the strong influence that graffiti from California had in León as well as “cholo writing” (that is, the style created by the Latino gangs in Los Angeles). This link to California points to an area worthy of further research on street art in the United States: the dialogues across the border, the role of NAFTA, and the influence and reappropriation of graffiti (and muralism) in and from the West Coast. These considerations would perhaps complicate the discourses and references surrounding Chicano graffiti from the 1980s or earlier.

Chapter 2 focuses on the media’s attunement with the implementation, between 2001 and 2002, of a zero-tolerance policy promulgated by Rudolph Giuliani’s consulting firm in Mexico as well as Colombia and Brazil. This “global” policy, implemented in León and supported by the media, promoted the understanding of graffiti as a form of contamination and an attack on civility and common sense. Bruce reminds us that Periódico A.M., one of León’s most recognized newspapers, compared the graffiti found in Boulevard López Mateos to “the panorama of any avenue in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx” (63). According to Bruce, the media intended to create a “public attunement to writers as ‘other than’ citizens” by decontextualizing photographs of graffiti and its writers and presenting the pictures as supposed documentation of violent gangs and drug addiction (54). Bruce proposes that the writers, in conjunction with the collective called Youths Coordinated against Authoritarianism (Jóvenes Coordinados contra el Autoritarismo, JOCOCA), responded by developing an “oppositional attunement,” consisting of protests, concerts, and publications (zines included) that rejected the abjection promoted by the media while intending to tune “citizens, media, and institutional authorities into their experience of Mexico’s ‘democratic transition’” (56). Bruce ends the chapter by suggesting that the youth’s oppositional attunement can be regarded as a practice of parrhesia and a “fecund mode of tuning into a global situation and forms of collective belonging and action” (82) and, I add, antagonism, which one expects would be highlighted in the following chapters.

While this second chapter deals with a very short period, chapter 3, titled “Harmonization,” covers a longer period from 1997 to 2011 to discuss “three moments of harmonization and experimentation in institutional attunement to the idea of convivencia” (86). Bruce initially describes convivencia as a “social coexistence” and immediately thereafter as a “social harmony” and an “active tolerance” (87). There are great differences between those descriptions (and others in the book) that any Spanish speaker would recognize in the uses of the very same word, since Spanish is a very contextual language. In her use of testimonies and references to policies in other places and times (for instance, early 1990s Bogotá under the Antanas Mockus administration), Bruce appears to gloss over the nuances and significant differences that can alter the understanding of the dynamics, limits, and possibilities of attunement as well as the possible “models of convivencia” that can be identified throughout the chapter.

A more careful analysis of the various senses and understandings of convivencia is required to reinforce the ethnographic account and analysis of the several types of attunements, including institutional attunements, that emerge across several voices in the period. This is especially critical since chapter 3 covers a period of more than a decade, in which León, like many other cities in Latin America and the United States in the early twenty-first century, went through significant transformations in terms of globalization, social organization, and mobilization. During this time, when at least three different generations of writers (and street artists) were active, the identification and relationship between the people, the city of León, and the work of writers there, were undoubtedly affected by the Integrated Transportation System, inaugurated in 2003, and the bike-lane system, both of which, it is worth mentioning, emulated systems inaugurated in Bogotá years before. Also noteworthy, the transportation system in Bogotá soon revealed the limitations of the understanding and policies of convivencia, as well as attunements that the Mockus administrations (inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action) pretended to promote and enact, nurturing critical changes in practices, aims, and strategies of attunement—and fomenting a decided antagonism in the following years.

In contrast, the fourth chapter focuses on the Youth Institute’s City of Murals program, which ran between 2010 and 2012. This is perhaps the chapter that falls closer to a standard book on muralism in Mexico, since it includes more illustrations and finally refers to the postrevolutionary Mexican school of muralism. The latter was evidently referential for a program pursuing the social acceptance of writers and their alignment with conventional and already legitimized forms of street art, at times labeled “artistic graffiti.” The chapter explores the program’s aims and accounts for various voices among the artists, including some critical stances. Certain critics understood the program as a way of co-opting graffiti and attuning writers’ work to a largely conservative audience and an equally conservative media. In this chapter, Bruce discusses specific cases—the Homage to the Three Giants, the Cine de Oro murals, and the murals of Catrinas—paying particular heed to their creators’ and the public’s responses in the media.

A critical limitation of this chapter is the author’s assumption of a relatively smooth conceptual and historical transition from writers to muralists. While a person can be both a writer and a muralist, writing and muralism are not interchangeable. Neither is it the case that the new legitimation of murals and muralists is a legitimation of writing and graffiti. A more nuanced approach is needed, even if the emphasis for Bruce is on “institutional attunement.”

A fifth chapter follows a similar trend by discussing the Muraleón program (2016–18). The author introduces the term “urban art,” which widens the discussion’s scope and again requires a more nuanced and analytical approach. Bruce argues that this new program was intended to attune “society and writers to positive frequencies for the good life,” by emphasizing individual entrepreneurial approaches to urban art and by using color therapy as a politics of attunement politics “to promote an image of social harmony within a larger rhetorical ecology of neoliberal state restraint” (215). It is worth noting that this program, like many other urban art programs around the world, exemplifies neoliberal policies of gentrification, the taming of collective memory, and the neutralization of antagonism.

Surprisingly, the conclusion of the book introduces, under the title “León as Global Example,” new material, apparently intending to fulfill the book’s promise of thinking about graffiti globally. I find this problematic given the fact that the author’s references to graffiti and street art beyond León in the previous chapters is scant, including consideration of other cities in Mexico. There are just a few conventional references to 1980s New York graffiti. In the conclusion, Bruce presents the Hemispheric Conversations Urban Art Project, a university project she leads that aims “to promote graffiti and street art’s possibilities as a vehicle for public voice” (207). In the context of that project, Bruce invited writers from León, Chicago, and Pittsburgh to paint in Pittsburgh in 2017. She reflects on how some of the artist’s attunement strategies unfolded. I was left wondering if this attunement is itself an example of institutional attunement. This final part of the book, it seems, is less about the conclusions of her study of institutional attunement and the impact it may have had after 2018 in León and more an invitation to consider and contrast strategies of attunements in the works of a few Leonese artists and some Chicago and Pittsburgh artists “across the border.”

The book’s strength lies in redirecting the focus of urban art studies toward the ways practitioners and institutions seek to attune—or, perhaps more precisely, align—graffiti with political and neoliberal agendas. In this direction, the last part of Voices in Aerosol may be read as a timely invitation to develop comparative ethnographical studies that consider street art and institutional attunements within different conservative contexts across both sides of the border today. On the US side, think, for instance, of murals celebrating Basque tradition and heritage in the West, which clearly contrast with the more politicized Chicano murals in California and the Mexican and African American murals in Chicago. Think also of how institutions, including universities in the West, co-opt Native American artists to produce murals with a blatant institutional attunement that silences the long history of violence on Native communities. Or finally, think of the way the city of Reno, where I teach in Nevada, showcases hundreds of murals that hardly touch upon political and social issues, blandly existing next to casinos, fentanyl peddlers, unhoused communities, and sex work.

Cite this article: Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández, review of Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico by Caitlin Frances Bruce, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20970.

Colleges and universities are in crisis, experiencing decreased enrollment, the discontinuation and prohibition of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and faculty terminations for teaching the full spectrum of social and political theories in their classrooms.¹ Under federally mandated directives, many academic programs in the state of Florida have had to reformulate purportedly “woke” class content.² Within these upending shifts, it is important for university art leadership, especially at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), to strategize on how to traverse the changing landscape of higher education’s metrics-based funding, federal budget cuts to the arts, and rollbacks targeting MSIs. Cultural institutions housed on campuses, such as academic museums and galleries, must find ways to sustain themselves amid these obstacles.

I serve as the gallery director for the Foster-Tanner Fine Arts Gallery, a teaching gallery on the campus of Florida A&M University (FAMU)—the state’s only public Historically Black College and University (HBCU). The gallery and the Fine Arts Program are going through noteworthy programmatic changes.³ FAMU’s art program is small, with three faculty members, offering art foundations, including course sections in design, drawing, painting, printmaking, and art history. Recently, the Florida Board of Governors categorized FAMU’s fine arts department as an underperforming program and placed it on the Program of Strategic Emphasis (PSE) list—a categorization now serving as the basis for an extensive restructuring and consolidation.⁴ The Fine Arts Program is now poised to join the School of Journalism’s Graphic Design Program in fall 2026, creating a new Graphic Design and Digital Art Program with an emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I understand that art media is ever-changing and multidimensional, and I see new media art as a culturally significant art form and genre. Supporting digital art, especially for our digital-native students, makes sense. I am excited about exploring Black new media artists and fostering an emerging cohort of digital and new media artist scholars at FAMU. I am also interested in the ways AI can assist with analyzing our museum visitor data and improving museum visitor experience, such as visiting patterns, visitors’ interests, and optimizing interpretive tools.⁵ My hope during our program’s transition, however, is that the new program will be implemented thoughtfully while maintaining its core art foundation courses.

The consolidation of FAMU’s Fine Arts Program is happening as I write this article, so the future of the art gallery is unknown. Still, I must prepare for the personal and professional burdens imposed by Florida’s steep arts funding cuts and the “anti-woke” legislation efforts impacting public funding.⁶ Although these circumstances are discouraging, I draw strength and inspiration from a variety of sources. For example, amid the turbulence of the Trump administration and the erasure of Black and other marginalized cultures in museums, it is encouraging to see exhibitions like the Smithsonian’s At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at HBCUs (through July 19, 2026) recount the history of HBCU museums and cultural institutions.⁷ It has also been restorative to collaborate with fellow HBCU museum professionals, Black colleagues in the field of academic museums and galleries, and organizations like the Association of African American Museums, Museum Hue, and Arts Administrators of Color Network. They have served as channels for shared dialogue, research, and support in sustaining Black arts leadership and culture.

FAMU’s art program, its faculty, and opportunities have shaped my dedicated service to future students, and as an HBCU art alumna, current administrator, and art educator, I am committed to enduring the challenges presented in our current moment. My work advocates for a greater understanding of and appreciation for FAMU and the Fine Arts Program’s history. Located in Tallahassee, Florida’s capital, FAMU was founded in 1887 as a land-grant institution.⁸ Its art program was established in the 1930s as a program of the “graphic and plastic arts.”⁹ In 1953, artist, author, art historian, and educator Dr. Samella Lewis served as chair of the Department of Art and Ceramics (fig. 1). She started this position two years after graduating from the Ohio State University—the first Black woman to receive a PhD in art history.¹⁰ Inspired by her work with artist and activist Elizabeth Catlett, Hampton University art educator Viktor Lowenfield, and prominent artists associated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Lewis fiercely championed Black art, holding the mantle for the inclusion of Black artists in mainstream institutions and publications during a period of blatant exclusion by the art establishment.

Building on Lewis’s legacy, her successor Dr. Howard Lewis—department chair from 1958 to 1974—established the “FAMU Art Gallery,” later the Foster-Tanner Fine Art Gallery, as an exhibition space for recurring art exhibitions and the presentation of student art. For the last fifty years, FAMU’s gallery has served as a teaching gallery and kunsthalle for rotating exhibitions of Black contemporary artists, including Camille Billops, Elizabeth Catlett, Leon Hicks, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, John T. Scott, Joyce C. Scott, and many others. As an HBCU art gallery, we cultivate awareness and respect for visual art and the advancement of cultural leadership in the next generation of Black artists, curators, art administrators, and art educators.

I have experienced FAMU’s art gallery from multiple perspectives. As an undergraduate art student, I used the gallery as a resource for understanding Black art, artists, and exhibitions and for learning how to professionally display my own student work. As a doctoral student, I utilized the gallery as a research center for understanding how exhibition spaces, especially those on college campuses, can provide a counternarrative to the marginalization of Black artists in the larger art historical canon/ discourse. Today, as the gallery’s director in this uncertain time, my commitment is to continue the legacy of FAMU’s Fine Arts Program, and the Foster-Tanner Fine Arts Gallery, while contributing to the new program’s objectives. It was particularly fulfilling to present exhibitions like Shared Treasures from the Kinsey Collection (2016) and Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (2022) (fig. 2)—meaningful responses to the legacy of HBCU art programs, their faculty, and alumni.

HBCU art spaces are vital for the future of Black artists, so it is important to take lessons from figures such as Dr. Samella Lewis, who made immeasurable contributions in researching, documenting, collecting, and presenting Black artists to the world. HBCU art institutions were pivotal in elevating Black artists and their work when mainstream museums did not. It is increasingly imperative that HBCU academic arts administrators and leaders continue fighting for the elevation of Black artists amid national defunding, censoring, and the re-writing of Black history. In the spirit of the FAMU’s early generations of artists, educators, and administrators, I find pride in advocating for, adapting, and sustaining the gallery during this time of programmatic and administration transformation.

Cite this article: Aja Roache, “HBCU Art Survival in the Wake of Federal Cuts,” in “Call and Response: DEIA Tensions in Scholarship, Practice, and National Identity,” Colloquium, edited by Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Frederica Simmons, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20983.

Notes

Curated by: Laura Katzman, James Madison University, in collaboration with Steven Brown, The Jewish Museum, New York

Exhibition schedule: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, October 4, 2023–February 26, 2024; The Jewish Museum, New York, May 23–October 26, 2025

Exhibition catalogue: Laura Katzman, with contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, Christof Decker, and John Fagg, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity. The Jewish Museum, New York, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, in association with Princeton University Press, 2025. 288 pp.; 290 color illus. Paperback: $45.00 (ISBN: 9780691273112)

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, recently on view at the Jewish Museum in New York, was the first retrospective of Shahn’s art in the United States since 1976. Curator and professor of art history Laura Katzman organized a compelling, timely, fresh look at Shahn, the twentieth-century progressive social realist whose art mattered during his lifetime and remains relevant in ours. Taking the subtitle for the retrospective from one of the talks Shahn delivered for the 1956 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (published in The Shape of Content, 1957), Katzman positioned Shahn as a nonconformist examining the moral health of the nation and responding with empathy and humanity to inequity and injustice wherever he saw it.

The show was originally on view at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, where twelve thousand square feet were dedicated to the exhibition. Katzman’s task for the Jewish Museum was to cut the original checklist of 315 objects in half without compromising integrity and relevance. She negotiated 175 loans, several seen only in New York, to fit into the available six thousand square feet. Chelsea Garunay’s nuanced design spaced paintings, mural studies, prints, photographs, and posters to maximum advantage. Occasional recessed walls and accent colors—red, mustard, moss green, and different grays—focused the viewer’s attention unobtrusively. Organized efficiently in cases and vitrines, ephemera and small works supported the curatorial vision outlined on cogently written text panels and chat labels.

At the Jewish Museum, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity was divided into seven sections: “Art and Activism,” “A New Deal for Art,” “The Labor Movement,” “War and Its Aftermath,” “Age of Anxiety: The Cold War,” “The Struggle for Civil Rights,” and “Spirituality and Identity.” The exhibition proceeded in chronological order through Shahn’s forays into diverse mediums from the early 1930s until his death in 1969.

Shahn’s monumental painting The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–32), set in a red niche, opened the exhibition (fig. 1). Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants who were sentenced to death for armed robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, despite their likely innocence. Shahn, who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania when he was eight years old, was empathetic. The iconic tempera painting depicts members of the Lowell Committee, the presidents of Harvard and MIT, and the judge in the case hovering over the coffins of the executed victims of injustice. The work was created soon after Shahn completed twenty-three paintings devoted to the 1927 executions. The series marked the beginning of Shahn’s signature social-realist style and brought attention to his penchant for defending the disenfranchised.

To research the case and develop the series, Shahn consulted newspaper accounts and published photographs, establishing the working method of bringing together strategies of high art and popular culture that guided the remainder of his career. In the beginning, Shahn downplayed the importance of media sources in his art to prevent accusations of copying. Katzman substantiates a meaningful reconsideration of his use of media by exhibiting source material adjacent to works of art to illustrate how Shahn borrowed subject matter and likenesses liberally but not literally.

The section on the New Deal introduces Shahn as a photographer, a lynchpin of the exhibition. Shahn continued to refer to found material while generating his own images. Throughout his life, Shahn maintained extensive files of catalogued images, his own and those clipped from publications, confirming his belief that all images have the power to communicate.

Moreover, the same narrow depth of field found in photography is evident in Shahn’s stylized figurative representation. Initially, Shahn saw photography as a shortcut to sketching. His friend and studio mate Walker Evans provided rudimentary instructions for using a camera. Shahn possessed a photographer’s eye, and his New York photographs are among his most poignant. His gouache painting Handball (1939) portrays six inner-city youngsters playing the game against a cement wall in front of the built urban environment. Scenes from separate photographs inform the painting’s dynamic spatial arrangement.

Shahn’s tenure as a government employee in the Special Skills Division, Resettlement / Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) was pivotal. Roy Stryker, director of the RA/FSA, employed dozens of photographers to accumulate over 170,000 photographs that he archived for the Roosevelt Administration, which used the images to illustrate the living and working conditions throughout the country. Neither Shahn nor Stryker disdained the use of his photographs, posters, and graphics for commercial or political reasons, so long as the context was consistent with the original intention. While a photographer for RA/FSA, Shahn began advising Stryker on ways to disseminate New Deal messages through exhibitions, government pamphlets, and periodicals, such as Survey Graphic. An exhibit in this section displays copies of Archibald MacLeish’s 1938 photo book Land of the Free; Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States; and Family of Man (1941), which accompanied Edward Steichen’s renowned exhibition.

Shahn’s travels as a photographer, particularly in the rural South at the height of Jim Crow, revealed levels of injustice, discrimination, and inequity he had not realized existed in his adopted country. He referred to his RA/FSA photographs long after he left government work. For example, his photograph of Sam Nichols captures the fear and uncertainty poor tenant farmers faced in Boone County, Arkansas, in 1935 (fig. 2). Nichols’s likeness in tattered clothes with furrowed brow, deep-set eyes, one forearm folded across his chest, and his other hand covering his mouth appears in whole or part in subsequent paintings, prints, and posters. Shahn uses Nichols’s hand to symbolize the dignity of manual labor and pride in one’s work, values Shahn inherited from his working-class father, a carver and carpenter.

Shahn responded with empathy to the down-and-out as well as the working class, especially manual laborers—farmers, miners, factory workers. Shahn’s mass-produced posters and graphics promote the dignity of labor and his support for unions, starting with the Artists Union in New York in the 1930s.

Shahn said he was closely aligned with the goals of the New Deal, such as the Social Security Act (1935), which provided an economic safety net for society’s most vulnerable—the elderly, the blind, children, and the unemployed. He was awarded the commission to create the fresco mural The Meaning of Social Security (1940–42), which remains (for now) in the Wilbur J. Cohen Health and Human Services Building (formerly Social Security Building), in Washington, DC. One half of the two-part mural depicts the downtrodden and the other shows the positive effect of federal assistance. In a small study for the mural titled Steel Worker, a man sits on a girder rendered in line only. The figure is shown in color from behind, one leg dangling below the girder. The worker’s back takes up almost a quarter of the image, recalling the humanity and humility of Giotto’s figures with curved backs in his early fourteenth-century frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua, Italy.

For the Jewish Museum venue only, Katzman located a rare study for the Social Security mural executed in fresco depicting a Midwestern farmer harvesting wheat (fig. 3). Shahn learned fresco technique, which allows no room for error, from the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who was so impressed with Shahn’s 1933 gouache series for the Tom Mooney case that he hired Shahn to work on a mural Man at the Crossroads for the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. In 1934 Nelson Rockefeller had the mural painted over after Rivera refused to remove the unauthorized likeness of Vladimir Lenin. In May 2025 the Cohen building was slated for accelerated disposal, a decision that jeopardizes the Shahn mural and others created during the New Deal, echoing the destruction of Rivera’s mural many decades earlier.

Shahn, an avowed anti-Fascist, created numerous poster designs while employed at the OWI. The exhibition displayed the only two ever circulated: This Is Nazi Brutality (1942) and We French Workers Warn You (1942). Few works in this inclusive retrospective are more disturbingly relevant today than We Fight for a Free World! (c. 1942), a powerful indictment of the tactics of autocratic regimes. In a horizontal gouache and tempera, five handbills are depicted adhered to a brick wall above spray-painted block letters spelling out “THE ENEMY METHOD.” Each flier has a monochromatic figure with a different heading in lowercase serif font: “suppression,” “starvation,” “slavery,” “torture,” “murder.” The likeness of Sam Nichol’s appears behind barbed wire in the flier for slavery. The painting is the prime example of the claim made in the exhibition’s introductory panel that Shahn possessed a talent for layering art within art as well as combining word and image.

The timeliness of the exhibition is unmistakable—anti-immigration activities are rampant, the Wilbur J. Cohen building with its New Deal murals obstructs the sightline of a possible triumphal arch, and war tactics by authoritarian and rogue governments are pervasive. In the postwar years, Shahn responded to the enduring ramifications of war, the loss of property, and painful human sacrifice. For the remainder of his life, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were engaged in an ideological Cold War pitting capitalism against communism. After the USSR tested its nuclear bomb, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed. The Age of Anxiety was fraught with the fear of nuclear annihilation.

Shahn was, at times, at odds with his peers, including Robert Motherwell and others who favored nonobjectivity and abstraction in art during the postwar years. In her catalogue essay, Katzman points out that Shahn’s form of social realism was never completely out of favor, reminding readers he was selected to represent the United States at the 1954 Venice Biennale together with Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning.

The art in the final two sections of the exhibition was made concurrently, during the last decade of Shahn’s life. With economy of line, a defining characteristic of his art, Shahn paid tribute to slain Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner and to Mahatma Gandhi and the cause of anticolonialism. TIME magazine selected Shahn’s rendering of Martin Luther King caught mid-speech for its March 19, 1965, cover. To support Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar campaign in 1968, Shahn created one of his most iconic posters featuring a dove of peace overlayed by bands of red, white, and blue.

Elaborate lettering in English and Hebrew in the final section of the exhibition bring the retrospective full circle. At fourteen, Shahn apprenticed in his uncle’s lithography shop where he learned to draw, immersed himself in literature, developed a lifelong love of letters, and found ways to encourage empathy in a broken world that would appear in his art and service to society for more than fifty years. His wife, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, said her husband returned to religious themes when he was able to revisit them with a fresh eye. His final project, the Hallelujah Suite, comprises fifty lithographs and was a lasting testament to his love affair with calligraphy. Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity affirms that Shahn believed conformity was bad for art, literature, and politics. His life’s work was to communicate to the broadest constituency possible through fine and commercial art—by any means possible—that there is no place for complacency when so much is at stake.

Editors’ Note: The catalogue for this exhibition, by Laura Katzman, with contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, Christof Decker, and John Fagg, was reviewed by Katherine Mintie in the Spring 2024 issue of Panorama. 

July 9, 2026: Several corrections were made to this review, clarifying the dates of the Madrid venue, the publishing partners for the catalogue, the number of objects in the original checklist, the dates of objects in the exhibition, Shahn’s place of birth, the number of figures in Handball, the publication date of Wright and Rosskam’s Twelve Million Black Voices, the medium of the study for Shahn’s fresco in the Cohen Building, the date of the decision to dispose of the Cohen Building, and the medium of the Hallelujah Suite. The word likely was also added to reflect historical debate over Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt or innocence.

Cite this article: Susan Edwards, review of Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, Jewish Museum, New York, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20946.

At the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA, a recent reinstallation in Gallery 209 positions the ambitions of early America in dialogue with the questions of our present in Virginia’s Hamptons Roads region (fig. 1).¹ The result is less a linear narrative than a conversation that moves across centuries. On the back wall, a sculpture by Betye Saar from 2010 evokes the enduring trauma of the slave ship. Its message reverberates through the adjacent paintings: at left, a portrait of a white mother and child by the formerly enslaved professional artist Joshua Johnson; at right, a group portrait with three Black women standing behind the white family they were forced to serve. With Saar’s sculpture as an anchor, these works articulate a moving dialogue about enslavement and its lasting impacts across three centuries.

On the adjacent wall, Hale Woodruff’s Death of Crispus Attucks, George Caleb Bingham’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, and Edward Hicks’s Declaration of Independence illustrate events from the American Revolution. Completed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—many years after the actions they describe—these works prompt visitors to rethink familiar questions: Who tells the stories of our nation’s past? Who tells us which of those stories matter?

Those questions find direct answers in the gallery’s collaborative interpretive framework on the opposite wall. Seventeenth-century maps of Virginia (see fig. 1, far left)—derived from the surveys of English colonizers such as John Smith—are presented alongside interpretive texts developed with local Pamunkey citizens Rebecca Hill and Jessica Bradby.² This juxtaposition demonstrates the ways in which early map-making projects were not neutral initiatives but instead the tools used by colonizers to rename, partition, and claim Indigenous land. Furthermore, Hill and Bradby redirect attention to what these maps omit: the Pamunkey Reservation, the oldest of its kind in the country, on land in eastern Virginia that was never ceded to the United States government. The reservation’s absence, in this context, becomes a form of evidence.

As Bradby observes, museums are spaces where people come to learn but also to listen. Centering this proposition, Gallery 209 expands the stories told by American art and redistributes authority over who gets to define it, an approach that offers a preview of some of the interpretive directions for the museum’s comprehensive reinstallation of its American art collection that will begin in 2028.

Inspired by the Chrysler Museum’s larger mission to foster community connection and celebrate our shared humanity, future installations of American art will continue to incorporate a variety of multivocal narratives in its galleries. As Bradby observed, “When you hear voices from your area, people listen; they become curious. People want the truth, and it’s important to share the truth by including a variety of perspectives.”³

Cite this article: Caroline Culp, “‘A Variety of Perspectives’: American Art at the Chrysler,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21020.

Notes

Curated by: Phong H. Bui, cofounder, publisher, and artistic director, The Brooklyn Rail

Exhibition schedule: Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, VT, November 15, 2025–February 15, 2026

Scanning the art of his time, the great twentieth-century art historian and professor Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996) observed “that the arts have become more deeply personal . . . artists are willing to search further and to risk experiments or inventions which in the past would have been inconceivable because of fixed ideas of the laws and boundaries of the arts.”¹ Schapiro’s analysis of postwar art’s aesthetics avoids disciplinary specificity and hierarchical distinctions. He engages art and society as multidirectional, without a fixed essence. A dialectical materialist, he was close to the leading socialist thinkers of his time, including Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and philosopher John Dewey. Although Schapiro’s expertise was in medieval European art and architecture, he took seriously the art of his time. Indeed, he seemed to prefer the company of artists to the university community. Schapiro lived in Greenwich Village in New York, seven miles south of Columbia University’s campus, where he taught. From 1936 through 1952, Schapiro lectured on modernism at the New School for Social Research, and artists flocked to him; he even hired painter Jane Freilicher to ensure that artists could gain entry to his talks.² “Only a mind opened to the qualities of things,” Schapiro advised, “with a habit of discrimination, sensitized by experience and responsive to new forms and ideas, will be prepared for the enjoyment of this art.”³

Artist, curator, and publisher of the Brooklyn Rail Phong H. Bui provided precisely this opportunity in Singing in Unison, Part 13: Homage to Meyer Schapiro, an exhibition held at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Vermont last year (fig. 1). As part of Bui’s project to foster cultural dialogue, the show was installed in three galleries without thematic categorization. A mix of better-known artists were on display alongside artists who should be better known. The selection included works by Schapiro’s art history students Robert Motherwell and Lucas Samaras, artists of his generation and of the next, and successors of Abstract Expressionism. Viewers were entrusted to explore each artwork and notice stylistic affinities on their own. A reference room included Schapiro’s publications and first-edition periodicals that revealed connections between the artists and the art historian (fig. 2). In total, there were forty-one works by thirty artists, all of whom Schapiro knew, admired, and in some cases collected.

This capacious range reflects Schapiro’s curiosity. But his respect for living artists did not mean Schapiro liked everything he saw. “I met [Schapiro] when I was about 23 or 24 years old,” painter Gandy Brodie (1924–1975) recalled in 1965, reflecting on the late 1940s, “and his first reaction to me was very negative, at least I thought it was negative because I brought him three paintings to look at, of which he liked only one, and that in a kind of condescending way.”⁴ Initial disappointment aside, the two became close, a friendship that ended only with Brodie’s untimely death in 1975. Bui selected one of Brodie’s finest paintings for the exhibition, Butcher Boy from 1957, made when the artist was living in Florence (fig. 3). A solitary stolid young man, attired in a white coat and apron punctuated by blood-red stains, stands centrally before a painted sign above his head, which announces “Non Alla Guerra” (no to war). Brodie outlined the boy’s face in black; his visage is drawn, not modeled. He stares directly at the viewer, impassive. But more striking than the boy or the antiwar message is the quality and energy of the paint itself. Vigorous, short strokes of black, gray, blue, and white form the background, a mass of short lines that move in all directions. Areas of contrast burst forward, orange and red at the bottom, a hot flash of light. The white apron and shirt are thickly built up with contrasting shadows in gray, yellow, and brown. The figure and the background are treated with equal intensity. The tension between pulsating paint and the stillness of the subject gives the painting its commanding verve.

Another artist that Schapiro befriended was the Surrealist Kurt Seligmann (1900–1962). In 1944 they collaborated on six etchings in the portfolio The Myth of Oedipus, published by Kirk Askew of the Durlacher Brothers. Bui borrowed Seligmann’s Manticore from 1958, representing a human-animal figure transformed into a sinewy form that mixes flora and tissue (see fig. 3). The background is a spectrum of pink to blue, resembling dusk during winter. It is an arresting image, technically masterful—the paint is meticulously controlled, reminiscent of the old masters and entirely different from Brodie’s thick impasto. Yet, like the figure in Brodie’s painting, the Manticore registers as a singular image.

Brodie and Seligmann represent the dialectic between control and abandon in artwork from the mid-twentieth century. An artist who synthesized these tendencies was the Chilean-born Surrealist Roberto Matta (1911–2002). Installed opposite Manticore is Matta’s L’Aube Permanente (The permanent dawn) from 1972, made when the artist was involved with the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) government of Salvador Allende in Chile (fig. 4). Blue-black areas and vivid yellow paint, some stained into the canvas, some brushed atop it, coexist with interconnected triangles outlined in white and gray that float at the surface. Hovering like an underwater scene are crustacean-like creatures. They drift into the picture as if from another painting. The viewer is in a generative space: less calculated than Seligmann and Brodie, yet related by virtue of their inclusion. According to Bui, Matta mastered the use of thin washes on canvas, where “accidental images” were elaborated on and “the spilling suggests some larger forms which at the same time give birth to the smaller and more elaborate biomorphic shapes.”⁵

In 1950 Schapiro collaborated with Clement Greenberg on a group show at the Kootz Gallery that included Larry Rivers (1923–2002), whose work introduced a conceptual approach to figuration. Bui secured the fantastic Double Nude from 1957, which exudes psychological intensity. The American flag morphs into patterns that depart from blue, red, and white. Rivers’s colors become a bed on which lie two female nudes, incomplete, possibly the same model painted twice. The left figure curves toward the right, her arm crossing over her companion’s midsection as she stares directly at the viewer.

A completely different approach to the figure, equally intense, was shown nearby: two paintings by Jan Müller (1922–1958), the 1955 Untitled (Provence Landscape) and Phantom Riders (Study for The Search for the Unicorn) from 1957, made just before the artist’s death. Müller, whose family fled Nazi Germany, spent his youth in escape, traveling through Switzerland and France before finding safety in New York. The two paintings allude to his experiences via medieval myths, biblical parables, and Germanic legends—stories that feature heroic quests, mythical creatures, and symbolic journeys. Schapiro appreciated the literary references and collected Müller’s work. In 1957 Schapiro might have been thinking of Müller when he wrote, “The artist’s freedom of choice in both subject and form opens the way to endless reactions against existing styles.”⁶ In essence, he believed that an artist must find the subject true to themselves no matter what is popular.

The artist Bob Thompson (1937–1966) picked up where Müller left off, but instead of literature, he drew from the European Renaissance to express African American themes. At the artist-run Delancey Street Museum, Thompson had his first solo exhibition in New York, from which Schapiro purchased Triptych, painted on the backside of a bureau drawer, included in Bui’s show. Triptych contains overt echoes of Müller’s paintings, replete with lollipop trees and frolicking couples, but in a darker palette, punctuated by glorious areas of aquamarine blue, bright yellow, and different hues of green. The three paintings incorporate dark figures among the shadows. “I met Bob Thompson in 1960 at his first show at the Delancey Street Gallery,” Schapiro wrote, noting that the panel he purchased “was inspired, I think, by the work of Jan Müller, but had already a decided personal quality and showed his exceptional gift of color.”⁷

Schapiro also supported women artists. The exhibition included a gestural, nearly abstract painting of dolls from 1955 by Grace Hartigan (1922–2008; see fig. 3) and paintings based on Provincetown views by Ethel Schwabacher (1903–1984) and Janice Biala (1903–2000). Biala’s paintings are especially revelatory. Her Hillside (Provincetown) from 1958 is an abstract rendering of the Atlantic coast’s colors—browns, greens, and blues punctuated by purple and even a dash of pink. Biala’s work feels like the beach; it hovers between atmosphere and earth. Bui also selected a Biala painting made a decade later, Absorbent, a larger canvas in three sections of blue, pink, and white. It is also abstract but suggests an apartment with a ceiling fan and cabinets. Tucked into a smaller gallery was Dorothy Dehner’s (1901–1904) magnificent tabletop bronze sculpture Siena #1 from 1962, with spheres, triangles, squares, and rectangles forming a semicircle.

Between 1950 and 1967, gallerist Betty Parsons regularly exhibited Bay City, Texas–based artist Forrest Bess (1911–1977), and Schapiro attended the shows. “Each year, for a number of years,” he told James Thompson and Susan Raines, “I would buy one for Lillian’s [his wife] birthday, so we have quite a collection. A poetic person, who wrote little texts to go with his painting.”⁸ The exhibition included an untitled green, white, and black geometric painting by Bess, “just large enough to be the size of a big head,” as Schapiro analogized, a fitting scale for an artist who painted the visions that lived in his mind.⁹ The painting was installed high up on the wall, stacked above Loren MacIver’s (1909–1998) Green Votive Lights (1946), a serial painting that anticipated Pop Art with five symmetrical rows, each containing fourteen green votive candles, painted to scale, all lit. Bess’s diminutive painting holds its own, however, hovering over the wall like an icon.

Schapiro cofounded the short-lived publications Marxist Quarterly and later Dissent. He took part in the left-wing coalition Popular Front along with artists Stuart Davis, Philip Guston, and Mark Rothko (see fig. 3), all of whom were included in the exhibition. Davis edited Art Front, and in 1936 Schapiro wrote two essays for it: “The Social Bases of Art,” which outlined an art-historical methodology for incorporating social, historical, and psychological context; and the forceful, “Race, Nationality and Art,” in which Schapiro distilled far-right nationalism’s corruption of the social compact in Europe and in the United States. He argued that “the pretense of peoples [is] that they are eternally different from and superior to others and are therefore justified in oppressing them,” and this animates the far right’s opposition to cultural pluralism. Nationalism was (and is) premised on monoculture. He averred that “racial theories of fascism call constantly on the traditions of art; its chief emblems are drawn from ancient motifs of ornament”—the swastika being a central example—and this distortion of culture is the ostensible justification for racial superiority. The fascist position leads inexorably toward injustice, because in its conception, “the great national art can issue only from those who really belong to the nation,” and “Immigration of foreigners, mixture of peoples, dilutes the national strain and leads to inferior hybrid arts” due to “alien influences.”¹⁰ Schapiro’s liberal imagination saw difference as the key ingredient for vitality. This explains why he refused to prefer one mode of expression over another and why Bui’s curatorial logic—following Schapiro’s lead—juxtaposed what appear like vastly different styles. At their root, the artists responded to their shared social context.

Bui met Meyer and his wife, Lillian Milgram Schapiro, in 1986 when Bui was a graduate student at the New York Studio School in Greenwich Village. He had been asked to retrieve an artwork owned by Schapiro for an exhibition at the school. Upon arrival at Schapiro’s townhouse, where art hung salon style throughout, Bui was invited into an arrangement of informal, independent study. According to Will Corwin’s perceptive profile, “Bui would borrow, read and discuss a different classic,” selected by Schapiro, for each visit, and their friendship blossomed.¹¹ Schapiro’s life became Bui’s model: to be curious about the past, to be awake to all that is produced in your time—and to found publications that reflect your worldview. It is a “positive” concept of liberty, the scholar C. Oliver O’Donnell explains, that equates Marxist ideas about freedom “with the active power of self-realization and self-determination.”¹² Of course poverty and injustice impede freedom to live the self-actualized life, and part of Schapiro’s scholarship and activism supported the conditions to make self-actualization possible. This was why Schapiro connected with Bui, new to New York City, broke and living on a stipend. It is why so many people involved in the arts across styles and polemics found an alliance with Schapiro.

Perhaps Bui’s strongest claim as custodian of Schapiro’s legacy was evident in the middle of the exhibition: a recreated shrine to Schapiro from his Brooklyn apartment (fig. 5). In the center was a mirror and surrounding it were a wooden mask originally gifted to Schapiro from André Breton; a handcrafted wooden bench and two figurines, a gift to Schapiro from Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; and a small painting of a barn by Lillian Schapiro. Everything else, twenty drawings and paintings and two sculptures, were made by Schapiro: careful renderings of artworks Schapiro saw in European museums and churches, self-portraits, abstract designs, carved wooden figures, and a 1954 drawing—possibly depicting Saint Peter’s Basilica from a perch along the Tiber River and dedicated “for my dear friend Phong Bui, Meyer Schapiro.” Singing in Unison, Part 13: Homage to Meyer Schapiro represents the twentieth century’s crosscurrents and friendships. Bui’s anti-hierarchal installation compels the viewer to explore art as Schapiro did, in “contemplativeness and communion with the work of another human being,” which reminds us that unity is possible.¹³ From difference we produce harmony.

July 7, 2026: An earlier version of this article misspelled one instance of Phong H. Bui’s name.

Cite this article: Melissa Rachleff, review of Singing in Unison, Part 13: Homage to Meyer Schapiro, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20962.

Notes

When I joined the Newport Historical Society (NHS) in Rhode Island as a summer scholar in 2021, I saw an opportunity to push my nascent career in metadata toward the intersection of memory work and social justice. The institutional description and preservation of historical documents has traditionally been marked by colonialism and racism, creating silences where the stories of marginalized people should be.¹ “Voices from the NHS Archives,” a four-year research project, worked to fill these silences. This type of reparative work, alongside a wide range of activism in the cultural heritage field, is what keeps libraries, archives, and museums relevant. I returned to the NHS in 2023 as a research fellow and in the following year became the visiting curator. In partnership with H2 Design Studio, Kaela Bleho and I set out to turn the “Voices” research into a dynamic exhibition that invited the public to explore our findings.

A Name, A Voice, A Life: The Black Newporters of the 17th–19th Centuries was on display at the Richard I. Burnham Resource Center from May to November 2024. Emphasizing themes of personhood and remembrance, it practiced a restorative rereading of the historical record and centered five freed people: Arthur Tikey, Obour Collins, Mereah Brenton, Robert Wainwood, and Hannibal Collins. We recognized that an exhibition of documents would be challenging for visitors to connect with, and we wanted to demonstrate that colonial Newport’s Black history was more than documents, numbers, and footnotes. To extend our text-based narratives and forge deeper connections within the Rhode Island community, we commissioned three Rhode Island–based contemporary artists—Cat Laine, Eric Telfort, and Toby Sisson—to create art that spoke to three of the featured Newporters’ lives and experiences.

Although art has always been a medium for grappling with contentious subjects, the “archival turn” in contemporary art at the start of the twenty-first century signaled a rapidly expanding interest in the concepts of historicity, power, knowledge, and memory.² Among the many ways artists have engaged with the archive, the concept of the imagined record—those records which are purely speculative or otherwise inaccessible—is key, since it is a powerful tool for beginning to grapple with a wealth of archival silences.³ Laine’s, Telfort’s, and Sisson’s artworks are manifestations of imagined records. Based on the available historical evidence, these pieces actualize possibilities and give us a compelling way of pushing back against the so-called neutrality of archives and museums, which establish whiteness as the norm.

Cat Laine (née Catherine Lainé) focused on Obour Collins, using self-portraiture to imagine the interiority of Collins as a woman most likely stolen from her homeland (fig. 1). Laine played with the notions of memory and home in a nonlinear fashion inspired, at least in part, by Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Eric Telfort painted Mereah Brenton, endeavoring to embody the spirit of this fifty-year-old woman who witnessed the birth of a nation (fig. 2). Telfort depicted her dignity and standing as a community healer against a turbulent historical backdrop. Toby Sisson created a piece that spoke to Robert Wainwood’s relentless pursuit of freedom (fig. 3). Through abstraction, Sisson relied on color and shape as a means of communicating Wainwood’s journey to emancipation, a path that the historical record reveals was marked by re-enslavement and a protracted legal battle for freedom.

By exhibiting these artistic records alongside historical documents, ranging from vital records in church registers and probate records to manumission records and family papers, A Name, A Voice, A Life blended the actual with the possible. All history is an interpretation of the available evidence, and our interpretations are inevitably shaped by our internal biases, intentionally or otherwise. The artworks and the exhibition as a whole were simultaneously acknowledgments and refusals of archival silence. From the exhibition’s inception, Bleho and I positioned it not as a definitive story but a reflection on what we had learned so far. It was both challenging and liberating to assume the role of authority (as researcher and curator) while openly embracing the unknown. Laine, Telfort, and Sisson had taken on the roles of both artist and historian in the creation of their imagined records, demonstrating that the activation of imagination in the spaces between the available records need not be antithetical to historical fact. In doing so, they helped breathe life back into the spaces where it was once stolen from Black and Indigenous people of color.

Cite this article: Zoe Hume, “Navigating Archival Silences Through Art,” in “Call and Response: DEIA Tensions in Scholarship, Practice, and National Identity,” Colloquium, edited by Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Frederica Simmons, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20929.

Notes

In a journey through art, architecture, and nature, Visions of America is the opening chapter of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s complete reinstallation of the collection of five centuries of American art. The new presentation reveals the museum’s commitment over the last six years to craft and Indigenous art, foregrounding these practices as central to the story of American art. In five thematic sections, Visions of America shifts how American art can be experienced and understood.

As guests cross the threshold into the “We” section, an arresting example of Arkansas quartz crystal stands at the center of the gallery (fig. 1). The natural marvel signals a clear sense of place and reveals the earth as a creator of objects of aesthetic beauty on par with artworks reflecting America. All around, portraits of ordinary to world-famous American figures in real and imagined settings greet visitors. Collection icon Rosie the Riveter (1943) by Norman Rockwell appears beyond two new commissions, “Sheyahtse” Warrior (2024) by Jeri Redcorn (Caddo/Potawatomi) and K’Gui Stah Gyah, Gyah Stah Gyah (The Kiowa World: As We Have Always Been, As We Are, As We Will Be) (2025) by Teri Greeves (Kiowa), her largest work to date. Redcorn’s ceramic head with copper designs and earrings, and Greeves’s beaded and hand-dyed silk triptych representing past, present and future Kiowa women, convey feelings of strength and resilience that reverberate through the gallery.

The following sections—”Dreaming,” “Nature,” “Making Our Mark,” and “We the People”—each revolve around large-scale works creating focal points. “Dreaming” embraces imagination, possibility, and reinvention through Nicholas Galanin’s (Lingít and Unangax̂) recombined bronze totem I think it goes like this (memory and interference) (2024) and Joseph Stella’s Tree of My Life (1919), on loan from sibling collection Art Bridges. “Nature” explores relationships between people, the earth, and materials. Raven Halfmoon’s clay Caddo Woman Warrior (2021) and a case of Norm Sartorius’s inventively carved wooden spoons demonstrate artists pushing the expressive limits of a medium. The colorful confetti stained‑glass of Tiffany Studios’ Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window) (1917), newly conserved and illuminated, prompts a heightened awareness of nature’s details and artists’ approaches to light.

“Making Our Mark” revolves around Tomokazu Matsuyama’s You, One Me Erase (2023), a twenty‑one‑foot‑wide painting recreating art and objects from across art history in an imaginary interior. Cobalt‑blue furniture matching the sofas depicted in the painting blurs boundaries between the canvas and the gallery. This extension of the painting encourages visitors to feel a part of the art and take it all in, including the adjacent ceramic wall installation, Betty Woodman’s House of the South (1996).

“We the People” explores the unfolding story of America. Thousands of varied shoelaces making up Nari Ward’s We the People (black version) (2015) dangle before images of faith and family, everyday life and labor, and national symbols.

Aligning with the museum’s fifteenth anniversary and expansion in 2026, Visions of America celebrates the role of artists in shaping our sense of identity and possibility.

Cite this article: Austen Barron Bailly, “Visions of America at Crystal Bridges,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21012.

Visitors to Gallery 13 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco encounter three striking works by the Bay Area–based Abstract Expressionists Bernice Bing (1936–1998), Sonia Gechtoff (1926–2018), and Zoe Longfield (1924–2013) (fig. 1). All three artists developed their signature styles while living in San Francisco and studying at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA, later the San Francisco Art Institute). In the mid- to late 1940s, artists associated with the New York School, such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, taught at the CSFA and transformed the school into an important center on the West Coast for Abstract Expressionism.

Gechtoff’s work Lucia and the Wave (1961–62) was recently acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and it is the first painting by this pioneering Abstract Expressionist artist to enter the American art collection at the de Young. Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia and attended the CSFA from 1952 to 1953. She returned to teach at the school in 1957, the year she had a solo exhibition at what was then called the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. In Lucia and the Wave, Gechtoff used lush, painterly brushstrokes and bold color relationships to express the drama and poetry of the natural world, with its intense creative and destructive energies. The name Lucia in the title stems from the Latin word lux and the Italian word luce, meaning light. It may relate to the burst of brilliant, flame-like colors at the center of the composition. Above, the swirling strokes of black, white, and blue paint evoke a vortex or a cresting wave, surrounded by roiling green waters.

Longfield’s painting Glacier (1949) is also a new addition to the de Young’s collection. Longfield was born in San Francisco and studied at the CSFA from 1947 to 1949. She was recognized early on for her talent and was one of a small number of artists invited to take Still’s coveted graduate painting seminar at the CSFA. Inspired by Still’s noncommercial approach to art making, twelve of his students, including Longfield, cofounded the co-operative Metart Gallery in San Francisco, in April 1949. Longfield exhibited Glacier (originally titled No. 9) in her December 1949 solo exhibition at Metart Gallery. With its richly layered colors and forms reminiscent of icy crags and precipices, Glacier has a magnetic presence that pulls the viewer in and invites quiet and prolonged contemplation.

Born in San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood, Bing, an artist and activist known to family and friends by her nickname “Bingo,” studied at the CSFA from 1957 to 1961. Bing created Mayacamas No. 6, March 12, 1963 (1963) during a three-year stay at the Mayacamas Vineyard in the Napa Valley, where she harvested, bottled, and labeled wines, ran the tasting room, and gave tours. She was inspired by the expansive landscape surrounding the winery, which she depicted in Mayacamas No. 6 using loosely brushed, broad planes of both vibrant and earth-toned colors. Bing later described the “overpowering spirituality that one feels when one is in a natural environment.”¹

These lyrical and powerfully expressive works reveal the important contributions of Bing, Gechtoff, and Longfield to the development of postwar American abstraction. Their nature-based compositions resonate with the work of other Bay Area artists represented in the de Young Museum’s Gallery 13, such as Jay DeFeo and Richard Diebenkorn, who also merged their sensory and emotional impressions of the Northern California landscape with the gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism.

Cite this article: Emma Acker, “Bay Area Abstract Expressionist Display at the de Young Museum,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21002.

Notes

On this 250th anniversary of the United States’ “founding,” there are calls to name the country’s strength. As I reflect on what strength means, I recall Charleston, South Carolina, ten years ago, in 2016, when strength became a mask and a spectacle. That moment marked one year after the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church, when the phrase #CharlestonStrong blanketed storefronts and tourism advertisements and echoed throughout civic speeches. It offered resilience without reckoning. Unity without structural change. Forgiveness without justice.

After a year of #CharlestonStrong and the liberal and denialist projections it carried, we decided to interrupt the script.

Earlier that spring, organizers from Southerners on New Ground (SONG) met with the artist-activist group AgitArte. This cultural organizing collective uses performance to dramatize state violence and grief.¹ From them, we learned a form: Build a machine out of bodies. Expose what operates invisibly. Construct repetition. Escalate contradictions. And watch it explode.

On a gray, wind-heavy afternoon at Waterfront Park in Charleston, we performed what we called the #CharlestonStrong Machine (fig. 1). Tourists walked behind us along the harbor. The water formed the backdrop. We wore plain white T-shirts, visually neutral and almost uniform. I began the loop: “We’re better than Ferguson. We’re better than Baltimore.” A Black organizer stepped into frame and raised a Black Power salute. A white woman entered and yanked their arm down, yelling, “All Lives Matter.” The sequence repeated.

Another person entered the frame, dropped to their knees in prayer, looping, “We are hurting.” A man holding a camera appeared and asked, “Where’s the church?” Another white participant stepped forward, patting backs, their back, mine, the All Lives Matter chanter’s—a choreography of congratulatory liberalism. Behind them, someone sighed loudly: “Oh my gosh.”

We operated in repetition. Mechanical. Unfeeling. Steady.

The machine made visible how Charleston itself was operating: grief converted into branding, racial terror absorbed into civic pride, white denial moving like muscle memory. Spectators paused. Some filmed. Most kept walking. The harbor wind cut through our loops.

Then we stopped.

As the wind lifted the white fabric of our shirts, the person who had been kneeling said, “This is a #CharlestonStrong machine. It is a living, breathing mechanism that thrives off of grief tourism and willful ignorance; a way of patting oneself on the back for profiting off of violence and historic suffering. This is not what a strong Charleston looks like. We are hurting.”

The loops resumed, louder, with more rage, pain, and urgency: “We’re better than Ferguson.” “All Lives Matter.” “Where’s the church?” “We are hurting.” The contradictions collided until the noise became unbearable. Then we stopped again. I placed a white flower on the ground and walked away.²

This kind of guerrilla theater was not embellishment; it was infrastructure. The action did not ask for institutional validation. It did not wait for museum walls. It used public space as its stage and repetition as its medium. The waterfront, layered with tourism, with histories of enslavement and trade, became a temporary site of exposure. The city’s antebellum mystique cracked, even if only for a moment.

The machine functioned as a counter-monument. Not cast in bronze, no permanence, no plaque. Instead, it staged the mechanics of denial. The white shirts became a blank canvas onto which spectators projected themselves. The choreography mapped how white liberalism performs solidarity while suppressing Black grief. The loops mirrored how slogans circulate faster than structural transformation.

This form did not come from nowhere. Across the South, queer organizers have long relied on embodied action to surface what the state prefers to keep abstract. From die-ins to pride marches that double as protests, performance has functioned as both an archive and a tactic. The collaboration between SONG and AgitArte placed #CharlestonStrong Machine within a longer lineage of cultural organizing in which the body becomes medium, stage, and evidence. Just days before we began building the machine, the Pulse nightclub massacre had unfolded, and the weight of that violence sat with us as we gathered.

In the wake of the massacres at both Mother Emanuel Church and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, days before their one-year anniversaries, public officials reached quickly for new slogans: “Orlando Strong” and “Charleston Strong.” Strength became shorthand for silence. The machine refused that closure. It insisted that mourning is political. That grief cannot be hashtagged into resolution. That unity without accountability is choreography.

As the United States prepares to celebrate its semiquincentennial, the question is not whether freedom exists but how it is staged—and for whom. The #CharlestonStrong Machine exposed how narratives of national resilience depend on the suppression of Black suffering. It showed that organizing itself can function as visual culture: ephemeral, embodied, confrontational.

The flowers were gone by morning.

The script was not.

Cite this article: Kamau Pope, “The #CharlestonStrong Machine,” in “Call and Response: DEIA Tensions in Scholarship, Practice, and National Identity,” Colloquium, edited by Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Frederica Simmons, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20935.

Notes

Curated by: Gwenolee Zürcher

Exhibition schedule: Zürcher Gallery, New York, May 17–July 22, 2025

Taking leading publications on American Minimalism as a guide, one would be excused for thinking that the inventive and versatile New York artist Alice Adams, age ninety-five, does not exist.¹ Yet Adams’s oeuvre—now spanning over seventy years—boasts an impressive and eclectic body of work, mostly wood, metal, and foam sculptures; tapestries; and public art across the United States. The twenty-object show at the Zürcher Gallery in New York, which represents Adams, followed on the heels of Zürcher’s 2023 and 2024 shows featuring other works by Adams from the 1960s to 2023. The latest show, titled Alice Adams: Sculpture and Drawings, 1964–2025, was a welcome chance to elevate Adams’s profile and her place among prominent American Minimalists, as well as to ponder why this recognition has been so long delayed.

The exhibition consisted of nineteen objects made by Adams—eight wooden sculptures, a wall-mounted latex-and-foam object, and ten works on paper—along with one historically significant exhibition poster from 1966, described below. Gwenolee Zürcher, the gallery’s owner and curator, received approval from Adams for curatorial decisions. In addition to hosting three Adams shows in as many years, Zürcher has also published a thoughtful, comprehensive 209-page catalogue of Adams’s art, freely available online.² Prior to the 2023 Zürcher exhibition, Adams’s last solo show in New York City took place forty-two years earlier at the Hal Bromm Gallery in spring 1981.³

Along with the Zürcher show, Adams has recently garnered international attention with the concurrent exhibition Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams (June 20–September 14, 2025) at the Courtauld Gallery in London, the first presentation of her work in the United Kingdom.⁴ The Courtauld show brought together a small but notable group of objects by the three artists nearly sixty years after the 1966 Eccentric Abstraction show at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, curated by Lucy Lippard, which featured eight artists and helped launch the careers of Adams, Bourgeois, and Hesse. The Courtauld included a number of Adams’s well-known early pieces, including a cotton-cord-and-rope object (Sheath, 1964); seven wooden beams leaning against a wall (Resin Corner Pieces, 1967); and a steel-cable-and-metal-plate object (Threaded Drain Plate, 1964) (the second and third courtesy of Zürcher). Although Lippard herself had referred to Adams’s “animate references” as “erotic and often humorous,” Adams’s Courtauld pieces were less erotically suggestive than those of Bourgeois and Hesse, nor did the objects in the Zürcher show center on that theme.⁵ Nevertheless, a promotional video of the Courtauld exhibit, with curators discussing the three artists and their work, was played at Zürcher for visitors interested to learn more, and the Zürcher exhibition helpfully included a 1966 poster for the Fischbach show, linking past and present, the New York and Courtland shows.

Born in New York in 1930, Adams received her bachelor’s in fine arts in painting from Columbia University in 1953, where she also studied architecture with the art historian Meyer Schapiro. Adams then spent a highly formative year in Aubusson, France, studying tapestry on a French government fellowship, calling it “a life-changing experience.”⁶ As Adams recounts, while in France, she “visited many Romanesque churches and their frescos” and photographed architectural ruins.⁷ Since the mid-1950s, Adams mostly lived and worked in New York City, cofounding an influential co-op gallery at 55 Mercer Street in 1970.⁸ After making tapestry- and rope-based objects in the 1950s and early 1960s, she experimented with diverse media in her sculptural practice, including steel cables and chains, aluminum, polyurethane foam, latex, plaster, and, of course, wood.⁹ Adams created large site-specific art installations, such as Leveling (1977–86) in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and Shorings (1978–79) in Lewiston, New York.¹⁰ In the 1980s, she shifted to creating public art in settings such as universities, parks, and mass-transit hubs, like the Denver International Airport and Seattle’s mass-transit system.¹¹

Although the objects in Zürcher’s latest show offered an inevitably selective look at Adam’s art making, they were nevertheless representative of central preoccupations and motifs, as well as technical strategies, in her artistic practice across the decades. Two iconic early works—Column with Frame for Two Arches (1973; figs. 1a–b) and Column with Three Arches Springing (1974; figs. 2a–b)—were, for me, the stars of the show. As Adams observes, “There is a very strong relationship to architecture in my work,” an affinity made vivid in these sculptures.¹² Both are larger-than-human scale and constructed using a base made of narrow rectangular wooden segments hammered one above another into long vertical beams; atop the base are lyrical embellished components. The wooden surfaces are roughly hewn and coarsely textured; nails are driven in without aspiring to perfect linearity or excessive effort to mask the art-making process. The sensibility is that of unpretentious woodshop mastery—entirely unlike the sleek, industrially fabricated objects of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin or the flawlessly geometric modular structures of Sol LeWitt from the mid-1960s—against which Adams implicitly appears to rebel. One thinks, rather, of Carl Andre’s wooden sculptures, including Pyramid (1959), Last Ladder (1959), and Hern (1960); Mark Di Suvero’s wooden pieces; and even some aspects of Lucas  Samaras’s densely intricate sculptures, like Box #3 (1962–63).¹³

Column with Three Arches Springing arcs upward and curves toward the viewer, its concave slope echoing the Romanesque semicircular arches that Adams had photographed in France or, perhaps, a ship’s elegant bow.¹⁴ Column with Frame for Two Arches is more jagged and chaotic, featuring two antler-like emanations made of slender, curving wooden pieces and a complex web of subcomponents. Each shift in perspective discloses new vantage points onto textural details and the interplay of forms, so that the viewer feels somewhat overwhelmed, unable easily to bring the works under a single conceptual category. Hermeneutically dense and almost oracular, these sculptures are perhaps better described as primordial than Minimalist, content to just be without a polemical aim or program. This quality is both a strength and an Achilles’ heel of Adams’s oeuvre—and may be one clue to why her art has received less critical scrutiny over the years than that of many of her contemporaries, such as Eva Hesse.

Six of Adam’s recent sculptures served as intriguing counterpoints, though none rivaled the older sculptures in formal ingenuity and aesthetic force. Column with Three One-Half Arches II (2025) rhymed most clearly with the early pieces in terms of materials, composition, and title. A rectangular wooden anchoring structure created a hollow inner compartment with vertical beams of contrasting heights jutting out from it. The sculpture curved at the top in three linked concave segments, terminating where an architectural keystone would have been, again reminiscent of a support column, with the haunch’s elegant shape accentuated by thicker wooden segments. Despite obvious affinities with Column with Three Arches Springing, this work was less striking overall. I wondered, too, about the practicalities of fashioning such a large-scale object and whether Adams relied on assistants to construct it.

Yet another paired composition—here, integrated into a single sculpture titled Outside In (2024)—consisted of two wooden panels, akin to easels, made up of thirty or so rectangular wooden pieces affixed to a large supporting apparatus. One panel was made of light wood; its Janus-faced companion was painted black, recalling the Linlithgo colors. The panels resembled two people standing with their backs nearly touching, slightly off-center, gazing in opposite directions. Adams ably incorporated subtle asymmetries into the composition, with one panel elevated above the other, the floor supports positioned asymmetrically, and the two planar elements linked by both horizontal and diagonal beams. This work, too, must be seen in context of Adams’s earlier kindred sculptures, such as Long Wall (1973) and Four Corners (1972).

Finally, a pair of deceptively simple sculptures, the smallest on view—Sculpture 1 (2025) and Small Sculpture 2 (2025)—were placed side by side on a windowsill. These again featured rectangular wooden strips, three facing each direction and nailed in staggered cross-shaped formation into a vertical block sitting atop a wooden platform. The companion piece was almost identical, except that three of its wooden segments varied in length, decreasing in size from top to bottom. The simplicity of these sculptures was belied by their deft scaling and assured execution, recalling Adams’s earlier works like Cross Section (1974) and Wall Section B (1974). Although the gallery’s faded, uneven wood plank floors, white support columns, and conspicuous ceiling beams produced intriguing resonances with Adams’s wooden objects across the show, I found that the surfeit of wood and columnal elements in the gallery ultimately made it more challenging for her pieces to stand out than they might have in a more neutral space (fig. 4).

Alongside Adams’s wooden sculptures, a wall-mounted, human-scale sculpture made of foam rubber, latex, and acrylic paint was given pride of place on one of the walls. Latex Covered Foam Construction (1970; fig. 5) is one of several such pieces that Adams fabricated in the late 1960s (along with one in 2017).¹⁶ A bit off-putting, the bulbous latex mass looks like a three-dimensional field with faded marshmallow-like protrusions in diagonal rows, the edge pieces sticking out to avoid straight borders. The undulating, quiltlike texture brings to mind Adams’s expertise in woven work and patterns. The sculpture has the quality of a sedimented layer of rock or wall insulation, recalling Adams’s pieces featuring walls, floors, and drywall.¹⁷

The repeating shapes and diagonal design of Latex Covered Foam Construction echo the composition of her works on paper or vellum, mostly from 2018 to 2024. Nine were made with felt pen or pencil and featured repetitive hexagonals, L shapes, and other patterns drawn by hand in red or black ink with no pretense of exactitude. The works embodied a tension between geometric perfection and an urge to resist a Platonic ideal by emphasizing the human and imperfect, a tension found in many of Adams’s works. One of the two older drawings, Two Columns on Graph Paper (1964–65), features a dark gray columnar shape paired with a more diminutive shape to its left arcing toward it. The standout work was probably Woodlathe Print #2 (1970), hung in an alcove with Column with Three Arches Springing. An homage to materials central to Adams’s art, the print depicts seven wooden beams resembling two-by-fours—six horizontal and one vertical—as impressionistic, unfinished forms in striking, dark blue ink.¹⁸ Running to the margins, the wooden elements dominate the field, telegraphing the primacy of wood in Adams’s aesthetic.

Although it is difficult to diagnose why Adams’s art has not been as widely recognized as it deserves, Alice Adams: Sculpture and Drawings, 1964–2025 offered some insights. What struck me most was how simultaneously thought-provoking yet also self-contained, self-effacing, and hard to pin down some of the works were. Their antipolemical quality—appearing indifferent to, rather than vying for, the viewer’s gaze (which may also be a trait of the artist herself)—likely has something to do with their underappreciated status. Other possible factors are that Adams was initially a weaver rather than a sculptor, that her styles and media kept shifting over time, and that gender bias was common in the mid- to late twentieth-century art world.¹⁹

Overall, the show’s works from the 1960s and ’70s embodied greater compositional subtlety and imaginative power than the more recent pieces. The five early works highlighted above—two columnar sculptures, one latex installation, and two works on paper—showcased Adams’s distinctive strengths across three different media. This exhibition, together with Zürcher’s 2023 and 2024 shows, the Courtauld retrospective, and accompanying publications, are welcome and overdue efforts to highlight the ingenuity and breadth of Adams’s art and to begin to raise her profile.²⁰ One hopes that authors of books and compendiums on Minimalist art, where Adams deserves a more prominent place, take note.²¹

Cite this article: Mark L. Hanin, review of Alice Adams: Sculpture and Drawings, 1964–2025, Zürcher Gallery, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20896.

Notes

In Crossing Waters—a powerful memorial of the transatlantic slave trade—artist Thornton Dial Sr. (1928–2016) uses a palette of blue, purple, and white paint and a web of cloth strips to mimic light rippling across open water after a shipwreck (fig. 1). The absent vessel has sunk beneath the surface, leaving an oval of stillness in its wake as wreckage collects around the border. In the lower right, Dial includes the harrowing detail of a small figurine repainted to depict a white enslaver holding the headless body of a Black man. This addition emphasizes the brutality of enslavement and underscores the artist’s interest in reusing material to confront the most difficult episodes of world history. In this way, even without formal artistic training, Dial participates in the tradition of history painters whose choice of subject matter emphasized those formative events that speak to larger ideas of a people, their history, or their country. Indeed, the water crossing Dial chose to depict is no less foundational to American nationhood than the more art-historically ubiquitous image of George Washington’s voyage across the Delaware River.

As the High Museum of Art in Atlanta prepares to celebrate its centennial in October 2026, a new presentation of its American galleries featuring unprecedented cross-collection dialogues, such as Dial’s Crossing Waters, widens the scope of our focus on the so-called American art canon.¹ This refreshed installation draws on five of the museum’s seven collecting areas to create a story of American cultural production that only the High can tell. One of the principles of this reinstallation is to convey that there has never been a singular way to be or become an artist in the United States, evidenced by a collection rich with creators who took diverse paths to achieve mastery of form and style as well as depth of signification.

This reinstallation traces a visual journey that spans early American design and the museum’s celebrated Neoclassical sculpture collection to a pluralistic view of modern art and design between the World Wars. Although these new galleries remain chronologically organized, transhistorical moments occur throughout, represented by artists from the Folk and Self-Taught, Decorative Arts and Design, Modern and Contemporary, and Photography departments—from vanessa german and Carolyn Mazloomi to Robell Awake, Jiha Moon, Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others—who enrich conversations with historic makers. The didactic program will also dive into iconic eras, schools, and breaks from convention in American art history. It includes new research on everything from Henry Inman’s nineteenth-century racializing portraits of Indigenous leaders to the identity politics surrounding Southern furniture production.

If the “canon” of American art can be thought of as a construction, then our task is to look carefully and fully at the diverse breadth of achievements by the many artists and makers who lived, practiced, or traveled to the United States to create their work. As we grow the collection and deepen our understanding of these objects, the galleries will also change, forming an ongoing presentation that seeks to undo hierarchical assumptions while centering the questions, provocations, and creativity of these artists within their time and in ours today.

Cite this article: Katherine Jentleson and Anni A. Pullagura, “New ‘Crossings’ in the Collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21046.

Notes

Curated by: Siri Engberg (Walker Art Center) and Tarah Hogue (Remai Modern), with Brandon Eng (Walker Art Center)

Exhibition Schedule: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, October 18, 2025–February 15, 2026; Remai Modern, SK, April 25–October 4, 2026

Exhibition catalogue: Tarah Hogue and Siri Engberg, eds. Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, exh. cat. Walker Art Center, distributed by D.A.P. Exclusive, 2025. 320 pgs. Hardcover: $50.00 (ISBN: 9781935963349)

Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976), the award-winning Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist, defines her multimedia artistic practice as an “expression of love.”¹ This intimate and relational ethos does not mean that she avoids addressing past or present injustices in her artwork but rather that she does so in the spirit of collective growth. Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, the artist’s midcareer retrospective, which opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, bears out this vision of artmaking as an act of generosity shared within and across diverse communities. Organized into four thematic sections chosen by the artist herself—“See,” “Honor,” “Nurture,” and “Celebrate”—the Walker’s survey of White Hawk’s oeuvre is a paean to the communities she belongs to and the connections that bind us all. In the final months of the Walker’s installation, amid a period of heated public demonstrations, the exhibition’s emphasis on the triumphant power of art to build and sustain human connection gained greater urgency than curators Siri Engberg and Tarah Hogue could possibly have predicted.

The exhibition opened with a challenge to dominant histories of Western modernism and abstract art. In a series of introductory galleries, selections from White Hawk’s early career evidence her dedication to recognizing and upholding the influence of Indigenous abstraction. Drawing on parallels between Lakota aesthetics and strategies employed by mid-twentieth-century American modernists, White Hawk proposes a more plural history of abstraction. These works reflect White Hawk’s eclectic artistic training at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas; the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While studying for her MFA at Wisconsin, White Hawk began to recognize that she and her peers had learned different histories of art. Canvases like Master’s Study (2011) bridge the gap between these different approaches and between distinct lexicons of abstraction. Thick, horizontal lines in red, white, and black alternate irregularly to fill the square canvas, interspersed by thinner, bright blue, hyphenated lines. Combining the style of a Diné “chief’s blanket” with the form of Mark Rothko’s Color Field paintings, White Hawk uplifts an alternative canon of masterworks. Other pieces assembled under the theme “See” introduce viewers to White Hawk’s savvy intermedial negotiations: beads stitched on antique ledger paper, painted quillwork, and the first of several sculptural installations that punctuate the gallery’s wide throughways.

Sculptures from White Hawk’s Carry series consist of a large copper bucket and ladle wrapped by intricately beaded skirts and fringed by long buckskin strips, whose ends gather on the plinths below like an elaborate root system (fig. 1). An invisible armature lends these sculptures a commanding yet spectral presence in the gallery. A label for the series explains that White Hawk wanted to challenge the tendency to relegate craft to anthropological spaces, a vision she accomplishes through imposing scale and the honorific adornment of utilitarian objects in a kind of regalia. In their catalogue essay, Hogue and Engberg articulate how these sculptures—first introduced in “See” and appearing again in the sections “Honor” and “Nurture”—reveal how “Indigenous abstraction extends beyond form” to include the “relational and functional aspects of objects.”² Like the root system in which they terminate, these sculptural forms anchor the exhibition in an aesthetic and artistic practice that is as engaged with revising an art-historical canon as it is in honoring the resilience of those historically excluded from it.

Women are often the recipients of White Hawk’s honorific artwork. In another series, Takes Care of Them (2019), White Hawk commemorates the way women lead, nurture, protect, and create for their families and communities. The English words, paired with the Lakota concepts they approximate, provide the title for a series of four prints abstracted from Plains women’s dresses. The four dresses serve as portraits (including one of the artist’s mother) and as surrogate protectors. They evoke the US military veterans who stand at the four directions during a Wabléniča Ceremony to welcome back individuals removed from Indigenous communities by adoption or foster care. The artist’s mother, Sandy White Hawk, has been instrumental in spearheading this healing ceremony.³

This careful attention to women’s artistry and community work runs throughout Dyani White Hawk: Love Language. Several of White Hawk’s large-scale paintings pay homage to female relatives and art forms traditionally made by women such as star quilts. In two 2015 canvases, Wičháȟpi Wakíŋyaŋ Wíŋyaŋ Wíŋyaŋ (Thunder Star Woman) and Čhokáta Nažiŋ Wíŋyaŋ (Stands in the Center Woman), White Hawk celebrates women’s inventive incorporation of trade goods, like calico, into a Lakota aesthetic. Other recurrent motifs, like moccasin vamps, attest to White Hawk’s generosity as an artist and curator. These elliptical shapes serve, in the artist’s words, as “an entry point for Native audiences . . . who aren’t art historians or art students” to offer an “immediate point of recognition.”⁴ Several of these vamps reference a long history of Indigenous resistance to what historian Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux), echoing his grandfather, calls “the paper world” of colonialism⁵—that is to say, the bureaucratic forms and systems used to manage Indigenous Peoples and their lands. Antique ledger paper stitched over with beads or acrylic paint tether White Hawk’s abstracted vamps to the Plains artists of the nineteenth century, who repurposed pages from accounting books to record their lives.

Although themes and motifs recur, White Hawk’s body of work spans media and scalar extremes. This diversity is a testament to her collaborative spirit. In the series of photographs I Am Your Relative (fig. 2), White Hawk worked closely with photographer Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) to document a performance she first staged three years earlier at a women’s rights forum in Minneapolis. Installed at the top of a shallow staircase, these six, nearly life-size photographs confronted viewers at the threshold between two galleries. Each woman wears a ribbon skirt from her tribe with a lettered black t-shirt that, read together, proclaim: “I am/ more than your desire/ more than your fantasy/ more than a mascot/ ancestral love prayer sacrifice/ your relative.” This commanding photographic installation refutes stereotypes and highlights the real stakes of representation in Indigenous women’s lives. It also speaks to White Hawk’s deepening engagement with language—a concept she explored further in the nearby eight-channel video installation LISTEN (2020). On each monitor, a woman speaks her Indigenous language interspersed with footage from her tribal homelands. An insightful catalogue essay by Mary V. Bordeaux (Sicangu/Oglala Lakota) describes the work as an invitation to an “intimate act of communal deep listening,” rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing.⁶ For some visitors it is an introduction to languages previously unheard, while for others it is an affirming celebration of familiar sounds. Couches adorned with throw blankets and pillows designed by White Hawk and produced by Minnesota’s Faribault Woolen Mills offered a comfortable place to sit and reflect.

The final section of the exhibition, “Celebrate,” was an exploration of scale. The new monumental mosaic sculpture Infinite We (fig. 3) makes the kapémni—an important symbol in Lakota cosmology and a longstanding interest of White Hawk’s—three-dimensional for the first time in the artist’s work, taking on a towering form. Composed of two triangles joined at their points, this hourglass symbol for the connections between the “expansive star world above and the grounded world of the Plains below” recurs throughout White Hawk’s oeuvre.⁷ Made with colored enamel, copper, and brass, the ten-foot-tall Infinite We is inviting despite its immense scale. The air that flows around its tapered axis seems to anchor the sculpture and its viewers in the same breath.

In the final room of the exhibition, another tower dominates, this one rectilinear and ornately decorated with sparkling seed beads. The columnar form of Visiting (2024) is an homage to Minnesota-based artists George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe) and Jim Denomie (Lac Courte Oreille Ojibwe), while its beadwork is a tribute to the artists who work with White Hawk in her studio. The tower consists of strips beaded by White Hawk’s studio team and assembled like a puzzle. A nearby interactive label gave viewers the opportunity to feel the beadwork and see the difference between lane-stitch and loomed work. Similar touch stations scattered throughout the exhibition also featured quillwork and buckskin. Unlike the uniform strips of color that make up the adjacent Wopila|Lineage (2022), which first debuted at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, White Hawk encouraged her studio workers to bring their own vision and creativity to the beadwork on Visiting. Pieced together like a quilt, the diverse array of beaded designs generously makes visible the community of artists, past and present, to which White Hawk belongs.

Dyani White Hawk: Love Language is a jubilant solo exhibition for the Minneapolis-based artist. It also issues a challenge to the genre of the individual artist retrospective. Although the artist won the coveted MacArthur Fellowship in 2023, colloquially referred to as the “genius grant,” the works included in White Hawk’s retrospective, their interpretation, and the accompanying catalogue belie the art-historical myth of a lone artistic genius. In their acknowledgments in the catalogue, Hogue and Engberg report that White Hawk was determined that the publication also serve as a “platform for her artist peers.”⁸ As such, the publication includes a roundtable conversation between White Hawk, Marie Watt (Seneca Nation), and Christi Belcourt (Métis), moderated by the curator and writer Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation). White Hawk’s midcareer retrospective is a celebration of the reality that no artist works alone and that art is, and always has been, an opportunity to gather and to build better worlds together.

Cite this article: Manon Gaudet, review of Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20954.

Notes

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Hunter Museum of American Art’s practice of exhibiting objects from its permanent collection across different eras, grouped by similar themes, has produced striking juxtapositions. In the decorative arts gallery, a glass sculpture by Beth Lipman (b. 1971) titled Flowers, Bread, Chalice and Sticks (2012) is on view beside a classic still life by Severin Roesen (1815–1872), Nature’s Bounty (1852–54) (fig. 1). Visitors are often drawn first to Lipman’s installation, and from there they encounter a conversation between styles and decades that allows them to explore the enduring influence of early American art on contemporary life.

In addition to Lipman, the gallery highlights other historical and contemporary women artists. It currently features the work of pressed-glass sculptor Amber Cowan alongside that of Maria Longworth Nichols Storer, the founder of Rookwood Pottery. These pairings are complemented by classic decorative arts pieces by Tiffany and Company and John La Farge. This approach of blending the historical and the contemporary has helped us grow our audience in both areas while amplifying female voices.

Another space where we have experimented successfully with this approach is the early American portrait gallery. While the permanent collection is rich in historical portraiture, including works by Thomas Sully, Ammi Phillips, and Rembrandt Peale, depictions of and by more diverse early Americans are lacking. To address this imbalance, the Hunter Museum has drawn on works from its significant contemporary art collection and its partnership with the Art Bridges Foundation. The portrait gallery now features striking works by Glenn Ligon, Fabiola Jean-Louis, David Driskell, and Barkley Hendricks that directly address the disparity in the preservation of works by artists of color. Through the juxtapositions, visitors are immediately part of the conversation about who has been left out of art history and why. With grant-funded support from the Art Bridges Foundation, the museum has also created a digital interactive experience based on this gallery, allowing visitors to create self-portraits that can then be viewed and shared online.

A perusal of our nineteen permanent-collection galleries that have adopted this approach highlights the Hunter Museum of American Art’s prioritization of previously overlooked communities of artists to tell a more complete story of American art. Acquisition funds over the last two decades have focused on women artists, artists of color, new media, and historically underrepresented early American makers. The mixing of historical with contemporary has helped us remain relevant to our guests while illustrating important connections fundamental to the art of the United States.

Cite this article: Nandini Makrandi and Lauren Nye, “Hunter Museum Mixes Old and New,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21033.

when you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to get a peace, – / Dave

These eighteen words inscribed on the shoulder of a stoneware jar collapse history, time, and place. The words are direct and concise, and the jar’s impact is immediately felt: We know how this object functioned and that it held sustenance. We know a man named Scot ate from this jar and that a man named Dave created it. We know that peace was on their mind. We do not need to know about utilitarian stoneware, or the rich clay deposits in the Carolinas, or industrial slavery in the plantation economy to be humbled in the jar’s presence and to feel profound admiration, awe, and anguish. This vessel by the enslaved potter and poet David Drake (ca. 1801–1870s) demands attention and recognition.

A relatively recent addition to The Met’s collection, this powerful storage jar anchors a new introductory gallery in the American Wing (fig. 1). The centrality of its display underlines our commitment to recovering challenging and truthful narratives and to foregrounding our shared histories of displacement, enslavement, and extraction in various artworks. Highlighting over two centuries of creative expression, material innovation, and stylistic and cultural developments, the artworks in this gallery reveal the pluralities present in the American Wing’s hemispheric collection—from early porcelain experiments in the British colonies to a distinctively carved commemoration of Mexican independence, to meaningful items of Native American artistry in beadwork and basketry, to Neoclassical refinement in silver, along with key paintings, sculpture, and furniture. Together, these varied works provide an expansive representation of American art, one that is as diverse, imaginative, and ambitious as the vast continent that produced it.

— Adrienne Spinozzi

In 2024, The Met’s American Wing marked our one hundredth anniversary with the first major reinstallation since 2012. Refreshed galleries on three floors now reveal interconnections across the wing’s hemispheric holdings of art and design, and foreground meaningful interpretive narratives through various means.

Since the last major renovation, the department has expanded its collection with diverse artworks by African American, Asian American, Euro-American, Latin American, and Native American makers. To welcome visitors to the wing today and share a fuller scope of our holdings, two pivotal entrances to the first-floor galleries feature varied, multilayered works—from the colonial to modern periods, with select contemporary expressions—arranged in thematic contexts of “origin stories,” or founding narratives of art and history. On the second floor, six galleries were reinstalled with eighteenth-century furniture highlighting process and materiality, while a sequence of neighboring spaces display a range of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the late eighteenth to twentieth century, newly interpreted and recontextualized in narrative frameworks of American identities, places, and temporalities.

The juxtaposition of the American Wing’s well-known holdings with recent acquisitions and works from other Met departments—as well as strategic loans—encourages visitors to embrace fresh transhistorical dialogues that complicate and deepen our shared knowledge of American culture. Revealing the department’s ongoing redefinition of a broadly conceived American art, the centennial anniversary offered staff and visitors a chance to consider how our evolution mirrors and is constitutive of increasingly nuanced understandings of what it means to be American, both historically and today.

—Sylvia Yount

Cite this article: Adrienne Spinozzi and Sylvia Yount, “The Met’s American Wing,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21072.

The Milwaukee Art Museum’s Homelands: Mnë’nának, Māēnāēwah, Tešišik Gallery is a rethinking of what American art looks like and who gets to narrate it (fig. 1). From its conception, the Homelands Gallery was driven by collaboration rather than curatorial authority. The project was developed with the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Native Initiatives Advisory Group (NIAG), a circle of activists, artists, curators, and educators from tribal nations across Wisconsin.¹ Its title draws on Indigenous names for the current city of Milwaukee in Potawatomi (Mnë’nának, “the good land”), Menominee (Māēnāēwah, “some misfortune happens”), and Ho-Chunk (Tešišik, “bad lake”), underscoring that this land has always been shaped by Native cultures. The gallery’s themes of land, water, and identity extend that grounding. Through works by artists like Fritz Scholder, Truman Lowe, and Leon Polk Smith—in addition to John James Audubon and Robert S. Duncanson—the installation asks visitors to consider how landscapes we still experience have been depicted and how these depictions articulate relationships to space and contested natural resources.

Inaugurated June 2025, this reinstallation of the museum’s former American West Gallery was conceived to correct a long-standing imbalance in museum displays that have too often framed Indigenous Peoples as subjects rather than knowledge-bearers shaping both the past and present. The Homelands Gallery brings a clear objective into focus: to foreground contemporary Native art while reinterpreting historical works to offer visitors a more honest account of American history.

The gallery is equally committed to changing how museums interpret. With NIAG’s guidance, the space challenges one-sided narratives and introduces a multivocal model. NIAG members have contributed reflections that sit alongside curator-authored labels, inviting visitors to encounter both Euro-American and modern Indigenous artworks through additional perspectives and lived experiences. This approach aligns with the gallery’s broader mission to create a space where diverse visitors can feel a sense of belonging while making room for truth telling about representation, collecting, and storytelling.

Situated within the Milwaukee Art Museum’s American Wing, the Homelands Gallery redefines curation as a relationship between artworks, communities, and responsibilities, rather than a mere arrangement of objects. A related symposium held in November 2025, which featured Indigenous artists and curators, extended that ambition, emphasizing the responsibilities of museums regarding Native heritage and Native life in the present, as well as the ways museums and tribes can be allies in promoting Indigenous creativity. More than a discrete reinstallation, Homelands Gallery has become a blueprint for how the museum can tell richer stories, ones in which Indigenous presence is a central foundation of American art.

Cite this article: Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, “Homelands: Mnë’nának, Māēnāēwah, Tešišik, at the Milwaukee Art Museum,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21016.

Notes

When you visit the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), late this summer and enter the galleries for art of the Americas in the eighteenth century, John Singleton Copley’s (1738–1815) iconic Watson and the Shark (1778) will greet you at the door (fig. 1). You have probably met before—either in person or through a reproduction. But now you will be asked to think about the painting in a new context. For our reenvisioned eighteenth-century galleries, which open June 20, 2026, Copley’s scene of rescue serves as a starting point for visualizing the interconnectedness of the Americas. Painted in London by the Boston-born artist, the painting shows a Caribbean waterway that witnessed the movement of enslaved people and commodities from across the Atlantic.

Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of American Independence, the MFA is reinstalling its eighteenth-century galleries for the first time since they opened in 2010. Our new display brings together works in all media from across the Americas—integrating Native and non-Native art from North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean—and exploring how artists have contributed to, or in some cases resisted, ideas of nationhood and identity.

Watson and the Shark beckons visitors into an introductory space, flanked by objects that serve as a table of contents for each of our eight galleries and the diverse narratives that will unfold throughout the reinstallation. A delicately engraved tortoiseshell comb and case made around 1680 in Port Royal, Jamaica (then a British colony), anticipates a broader story about exotic Caribbean materials desired by the colonial elite living in London and Boston. A gleaming silver tea caddy made by Philadelphia silversmith Joseph Richardson Sr., hints at the lustrous drinkware visitors will encounter in a gallery dedicated to the practice and consequences of sipping tea, coffee, mate (a South American herbal tea), and chocolate across the Americas. A bagamaagan (ball-headed club) made for an Ojibwe male warrior anticipates a gallery about art as an instrument of power and resistance, showing how artists challenged the status quo—and continue to do so today. Other galleries focus on homes and family, history and mythmaking, Asian styles in the Americas, communities of makers, and John Singleton Copley. The MFA’s renewed galleries will feature many new and exciting acquisitions, together with familiar favorites, to tell a more complete picture of the eighteenth-century Americas.

Cite this article: Elizabeth Driscoll Smith, “The Revolution Reimagined,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21068.

Combining a Gothic Revival settee (c. 1850–60), a Severin Roesen (1815–1872) still life (c. 1850–55), and an H. Wilson & Co. pottery jar (c. 1869) creates a sophisticated mid-nineteenth-century aesthetic for visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), highlighting artistic skill as well as moments of unexpected beauty (fig. 1). This display combines the dramatic verticality of Gothic Revival design with the opulent naturalism of Victorian still life and the utilitarian beauty of Texas stoneware while also addressing more complex issues of race, class, and morality in the United States at the time of their creation. Such challenging and illuminating groupings of objects appear throughout the permanent American art galleries of the MFAH, offering a more complete and nuanced picture of American art.

The American art galleries were recently redesigned in an effort to rethink the traditional installation and interpretation of American art by bringing together its multifaceted expressions—painting, sculpture, photography, books, prints, furniture, ceramics, metals, textiles, and costume—as created by a diverse range of artists over a 250-year period. While the galleries include familiar highlights of the collection, they also feature works by artists not always represented in traditional narratives of American art. Drawn from across the museum’s collections, including seven curatorial departments and the library, the displayed works represent the art of Native Americans and of creators from Mexico; the British, French, and Spanish North American colonies; and the United States of America.

Inscribed through hundreds of artworks across the expanded galleries are ideas about religion, national identity, the natural world, war, fashion, materialism, poverty, memory, pleasure, and achievement. Following a chronological order, these themes are threaded together across a series of six galleries in the MFAH’s Audrey Jones Beck Building. Two of the museum’s foundational collections of American art are featured in the first orientation gallery: the Hogg brothers’ collection of works by Frederic Remington and their sister Ima Hogg’s collection of Native American art, both given to the museum in the first half of the twentieth century. The contemporaneous works here are intentionally in dialogue and lay out the aim of understanding both mythmaking and the rendering of the real in American art. The five subsequent galleries highlight other masterworks from the permanent collection as well as many notable recent acquisitions that reflect the MFAH’s commitment to an expansive understanding of American art: Paul Bennett’s pair of tortoiseshell combs with a case from 1670; Antonio de Torres’s Virgen de los Remedios de Naucalpan with Donors of 1724; Joshua Johnson’s Lady on a Red Sofa of around 1820; Rembrandt Peale’s pair of Niagara Falls landscapes from 1831; Cecilia Beaux’s Mother and Son of 1896; and Greene & Greene, Music Cabinet for the Blacker House from around 1909.

Cite this article: Kaylin H. Weber and Christine Gervais, “American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21081.

This past March, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, MA, opened an installation in East India Marine Hall, celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the museum’s original building and exhibition space (fig. 1). Reexamining the museum’s origin story through more than four hundred objects collected during the global voyages of the East India Marine Society, PEM’s founding institution, the gallery invites visitors to reflect on the history that shaped the museum as well as that of the broader identity of the early United States.

This installation gives voice to early collectors, trading partners, and museum visitors who have discussed these objects—with some accounts extracted from records in the museum’s vast archive. “Over the last two hundred years, East India Marine Hall has been visited by people from all walks of life in the United States and across the globe—from American presidents to foreign travelers to the farmer in the town next door,” said Dan Finamore, PEM’s deputy chief curator and the Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History. These captivating stories and works that reflect local and global history, as well as the impact of maritime trade, reposition East India Marine Hall as the center of the museum. From its inception, this space and the objects in it have elicited empathy, curiosity, and wonder, transporting their viewers to places around the world.

Built in 1824/25 by the society, East India Marine Hall was designed by architect Thomas Waldron Sumner in the Greek Revival style. The hall is distinguished by its tall arched windows and the nineteenth-century ship figureheads that line its walls. It was built using local Cape Ann granite and served as the society’s exhibition hall, as well as the site for long and lavish dinners where members toasted their adventures and shared their stories of ocean voyages beyond the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.

“The hall’s new installation aims to revive the experience of a nineteenth-century museumgoer who declared ‘to walk around this room was to circumnavigate the globe,’” notes curator-at-large George Schwartz. He continues, “Visitors will encounter artistic and cultural achievements that stitch connections across time and space while providing a global perspective on what, over the centuries, has made Salem such a distinctive city.”

Answering the East India Marine Society’s founding call “to form a museum of natural and artificial curiosities,” its members collected flora and fauna, including ostrich eggs, the lower jaw of a very large sperm whale, and a taxidermied King penguin, as well as many expressions of cultural identity from around the world. These works of art include spears from Fiji, ship models from China, a Māori nose flute, ceremonial kava bowls, and part of the museum’s very first donation: a pipe with two stems that came from the north coast of Sumatra and was gifted by Captain Jonathan Carnes.

Coinciding with the United States’ Semiquincentennial in 2026, PEM’s efforts in East India Marine Hall are part of our ongoing initiative to expand narratives of American art and identity through collection installations that challenge conventional boundaries while addressing our shared complex history. This commitment is evident across multiple galleries in the museum. In American Art: Traditions Transformed, a diverse range of materials are featured—from wood and glass to paint and fiber—in showcased objects whose inspirations have their origins in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. These works tell a larger story of connection and cultural exchange, highlighting compelling narratives of American history and everyday life while presenting the sea as an enduring source of opportunity and peril, inspiring creativity and encouraging engagement with the wider world. This installation provides a range of perspectives, spanning centuries and continents, that demonstrate Salem’s rich history of maritime trade and exploration.

Other galleries turn a different lens on the American experience. A long-term installation, titled On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America, brings together two extraordinary collections of Native American and American art for the first time, spanning ten thousand years of creation. This installation celebrates a diverse range of voices, modes of artistic expression, cultures, and media. Additionally, the installation of Bethany Collins’s work America: A Hymnal (on view through 2027) reinterprets the song “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee)” by foregrounding more than one hundred rewritten versions. This powerful artwork uses language to lay bare the continuous, evolving debate over what it means to be American, chronicling dissenting ideas from those advocating revolution and abolition to those supporting the Confederacy and suffrage. Finally, entering its seventh year, PEM’s Fashion and Design gallery continues to explore how fashion and design exist in our lives. A major rotation opening in August 2026 will specifically focus on Salem’s and Essex County’s history in honor of the 2026 Salem 400+ celebration.

Together, these experiences illustrate the Peabody Essex Museum’s dedication to examining and expanding the stories that shape American identity. By embracing an inclusive, interconnected, and human-centered approach in its permanent collection displays, PEM fulfills its mission to share the complex relationship between artistic innovation and identity in North America.

Cite this article: Petra Slinkard, “Where Creativity Meets Wonder,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21064.

Celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States coincide with the long-awaited opening of the permanent collection galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) displaying American art from about 1840 to 1960. Promoted as part of A Nation of Artists, a joint survey of American art by the PMA, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), and the Middleton Family Collection, the project is at heart a reinstallation. Superb loans from the Middletons will add sparkle for fifteen months, but the core presentation reflects a new long-term reinterpretation of the PMA’s American collection.

The 2026 reinstallation follows on the 2021 opening of new spaces on the first floor for the early American collections of works dating from the mid-1600s to about 1840. Renovated galleries on the second floor now pick up that story and carry through to the mid-twentieth century. Challenges included both visual and intellectual continuity from the earlier galleries and the development of key themes shared with PAFA in their parallel installation. The overarching title A Nation of Artists seeks a message of pluralism and inclusion in a divisive time: Americans can unite, we hope, to appreciate a panorama of three centuries of creativity. Insisting that there is no single story of American art, the first gallery (fig. 1) introduces the idea that “artists are everywhere” and examines the variety of styles, materials, and communities that will echo throughout the rest of the galleries. It also represents the many pathways to becoming an artist, which can include academic training but also, for the majority of artists, involves experiences at home, at work, or alone.

The first objects encountered in this initial gallery are by Indigenous artists: Acoma mother and daughter Frances Torivio and Wanda Aragon. Their presence foreshadows a later gallery that, for the first time at the PMA, focuses on the work of Native American artists from the 1800s to the present. Curated in collaboration with five Indigenous curators, scholars, and culture bearers from across North America, the installation emphasizes how, despite settler violence and displacement, Native creativity has always been resurgent. We invited advisors based on strengths within the PMA’s historic collection of Indigenous art to build the checklist from the ground up. After presenting the interpretive throughlines structuring the entire run of galleries, we asked our advisors to explore how they could bring art from different cultural areas into dialogue. To emphasize the continuing vitality of these communities, our advisors helped secure contemporary work: the loan of Honor Blanket by Lenape artist Laura Watters Maynor and the acquisition of a beadwork pouch by Seneca artist Randee Spruce. The advisors also wrote labels or reviewed texts written by our curatorial team. The result is the first presentation of multivocal interpretive texts in the PMA’s galleries.

Celebrating something as complicated as our nation’s founding requires humility; it is important to not always be the expert. As we move forward, we hope that the framework established in these new galleries will continue to provide pathways to bring more stakeholders and communities into the museum to tell their own stories.

Cite this article: Kathleen A. Foster and Julia Hamer-Light, “New American Galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21025.

Welcome to the Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield Gallery at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), which is more often than not called the “Bingham Gallery” (fig. 1). This nickname is not surprising, since the gallery displays five paintings by George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879), and SLAM is arguably the most important repository of his works. The museum owns eighteen paintings by Bingham, as well as twenty-nine prints and two printing plates after his works. We also hold fifty-nine of his drawings on long-term loan from the Bingham Trust.

If you look carefully, you’ll see that this gallery is installed to highlight Bingham’s regional rather than national connections. His paintings are not installed alongside those of his national cohort, such as Thomas Cole or John Frederick Kensett, nor among other nationally known genre painters in the collection, such as John Greenwood or Winslow Homer. Instead, Bingham is joined by Lucinda Redmon Orear and the “Potosi Painter.” You may not recognize these names, but these artists represent the regional art world around St. Louis to which Bingham belonged.

We chose this approach for two reasons, both stemming from what we believe to be a curatorial responsibility to our collections and to our local audiences. First, the local emphasis that structures this gallery comes from Bingham himself. He was a self-taught painter from the region and chose to identify throughout his career as “the Missouri Artist.”¹ This approach establishes the important interconnectedness of regional and national art worlds, strengthening our understanding of both. It brings deserved parity to the accomplishments of lesser-known artists, such as Orear, whose works hold their own next to Bingham’s. Placing Bingham into a vibrant local art world outside the major centers of the 1840s and 1850s informs our interpretations of his works.

The second reason for this approach is that it creates opportunities for regional visitors to “see themselves” in the museum. We know this phrase has, in many instances, become a cliché. However, our embrace of it is best exemplified by the experience of a fourth grader from Potosi, a town located in an economically disadvantaged area about an hour’s drive from St. Louis. While touring the gallery with her summer camp, she encountered Portrait of Cresswell Farm, painted in the early 1840s by an itinerant artist we affectionately call the “Potosi Painter.”² The student immediately knew the house, which still stands, and she was amazed and proud that something she recognized from her own town was in SLAM. Such an experience is not singular to this gallery, of course, but this story demonstrates the importance of being intentional in providing museum space that facilitates it.

Keeping this resonance for viewers as our priority, over the past ten years, we have focused conservation resources on deserving regional works whose condition issues prevented their display. Likewise, we acquired a number of works from regional artists that broaden our ability to tell compelling stories about the art that was produced in our own communities by both locally and nationally celebrated artists.

Cite this article: Melissa Wolfe and Amy Torbert, “Local Connections at SLAM,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21076.

Notes

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM)’s American art galleries open not with a Hudson River School panorama or a display of Revolutionary-era portraiture but with contemporary artist Wendy Red Star’s (Apsáalooke, b. 1981) Áakiiwilaxpaake (People of the Earth): a monumental view of Mount Tahoma (Rainier) and the Seattle skyline with a group portrait of women and children from the region’s Indigenous communities (fig. 1). Red Star’s work—local, Native, and female—disrupts the Eurocentric masculinity of canonical American art, and it sets the stage for gallery spaces that challenge received notions of portraiture and landscape. There, scenic views by Frederick Edwin Church and John Frederick Kensett sit in dialogue with abstract paintings and sculptures by Morris Graves and George Tsutakawa to explore artists’ strategies for responding to the natural world, while likenesses by Will Wilson and Kehinde Wiley face off against their historical counterparts to question notions of portraiture, privilege, identity, and representation in American art.

This installation reflects curatorial goals to reimagine how we talk about American art at SAM and display it in our galleries. What is America? What is American art? Who decides and why? Answering these questions required stepping out of the dual museum comfort zones of chronology and institutional voice to take a more dynamic, thematic, and collaborative approach. Working with three artists—Red Star, Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂, b. 1979), and Inye Wokoma (b. 1969)—four interns, and twelve community advisors, we interrogated the American art canon, explored the context and history of SAM’s American art collection, set priorities, identified big ideas, and developed ways of activating them—all to offer a more expansive vision of the American experience.

Front and center in all of our of conversations was the fact that American art is as multilayered as America itself. More a collective of regions than a homogenous whole, the geopolitical expanse now known as North America is home to numerous clearly identifiable yet often intersecting communities, each of which possesses equally layered artistic traditions and cultural practices. Through overlapping thematic displays of works from SAM’s collection, our galleries now give voice to the stories told and carried in America through its art. To close with one example, we explore boundaries, borders, and cross-cultural exchange through the display of paintings by Church, Kensett, Robert Swain Gifford, and Cleveland S. Rockwell together with early American silver and Northwest Coast Native trade goods.

Cite this article: Theresa Papanikolas, “American Art: The Stories We Carry at the Seattle Art Museum,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21054

Last year, when the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond acquired Making Medicine: Coyote (Going Forward, Looking Back) by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025), we installed it in front of Progress (The Advance of Civilization) by Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), allowing works from our Indigenous American art collection and our American art collection to hold equal prominence (fig. 1). The installation highlights these two deeply influential artists in their respective fields, who, through these works, articulate their perspectives on what is now the United States. Durand’s painting meshes nature and Indigenous Peoples with industry and settlement. In so doing, however, he casts the advances of the Industrial Revolution in the present and future tense and the three Indigenous figures huddled in the forest in the past tense—as if shoved aside in service of “progress.” Smith’s sculpture foregrounds Coyote, a trickster who plays a central role in Salish creation stories as a teacher of Salish spirituality and lifeways, and as a mischief-maker whose misdeeds illustrate potential for human error. In Making Medicine, Coyote appears to clean up physical remnants of colonial and environmental chaos, with single-use plastics, crucifixes, and syringes filling a monumental canoe. The very titles of these works hint at their divergent temporal sensibilities, with Durand proposing a fixed idea of the “advancement of civilization,” while Smith suggests an Indigenous understanding of time as nonlinear—Coyote looks “backward” to understand how to move “forward.”

The VMFA is currently preparing for the largest expansion and renovation project in its history. Scheduled for completion in 2029, this transformative building project coincides with the establishment of the museum’s first full-time curatorial position dedicated to Indigenous American art. As curatorial colleagues, we feel that the time is ripe for thoughtfully reimagining dialogues between American and Indigenous American artists in our spaces. What we have been calling the “American galleries” will double in size to thirty thousand square feet in the new wing, with three galleries devoted to Indigenous American art. The new American and Indigenous American galleries will also intermix works falling in both categories.

With this installation, and the future expansion of the galleries, we aim to keep the works of Indigenous artists from becoming a footnote in or mere disruption to the American installations. Indigenous artists belong to sovereign nations whose existences on this land stretch far beyond the confines of American history. Their works should be a part of an equal dialogue within spaces dedicated to understanding America and American art. At twelve feet wide, Smith’s Making Medicine extends farther even than Durand’s panoramic span; her work dominates the room, demanding a symbiotic relationship with Progress. With the Coyote in full force, Making Medicine asserts a strong message of cultural resistance, contrasting Durand’s portrayal of Indigenous Peoples as defeated and transforming his illustration of mourning into a call to action. These narrative tensions, we hope, will provide museum audiences with more options for destabilizing quick assumptions about land and what it means to claim place.

Cite this article: Siera Hyte and Leo Mazow, “American and Indigenous American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21029.

Captured in his portrait, Benjamin Judah, confident and sophisticated, pauses in his examination of paperwork to look out toward the viewer (fig. 1). Nearby is a case displaying an elegant cann, or mug, made by the silversmith Myer Myers (1723–1795) between 1770 and 1776. For the museum visitor glancing at the portrait canvas by Ralph Earl (1751–1801), a deeper connection between the successful New York merchant and the silver vessel is not immediately apparent. Upon reading a label titled “Look Again,” however, the visitor learns that Judah and Myers were both successful in colonial America despite their minority status as Jews. They each marketed their skills to various clientele—for example, Myers made secular pieces and Judaica—and both supported the Jewish community by helping govern the historic Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City. Illuminating these connections reveals the multifaceted context of the American experience that is fundamental the curatorial strategy of The Wadsworth (until recently the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) in Hartford, Connecticut.

The Earl/Myers pairing is part of The Wadsworth’s reimagined installation of the American decorative arts collection. Unveiled in January 2026, the two galleries are dedicated to the early American colonies and nascent United States. They feature a dynamic display of paintings with furniture, textiles, architectural fragments, metalwork, ceramics, and glass. The gallery titled “Across the Sea: Crafting Early America, c. 1630–1740” explores the colonies’ global connections, while the gallery titled “‘The Age of Homespun’: Materializing American Life, c. 1741–1850” (fig. 2) celebrates American artistry and ingenuity of the late colonial era and the early Republic. Entering the year of the United States’ Semiquincentennial, the added interpretation on our labels helps to advance a curatorial framework that addresses the complexities of American art, artists, and makers by showing that there is no “single story” in American history and visual culture.

Working collaboratively, The Wadsworth’s curatorial and learning and engagement teams have devised “Look Again,” an initiative to foreground a multiplicity of voices and interpretive viewpoints across the museum’s collections. The “Look Again” project features chat labels providing focused perspectives and critical analyses of objects from the permanent collection. One of its primary goals is to present underrepresented historical narratives and voices as integral to focused and comprehensive scholarship and research. An example is the Jewish Art & Culture Research Project, launched in 2023 to examine The Wadsworth’s collections through the lens of the Jewish experience, considering Jewish art expansively and across time.¹ At a time of rising antisemitism and heightened public discourse around identity, the Wadsworth’s approach offers thoughtful and accessible means of exploring Jewish experience through art while also celebrating the resilience and creative contributions of Jewish artists.² Multiple galleries now feature “Look Again” labels reflecting more than two years of research into the collection as part of this project. The initiative will continue as part of The Wadsworth’s forthcoming reinstallation and rotations of the American galleries, scheduled throughout 2027.

Cite this article: Erin Monroe and Katherine Tycz, “The Wadsworth’s ‘Look Again’ Initiative,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21038.

Notes

In the reinstalled galleries of American art before 1900 at the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) in Massachusetts, visitors encounter a bronze relief sculpted by Randolph Rogers around 1855 depicting Christopher Columbus leaving the monastery where he awaited funding for his initial voyage across the Atlantic. A cast of one of the eight panels Rogers made for bronze doors at the US Capitol, this work glorifies Columbus as the “discoverer” of America and the embodiment of an intrepid American spirit, in part through allusions to the iconography of Jesus Christ’s Entry to Jerusalem.

Rogers’s sculpture had been languishing in storage for decades. Putting it on view now might seem ironic (or worse) in light of the fairly recent removal of many Columbus monuments across the United States. Yet, the opportunity to address the explorer’s shifting reputation and complex legacy—to tackle the nation’s difficult history—is precisely why we included this work in the reimagined galleries, which opened in April 2026.

Planned in conjunction with infrastructural improvements, WAM’s reinstallation provides a fresh and critically engaging approach to its American collection (fig. 1). In stark contrast to the previous iteration (a decades-old display featuring primarily paintings arranged chronologically), the new galleries integrate art of many different media and organize works thematically. The introductory section, with the Columbus relief, defines the parameters of “American art” for this installation—art produced in what became the United States—and outlines art’s role in constructing national mythologies. The other thematic sections in the galleries explore nature, regional expression, global connections, constructing identities, and artistic practice.

A key goal of this reinstallation is to showcase more diversity in the artists, stories, and types of objects on view. This was particularly challenging given the contours of WAM’s collection, which is best known for its holdings of early American portraiture (including the iconic portraits of the Freakes and Thomas Smith), silverwork by Paul Revere, and American impressionist paintings. Limited resources for acquisitions and loans make it difficult to fill collection gaps. Whenever possible, we mined the collection for works by historically underrepresented artists, such as the female miniaturist Eliza Goodridge and the Black engraver Patrick Reason. Another way we diversified the exhibition is by acknowledging the unnamed apprentices and enslaved people who helped produce some of the works, such as the silver spout cup from John Edwards’s Boston workshop.

These are “no tech” galleries that use the traditional format of wall panels and object labels. Yet, the interpretive dialogue prompts audiences to consider the art in new and more nuanced ways. Gallery texts address the institutional biases and structural inequalities that shaped not only WAM’s collection but also American art history in general. For instance, in the section about artistic practice, the labels for a biblical painting by Benjamin West, who became president of London’s Royal Academy and history painter to King George III, and a still life by Charles Ethan Porter, the first Black artist admitted to the National Academy of Design, discuss access to training opportunities and the academy’s influence on artistic hierarchies and museum collections. Texts also explore hidden histories, such as the erasure of Indigenous people in an Albert Bierstadt landscape and the ecological impact of a mahogany chest made in Rhode Island.

WAM’s reinstallation of the galleries of American art before 1900 seeks to foster deeper audience engagement with this collection. The thematic organization prompts critical comparisons among works of art, while the interpretation presented in gallery texts delves into complex stories about the objects. Overall, these galleries present a richly layered vision of American art—one that is provocative, enjoyable, educational, and relevant for today.

Cite this article: Karen Sherry, “Reimagining American Art at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts,” in “In the Galleries,” edited by Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21058.