Please note that language and images in this article may be disturbing to readers.

John Marin (1870–1953) is comfortably ensconced in the canon of American art. Though scholarship on the artist has been relatively scant in recent decades, and his preference for watercolor painting ensures that most of his works are only shown intermittently, his fame and status are indisputable. In the mid-twentieth century his renown saw him voted by museum directors and painters in a Look magazine poll as “America’s Artist No. 1.”¹ Many of the United States’ most esteemed museums collect his work, and his paintings have sold for seven figures in recent years.² He is widely viewed as an uncontroversial figure whose works constitute a significant contribution to American modernism.

Marin is also often noted for his association with the so-called second Stieglitz Circle, the loose group of modernists that assembled around Manhattan photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) beginning in the late 1910s. Stieglitz and Marin met in 1909 and developed a close and lasting personal and professional relationship that endured until Stieglitz’s death in 1946. Despite the lack of new scholarship on Marin, in recent decades research on some of the other artists associated with the Circle has remained more active. Among other topics, the connections between the works of several artists in the group and early twentieth-century racism have attracted increased attention in the last twenty years. Donna Cassidy pioneered this scholarship with her investigation of Marsden Hartley’s (1877–1943) White supremacist interests,³ and subsequent studies have focused on Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), Arthur Dove (1880–1946), and Stieglitz himself, although most of these investigations have focused on particular artworks or segments in the careers of individual artists rather than the social contexts and ideologies that they shared.⁴ By contrast, next to nothing has been written that connects Marin to such concerns.

A goal of my doctoral dissertation was to rethink the connections between the Stieglitz artists and racism in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States by exploring new contexts for their art and thinking about how the social and cultural milieux that they shared led them to work in parallel ways. As part of my research, I discovered a group of erasures in the published versions of Marin’s writings that might change scholars’ perceptions of the relevance of race to his life and work. Publicizing these erasures also adds to the growing evidence of alterations made to primary source collections by sympathetic compilers whose interventions have misled generations of art-historical researchers.⁵

Dorothy Norman’s 1949 collection of Marin’s writings, The Selected Writings of John Marin, repeatedly sanitized Marin’s use of the N-word in letters with his close friend Stieglitz, evidence of which remains in the originals preserved in the Stieglitz/O’Keeffe Archive at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.⁶ In a 1924 letter, after telling Stieglitz about an unusually successful recent fishing trip during which he and two friends caught many more mackerel than the other anglers fishing in the same area, Marin compares their luck to a story of “the powerful swimming n****r with the Shark ahind him and the terrible roarin Lion on shore a waiting him—he put his trust in the Lord + swam for the shore—The Lion jumped right over that n****r’s head into the shark’s mouth but—the Lord aint agoin to provide a Lion for every n****r.”⁷

As Marin implies, by suggesting that Stieglitz might already be familiar with the story in his letter, this was not an anecdote of his own invention but rather one in circulation in the United States since at least the 1880s. Often called “A Darkey’s Sermon,” longer examples of the story can be found in several newspapers from the mid-1880s, often crediting the St. Louis Republican newspaper as the tale’s origin.⁸ Versions of the story with the title “The Ship of Faith” can also be found in manuals from the 1890s containing stories, poems, and plays intended as fodder for oratorical performances.⁹ In all cases, the account is told at least partially in an offensive imitation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and ends with some version of the assertion that “de Lord ain’t a-gwine to furnish a lion for every n****r!” One of the oratorical manuals suggests that the speaker might wish to perform a form of minstrelsy by wearing a wig and clothes to imitate a stereotype of an African American minister, from whose perspective the story is told. Indeed, the instructions tell the performer to consider wearing ill-fitting and worn-out yet ostentatious clothes that resemble the sort of costume worn when enacting the popular “Zip Coon” minstrel show character, which was designed to mock the supposed ignorance and inelegance of socially aspirational Black Americans.¹⁰ The story also paints African American religious activity as sincere yet unsophisticated and crude. Given its circulation in such manuals, it is possible that Marin heard the story as part of a minstrel show or other public performance, or through more casual conversations with friends.¹¹

Marin’s intention in telling this story in the letter to Stieglitz seems to have been to comedically emphasize his good fortune in comparison to that of other fishermen. There may be some humility (or perhaps faux humility) in this decision to convey his fishing success while attributing it to fortune rather than skill. However, it seems strange that he leapt at the opportunity to express his luck by telling a folksy tale featuring racial slurs in which he compares himself to a Black man saved from a grisly demise by divine intervention. There is a shared nautical context between the two stories, but the metaphor is not a very apt one; in fact, the lion and shark story features a much more complicated scenario than what happened in Marin’s real-life tale and seems focused on discouraging complacency or reliance on divine intervention to fix one’s problems while also making its audience laugh and reinforcing anti-Black stereotypes. Within the context of Marin’s letter, the inclusion of the story actually leaves me more confused about what he was trying to say rather than less. It is, in short, a baffling and deeply racist narrative flourish.

Understanding Marin’s deep interest in the state of Maine and its people and culture may help to explain why he wanted to include this strained metaphor. The language in Marin’s letter reflects, on one hand, an affectation of Black Americans’ speech patterns that seems to have been fundamental to the story he was citing. However, the informal vernacular speech in the letter also resembles the homespun speech habits that Marin, though born and raised in New Jersey, developed and used liberally in letters he wrote in Maine to many correspondents. Marin spent his summer months in Maine almost every year beginning in 1914 until his death there in 1953, and it was during one of these visits that he undertook the fishing trip discussed in his letter to Stieglitz. Across the decades when he visited the state, Marin changed his behavior to adopt what he felt was a Down East Mainer way of life, which included avid participation in activities like hunting, fishing, lobstering, and berry picking.¹² This effort included affecting a Yankee identity in his writing. Review of his correspondence with friends and family reveals consistent attempts to adopt a rural Mainer vernacular. Even if Marin first heard the “swimmer” anecdote when it was told by someone stereotypically imitating African American speech, his practice of emulating unschooled Mainers’ speech patterns is an equally relevant context for how he recounted the tale in his letter.

In a 1920 letter, Marin mocked the peculiarities of the Maine locals’ speech: “The people up here are certainly a funny bunch. They call Tamarac, Ramatac. They call a bush with berries on it wild raisins and a lot of other silly names.”¹³ Yet later that same fall, he adopted Mainer speech patterns for his own purposes in a letter to Stieglitz: “Just a word before ye leave . . . Just a word my de-as (Maine pronunciation), I shed te-as for ye.”¹⁴ Soon, his habitual use of the valediction “Your friend, Marin” in letters to Stieglitz was being replaced by “Yer friend” or “Your dogoned,” and eventually by the appellations “the Ancient Mariner” or “Aged Marin the Ancient Mariner.”¹⁵ This shift was partially characterized by Marin’s growing use of nautical terminology and metaphors in his writing, as when he suggested that a recently married couple were newly “spliced” or declared that he was back “on deck” after recovering from an illness.¹⁶ Another part of this affectation were Marin’s persistent attempts at what some termed “Yankee humor,” a dry wit that was a common feature of his letters.

Though the swimmer anecdote was not particular to Maine, I believe that it reflected Marin’s growing adoption of Mainer lifeways and speech patterns. This affectation is seen in Marin’s attempts at nautical-themed New England humor and, most important, his imitation of supposedly unsophisticated speech patterns among the people he met there. These Mainer speech habits were an especially frequent feature in his letters to Stieglitz, who was both Marin’s confidant and the foremost promoter of his work. Though the racist story was not one of Marin’s invention, it fit into the unrefined Mainer persona that he sought in friends he made in the state and worked to imitate. Terms like “aint” and “agoin” were featured in other letters that Marin sent from Maine, but the terms were normally written slightly more correctly (as “ain’t” and “agoing”), while the truncation of “roarin” and the incorporation of terms like “ahind” and “a waiting” in the swimmer anecdote may hint at subtle differences between Marin’s typical invocation of an unlearned Mainer dialect and this version that combines that dialect with an affectation of AAVE.

Other potentially relevant contexts for the swimmer story are period tropes that connect African Americans with violence at the hands of marine animals. In the early twentieth century, a common racist trope cast Black Americans as “alligator bait,” with ephemera like postcards, print advertisements, and newspapers showing Black people—and especially children—being chased or devoured by the creatures (fig. 1).¹⁷ Though these narratives differ from the story Marin recounts, they similarly concoct an improbable scenario in which a Black person is being chased or eaten by a wild animal and frame the event as humorous, rather than tragic or disturbing. Like many other Jim Crow–era cultural archetypes, the trope normalized and trivialized violence suffered by Black people and played into period notions that Black people’s racial inferiority made them too unintelligent to avoid a violent death.¹⁸ Marin’s story is guided by a similar message.

Just as much as the details of Marin’s tale, however, I am interested in his choice to use the N-word as he retold it to Stieglitz. The slurs were likely a part of the story as he had heard it; the versions of it in newspapers and oratory guides also include the N-word. Still, this was not a word that Marin used in most of his letters. His willingness to employ it in this letter not only speaks to his closeness with Stieglitz but also suggests a willingness to express the sort of contempt for and/or dehumanization of Black people that that word, when used casually by a White person, typically implies.¹⁹

The topic of Marin’s racial bigotry was relevant to me because my dissertation included a chapter on Marin’s racialized self-understanding and how his views drew him to celebrate and fetishize the state of Maine and its people for nearly forty years. I argue that he, like many other tourists, perceived Maine as a sort of ethnic Eden—what the author of a state tourism guide called “the last stronghold of the Puritan.”²⁰ As the rest of New England became increasingly industrialized and diverse in the early twentieth century, Maine’s perceived ethnic purity began to be celebrated with greater frequency.

Rethinking the enduring fascination with Maine that led Marin to return there year after year to paint while integrating himself into the small lobstering community where he bought a home offers a new way of understanding this artist and the broader Stieglitz Circle movement of which he was a part. Tellingly, a small number of pictures that he made in the state, like Young Man of the Sea, Maine (fig. 2), highlight racialized physical traits (in this case, bright blue eyes) and even imply that certain Mainers possess an inherent connection to the sea. In my dissertation, I suggest that this picture and a handful of similar portraits are the clearest manifestation in Marin’s work of the racialization of the state of Maine and its citizens. I argue that this racialization was fundamental to the state’s appeal to Marin and other outsiders in the early twentieth century and played a key role in its tremendous growth in popularity as a tourist destination during the period.

Marin’s watercolors from Maine often picture small towns; various (often racialized and fetishized) forms of working-class labor, such as fishing and lobstering; and representative environmental hallmarks, including evergreen flora, granite coasts, and choppy seas (figs. 3–5). Frequently praised for their expressiveness and unique insights into the state’s character, Marin’s paintings recreate the kinds of scenic views that made Maine an attractive destination.²¹ However, when I look at them now, I see in them the ghost of the racial anxieties that drove him and other tourists to the state time and again in the twentieth century—the same anxieties that led Marin to use anti-Black slurs as he wrote to Stieglitz.

Most if not all scholars who have studied Marin’s life and work have been unaware of his use of the N-word in his correspondence. In Norman’s published version of the letters, the slurs included in this passage have been removed and replaced by the word “swimmer,” along with several other changes: “The powerful swimmer with the shark ahind him—and the terrible roarin Lion on shore awaiting him—well he—this powerful swimmer—put his trust in the Lord and swam for the shore—the lion jumped right over that swimmer’s head into the shark’s mouth—but—said the preacher—the Lord ain’t agoin to provide a Lion for every swimmer.”²² Among the edits is the reinsertion of a preacher into the story to whom the parable is attributed instead of the artist. This decision not only shifts responsibility for the tale away from Marin but also arguably gives the perception that he was interacting with characters who offered him rustic wisdom that he merely passed along to his urbanite friends. In the original version, the threat of physical harm to this fictional Black man is made into a joke, and his luck in finding his two predators attacking one another is a humorous punchline. Marin’s slip into vernacular language also loses much of its context in Norman’s version, in which the identity of the swimmer is sanitized, among other changes. These alterations are particularly important because Marin was reluctant to speak publicly about his artistic practice but was an enthusiastic private correspondent. Scholars have often relied on Norman’s compilation not only because it was more convenient than viewing Marin’s letters to Stieglitz at the Beinecke in person but also because there are not many other primary sources to rely on when interpreting his work.²³

In another letter to Stieglitz, Marin uses the N-word in a similar circumstance as he recounts a parable told to him by art collector Duncan Phillips. In Norman’s edition, she similarly edited this letter, cutting out Marin’s characterization of Phillips’s anecdote entirely.²⁴ Norman also did not include any of these letters when she published some of Marin’s writings in her journal, Twice a Year.²⁵ The Phillips letter was written too late to have been included in Herbert Seligmann’s earlier, less-comprehensive published collection of Marin’s letters, from 1931. However, the 1924 letter featuring the “swimmer” was not included.²⁶

It is notable that the compilers and editors of these volumes were both close with Marin and other members of Stieglitz’s cadre. Seligmann was a friend and ardent supporter of the Circle and the editor of multiple books about its members. The opening words of the introduction to his 1931 collection of Marin’s letters makes his admiration for Marin clear, while also celebrating the supposedly American nature of Marin’s paintings: “John Marin’s world in water color is part of his country’s heritage. To the native spirit of the land he has shown unwavering fidelity. He has been masterful in its interpretation.”²⁷ Norman is best remembered for her association with Stieglitz’s group, having become an ardent advocate for their activities soon after meeting (and commencing an affair with) the photographer in 1927. In the following decades, she regularly helped Stieglitz run his gallery An American Place; was one of the coeditors of the 1934 paean to him, America and Alfred Stieglitz; and published a biography, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, in 1973, in addition to the Marin book and other writings in Twice a Year.²⁸ She was also fond of Marin, telling him in letters that “I miss you greatly,” “You are constantly in my thoughts,” and “You are so much in my mind. . . . I am glad again that we talked.”²⁹ Marin reciprocated these feelings, inviting her to visit him in Maine in 1948.³⁰ Stieglitz and the artists in his orbit fiercely resisted interpretation by chroniclers that they did not choose themselves, so the fact that Marin’s letters were published by such close associates is unsurprising.³¹

As she proselytized for Marin, Stieglitz, and others, Norman’s intention was closer to glorification than documentation. According to art historian Susan Noyes Platt, Norman and Stieglitz collaborated on Stieglitz’s mythologization: “Stieglitz and Norman created . . . anecdotes through a complex process of dictation and editing. . . . These stories became a mythology.”³² Norman’s work on The Selected Writings of John Marin was a similar collaboration, and her intention to celebrate Marin as an artist and author are made plain in the book’s introduction: “That John Marin should be widely acclaimed as one of America’s foremost painters is scarcely surprising. With the publication of this volume it is to be hoped that his writings may well come into their own.”³³ Comments in the book suggest that she reviewed at least some of the letters with Marin, and we can therefore surmise that Marin may have played a role in the published edits. Norman’s papers include lists of questions that she asked Marin while working on the book, including queries about the possibility of excising sensitive comments and topics, though these questions focus on topics other than the slurs mentioned above. There is also correspondence that demonstrates his cooperation on the project, including Norman’s invitation to cut out any material that he was not keen to see published.³⁴ In her correspondence with O’Keeffe’s assistant Doris Bry, Norman also mentions her interest in reviewing Stieglitz’s letters before they were handed off to the Beinecke to see if any of them should be “withheld”—a request that O’Keeffe rebuffed.³⁵ Clearly, censorship was a strategy that Norman was not afraid to employ, though her reasons for wishing to do so were not always clear.

Norman and Seligmann chose to preserve their friends’ public standing (and by extension that of the greater Stieglitz Circle) rather than accurately document what Marin’s letters actually included. We have little direct evidence that might inform us about the extent to which their decisions to alter the letters were inspired by personal affection for Marin, some sense of editorial duty, or even self-interest, given that both compilers had closely linked their own reputations with that of the Circle. Indeed, the best evidence is likely offered by Norman herself in the front matter of her book, in which she thanks both Marin “for his cooperation in the preparation of this volume and for extending permission to use his . . . writings” and Seligmann for allowing her to reproduce material from his earlier collection. She then calls the book “an act of cooperation with the artist . . . an opportunity to be heard in his own right . . . and in as comprehensive a manner as possible” in response to “some of the manifold misconceptions that have been held about his pictures.”³⁶ For Norman, offering Marin the platform to speak for himself was part of a bigger project to defend the Circle artists against an ongoing onslaught of supposed mischaracterization by outsiders—a project to discourage others’ interpretations that was helmed by Stieglitz for years and then carried on by Norman and O’Keeffe after his death.³⁷

We can only speculate about what omissions or edits may have been made to other collections of artists’ writings and remembrances for which there is less extant documentation or how the omissions of compilers like Norman and Seligmann have affected how the Circle has been perceived and written about in the time since these books were published. In the case of the Stieglitz group, another notable collection assembled by Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking has, to my knowledge, no extant documentation, which is not surprising given that it is based on notes that Seligmann took while observing Stieglitz in his gallery. However, the book notably defends Stieglitz from potential accusations of racism for his insistence on using the original title for Arthur Dove’s assemblage, N****r Goes A’ Fishin’ (now normally titled Goin’ Fishin’) (fig. 6).³⁸ Given Seligmann’s close affiliation with Stieglitz, it seems likely that he made editorial choices as he constructed the book—which focuses on conversations documented in the mid-1920s but was not published until 1966, twenty years after Stieglitz’s death—that prioritized loyalty to his friends over accuracy or objectivity.

Cite this article: James Denison, “The Whitewashing of John Marin,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20421.

Notes

In 1998, US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor prepared the opinion of the court in the case of National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley. She was joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a separate concurring opinion, which Justice Clarence Thomas joined. Justice David Souter wrote a dissent. At issue was a 1990 amendment to the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act. That act created the two national endowments, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The 1990 amendment, enacted after complaints about some NEA grants, required the NEA to take into “consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.”¹ In response, the NEA created a review panel to ensure that proposals met those objectives. Karen Finley, whose proposal had been rejected by the review panel, joined by three other artists whose proposals had also been rejected and the National Association of Artists’ Organizations, challenged the review proceedings as being unconstitutionally vague and discriminatory. The complainants prevailed in the initial court decision and in the appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court. However, when the NEA appealed to the Supreme Court, that body upheld the 1990 amendment, thereby confirming that the federal government is allowed to discriminate when allocating funding. Justice O’Connor drafted the opinion.²

In her opinion, Justice O’Connor’s fifth footnote reads:

On proposing the Public Works Art [sic]Project (PWAP), the New Deal program that hired artists to decorate public buildings, President Roosevelt allegedly remarked: ‘I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building.’ Quoted in Mankin, Federal Arts Patronage in the New Deal, in America’s Commitment to Culture: Government and the Arts 77 (K. Mulcahy & M. Wyszomirski eds. 1995). He [i.e., Roosevelt] was buying, and was free to take his choice.

Justice O’Connor’s source for Roosevelt’s statement was Lawrence D. Mankin’s chapter in the anthology America’s Commitment to Culture: Government and the Arts.

Fortunately for Justice O’Connor, her decision did not hinge on this quotation. Like others over the past sixty years, she relied on a secondary source for the Roosevelt quotation rather than confirming it by going to the original source. Other authors have provided a longer version of Roosevelt’s alleged words, citing the quotation as coming from George Biddle’s autobiography: “You talked of Rivera and ‘social ideals’ and ‘the Mexican Revolution.’ You stuck out your neck. I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building. They all think you’re communists.”³ Authors have repeatedly interpreted these words as Roosevelt’s reaction to Biddle’s letter of May 9, 1933, which has long been cited as the origin of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP, which lasted from mid-December 1933 to late April 1934). The PWAP was the first New Deal art project and the prototype for the three subsequent New Deal arts projects. Most importantly, the authors who present the quotation all interpret it as a warning from Roosevelt to avoid controversial content in federally funded art. However, Roosevelt never said those words, and everyone who has quoted him has apparently misread or misunderstood a comment by Biddle—not Roosevelt.

So where and how did the confusion arise? We may begin with Mankin’s “Federal Arts Patronage in the New Deal,” upon which Justice O’Connor relied, which gives the following citation for the quote:

Steven Dubin, Bureaucratizing the Muse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 10–11. Dubin cites the quote from Gerald Monroe, The Artists Union of New York (Ed.D. diss. New York University, 1971).

So we can see that Justice O’Connor (or her law clerk) cited a secondary source, which cited a secondary source, which cited a secondary source. A sampling from other authors who have presented the false quotation yields similar results. Some offer no citation. Others cite a secondary source. A few do cite Biddle’s autobiography but, curiously, fail to understand it. A selection of examples will illustrate the problem; I present them all purposefully without citation, as my intention here is not to embarrass anyone. A first example, from 1966:

Although the President later replied that “I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building” (a jibe at the controversial Diego Rivera portrait of Lenin in the artist’s later-destroyed Rockefeller Center mural), the first Federal art project got under way in December 1933 [given without citation].

A second example, from 1970:

Franklin D. Roosevelt, commenting on the suggestion that the federal government should undertake a relief program for unemployed artists, expressed some misgiving: he didn’t want, he told a friend in 1933, “a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building” [given without citation].

A third example, from 1986:

When the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP, forerunner of the WPA) was being discussed in 1933, President Roosevelt’s response to its major proponent set the mood of caution with which such programs were generally undertaken: “I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building” (quoted in Monroe, 10–11). By referring to the radical political motifs included in the work of popular Mexican muralists, from the beginning national leaders decided that the output of government-supported art projects would have to be monitored [citing Monroe, the same source Mankin gave].

And, finally, a fourth example, from 2017:

“There is a matter which I have long considered and which some day might interest your administration,” Biddle wrote to Roosevelt in May 1933, explaining how the Mexican muralists worked at “plumbers’ wages” to “express on the walls of government buildings the social ideals of the Mexican revolution,” and how he imagined that the young artists of America too could “[express] in living monuments the social ideals that you are struggling to achieve.” Roosevelt was into the idea and supported Biddle, but Biddle’s proposal was initially rejected by the national Fine Arts Commission, who were understandably weary [sic] of setting a bunch of lefty artists loose on government buildings. Roosevelt, in turn, subtly encouraged Biddle to persevere with the effort in one of the more badass presidential memos I’ve ever seen: “You talked of Rivera and ‘social ideals’ and the ‘Mexican Revolution.’ You stuck your neck out. I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building. They all think you’re communists. Remember my position. Please. I wash my hands. But here’s the dirt. Now it’s up to you.” [citing a 1982 dissertation].

It is high time to clear this up once and for all. Biddle’s 1939 autobiography, An American Artist’s Story, provides the full context for understanding the quotation in question. He first gives an account of his May 9, 1933, letter to Roosevelt encouraging federal support for artists and citing the example of the Mexican muralists, a letter often quoted in accounts of the creation of the PWAP. These accounts also indicate that Roosevelt put Biddle in touch with L. W. Robert Jr., in the Treasury Department, who brought in Edward Bruce, also in the Treasury Department, and that those officials took the lead in creating the PWAP late in 1933.⁴

In his autobiography, Biddle then recounts that, in mid-1933, several weeks after that first letter, he sent Roosevelt another letter, proposing a specific mural project, including certain artists, for the Justice Department building. Roosevelt sent this second proposal from Biddle to the federal Fine Arts Commission for review and comment. That agency returned a negative review. According to Biddle’s memoirs, on August 6, 1933, Roosevelt sent the commission’s review to Biddle with a short cover memo that said only: “The enclosed from the Fine Arts Commission speaks for itself. It does not sound very encouraging for the mural painting” (fig. 1a).⁵

In his memoirs, written some five years after the events occurred, Biddle provides this account of the Fine Arts Commission’s review of his proposal for the Justice Building:

They had arrived upon reflection at “several assumptions and conclusions” that would “probably prove fatal to the project.” Our group were “painters of easel pictures of an incidental nature”; our intention ignored the architect. “The efforts at mural painting by some of the group and others of their persuasion” had “been attended by much controversy and embarrassment,” “condemned by the profession for chaotic composition, inharmonious in style and scale with the building and in subject matter, professing a general faith which the general public does not share. I think the government would be glad to avoid such experiences.” Our group also ignored “the established tradition built up by its pioneers and fostered by the American Academy at Rome—which has brought forth a younger, more liberally minded and murally trained modern talent.”⁶

Biddle provides the following characterization of Roosevelt’s short cover memo:

What the President might have done was to file the report and so clear his desk of one more routine correspondence. But he had written a letter, which I believed I might thus translate: Dear George: You talked of Rivera and “social ideals” and “the Mexican revolution.” You stuck out your neck. I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building. They all think you’re communists. Remember my position. Please. I wash my hands. But here’s the dirt. Now it’s up to you.⁷

Biddle’s memoirs make clear that these words are not Roosevelt’s language but his own interpretation (he called it a translation) of Roosevelt’s very brief memo, which was included when he forwarded the Fine Arts Commission’s review of Biddle’s proposal for the Justice Department building. Although the first “translated” sentence seems to point to Biddle’s letter of May 9, 1933, which did refer to Diego Rivera (1886–1957) and the Mexican muralists, the discussion of “Lenin’s head” can only be understood as a reference to the events from mid-1933 through February 1934, when Rivera included a portrait of Lenin in his mural Man at the Crossroads for New York’s Rockefeller Center (fig. 2). News of Rivera’s work in progress appeared in mid-May 1933. Nelson Rockefeller, who was in charge of the project, stopped work on the mural, eventually paid Rivera his commission, and, during the night of February 9, 1934, had his workers destroy the mural. The event received nationwide press coverage.⁸ Biddle’s mention of “communists” may also refer to the nationwide press coverage of another controversy in July and August 1934, when an artist painted a hammer and sickle as part of a PWAP project at Coit Tower in San Francisco.⁹

The remainder of this section of Biddle’s autobiography discusses and presents photos of his own work on the Justice Department murals in 1936 (fig. 3).¹⁰ It fails to mention PWAP by name or even by implication, and it focuses on Edward Bruce’s administration of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934–42), renamed the Section of Fine Arts in 1938 and usually called “the Section.” Biddle also stresses the difference between the Section and the Fine Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration.

A review of Biddle’s papers at the Library of Congress provides several corrections to the version he presents in his memoirs. The finding aid to the Biddle papers lists box 30 as the location of communications from Roosevelt in 1933–43. There is only one item in box 30, file 5: “General Corr-FDR,” a letter dated July 31, 1933, and postmarked at Poughkeepsie on August 1, 1933 (see fig. 1a–c). Roosevelt’s very short cover letter consists only of the two sentences quoted by Biddle: “The enclosed from the Fine Arts Commission speaks for itself. It does not sound very encouraging for the mural painting.” The enclosure is a two-page letter from Charles Moore, chairman of the Commission on Fine Arts, dated July 26, 1933. Most of that letter quotes a member of the commission, Eugene F. Savage. Savage’s analysis contains some of the phrases quoted by Biddle in his memoirs but not always in the same context. The phrase “several assumptions and conclusions in the statement that might prove fatal to the project” is clearly a reference to Biddle’s proposal for the Justice Department. Savage raises questions about the suitability of fresco as a medium for buildings requiring artificial heat. Savage also states: “The efforts at mural painting by some of the group and others of their persuasion [Biddle underlined the last four words in pencil], though not without real merit in many respects, have been attended by much controversy and embarrassment to those authorizing the work, condemned by the profession for chaotic composition, inharmonious in style and scale with the building and in subject matter, professing a social faith which the general public does not share.” Savage’s reference to the American Academy in Rome is mostly the same as Biddle reported. As is plain to see, neither Roosevelt’s cover letter nor the detailed analysis provided by the commission contains any reference to Rivera, Lenin’s head, or communists, although “a social faith which the general public does not share” was almost certainly a reference to the Left.

What is clear, both from Biddle’s autobiography and the original documents, is that Roosevelt never said, “You talked of Rivera and ‘social ideals’ and ‘the Mexican Revolution.’ You stuck out your neck. I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building. They all think you’re communists.” These words are Biddle’s “translation” of Roosevelt’s memo. However, they have repeatedly appeared in the work of art historians over the past sixty-plus years, always attributed to Roosevelt, not to Biddle, and usually presented as evidence that the president expected federal art to avoid political content. Those accounts routinely (as seen in the examples I provide) conflate Biddle’s two separate proposals (first, for what later became the PWAP; second, for murals in the Justice Department building) and present Biddle’s “translation” of Roosevelt’s comments about his second proposal as a reference to his first proposal.

For future researchers, the most important message to take away from this investigation is to not trust another author’s quotation but always to go to the primary source for confirmation.

Editors’ Note: Read more about more recent projects that were inspired by the history of the WPA in the Colloquium section of this issue.

Cite this article: Robert W. Cherny, ““I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building”: Words FDR Never Said,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20441.

Notes

National Park Histories at Risk

Over the past few months, the Trump administration has unleashed an alarming series of attacks on US cultural, arts, and historical institutions. On March 27, 2025, the administration released Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” This order took specific aim at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, singling out exhibits at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the planned Smithsonian Women’s History Museum. The administration demanded that the Smithsonian “remove improper ideology” within the institution’s museums, education and research centers, and National Zoo.¹ On August 12, 2025, the Trump administration sent a letter to the Smithsonian Institution titled “Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials,” which stated that “we will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions. This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”²

In addition to the Smithsonian, the executive order had another explicit target: the cultural sites under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior (DOI), including the National Park Service (NPS). The DOI was ordered to scrub any “content that inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)” from its sites, which include public monuments, memorials, statues, and markers.³ On May 20, 2025, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Secretarial Order 3431, also titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In this order, Burgum directed all NPS sites to perform an internal review of all their signage and additionally required these sites to post new signs asking the public to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”⁴ Burgum laid out deadlines for interpretative signs to be changed to comply with the executive order.

Collectively, these documents reveal a chilling reality: the current US administration views existing practices of preservation and interpretation of history, culture, and art as an active threat. As Trump stated in Executive Order 14253,

It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.⁵

In sum, these documents detail the administration’s goals to stifle works of culture and accounts of history that go against their chosen ideology and remove portions of history that, in the administration’s view, do not cast the United States in a good light.

While it may seem incomprehensible why this administration has chosen to attack an institution that has long been appreciated by Americans across the political spectrum, we can better understand when we remember that the National Park Service, established in 1916, is, in essence, the nation’s “largest outdoor history classroom.”⁶ While we may traditionally picture parks like Yosemite when thinking of National Parks, the NPS also includes National Historic Sites, National Monuments, National Battlefields, and more. Every NPS site, regardless of type, is designated by Congress and has a unique mandate to tell the story of the historic significance of that site. To meet this goal, each site displays interpretive signs and text to help visitors learn about the land and historic events in that location, connecting them to American history, often beyond what can be learned in a classroom.⁷ Creating interpretations for these sites is a long process that involves consultation with local community groups and stakeholders, consideration of accessibility for visitors with differing reading levels and disabilities, and incorporation of interactive activities and videos.

Sign designers and exhibit curators see these signs as an opportunity to create meaning and to build place-based public memory.⁸ Many NPS sites commemorate significant events and, at times, confront trauma with the aim of facilitating healing and justice.⁹ In this way, these historical sites, memorials, and national monuments, along with their accompanying interpretive signs, help construct public memory and national identity. Signs guide visitors in their experience of these “memory sites,” passing along the stories of the past and imparting their national significance to visitors. Due to their role in communicating national significance, “memory sites” are often contested.¹⁰ However, today’s contestations around “memory sites” differ from previous debates about public memory in a crucial way: In contrast to prior community-based grassroots efforts, this administration is imposing top-down directives and leaving little room for open dialogue.¹¹

Further, the language of the administration’s executive order and subsequent secretarial order is vague, perhaps intentionally, so it is difficult to know which signs and exhibits will be targeted for censorship. As has been widely reported, in responding to these orders, NPS staff have flagged exhibits addressing topics including civil rights, slavery, Indigenous history, women’s rights, and climate change.¹² As the New York Times reported, the first redaction took place at Muir Woods National Monument in California (fig. 1).¹³ The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and other news sources have reported on the planned removal and alteration of signage at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of American independence in 2026.¹⁴ In the redaction process, this administration is censoring not only ideas and narratives, but it is also obscuring the historical record and delegitimizing public history work, a process that links scholarship with grassroots efforts. For example, the Philadelphia exhibits slated for revision were created thanks to the efforts of community activists who organized for years around adding more historical context about the nine enslaved people whom George Washington had held there.¹⁵

This article describes a collaborative effort to preserve NPS signage through a crowdsourced project called Save Our Signs, which aims to create a “people’s archive” of these interpretive signs before they disappear.

The First Attempt

Secretarial Order 3431, the order directing NPS sites to review their signage and post new signs focusing on the “greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people” and the “beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape” sparked deep concern among members of both the Data Rescue Project (DRP) and Safeguarding Research and Culture (SRC), two grassroots organizations dedicated to preserving government information.¹⁶ DRP is a collection of data librarians and professionals that formed in February 2025 in response to changes under the Trump administration that potentially threatened or diminished public access to federal datasets. Formed in 2025, SRC members preserve born-digital at-risk materials by using web scraping techniques to create a snapshot of the content contained on a website at a specific moment in time. Both organizations serve as gathering places via online forums and chat groups for people from different institutions who are interested in working on the issue of government censorship.

In past months, DRP and SRC had cultivated a strong relationship through joint work on other initiatives, and the groups set to work to pool ideas, contacts, and resources to address the threat to NPS signs. Because neither group could easily set up a scalable digital infrastructure to collect photos of signs on such short notice, they initially identified Wikimedia Commons as a potential solution.¹⁷ Since Wikimedia Commons serves not just as a media repository for Wikipedia but as a collaborative project in its own right, it seemed like the perfect fit. The ability to create custom upload campaigns would ensure ease of use for volunteers, uniform public visibility, and consistent information about each sign photo.

However, the decentralized and community-based nature of Wikimedia Commons made the actual setup difficult. As outsiders to the Wikimedia Commons community, it took the SRC and DRP over a week to get permission to create a custom campaign. Even after these groups successfully attained permission, the first test upload was immediately flagged due to Wikimedia’s automatic anti-spam measures and deleted. Without a way of ascertaining what exactly in the uploaded image triggered this filter and lacking any preexisting connections in the Wikimedia Commons community, the SRC and DRP collectively decided to look into other alternatives, as the September 17 deadline was looming.

Joining Forces

Around the same time that DRP and SRC were developing plans to collect photos of National Parks signs, librarians and public historians at the University of Minnesota (UMN) were becoming alarmed by news of the impending review of the parks’ interpretive signs. They quickly formed a team of librarians, spatial-data experts, and public historians involved in the library-based research project Mapping Prejudice. Since its formation in 2016, Mapping Prejudice has worked with community members across the nation to identify and map racial covenants, which are clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not white from buying or occupying homes.¹⁸

This internal collaboration across units in the UMN Libraries brought a variety of strengths to developing the Save Our Signs project. The Mapping Prejudice team contributed deep crowdsourcing experience and a public history lens; the spatial-data experts brought technical skills and geographic knowledge; and the government publications and social sciences librarians brought subject knowledge and collections and archival goals.

After brainstorming a variety of potential methods to collect National Park sign photos from the public, the UMN team settled on using a Qualtrics survey because the tool made it easy for members of the public to submit photos, had the ability to protect participant anonymity, and could generate a structured dataset that would allow for future photo and data sharing. The UMN team developed a draft survey and took test photos in late June at Independence National Historical Park (a park specifically cited in Executive Order 14253 in the section “Restoring Independence Hall”) while attending the annual American Library Association conference in Philadelphia. At the end of the conference, a member of the UMN group learned that the DRP was looking for volunteers interested in working to preserve NPS signs and reached out to form the official collaborative Save Our Signs project.

SRC purchased the domain name at saveoursigns.org and pointed it at the new Qualtrics survey to make it as simple as possible for users to add photos to the collection. We launched our project on July 3, 2025, the eve of the Fourth of July holiday weekend; our initial messaging leaned into this connection with the tagline “Save Our Signs: Celebrate All-American History.”

Reclaimed by the Public, Strengthened by Partnership

Once the groups joined forces and developed the initial infrastructure, the next challenge was to quickly spread the word about this time-sensitive project. Due to the project’s crowdsourced element, it was crucial to quickly reach individuals across the country. Our first step was to utilize existing connections through the DRP, the American Library Association (ALA), and public history groups and send out email blasts to a number of organizations.¹⁹ Members of these organizations, in turn, helped spread awareness through social media. In addition, these initial contacts helped improve the project’s design and communication by providing early feedback. The first public iteration of the survey was very basic and only allowed participants to upload one photo each time. Through DRP connections, a Qualtrics expert at another university gave advice, and with her help, the survey was revamped to better follow web accessibility guidelines and improve usability.

Media coverage was crucial to boosting the project. The first media inquiry came from 404 Media, a publication with which members of the DRP had cultivated a strong relationship through previous projects and initiatives. On July 8, just days after the project launch, 404 Media published an article titled, “‘Save Our Signs’ Wants to Save the Real History of National Parks Before Trump Erases It.”²⁰ A second early media inquiry came from the Minnesota Star Tribune, where a reporter published a column about the project on July 19.²¹ These two initial publications raised early awareness about the project and sparked increases in photo submissions (fig. 2).

Feedback from both volunteer photographers and the media also helped to improve the project, aiding in the crowdsourcing process and developing clearer and more effective messaging around the urgency and significance of the project. Save Our Signs added a Frequently Asked Questions page to the project website to clarify the goals and scope of the project and share some basic general guidance for photo submission. Specifically, this guidance stressed the importance of capturing legible sign text and discouraged the submission of photos with people in them.²² In response to repeated media requests for sample photo submissions and information about which sites had been documented, the site added a photo highlights page as well as a photo counter page to share which NPS sites had submissions and which still needed photos. These additions addressed common media questions and encouraged volunteers to visit locations that still lacked photographs.

The project experienced the largest boost in visibility when a New York Times article on July 22, 2025, covered the administration’s censorship of NPS signage.²³ This story was published shortly after the NPS altered certain signs in Muir Woods National Park. While the initial Times story did not reference Save Our Signs, project supporters reached out to the reporters to alert them about our efforts. As a result, a reference to the project was added to the Times article just hours after its initial publication, sparking a huge boost in photo submissions and additional media inquiries.

Shortly after this publication, project leadership received about two dozen postcards expressing appreciation for the project (fig. 3). These postcards underscored how members of the general public grasped the gravity of this threatened censorship of US history. “Thank you for informing and including the public in pushing back against revisionist regulations and working hard to keep our history safe into the future,” one individual wrote. Others expressed gratitude for the opportunity to take action at a time when many Americans felt disempowered and hopeless in the face of ongoing administrative censorship and threats to US democracy and human rights: “Thank you for giving the rest of us a job to do—to save signage.” And one perfectly encapsulated the unique power of crowdsourced projects: “Thank you for your courage. Each act of courage builds hope and engagement for people like me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Advice for Other Crowdsourced Projects

The Save Our Signs project deliberately chose a crowdsourced model for three main reasons. First, given the decentralized nature of the NPS sites, Save Our Signs realized that it needed to mobilize as many people as possible to document these signs. Second, the group believed it was crucial to invite the public into the preservation effort, since NPS signs were created for the public in the first place. Crowdsourced research projects are unique in that the research process is collective, not solely conducted by academics, and often the resulting dataset is open access. The group wanted to keep this research, and any data created from it, in the public’s hands. The third reason Save Our Signs chose a crowdsourcing model is that it wanted to invite the public into the research process not as test subjects but as coresearchers. Through community data generation, people are invited to exercise their critical and creative faculties and to participate in experiential learning as they engage with interpretive signage in new ways. In this way, crowdsourcing offers an action step that people can take that provides a sense of purpose. This aspect of crowdsourcing is especially pertinent during our current cultural climate, in which large swaths of the public feel apathy or paralysis in the fight for social justice. By inviting anyone and everyone to engage with this project, Save Our Signs hopes to create a “people’s dataset” about which the people will feel ownership.

In wanting to engage the public, crowdsourced projects need to be thoughtful about the “user experience.” This means making the public-facing interface accessible and intelligible. From the mechanics of the Qualtrics survey down to the website’s messaging and word choice, the Save Our Signs project keeps this emphasis on accessibility central to the project design. In order to prioritize accessibility, crowdsourced projects need to be open to continually adjusting design and functionality. As mentioned previously, Save Our Signs started out with a more clunky user interface and no bulk upload option, but it adapted in response to community feedback.

While crowdsourced projects should remain open to feedback and responsive to their volunteer base, it is crucial that they retain a firm grasp on the scope and primary purpose of their project. As the Save Our Signs project gained visibility in the public eye, it received multiple competing requests from external stakeholders to expand or focus the project in different ways. Thanks to the expertise of project leadership who are also involved with Mapping Prejudice, the team understood that the project would need to clearly articulate its scope in order to both successfully collaborate and communicate its goals to the public. This does not imply preemptively cutting off potential future work or stifling natural innovations; rather, it serves to protect the capacity of the project leads. At its beginning, Save Our Signs was approached to include signage for other Department of Interior bureaus and offices, such as the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and even the US Forest Service sites, which are part of the Department of Agriculture. The group chose to stick to the NPS because of the unique congressional mandates of each site to tell site-specific history. With public historians as project leads, this initiative had more content expertise, which made its launch easier and quicker than if it had to build new relationships and content expertise for other bureaus of the Department of the Interior. In addition, the NPS has a public list of all its sites, and each has a website.²⁴ This existing structure enabled the team to quickly develop a concrete list of sites, maintain the data on the back end as submissions came in, and easily research any oddities when volunteers raised questions about specific parks. Instead of undertaking compounding projects, the leads continue to strategically pursue collaborations that may expand the scope and reach of the project in ways the Save Our Signs project team alone could not.

As a project that holds community cocreation and public access as central tenets, Save Our Signs welcomes any “spin offs” or sister projects that may arise. The team has already consulted with a group hoping to launch a sister project relating to recent censorship attacks on the Smithsonian Institution. As an effort that greatly benefited from the precedence and guidance of another crowdsourced project (Mapping Prejudice), Save Our Signs hopes to offer similar support to other groups that want to expand on this work or take it in different directions.

Future Plans

At the writing of this article, the project is still very much underway. Given the original September 17, 2025, deadline for the removal of “negative” content stated in the Secretarial Order, the project committed to making the initial photo collection public by October 13. This date gave the group time to curate the photographs and data before officially publishing them (fig. 4). Photos will likely continue to be submitted into the future, especially if and when volunteers notice that changes have been made in park signage. Save Our Signs will continue to make periodic updates to the public data to incorporate new photo submissions.

The collection of photos and location data will be downloadable in whole or in part, and there are plans in development to create a basic interface for ease of access, such as a simple map or gallery of the photos.

As academic librarians and public historians, the team’s goal is to create a long-term archival home for the photos and data, in which, most importantly, the photos are publicly accessible and reusable by anyone. Hopefully other organizations and researchers will bring their own expertise and knowledge and create new outcomes with this photo collection—such as visualizations, interactive tools or maps, and educational materials. The team also anticipates that the photos, being in the public domain, could be added to public photo collections like Wikimedia Commons to further increase access.

The outpouring of support and participation that Save Our Signs has seen from all over the country demonstrates the power of crowdsourced projects in offering people a means to activate and engage around issues that matter to them. Save Our Signs underscores that many Americans deeply care about National Parks and the indispensable histories told in them. The intent is for volunteers, by helping to create this crowdsourced public photo collection, will feel a part of the collective work to resist government censorship and preserve cultural history.

Cite this article: Lena Bohman, Molly Blake, Jenny McBurney, Amelia Palacios, and Henrik Schönemann, “Save Our Signs: A Crowdsourced Project to Combat Censorship at US National Park Sites,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20459.

Notes

“Georgia O’Keeffe [1887–1986] spends much of her time nowadays down in New Mexico,” writes the art critic Edward Alden Jewell in his review of her 1931 exhibition at An American Place, the last New York gallery overseen by his friend—and O’Keeffe’s husband—Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). Narrowing in on what he considered a particularly significant image, Jewell goes on to describe his encounter with Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose (1931; fig. 1), a painting marked by complex layers of color that set this image apart, he suggests, from her other paintings of white flowers fading into pale animal bones displayed along the ash-tinted walls of the gallery. Deep blues at the edges of the frame spill into the center of the picture plane, transforming the white background from a flat expanse into an undulating surface; a shock of pink—petals of an artificial rose—emerges above the eye socket of the parched skull.¹

Stieglitz framed the image at the left edge of an installation shot he snapped during the exhibition (fig. 2), flattening the vibrant tones of the canvas into gradations of black and white. In the photograph, the painting hangs on a stark gallery wall that blends at the edges and corners of the room into the pale gray of the stone floors and the shadowed white of the ceiling.² In the black-and-white photo, the animal bone at the center of O’Keeffe’s image hovers over a light background that pulls away from the edges and corners of the frame to reveal dark pools of paint; it appears, as one unnamed critic had written in response to the inaugural exhibition at Stieglitz’s space one year earlier, to be “suspended in air rather than backed against a wall.”³

In this essay, I explore the connection that O’Keeffe formed with the artist Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) within and around Stieglitz’s gallery and through their engagement with two overlapping constructs of “place” that resonated within its light-filled rooms. The first is the gallery itself as a shelter for discussion, as a “phenomenon, an event, an environment,” in Jewell’s words, “in which the creativeness of the spirit became articulate in a sense that might be shared.”⁴ The second is the small expanses of space, extending outside these white walls in different directions and distances, that the artists who gathered there worked to know deeply, observe carefully, and translate into visual form.⁵ I suggest that these two artists, connected through coinciding but very different struggles to navigate the systems of cultural marginalization and essentialism that seeped into the space of Stieglitz’s gallery, explored and amended the aging photographer’s intellectual ideals as a strategy of shaping a place for themselves at An American Place.

Perched on the seventeenth floor of a Madison Avenue office building, An American Place was more than a stripped-down architectural structure, a bare and shimmering space. It was the place for the cultivation of intellectual ideals, defined, as the writer and photographer Dorothy Norman suggests, not by its physical boundaries, but rather by the “aliveness of what might happen there.”⁶ “The walls in the different rooms are painted from varying pale luminous grays to white, which reflect the light coming in through large windows,” as she puts it, describing the way beams of sunlight filtered in from the large expanses of glass facing the street. “With the white ceilings and bare, uncovered light gray painted stone floors,” she continues, “there pervades in the space a clear and subtly fluid ever varying glow of light”—a light, for her and the other artists who gathered there, that symbolized the way that the space served as a center for artistic evolution and intellectual enlightenment.⁷

Delaney, who first visited An American Place in 1936, became a regular participant in lectures and conversations at the gallery, even as he continued to develop his connections to other queer artists and Harlem Renaissance thinkers. It was there that he nurtured his relationships with many of the cultural workers who gathered around Stieglitz, including Norman, the photographer Edward Steichen (1879–1973), the painters John Marin (1870–1953) and Arthur Dove (1880–1946), and, significantly, O’Keeffe, whom Delaney first met as a guest in the home of their mutual friend Mary Callery.⁸ As he suggests in a letter from June 1944, Stieglitz not only welcomed Delaney into the hallowed halls of the gallery space but deeply valued his presence there. “I asked the question ‘What is 291’ many years ago,” the photographer writes in broken lines that slant toward the bottom right of the page, beginning with the words “For Beauford Delaney.” “I ask ‘What is An American Place’” he continues, reframing the same inquiry he posed decades earlier when he was gathering essays and poems from his colleagues for a 1915 special issue of his journal Camera Work—a collection of writings that transform the space of his former gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue from a humble loft into a symbol for their most elevated ideals:

There was war then—There
is War to-day—
There are as many and more
promises to-day than then.
Promises. What are
promises—
I am an old man to-day
still serving—Yes
serving.—Which?—I
know—so does my
friend Delaney.⁹

Reflecting, at the age of eighty, on the span of his life—on the waves of violence and cycles of history he had witnessed, often from the doorways and windows of the bare physical spaces he had formed and shaped into hubs of artistic dialogue—Stieglitz, in many ways, drew Delaney into the inner sanctum of An American Place. In writing this letter, Stieglitz extended an invitation that he reserved for close associates, for artists and writers with deep understandings of his vision as a gallerist. Delaney, in turn, suggests his own sense of belonging as he offered his insights into Stieglitz’s last exhibition space: “An American place is white and gray,” the painter writes, filled with artists and intellectuals who have “extended the dignity of the American spirit into the consciousness of our own times.” Delaney, here, offers a gesture of reverence toward Stieglitz and the other frequenters of the gallery, “indomitable spirits,” in his words, who met and shared ideas inside these walls—pale gray and clean, white surfaces that, significantly, never displayed Delaney’s work.¹⁰

The underlying reasons for this exclusion were likely complex and overlapping. They involved, I suggest, Stieglitz’s dedication to the artists he had represented for long spans of his career, his unexamined racial biases, and his interest in cementing his status as an American intellectual leader as he neared the end of his life. As Norman notes, Stieglitz believed that he had a responsibility to finish what he started—to give the artists in whom he believed a consistent platform that would allow them to evolve over the years to their fullest potential. He rarely took on new artists in the final years of his career, and the exhibition schedule at An American Place rotated almost exclusively among five painters he had already worked with for decades: Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth (1883–1935), and Marsden Hartley (1877–1943).¹¹ By 1942, that list had narrowed even further to O’Keeffe, Marin, and Dove, artists who became, for Stieglitz, emblems of a homegrown American modernism, of an art that emerged out of “the American soil.”¹² Stieglitz, a second-generation German-Jewish immigrant, reserved the white surfaces of his gallery for this small circle of white artists as a way of codifying his own claim to nation: “Georgia . . . is American,” as he wrote to his friend Paul Rosenfeld in 1923. “So is Marin. So am I.”¹³ The gallerist, who existed, throughout his life, suspended between cultures and in an ambiguous, unstable racial category himself, was invested in shaping his exhibition space not only into a place but into an American place. His exclusionary exhibition programming was, in part, a tactic of veiling his immigrant roots and sealing his legacy among the cultural elite.¹⁴

In his efforts to downplay his own cultural difference, Stieglitz embraced Delaney with ambivalence—both accepting the painter as a respected colleague and refusing to display his work in the gallery. Delaney, in response to his unfulfilled longing to see his paintings hanging on Stieglitz’s white walls, converted his one-room apartment and workspace into an off-site replica of An American Place; it became a kind of auxiliary exhibition space that showed only his canvases, a sanctuary for intellectual conversation with his friends and colleagues—his own place. He moved into his loft at 181 Greene Street in Greenwich Village the winter before his first visit to An American Place, and as a means of approximating the gradations of light gray that defined the physical structure of Stieglitz’s austere space, Delaney draped white sheets over his furniture and cover his cracked walls with drawing paper.¹⁵ The painter Paul Jenkins (1923–2012), recalling his 1952 visit to Delaney’s home, describes the dark stairway that led him up to the second-story room. “When I walked into the place I knew I was somewhere,” he writes, noting the ways that the quiet room, elevated above the Remsen Trucking Corporation, seemed far away from the noisy street below: “Delaney talked along and kept walking around, something in himself always in motion. His hands would touch things as he walked past them—chairs covered with sheets, their vintage and value hidden by the cool white.”¹⁶

In a 1944 photograph of this space (fig. 3), Delaney leans against a wall rippling with the undulations of the lightweight paper suspended behind him. He stretches his legs across a draped seat—perhaps doubling as his bed—and his fingertips cradle the edges of a record. The surface of his drafting table, also white, extends over the ledge of his perch and into the bottom right corner of the frame, and wires dangle precariously from the light fixture suspended from his ceiling at the center of the room. His paintings are installed salon style across the wall behind him, stacked and piled in the corners of the space, balanced against the edges of his furniture. His image Dark Rapture—a nude portrait of his close friend James Baldwin, who was a regular visitor to this space—hangs above Delaney’s head. In the painting, a wide black mark extends down the surface of the canvas from the figure’s left ear to his clavicle, accentuating the writer’s broad shoulders and graceful, attenuated neck. Thick patches of paint build up Baldwin’s muscular legs, one folded underneath the other at an angle that echoes the contours of Delaney’s bent elbows in the photograph. The curve of the his spine, leaning into the support of the wall behind him, contrasts with Baldwin’s upright torso suspended on the white wall above.

Henry Miller, who reflects on his visit to Delaney’s apartment in a 1947 essay, remembers shivering in this white-covered studio in the early days of autumn, as the painter, wearing layers of sweaters with a wool hat tucked around his ears, showed off his canvases. There was only a small potbellied stove to cut the chill, and when it went out, Delaney’s studio became “icy cold, the dead cold of cold storage in which cadavers are preserved in the morgue.”¹⁷ O’Keeffe, too, commented on the biting cold that coursed through her veins when she visited Delaney at his Greene Street apartment.¹⁸ Indeed, she decided to draw a series of pastel and charcoal portraits of him, at least in part, as an offer of financial support; he “posed for others,” she noted in her reflection on this project, “because he had no heat in his studio and needed to keep warm.”¹⁹ In one image from this series from 1944, O’Keeffe blends the contours and shadows of Delaney’s face, shaping a series of lines along his hairline, ears, jaw, and throat that sharply divide his dark features from the surface of the paper (fig. 4). The image of Delaney seems to hover over the background, as if O’Keeffe, in arranging the composition on the surface of the page, was placing the portrait along a wall in Stieglitz’s gallery—or alluding, as the art historian Sarah Greenough argues, to the wooden carvings that Stieglitz installed at 291 Fifth Avenue during the 1914 exhibition Statuary in Wood by African Savages—The Root of Modern Art. Greenough, in her description of the rigid, frontal layout of the portrait—the dark marks around Delaney’s lips and eyes that divide the black charcoal from the white paper—suggests that O’Keeffe may have been responding visually not only to the details of Delaney’s features but also to the sculptures and masks that Stieglitz installed in his first gallery and kept in his collections.²⁰ Indeed, the precise edges of his face, displayed on the page like a kind of object suspended over a white void, evoke the sharp contours of the Baulé object that O’Keeffe represented in her 1923 work Mask with Golden Apple (fig. 5). In the painting, installed on the walls of An American Place as part of a 1935 exhibition, the sculpture emerges in horizontal profile across the canvas—suspended in what the scholar Charles Eldredge aptly describes as “the ambiguous space of the white ground”—behind the fleshy, shimmering surface of a piece of fruit.²¹

Although O’Keeffe, in her portrait, problematically rendered Delaney’s features in conversation with her studies of the formal qualities of African statuary, she also reveals in the image a deep connection she formed with the painter, her sensitivity to what she described as his “dark—clean—really beautiful” visage. It is in the details of her drawing, in the way she shades the gentle curves of his cheeks; his expressive eyes, slightly asymmetrical and sloping gently downward at the edges; the subtle wrinkles in his forehead; and the slight upward turn of his pursed mouth that she expresses her understanding of Delaney as “a very special sort of person”—a person who, like her, struggled to navigate a precarious position in the deeply stratified art world and complex contours of the social realm.²² The forms of marginalization they worked to negotiate were never the same; doors opened for her that remained closed to him. Whereas he was never able to see his own paintings displayed along the white walls of An American Place, her work consistently filled the rooms. As she brought new paintings back from New Mexico to install at her husband’s gallery, however, O’Keeffe was engaging in a strategy—one of many that she developed over the course of her career—to distance herself from critical paradigms centered on her femininity. She was attempting to transform herself from what Stieglitz famously described as a “woman on paper” into a painter of the high desert region.²³ Central to this process, as Wanda Corn argues, was O’Keeffe’s relationship with the concept of “place,” a term that took on sacrosanct layers of meaning for the circle of artists who gathered in Stieglitz’s last gallery and connoted a practice of rooting themselves in small sections of land and specific geographic locales.

Inspired by these discussions as they unfolded at An American Place, O’Keeffe was spending increasingly long stretches of time in and around Abiquiú, making work that expressed a sustained and intimate connection with the arid topographies and sun-bleached animal bones of New Mexico.²⁴ She even evoked the language of “place” directly in the title of a series of paintings from this time, describing a region of the Bisti Badlands—where sandstone, shale, mudstone, coal, and hardened volcanic ash formed dark gray hills, punctuated with layers of color that seem almost alien—as “The Black Place.”²⁵ It became, for her, a remote, isolated piece of earth that she returned to again and again to engage with emotionally and spiritually, to explore on canvas; she created fifteen images of this site between 1936 and 1949. The paintings she made in New Mexico, as Corn notes, effectively disarmed critics, who struggled to reconcile her images of hard-edged rock formations and desert skulls with their expected expressions of a soft and fleshy feminine sensuality.²⁶ In his review of her 1931 exhibition at Stieglitz’s gallery, for example, Jewell uses a very different kind of language in his response to these works—”handsome pieces of painting” that reveal not her instinctive, emotional qualities as a woman but rather her “tireless ingenuity” as an artist.²⁷

As O’Keeffe was reshaping the critical parameters of her work by displaying images of New Mexico—her place—at the gallery, Delaney was carving a space for himself within the Stieglitz circle through his own deep engagement with the discussions unfolding within those walls. Against the white sheets of paper in the ancillary exhibition space that he shaped in his small apartment, he displayed the paintings he made of the sprawling Greenwich Village streets outside his window—the narrow stretch of land that he knew most intimately. These images, as Miller recalls in his reflections on his visit to Delaney’s studio, were “virulent, explosive paintings devoid of human figures.” They were “Greene Street through and through, only invested with color,” he goes on to note, “full of remembrances too, and solitudes.”²⁸ In the 1948 image Washington Square, for example, Delaney outlines a grove of skeletal trees in white outlines (fig. 6).²⁹ Their ocher branches fade into black in the background, and the top edge of the painting is built up of layered patches of orange and brown paint that shift into a stretch of blue sky. A trunk at the left edge of the image intersects, along a curving white border, with a black lamppost that extends down vertically toward the bottom of the image. Its yellow bulb, bordered in concentric circles of orange and white, illuminates the white expanse of the foreground in textured planes of gold and green. At the center of the painting, and up toward the top, another electric light casts a yellow beam down the canvas. This lamp seems to dangle from the branches extending above, as if it is suspended over the tactile layers of white paint below, recalling both the bone that hovers over the undulating surface of O’Keeffe’s Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose (see fig. 1) and the way that images appeared to float off the white walls and into the light-filled rooms of An American Place.

In a letter to O’Keeffe dated October 1952, Delaney describes the single window in his new apartment, covered with a pane of opaque glass that blocked the sunlight from filtering into the dark room covered in white sheets. “Recently I have moved from Greene Street to Broadway where I have a loft with windows for the first time in 16 years,” he writes to O’Keeffe, a friend who had become a “symbol” for him of “a way of life and creative realization”—a fellow explorer of the concept of “place” as a strategy for negotiating social and intellectual hierarchies. “Nevertheless,” he adds, looking back on the years he spent in Greenwich Village, “I learned to see and feel in other ways.”³⁰ He learned how to reshape his home into a place—to transform his bare, cramped studio into a center for intellectual dialogue and artistic debate. He draped his studio in white sheets and pieces of drawing paper to honor—and to protest—the light-filled, white-and-gray rooms of An American Place, a space that embraced him and nurtured his painting practice in some ways but that marginalized and excluded him in others.³¹ In his Greene Street studio, he created and cultivated a small wedge of earth that was, more than anything, his: a place pulsing with constant visitors, alive with possibility, and vibrant with the thick, textured, swirling colors he used to deepen his connection to the surrounding Greenwich Village streets.

Cite this article: Tara Kohn, “On White Surfaces: Beauford Delaney and Georgia O’Keeffe at An American Place,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20481.

Notes

Introduction

Contributors

Makeda Best, “Growing up in a CETA City”
Elizabeth Fair, “Federal Funding, Local Practice, and Teaching Art History Through CETA in San Francisco”
Deborah Cullinan, “Investing in Artists: Ripples of Return”
Jodi Waynberg and Molly Garfinkel, “ART/WORK: Civic Imagination and the Legacy of the CETA Arts Programs”
John Bowles, “Sargent Johnson’s Athletics: A Modernist Experiment in Public Art”

How has the government supported expressive culture and the arts in the United States?¹ This was the guiding question for a public convening we organized in March 2025: “Forgotten Federal Art Legacies: PWAP to CETA.”² Over two and a half days, artists, scholars, curators, and arts administrators discussed the history of government patronage and visited San Francisco public art sites, either built during the New Deal (1935–43) or funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) (1974–82).³ We wanted the convening to contribute to existing interdisciplinary histories of New Deal art—advanced in many scholarly publications and museum exhibitions to date—and to highlight what we had discovered ourselves through the Living New Deal’s Advocating for New Deal Art initiative, namely that CETA is an important and largely forgotten New Deal art legacy.

New Deal and CETA art projects were administered very differently, but federal funding in both their respective eras resulted in similar benefits for artists and the communities they served.⁴ The diversity of cultural production, cultural workers, and the prominent place of public art in the art world of the 1930s and 1970s are distinct from decades when federal funding for the arts was unavailable or more difficult to access. New Deal and CETA art history reveals what happens when a generation of artists is hired and encouraged to serve working-class communities rather than the narrower interests of the art market and large cultural institutions.

As we discovered, a key chapter in the story of CETA as a forgotten New Deal legacy took place right where we live. In 1974, the San Francisco Bay Area became the birthplace of CETA funding for the arts when local leaders used its Title VI funding, which was earmarked for community service positions, to hire artists.⁵ Qualifying Bay Area creatives specializing in the fields of literature, craft, and the visual and performing arts took up a range of civic assignments in neighborhood cultural centers and schools, the latter captured on the cover of a 1980 report documenting San Francisco CETA artists’ contributions to public education (fig. 1).⁶ As had been the case during the New Deal, applicants for federally funded jobs included painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, poets, folklorists, playwrights, historians, curators, musicians, dancers, actors, archivists, and other creatives. Under CETA, they taught, made civic murals, designed and maintained public gardens, and organized cultural events, many of which continue to enrich San Francisco culture. They were paid to engage in service work and also received paid time to develop their art practices, grassroots arts organizations, and multidisciplinary creative networks.

In the planning process for the Forgotten Federal Art Legacies (FFAL) convening, we met John Kreidler, a central figure in San Francisco’s CETA history. He wrote a master’s thesis on New Deal art programs at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s; went on to pursue work for the federal government after graduating; and returned to the area to take on a graduate public policy internship at the San Francisco Arts Council.⁷ Familiar with federal hiring and employment administration, in 1973 he drafted the first proposal to use CETA funds to hire underemployed San Francisco artists. Alongside other arts administrators, among them the artist-educator Ruth Asawa, he witnessed the immediate economic and cultural impact of that proposal; there were more applications from local artists than CETA positions available, leading to the immediate creation of more jobs.⁸ San Francisco’s successful pilot of CETA employment for artists sparked similar developments across the country. As CETA primary sources and recent CETA literature reveal, between 1974 and 1982 there were as many as twenty thousand CETA artists working in various service jobs in more than two hundred localities, both urban and rural, the largest federal investment in basic income for artists and in community-based practices since the New Deal.⁹ Recent exhibitions, including ART/WORK: How the Government-Funded CETA Jobs Program Put Artists to Work (New York, 2021), Street Scene: CETA Murals, New Haven and the Late 1970s (virtual, 2023), the Delaware Art Museum’s upcoming survey Citizen Artist (2026), and a new iteration of ART/WORK (New York), raise awareness about the variety and breadth of CETA’s impact on local and national culture.¹⁰

The essays in this Colloquium present responses by five FFAL participants who reflect on New Deal and CETA history and the stakes of federally funded art. In his essay, “Sargent Johnson’s Athletics: A Modernist Experiment in Public Art,” art historian John Bowles, who led FFAL’s tours of Johnson’s public art projects in San Francisco, shares some reflections on Johnson’s monumental relief sculpture at George Washington High School and the questions about federal funding that it raises. In “ART/WORK: Civic Imagination and the Legacy of the CETA Art Programs,” curators Jodi Waynberg and Molly Garfinkel discuss their research into the national story of CETA, presented at greater length in their CETA Arts Curator Lecture.¹¹ Waynberg and Garfinkel assert that the legacy of CETA “continues in community arts practices, in artist-led organizing, in the ongoing struggle to define cultural work as civic work.”

Art historian Makeda Best, a San Francisco native, moderated FFAL’s “Radical Work: The Artivism of CETA,” a roundtable discussion that featured painter and art professor Dewey Crumpler, San Francisco poet laureate Devorah Major, printmaker and curator Nancy Hom, and photographer Bob Hsiang.¹² Writing about her childhood understanding of the city’s cultural landscape in “Growing Up in a CETA City,” Best focuses on the 1977 forced eviction of tenants at the International Hotel in San Francisco. This mixed-use, low-income complex housed the CETA-funded Kearny Street Workshop, where Hom, Hsiang, and other artists worked. In “Federal Funding, Local Practice, and Teaching Art History Through CETA in San Francisco,” art historian Elizabeth Fair considers insights she gained about the role of CETA in Hom’s career and in local Asian American arts and historic preservation organizations. Fair envisions teaching an art history course modeled on the FFAL convening’s engagement in site visits and conversations with CETA elders.

Finally, Deborah Cullinan, a leading arts administrator mentored by Kreidler, moderated FFAL’s “Intangible Legacies of Public Art” roundtable. The panelists were CETA artist contemporaries Susan Cervantes and Rhodessa Jones, along with Gilda Posada, an artist-curator-scholar who was mentored by CETA participants at the Mission Cultural Center and Mission Grafica.¹³ Posada’s print ARISE (fig. 2) pictures a scene of public classroom education, a form of community-based labor that CETA art programs supported. As Posada advocates, looking back at CETA’s accomplishments means “serving as a bridge” between the generations, learning firsthand about how artists gained “the freedom to just be artists and support the self-liberation, the self determination that stands out of the civil rights that our communities were fighting for.”¹⁴ In her essay, “Investing in Artists: Ripples of Return,” Cullinan champions intergenerational dialogue and describes CETA’s ongoing impact on her career, the Bay Area arts community, and recent efforts to pilot basic income programs for cultural workers modeled after CETA. Cullinan has argued for federal adoption of such frameworks, because there are ample resources to fund them nationally. At FFAL, she spoke of the tenfold return on investment when communities hire artists and demonstrated the need to enable artists to “dream bigger.”

As scholars, we are interested in the historical stakes of such recommendations. With the closing of the New Deal art programs, allied arts professionals (including scholars) advocated fiercely for the expansion of public art education, establishing or growing academic departments and studio art programs.¹⁵ They did so in the belief that providing general access to art making, art education, and art history inoculated the public against fascism and nurtured a healthy democracy. Decades later, CETA artists and administrators, who came of age during the Civil Rights era, shaped different and more sustainable grassroots relationships between the government, art, and art education that outlasted CETA itself. Elders remind us that although their time with CETA was brief, it enabled them to forge local and national coalitions and influential arts and arts education projects that continue to merge art practice with community activism. Prominent examples include Judy Baca’s Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) and the Great Wall of Los Angeles in Southern California, as well as Lou Bellamy’s Penumbra Theatre Company in Saint Paul, Minnesota.¹⁶ Beyond CETA, there are other federally funded art history throughlines to consider. COVID-19 emergency relief measures, which funded artists during a pandemic-driven economic shutdown, and the General Services Administration (GSA)’s Art in Architecture program, which has quietly commissioned new art for federal buildings since 1972, offer two other areas of research in response to the question “Why federally funded art?”¹⁷

We see such scholarly investigations as a useful context for navigating our present. In the months since our FFAL convening, funding for arts, cultural, and educational institutions, federal agencies, and individual artists and researchers has been cut with devastating effects. The impact—from loss of livelihoods to threats facing collections, data preservation, and interpretation—ushers in a time of crisis for our labor sector that may rival the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of the 1970s. The past shows us that in such trying times key individuals shaped US arts policy with a knowledge of art history that informed their interventions, such as the federal patronage of the arts and culture under the New Deal and CETA. As an exhaustive report on the impacts of CETA produced by the US Department of Labor in 1981 asserts, “Most significantly, the WPA established and CETA reaffirmed the importance of ‘creative work,’ within the social and economic fabric of the nation . . . [and] demonstrated the power of the cultural arena to provide jobs for thousands of unemployed Americans.”¹⁸ Can we pivot to center more stories about such federal policies and structural mechanisms that support emerging artists developing their skills and talents alongside established artists and elders? Today, ninety years after the New Deal and fifty years after CETA first used federal funds to hire thousands of artists, we join in solidarity with this Colloquium’s writers and other allies interested in such research and intergenerational dialogue.

Panorama Editors’ Note: See more about the history of public art and the WPA in this issue in this research note by Robert Cherney.

Cite this article: Jacqueline Francis and Mary Okin, introduction to “Why Federally Funded Art?” Colloquium, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20469.

Notes

This issue of Panorama opens in colonial New York and closes in present-day Mississippi, cutting through time and traversing the globe to tell new stories of the development and impact of artistic endeavors. While the transhistorical and transnational range  of these digital pages is always the goal, the current essays pay especially close attention to the material significance of money within art history. While numismatics is an area of aesthetic and material scholarship unto itself, American art history tends to approach money only indirectly, as a tool for the acquisition of artworks, not as a subject of research itself. Provenance research is among the most common vehicles to delve deeper into the role of money in art history, as is exploring governmental and institutional networks that support artistic production. The essays in this issue expand this approach to direct our attention not only to the materiality of money itself—physical currencies and their circulation—but also to the relationships across time and geography that patronage makes possible.

In Nancy Um’s Feature Article, coins themselves reveal previously obscured relationships between the worlds of the British Atlantic and Indian Ocean. In the late seventeenth-century will and inventory of Margrieta van Varick, Um traces the descriptions of currency she left behind to reconstruct a history of international exchange—and to propose a speculative history for an enslaved woman, Bette, left to Van Varick’s daughter in her will. Contributors to this issue’s Colloquium, guest edited by Jacqueline Francis and Mary Okin, demonstrate how New Deal initiatives continued to inspire similar programs long after they ended. This collection of essays follows a March 2025 public convening called “Forgotten Federal Art Legacies: PWAP to CETA.” Presenters visited San Francisco public art sites that were either built during the New Deal (1935–43) or funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) (1974–82) to address the history of government patronage of the arts in the Bay Area. These writings advance existing efforts by scholars and curators to broaden New Deal art histories and argue persuasively for their continuation in projects later in the 20th century and beyond.

Three Research Notes also address the histories and stakes of artistic patronage. Robert Cherney tackles a thorny historical record regarding federal support of the arts under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and its reverberations. Tara Kohn and James Denison expose troubling omissions within American modernism’s predominantly white spaces: Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place gallery and midcentury Maine, respectively. Kohn explores how the Black artist Beauford Delaney was welcomed into Stieglitz’s circle but never given the opportunity to exhibit at his gallery, while Denison uncovers past scholars’ dogged suppression of John Marin’s writings that evince his racism—often disturbingly entwined with his famous fondness for Maine as “the last stronghold of the Puritan”—thus protecting his legacy (and presumably market value).

Our fall 2025 issue has much more to offer regarding how ideas about Americanness are built, developed, and challenged. Digital Dialogues addresses timely efforts to combat federal censorship in our National Parks sites, while a new slate of Book and Exhibition Reviews covers topics ranging from collecting American art in the nineteenth century to exhibiting Indigenous art in the twentieth.

Panorama continues to think about our evolving field and the opportunities that can emerge from our nimble digital platform. We are introducing a new section, In Memoriam, starting with former Executive Editor Katherine Jentleson’s essay on the material culture scholar Bernard L. Herman,  as a responsive digital space both for celebration of life and public memory. Individuals or groups may submit remembrances on a rolling basis, with an open space for comments as a site for further tributes. We are also planning to focus a future issue on our nation’s Semiquincentennial, and we seek proposals in many forms, either following the journal’s standard formats or offering new avenues of critique, interpretation, and knowledge building related to this national milestone.

As always, we hope that you continue to find value in Panorama as a vital, inclusive platform for innovative scholarship in American art history. We welcome responses to our content through Talk Back (details on our Submissions page), and for anyone using the journal in their teaching practice, we hope that you will make use of our downloadable PDFs for course packs. Finally, as we near the end of 2025, please consider a donation that supports the ongoing work 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 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20599.

Author’s Note: This essay is accompanied by an interactive map (https://indianoceanexchanges.com/coin/mvvmap.html) that will assist the reader in locating key sites, dispersed across four continents and two major bodies of water. The text prompts readers to find and explore the sites based on color, enabled by a color library selected for its visual accessibility. Purple markers indicate where Yemeni coins have been located in North America and off the eastern coast of Africa; teal markers indicate key Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean locations stretching from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia and the Cape of Good Hope; and yellow markers refer to places that are relevant to the life of Margrieta van Varick, which span the entire breadth of the map.

Introduction

In a recent issue of the journal Art History that treated the visual and material culture of the “vast early modern Atlantic,” coins make several prominent appearances among a range of other forms. In the volume’s introduction, the co-editors, Esther Chadwick and Cécile Fromont, show how a group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean coins were significantly modified through punching, clipping, and overstamping, interventions that vividly attest to the fragile British attempt to consolidate economic control over Spanish-ruled Dominica.¹ In her own essay in the volume, Chadwick explores a coin type from Haiti known as the “One Gourde,” which both enshrined and overwrote longstanding conventions of European coins and medals by featuring a prominent profile image of Henri Christophe, the Black king who adopted post-revolutionary power on that island in 1811.²

Drawing attention to an enduring limitation in the field, Chadwick boldly declares that “numismatic objects give distinctive material form to the historical complexities of power, value and representation in the Atlantic world. Accordingly, they are worthwhile as subjects not just of antiquarian but of art-historical study.”³ Chadwick’s pronouncement points to the ways that art historians tend to restrict the interpretive scope of coins, targeting them instrumentally as mere markers of chronology or as empirical indices of iconographic change. On the same topic, Laura Kalba has pressed even further, calling into question art historians’ “hardwired antipathy toward numismatic subjects.”⁴

This essay takes inspiration from these provocations to center coins within art-historical analyses. It also amplifies Chadwick’s pointed contention that coins are material instruments of exchange that traverse economic systems and can thus unlock the understanding of a whole host of complex early modern oceanic relationships both within and outside of the Atlantic world. Ultimately, this study is grounded in the simple premise that a woman named Margrieta van Varick held some silver coins from Yemen in her estate, among countless other items, at the time of her death in the year 1695. This basic contention, which builds on new archaeological evidence, is both unexpected and powerful, in that these coins wholly pivot our lens on Margrieta’s biography, which, in previous scholarship, has been oriented primarily around her role as a wife and mother.⁵

When spotlighted, these coins—modest in size, epigraphic in design, and excavated in sites far from their place of origin—speak loudly, prompting us to follow their distinctive peregrinations from the coast of the Arabian Peninsula to the southern islands of the Indian Ocean, and finally to the Atlantic seaboard of colonial North America. As such, they decidedly redirect our attention toward Margrieta’s role as a businesswoman and an enslaver during a fleeting period of time when New York City was directly connected to the Indian Ocean and deeply involved in the Madagascar slave trade. This shift, then, calls for speculation on the occluded biography of a woman named Bette, whose life story has been tethered to that of her enslaver. Ultimately, this interpretation reveals how far-flung matrices of maritime violence and enslavement facilitated the consumption of Indian Ocean goods in late seventeenth-century colonial New York.

The Inventory of Margrieta van Varick

Margrieta van Varick (d. 1695) is known to us today primarily through a copy of her inventory, held by the New York State Archives. Numbering eighteen pages and completed by three assessors on May 29, 1696, it lists her household possessions as well as those that remained in stock at the small shop she kept at the time of her death. She was born in Amsterdam in 1649 and then moved to Malacca, a major trade entrepôt in modern-day Malaysia, before she turned twenty (see map). She married in Malacca but then returned to the Dutch Republic after her first husband, a merchant, died. There she married for the second time and then traveled with her family across the Atlantic to New York in 1686. She settled in Flatbush, one of the five towns colonized by the Dutch on Long Island, where her husband was appointed as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church (see map).⁶ She lived there until her death in 1695. While overseas travel was not entirely unusual for women in the Dutch Republic during this booming maritime era, very few women had the opportunity to cross both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.⁷ Among them, Margrieta is unique in that her inventory has survived over the centuries and can serve as a materially salient window into her biography.

Among the long list of Margrieta’s possessions, we find expected household items, such as those that filled her kitchen: kettles, skillets, pans, dining utensils, porcelain vessels, and more (fig. 1). The inventory also contains the accessories of motherhood, such as baby’s caps, bibs, diapers, and toys. (She was survived by four children, ages two through thirteen at the time of her death.) Clothing and textiles also figure prominently on the list, both as yardage and as garments crafted of damask, serge, flannel, linen, calico, crepe, and other types; some of these she acquired for resale in her shop. Numerous items that may have held personal value, such as “a gold Ring—with seaven diamants,” “an East India Cabinet with an Ebony foot wrought,” and “the picter of Mrs Varick,” were expressly set aside for her children, while the rest of the estate was to be sold off, with the proceeds also going to her children.⁸

Some of these items are described with precious details that invite comparison to specimens in museum collections today, such as the aforementioned cabinet of tropical wood raised on feet of ebony (fig. 2). Even though none of the descriptions can be associated confidently with known objects, it is clear that some were procured from afar. Indeed, some items are labeled in terms that point directly to distant geographies, such as “Jappan boxes” and “China Cupps with Covers.” As a group, these objects evoke a late seventeenth-century world of consumption provisioned by networks of trade that stretched to the Middle East and Asia, offering painted cottons from India, Chinese porcelain wares of many types, Middle Eastern carpets, and items hewn from Asian hardwoods, among other goods. Caroline Frank posits that the presence of goods from China in colonial North America is evidence of an “indirect” relationship of exchange, both intellectual and material, between the two regions that existed before American independence.⁹ Margrieta’s inventory represents the wider material aspirations of the moment, with its array of items that were valued for their visual and tactile appeal, their innovative production technologies, and undoubtedly their perceived exotic uniqueness.

The inventory was featured as the centerpiece of a sumptuous exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York, in 2009. This show, which was groundbreaking in presenting the first comprehensive body of research on Margrieta and her estate, offers the prevailing assumption that her time spent in Asia, as well as her two husbands’ stints there, allowed her ready access to these goods, procured before they moved to New York (fig. 3). Namely, catalogue contributor Ruth Piwonka found the contents of Margrieta’s inventory, with its large quantity of high-quality wares from afar, to be unique in comparison to those of other New York women of similar status from the same era. This difference led her to posit that the foreign goods Margrieta owned were meaningful to her personally, based on her own travels in the East and those of her first and second husbands, both of whom had served the Dutch East India Company.¹⁰ The exhibition co-curator Marybeth De Filippis echoed that perspective, writing, “Margrieta’s first husband, Egbert van Duins, participated in this Indian-Malaccan trade, a connection that perhaps explains the presence of some of the Eastern goods on Margrieta’s inventory.”¹¹ In this way, Margrieta’s personal narrative and travels have greatly underpinned our contemporary understanding of her estate holdings.¹²

Here I suggest an alternate mode by which these goods entered Margrieta’s possession, contending that at least some were accumulated after her arrival in New York, for retail purposes and for personal use. During the 1690s, New York City, which was in close proximity to her home in Flatbush, served as a key entrepôt for goods acquired directly from Indian Ocean channels. This maritime path constituted an alternate route to the prevailing trading circuits that radiated from Europe and were sustained by the charter trading companies: the English East India Company, the West India Company, and the Dutch East India Company. Indeed, at this time, New York merchants engaged directly with Anglo-American pirates, and together the two groups trafficked enslaved people from Africa, working outside of the charter company circuits. Concurrently, New York officials sponsored privateering while also turning a blind eye to piracy, although the lines between the two domains could be traversed easily at a time when conceptions of maritime imperial sovereignty were being vetted hotly on the opposite shore of the Atlantic. As historian Robert Ritchie describes, “New York became notorious as a pirate haven and the center for supplying the Indian Ocean pirates.”¹³ These conditions served as more than a contested backdrop to Margrieta’s life in Flatbush. Margrieta herself was imbricated in these circuits of transoceanic exchange, as a shopowner but also an enslaver. The coins she held at the time of her death provide the most vivid material means to understand this involvement, while also prompting a return to the biography of Bette, the enslaved woman that is mentioned only briefly in Margrieta’s will.

The Arabian Chequin

Coins appear in multiple places in the inventory, including several that are singled out in its first pages as items expressly set aside for her children. To her son Marinus, Margrieta left “one gold duccate.” To her younger son, Rudolphus, she also left “one duccate,” but without specification of its metal content. One can presume that both coins were minted on the model of the Venetian gold zecchino, or ducat, a denomination that weighed 3.5 grams and measured around 20 millimeters in diameter (fig. 4). The Venetian ducat became a prevailing currency in the sixteenth century and was imitated across Europe and the Middle East. Its size and weight came to constitute an early modern transregional monetary standard over both land and sea routes. While we can ascertain the size and weight of the two coins due to the stated denomination, it is impossible to know where they would have been minted. The ducat and its derivatives were produced in many locations outside of Venice in the seventeenth century.¹⁴

Another gold coin in the inventory, meant for Margrieta’s elder daughter, Johanna, was described with more precision as “one gold arabian duccate” (fig. 5). A subsequent paragraph mentions a seemingly similar type: “one arabyan duccate” for Cornelia, her youngest child. In contrast to the ducats earmarked for Marinus and Rudolphus, which cannot be associated with mint sites, these two “Arabian” coins, both intended for Margrieta’s daughters, can be located with more confidence. They were likely minted by the Ottomans, or perhaps the Safavids, on the Venetian standard of the ducat. While the Ottoman altin or sultani and the Safavid ashrafi were of the same size and weight as their Venetian counterpart, each was covered with epigraphy in Arabic script and interspersed with decorative motifs, rather than bearing figural imagery (figs. 6 and 7).

In this context, the term “Arabian” should not be understood as a precise reference to the geographic region of the Arabian Peninsula or even to today’s broader Arab world. Neither Margrieta nor those who assessed her estate would have been able to read the coins’ inscriptions to determine where they had been minted. Nor would they have been aware of the distinctions between the various languages written in Arabic script, such as the Ottoman Turkish or Persian writing that would have been featured on these coins. I propose that the term “Arabian” was deployed in this context in reference to the presence of Arabic script, as an epigraphic way of pointing toward the wider Islamic world, rather than delineating a specific or known geographic location. It is also possible that the unspecified ducats intended for Marinus and Rudolphus fell into the same category, even though they are not referred to by the term “Arabian.”

So, why, then, would Margrieta hold two, or perhaps even three or four, gold coins minted in the Ottoman or Safavid world at the time of her death? To answer this question, one must turn to the history of coinage in the North American colonies in the late seventeenth century, which was characterized by a persistent lack of specie. There were no active mints in North America in 1695. The Massachusetts Bay Colony mint, which had issued low-denomination silver coins for a few decades, shuttered in 1682 (fig. 8).¹⁵ Additionally, England severely restricted exports of sterling to the colonies. Thus, without a dominant currency, colonial Americans had to rely on a panoply of foreign coins, in gold, silver, and copper, to conduct their business, in addition to engaging in barter, using bills of exchange, and eventually relying on paper money.¹⁶

It is not so surprising, then, that the Ottoman altin or the Safavid ashrafi found a useful place in colonial America, with its multiplicity of currencies. Numismatic historian Oliver Hoover notes, however, that the circulation of Islamic coins in the colonies “has been so thoroughly forgotten that only a very few are probably aware that it ever existed.”²⁰ A historical account published in 1708 listed the range of foreign coins in circulation in Virginia at that time, thirteen years after Margrieta’s death (fig. 9). Notably, the Arabian ducat appears here as well, referred to by a cognate term, the Arabian chequin.²¹ This foreign currency appears on this list without any gloss or description, suggesting not only that it was exchanged with a frequency that merited its inclusion but also that it was recognizable enough to be noted without further elucidation. Yet, even if it was a known currency in Virginia, it did not circulate widely there or in New York.²²

Hoover cites various possible channels of conveyance for these gold Arabian chequins to colonial North America, including both Mediterranean and Indian Ocean routes. While these gold coins appear in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century local textual sources, including those mentioned above, there are no extant specimens that are known to have circulated in colonial North America. According to Hoover, “they now seem to have completely disappeared from the North American find record.”²³ As is common with any item of gold, the raw material would have been avidly repurposed, so the lack of material evidence should not be taken as indicative of this coin’s historic reach or scope.

Arabian Silver Money

In addition to these four gold coins, a total of forty-two silver coins are included in Margrieta’s inventory, also set aside expressly for her children. As with their gold counterparts, the silver coins are invoked with varying degrees of specificity, although they are never named by denomination. Here as well, some of the silver coins came from the Islamic world, particularly those described as “eleaven pecces Arabian and Christian silver monny” that were earmarked for Margrieta’s elder daughter, Johanna (see fig. 5).

The curators of the 2009 Bard exhibition surmised that the coins described as “Christian” were Spanish reales, minted under Iberian authority of silver mined from Potosí, in present-day Bolivia. Although these Spanish reales were issued in various denominations, the most important and widely circulating was the Spanish real of eight, often referred to as the Spanish dollar or piece of eight (fig. 10). A hefty coin of 20 grams and 38 millimeters in diameter, the Spanish dollar is posited as the first global currency, having achieved a wide reach across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans since the sixteenth century. As suggested in the 1708 list of foreign coins used in Virginia (see fig. 9), the Spanish dollar was a common currency in colonial North America, to the extent that it constituted half of the coins in circulation before Independence.²⁴

Some of the “Christian” silver coins could also have been Dutch lion dollars.²⁵ The leeuwendaalder was minted for circulation in VOC Indian Ocean networks in the seventeenth century (fig. 11). However, the leeuwendaalder had a lower silver content than the Spanish dollar and never managed to supersede its global dominance. Former American Numismatic Society curator John Kleeberg indicates that the leeuwendaalder could be found in New York, particularly between 1693 and 1733, and ties its presence directly to the short-lived but vigorous investment of New York merchants in the Madagascar trade, a topic discussed in more detail below.²⁶

Unlike the Arabian chequins, the silver coins in Margrieta’s inventory are never mentioned by denomination. As such, their identity and objecthood are posited in a very different way than the foreign coins that sustained a consistent identity based on their face value—such as the ducat, which was understood as a distinct coin type regardless of the script that appeared on its surface. By contrast, the silver coins listed in this inventory are defined by three different characteristics: their origin, as defined in the broadest of terms (either “Christian” or “Arabian”), their quantity, and their weight. However, the individual weight of any one of these coins is impossible to isolate, because the weights were recorded in aggregation with other coins in addition to other items crafted of silver, which were likely both bigger and heavier. For instance, the eleven silver coins meant for Johanna were weighed along with two boxes, an egg dish, eighteen children’s toys, and a thimble, all made of silver totaling 51.5 ounces in troy weight, the standard used for precious metals.

While the gold coins (or ducats) and silver “Christian” coins mentioned in the inventory may be plausibly identified, the silver coins described as “Arabian” in this mixed group are more difficult to determine. Indeed, in 2009, the curators of the Bard exhibition could only speculate about reasonable candidates to represent them. As one possibility, they featured a silver mazuna, minted in present-day Morocco, noting that its weight equaled that of another coin fragment excavated from a colonial-era shipwreck.²⁷ The other Islamic silver coin selected for the exhibition was a rupee minted under the name of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, dated 1691. This choice seems to have been based on the kinds of coins that Margrieta and her two husbands may have come across while posted in Asia, perhaps with the assumption that these items remained in the family’s possession from those stints abroad. Her first husband, Egbert van Duins (d. 1677), had previously been posted to the Mughal port of Surat before moving to Malacca, where he met and married Margrieta (see map/ map).²⁸

Since the Bard exhibition, a series of new and surprising archaeological finds have emerged to shift our identification of the “Arabian” silver coins in the inventory. Namely, a significant number of silver coins from Yemen have been unearthed across colonial-era sites stretching from Connecticut to Maine. In 2018, archaeologists affiliated with the Connecticut Office of State Archaeology found a Yemeni silver coin at the Lt. John Hollister site in South Glastonbury, excavated at the edge of a building dating to the late seventeenth century (see map).²⁹ This small coin, only 12.5 millimeters in diameter, is worn, and its edge has been chipped off, resulting in a ragged outline (fig. 12). As with the Arabian chequins, the coin is defined by an epigraphic program. The Arabic inscriptions on both sides are surrounded by a solid border within a dotted band. The inscription on its obverse, unevenly stamped, bears the honorific title “al-Nasir li-din al-haqq,” which refers to Imam Muhammad bin Ahmad of Yemen, who died in 1718. On the reverse, the partial inscription conveys a pious phrase, “the faith rejuvenated,” and includes the date, which can be discerned as 1692–93 (1104 AH).³⁰

The Connecticut find joins several similar discoveries, such as a larger and much more pristine Yemeni coin specimen unearthed in Middletown, Rhode Island. A metal detectorist and historian named James Bailey found the coin in 2014 (see map). This coin bears a different regnal title, “al-Hadi,” and a very clear date, 1693–94 (1105 AH), along with the name of the mint site.³¹ Similar to the specimen featured in figure 13, this coin was produced in the Yemeni town called al-Khadra’, which was one of the ruling seats of Imam Muhammad bin Ahmad, who used three different titles during his rule, including both al-Nasir and al-Hadi (see map).³²

These two Yemeni coins, both found in sites associated with colonial-era occupation, are not isolated specimens. Professional archaeologists and the metal detecting community have announced several other similar Yemeni coin finds from four states across the Northeast, including Massachusetts and Maine.³³ Although some are too damaged or fragmented to be legible, at least eight can be identified with a certain level of precision.³⁴ It is striking that they constitute a consistent corpus that can be related to comparative examples in international coin collections, such as the American Numismatic Society. All date to the same short time period, between 1689 and 1695. They were all minted by the same Imam, Muhammad bin Ahmad, during his long reign of over thirty years. I am confident that more Yemeni coins of this type will continue to turn up, particularly as commercial metal detecting equipment improves in its sensitivity and depth detection.

However, Yemeni coinage from this era is notoriously difficult to study. The weights and sizes of coins are incredibly varied, even within a single denomination, and the local textual sources do not correlate with material specimens in a clear or consistent way. Even so, the bulk of the identifiable coins from Yemen that have been found within this North American corpus appear to be of the same type.³⁵ This coin type has been referred to using the Arabic vernacular term, khamsiyya (plural khamasi), which means five. The khamsiyya was a low-value silver coin, generally 12 to 16 millimeters in diameter and weighing an average of .72 grams.³⁶ Most of the examples are razor thin and smaller than a dime.

The khamsiyya is well documented in the trade records of the European merchants who operated out of the Red Sea port of Mocha, in modern-day Yemen. Calling it the “commassee,” they singled it out as a local currency that circulated in that city’s market, tendered for everyday goods such as groceries and dry goods. As an example, on January 15, 1721, some supplies were purchased for the English trading factory at Mocha. Among other items, the list included some greens for four khamasi, milk for four khamasi, salt for two khamasi, eggs for nine khamasi, and fish for three khamasi. At that time, the exchange rate was forty-five khamasi to one Spanish dollar.³⁷ Even while the khamsiyya was a local denomination, it was minted from silver mined at Potosí during a time when Spanish dollars were flooding the Arabian Peninsula for the coffee trade. In fact, the main Yemeni coffee market at Bayt al-Faqih only accepted cash in Spanish dollars, while other regional markets operated on credit.

Islamic coins have only very rarely been excavated at colonial American sites and usually stand as isolated finds without ready comparisons or detailed documentation.³⁸ By contrast, the Yemeni coin finds described here come together to constitute a significant and consistent corpus of silver Islamic coins produced during a fixed time frame and deposited at various colonial sites across the Northeast. Given the locations where they have been found, their consequential number, and their narrow but highly compatible date range, I contend that at least some of Margrieta’s pieces of “Arabian silver money” were Yemeni khamsiyya coins.

I also want to underscore that the various labels that appear in the inventory—ducats, Arabian ducats, and Arabian and Christian silver money—were assigned by the assessors, not by Margrieta. In fact, Margrieta seems to have regarded these foreign coins, including the Yemeni khamsiyya, as more than mere liquid tender. On October 29, 1695, several weeks before she died, Margrieta wrote (or more likely dictated) her will, in which she determined which items to set aside for family members, leaving the rest to be sold off for her children’s benefit.³⁹ Narrated in the first person, this document reveals her voice at a very fragile moment, when she was ill at the end of her life. As such, it communicates in a way that the inventory, compiled by the assessors after her death, does not. For this reason, the two documents, will and inventory, must be read together. Although the will conveys her final wishes, the inventory has tended to receive more attention from scholars.⁴⁰

In her will, Margrieta earmarked for each child a bundle of goods, each wrapped in a napkin. While the will does not mention the “Arabian” silver coins specifically, the inventory does, along with other small, precious goods, under the subheading “For Johanna van Varick—Bound up in a Napkin.”⁴¹ She prepared a similar wrapped bundle for each of her children and notably doled out the four gold ducats equally among them. The two specified as “Arabian” were given to her daughters. The silver coins were also divided such that each child received between three and twenty, although only Johanna’s were described as “Arabian and Christian.” In contrast to the methodical reporting of the assessors, it is clear that Margrieta took personal care in dividing up and preparing these parcels as parting bestowals to her children.

Indeed, these coins were treated differently from other forms of scattered cash held in the estate. The cash was tabulated by the assessors after Margrieta’s death and gathered up among the goods intended for auction. Rather than being singled out in the inventory as a particular type of coin or currency, this money was enumerated at the end of the assessed roster in a lump sum, appearing in one of its final lines as: “More found in Cash, £120:18:2” (fig. 14).⁴² This designation sets that money apart, cast in New York pounds, from the varied foreign coins described above, which were called out by denomination, identified as “pieces” expressed by their weight, and specifically wrapped and set aside for Margrieta’s children. This starkly differential treatment underlines how the array of foreign coins in her possession—whether Arabian chequins, Spanish dollars, Dutch leeuwendaalders, or Yemeni khamsiyya—constituted part of her personal and material object world. They were not treated as controvertible forms of cash or presented as direct sources of liquidity.

From Mocha to New York

As described above, some of the foreign coins held by Margrieta, namely the Arabian chequin, the Spanish dollar, and to a lesser extent the Dutch lion dollar, circulated quite fluidly as international currencies and could have arrived in New York through various channels of trade and exchange, via the Indian Ocean or the Mediterranean. Indeed, these coin types were transregional in their scope and played important roles in maritime trade circuits. By contrast, the Yemeni khamsiyya was a low-value currency with a very narrow purview of circulation. Even within Yemen, its usage zone was delimited to a small strip on the southern Red Sea coast in and around the port city of Mocha (see map).⁴³ Because of its small range of standard circulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the khamsiyya thus offers a specific and very short-lived history of conveyance that can sharpen our understanding of the maritime relationships sustained between colonial New York and the Indian Ocean at the time of Margrieta’s death.

Although Yemen played a nearly exclusive role in the global trade of the coffee bean during this time, direct connections between Yemen and North America were not established until after American independence. Rather, during the 1680s and the 1690s, the maritime spheres of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans became closely linked through the activities of a group referred to as the “Red Sea pirates.” These Anglo-American pirates had long operated in the Caribbean but, finding their activities constrained, sought out new lucrative arenas. Historian Mark Hanna describes them as the “hundreds, if not thousands, of Englishmen who preyed upon Muslim pilgrims sailing in the Indian Ocean bound for Jeddah [Jidda], the largest port in the Red Sea and the gateway to Mecca . . . who based themselves mainly on the East African island of Madagascar.”⁴⁴ They timed their arrival at Bab al-Mandab, the southern opening of the Red Sea, in order to seize pilgrimage ships traveling from Jidda on the return journey to the port of Surat in Gujarat (see map). Charged with carrying pious passengers, these vessels were also rich with precious metals, including the coin types mentioned above, and tended not to be heavily armed. The pirates targeted these ships with a sense of impunity, under the premise that it was justifiable to pilfer cargo carried by Muslims.⁴⁵

Many famous Anglo-American pirates plied this route, such as Thomas Tew, Henry Every, and William Kidd. Every (also known as Avery) plundered a particularly well-outfitted Mughal pilgrimage vessel, referred to popularly as the Gunsway, owned by Emperor Aurangzeb, in the year 1695.⁴⁶ Indeed, 1695 is a landmark year that marked more than Margrieta’s death. Every’s attack was singled out for the extreme brutality of the crew’s actions on board, in addition to the magnitude of riches that he and his crew seized. The infuriated Mughals retaliated against English establishments in India, which, in turn, led to a severe English crackdown against pirates in both the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, a decisive change in the official response to such activities. Every himself was never caught, although some of his crew members were tried and hanged in London. Others escaped punishment and were even spotted in the colonies. After the infamous attack on the Gunsway in 1695, piracy suppression became a top priority in English maritime affairs.⁴⁷

It is notable that pilgrimage ships like the Gunsway always stopped at the port of Mocha before exiting the Red Sea (see map). Mocha was the last major port of call before these vessels headed into the open waters of the Arabian Sea. The crew and passengers disembarked there to pick up fresh water and provisions before they began the most grueling seaborne leg of their return journey.⁴⁸ Inevitably, they left the Red Sea with some khamsiyya coins in their possession as change from their transactions in Mocha’s market.

These pirates sustained a base on Saint Mary’s Island (Île Sainte Marie), today’s Nosy Baraha, off Madagascar (see map).⁴⁹ After their exploits off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, they would retreat to that island to repair ships and tend to the ill and injured, heavy with the gains they had seized from pilgrimage vessels. At the same time, this island drew North American merchants, particularly from New York. Colonial merchants had purchased enslaved individuals from Madagascar since the 1670s, but these efforts intensified in the 1690s and were deeply intertwined with pirate activity.⁵⁰ These merchants provisioned the pirates on Saint Mary’s Island with supplies brought from the Atlantic world. They then, in turn, enslaved Malagasy people, who had been brutally captured, transporting them for sale back in the colonies. The traders saw Madagascar as an ideal target for a new and lucrative wing of the slave trade that sat outside the purview of the Royal African Company, which was founded in 1672 under an English charter and controlled the whole Atlantic coast of Africa. As historian Arne Bialuchewski describes in stark economic terms: “This legal loophole gave venturesome entrepreneurs an opportunity to set up a profitable trade, as slaves in Madagascar were much cheaper than those in West Africa.”⁵¹

This journey also provided a means for North American merchants to gain direct access to Indian Ocean goods, picked up at the Cape of Good Hope or acquired in the islands around Madagascar. In this way, they circumvented the circuits of trade that were tightly controlled and heavily taxed from sites such as Amsterdam and London.⁵² On the return journey to New York, many of these ships covertly ferried pirates to the colonies, where they sought haven and relative anonymity, provisioned with their newly acquired coins and loot.⁵³ Indeed, some colonial governors overlooked or even welcomed these cash-rich arrivals, despite their checkered pasts.⁵⁴ The governor of New York, Benjamin Fletcher, who held office from 1692 to 1697 and thus personally presided over the adjudication of Margrieta’s estate, publicly spearheaded legislation to suppress piracy, even as he made clandestine side deals to protect pirates from recrimination and to personally benefit from their activities. As Ritchie observes, “Under Fletcher’s administration the piracy business flourished.”⁵⁵

However, this period of free passage and relative immunity, which brought together the voracious interests of Indian Ocean pirates, New York enslavers, and colonial merchants, was short-lived, reaching a height precisely in the mid-1690s, right around the time of Margrieta’s death.⁵⁶ Every’s exploits in 1695 ended the tacit English tolerance for piracy and support of privateering. In 1698, Parliament authorized a new East India Company with monopoly rights, intended to end any direct trade between colonial America and the Indian Ocean.⁵⁷

These new conditions affected even those voyages that were already in progress. As an example, the Margaret, owned by the New York merchant Frederick Philipse, a key investor in the Madagascar slave trade, set sail for the Indian Ocean in 1698.⁵⁸ That vessel carried large quantities of wine, beer, and rum in addition to gunpowder and some “sundry” items. When the ship embarked on the return journey in 1699, with 114 or 115 enslaved people on board, it was stopped at the Cape of Good Hope.⁵⁹ The cargo was seized, the slaves were sold at the Cape, and Captain Samuel Burgess was sent to London for trial, accused of collaborating with pirates and engaging in piracy himself. The seized goods included nutmeg, cloves, saffron, dyes, coins, broadcloth, porcelain vessels, Indian textiles, and more. The coins were broken down specifically as 9,800 pieces of eight, 2,000 gold chequins, and 7,500 lion dollars.⁶⁰

Although they are not named among the coins brought back on the Margaret, some Yemeni khamsiyya coins were likely carried on that ship as it left Madagascar. In 1702, the Speaker sunk off the coast of Mauritius, with John Bowen, an infamous pirate, as its captain. Sources indicate that the ship had just come from plundering three vessels off the Arabian coast and was heading for Madagascar before veering off course only to sink just off that nearby island (see map).⁶¹ When a French team excavated the shipwreck in 1980, they found an array of coins, including six silver Spanish dollars minted in New Spain in denominations of four and eight, four Ottoman gold sultanis (or Arabian chequins), two Venetian ducats minted in the late seventeenth century, a Dutch lion dollar, three Yemeni khamsiyya coins, and a few other types.⁶² That set of finds, submerged for almost three hundred years, demonstrates the purview of pirate loot that is often referred to in generic terms as “coins of all nations.” Moreover, it illustrates how these coin types, the same denominations that Margrieta held at the time of her death, were aggregated when they were seized off the Arabian coast and then brought to the southern islands of the Indian Ocean.

In some ways, the khamsiyya can be compared inversely to the Arabian chequin. The golden Arabian chequin appears in text but has left no material trace from the colonial era. By contrast, the silver khamsiyya has been excavated or found in several colonial archaeological contexts but cannot be identified definitively in textual sources, even while plausible identifications, such as the present one, can be made. Additionally, the Arabian chequin was a high-value golden coin produced precisely for transregional exchange, while the khamsiyya was low in value and minted for local use within Yemen. Yet one can see the utility of the khamsiyya in the cash-poor colonies, where one of the biggest needs was for small change. This demand led to the frequent clipping of silver fragments from higher-value coins, such as the Spanish dollar, for practical use.⁶³ Yemeni khamsiyya coins could thus fulfill a demonstrated demand for low-denomination tender, which may be why they remained in circulation and continue to be turned up by contemporary archaeologists and metal detectorists across New England.

Margrieta and the Indian Ocean

One might assume that this intertwined sphere of Indo-Atlantic trade, piracy, and enslavement had little to do with the world of Margrieta van Varick, a minister’s wife, mother of four, and a modest shop owner. Indeed, these coins from afar could have come into her possession through various means, possibly transferred to her by way of a patron in her shop. Yet this detached view of her life is untenable. Margrieta was connected to the Madagascar trade through her business ties and social circle; in fact, she may have been directly involved herself.⁶⁴

In her will, Margrieta designated three people as executors: Nicholas Bayard, Charles Lodowick, and Jan Harperdingh.⁶⁵ In the 2009 Bard catalogue, these choices were described largely based on her personal ties, emphasizing longstanding friendships and family connections. On his deathbed in 1694, her husband Rudolphus had called on Nicholas to attest to his will, thereby indicating his status as a reliable member of his circle.⁶⁶ Surely, those ties were relevant to Margrieta, who, facing her own imminent death, would have been concerned with the welfare of her young children. At that dire time, she would have sought the most trustworthy representatives to ensure their well-being in her absence.

However, Nicholas and Charles may have also been her business contacts. Nicholas (1644–1707/11) has been described as the eleventh wealthiest man in New York during his era.⁶⁷ Historian Cathy Matson also indicates that he was “widely known to have benefited from piracy in the 1680s,” when he served as a city councilor and then as mayor of New York, a position that rotated annually.⁶⁸ Additionally, in the 1690s, Nicholas worked closely with Governor Fletcher, serving as his go-between with the various pirates and privateers who operated between New York and Madagascar.⁶⁹ Nicholas was so invested in the Madagascar trade that he went to England to rally his allies against rising trade restrictions after the governor, his patron, had been recalled.⁷⁰ His close associate Charles Lodowick (1658–1724) was an English merchant engaged in the fur trade, who held the positions of customs collector and then mayor of New York from 1694 to 1695. In 1692, Governor Fletcher dispatched both Nicholas and Charles to Albany, to aid the mayor of that city, Pieter Schuyler, during King William’s War.⁷¹ According to historian Kevin McDonald, Charles was also involved in the Indo-Atlantic trade.⁷² The third executor, Jan Harperdingh, does not appear to have been involved with these commercial activities, although he had served as an executor for several other estates among New York’s Dutch community, and so his experience would have positioned him well for this role.

These personal connections to merchants who were directly involved in the Madagascar trade provided Margrieta with access to some of the Indian Ocean goods that she sold in her shop.⁷³ Moreover, Margrieta was financially invested in the shipping industry. After her estate was assessed, it was discovered that she held one-sixth ownership in a sloop called The Flying Fish, which was valued at 60 pounds.⁷⁴ Yet, neither the inventory nor the will connect her shipping activities, or those of her associates, with the shop directly. Indeed, we know very little about Margrieta’s business. It is assumed that she started it as a way to care for her family after 1690, when her husband was caught up in the political drama brought on by the Leisler Rebellion, when English control of New York was overthrown in the wake of King James’ deposition. Implicated in the ensuing political drama in Flatbush, Rudolphus ended up in jail for a short time.⁷⁵ This is a murky time in Margrieta’s life, when she briefly fled Flatbush, although it is unknown where she went or exactly when she returned.

Despite these uncertainties about Margrieta’s business dealings, the goods that remained unsold in her shop were recorded with great detail, across four pages and separated from those items that she left to her children and her general household effects. The majority of her shop merchandise was comprised of textiles, calculated by the yard or the ell (a historic unit of length, the Dutch ell was around 27 inches), along with some tailored items. The types of named textiles are diverse, including flannel, jersey, druggett, damask, calamanco, serge, calico, “Bengall,” linen, fustian, and more. She also sold sewing supplies such as thread, lace, buttons, thimbles, and pins, in addition to spices such as nutmeg, cloves, mace, cinnamon, and pepper. The spices and some of the textiles—namely the calico and the “Bengall” cloth, which was a type of muslin— surely came from the Indian Ocean trade.

Although the inventory does not elucidate how or when Margrieta acquired these items for resale, it is likely that she procured them directly through Indian Ocean channels, drawing on her connections to Nicholas and Charles, who were actively engaged in the Madagascar trade around the time of her death, or even via the boat in which she held shares.⁷⁶ The maritime traffic between New York and Madagascar was regular, as indicated by Frank, who provides a list of eighteen such journeys conducted from 1690 to 1699, in addition to several others that landed at or were dispatched from nearby ports, such as Newport, Philadelphia, and Boston. Frank also notes that additional missions likely went unrecorded.⁷⁷

This proposal diverges from that of the Bard curators, who tacitly suggested that Margrieta procured these eastern goods during her time in the Dutch Republic before arriving in New York, or even when she was in Malacca almost two decades earlier. Frank concurs with their earlier perspective, presenting the view that Margrieta and both of her husbands’ stays in Malacca allowed for the “accumulation of . . . alluring Far Eastern goods.”⁷⁸ However, it is unlikely that Margrieta or her second husband, Rudolphus, would have had the foresight to acquire such copious quantities of Indian cloth or spices for resale before leaving Malacca. For instance, among the assessed items in the store, there were five pounds of pepper, nine and a quarter yards of “Bengall” textile, and at least nine different types of calico, equaling over thirty yards in total.

It is also possible that Margrieta provisioned some of the outgoing cargoes on these Madagascar missions. The shipments to that island included supplies that were intended for sale to the pirates who had just come from battles at sea and long maritime journeys. Ritchie underlines the particular need for clothes and tools used to make clothing, as pirates’ garments were subject to a great deal of wear and tear on the water.⁷⁹ In this regard, we should return to the outgoing cargo of the above-mentioned Margaret that headed for Madagascar in 1698, which included six chests and seven casks of “Sundry merchandise.” Among these varied items were guns of various types, knives, flints, cloth, looking glasses, thimbles, scissors, ivory combs, buttons, tobacco pipes and boxes, and hats. Bulk items included sugar, lead, and tar.⁸⁰ Margrieta’s store was replete with many of the named supplies. For instance, at the time of her death, the inventory of her shop merchandise included almost one hundred knives, thimbles, almost seventy pairs of scissors, twenty ivory combs and ten of horn, and tobacco boxes made of steel and wood, along with the textiles mentioned above.⁸¹ The list of shop goods also included fifteen mirrors, of which ten were described as “Indian looking glasses.”⁸²

Additionally, specific items on these outgoing vessels were intended for the “local trade” in Madagascar, which obliquely indicates a category of goods used to barter for enslaved people, as well as local products such as ivory. As Bialuchewski describes, North American merchants profited from intertribal conflicts, in which local Malagasy groups, often from the coast, aided in enslaving people from rival communities on the island. He also indicates that “the indigenous people were keen to acquire beads, novelties, and copper or brass wire. Silver coins—the widely used Spanish pieces-of-eight—were also highly valued,” and guns increased in demand during this time.⁸³ In 1698, the Margaret carried beads, brass neck collars, and armrings to Madagascar, presumably for this purpose.⁸⁴ Similarly, Margrieta’s shop inventory included “49 glasse Necklaces” and “a remnant Copres.”⁸⁵ It is notable that her shop carried significant quantities of some of the key items that would have been desirable to both the pirates who made temporary homes in Madagascar and the island’s resident human traffickers.

Lastly, it is surely possible that Margrieta procured some of the Asian goods among her personal belongings through the Madagascar trade, rather than acquiring them in Malacca or in Holland, as the Bard catalogue suggested. For context, we refer once again to the Margaret. In 1698, when the ship was about to be dispatched to Madagascar, the shipowner’s son Adolph Philipse made a request for a few specific items: “If you meet with a verry good Cabinet, bring that among the rest; Costs what it wil.”⁸⁶ The following day, he added, “And if out of the Produce you can bring So much good China Ware (of the best) as will fit a Mantel peice, I desire you so to do. . . . The Cabinet that I ordered, let it be of the best you can gett.” Although it is not specified if these items were for his personal use or not, he was clear about their desired high quality and had a vivid idea of where the porcelain pieces would sit within a household, perhaps his own. The pointed nature of these requests suggests that these were not generic items intended for resale to a prospective unidentified buyer. In the end, the cargo of the Margaret never made it to New York, and Adolphe Philipse went all the way to London to recoup his losses. Even so, his sprawling Hudson Valley estate was filled with sumptuous items imported from Asia, made of porcelain and lacquer, as indicated by a mid-eighteenth-century inventory.⁸⁷ Moreover, his repeated requests to the ship’s captain confirm that such items—namely movable hardwood furnishings (see fig. 2) and Chinese porcelain vessels, both which appear prominently on Margrieta’s inventory—were solicited through this channel. By extension, in the 1690s, the networks of procurement for and consumption of such desirable foreign goods in colonial New York were tied up with the brutal trafficking of enslaved people.

Bette of Flatbush

Margrieta was an enslaver, a fact that does not appear in her inventory. As historian Nicole Maskiell and others have amply demonstrated, she was not unique in this regard, as slavery underpinned the world of Anglo-Dutch New York City and its environs at this time. After listing the long roster of items that she wished to bequeath to her children in her will, Margrieta assigned the fate of “my neger girl Bette,” whom she invoked dismissively, using a pejorative Dutch term.⁸⁸ Clearly an enslaved Black woman, Bette was cast in a callous and dehumanized manner, mentioned only in relation to the task with which she was charged: to care for Margrieta’s youngest child, Cornelia, until Cornelia reached the age of fourteen. In line with conventions of the time, Bette is presented as moveable property, likened indifferently to the “china butter dishes” and Margrieta’s “best black night gown,” all of which appear in the same section.

After Margrieta’s death, Bette likely remained in the role assigned to her, caring for Cornelia until she turned fourteen, which was around the year 1706 or 1707.⁸⁹ Even if Bette remained with Cornelia beyond that age, her service would have surely reached its end after August 18, 1711, when, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, Cornelia married her first husband, Barent De Kleyn.⁹⁰ Although it is not specified in the will or inventory, it appears that young Cornelia joined the household of Margrieta’s niece Maritje van Tienhoven and her husband, Nicolas, at some point following Margrieta’s death.⁹¹ Bette probably accompanied Cornelia to their residence, also in Flatbush, where she would have spent the next twelve or more years of her life. As Piwonka notes, in other inventories that mention enslaved individuals, provisions for their future, including if or when they should be emancipated, are often included. Neither Margrieta’s will nor her inventory include any such language regarding Bette. After that point in time, Bette’s trail goes cold; the documents related to Margrieta do not provide any further details.

Based on the context sketched in this essay, it is possible that Bette was brought forcibly from Madagascar and transported along the maritime route that linked the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, at some point in the 1680s or 1690s. The anthropologist Wendy Wilson Fall has shown that the enslaved community in early colonial America was diverse beyond presumed West African origins. Ancestral roots to Madagascar are generally not evidenced by textual documentation; many descendant communities sustain their lineage to the southern Indian Ocean based instead on distant family memories or other modes of informal knowledge. Similarly, there are no solid figures about the number of enslaved individuals from Madagascar that arrived in New York at the end of the seventeenth century. Yet one can gain a sense of the scale of these movements through the shipping activity of Frederick Philipse. Records indicate that he spearheaded at least eight journeys between Madagascar and New York in the 1690s, involving 1,079 enslaved individuals, not all of whom survived the difficult maritime journey.⁹² Frank assesses that at least eighteen ships were dispatched on the route during this decade, including Philipse’s. By extension, an estimated total of 2,400 enslaved people can be proposed. That rough figure, as a very small fraction of the larger transatlantic slave trade, bolsters Wilson Fall’s assertion that “each ancestor from Madagascar serves a symbolic function as a claim to humanity that predates and survives the calamities of captivity, enslavement, and exile” and by doing so fuels the interest in learning more about this community.⁹³

In 2005, the remains of two Malagasy women were found in a burial ground in Colonie, New York, north of Albany, New York. A historic map indicated that the area was previously part of the extended grounds of the Schuyler Flatts property, owned by Pieter Schuyler (1657–1724), mentioned above as the first appointed mayor of Albany and a member of one of the region’s most prominent colonial families.⁹⁴ The Schuylers were described, along with the Bayards, van Cortlands, Stuyvesants, Philipses, van Rensselaers, and Livingstons, as being “bound together in an aristocracy of related wealth and position” in New York at this time.⁹⁵ Maskiell also identifies the same families as enslavers, vividly demonstrating that slavery was central to sustaining their wealth and position at the turn of the eighteenth century.⁹⁶ As underlined above, many of this group also profited directly from the Indian Ocean trade. For instance, Pieter Schuyler was noted as an investor in a 1698 voyage to East Africa.⁹⁷ An inventory from the Schuyler Flatts estate, dated April 12, 1711, lists seven enslaved people, described as “negros and negrowomen” named Jacob, Charles, Peter, Thom, Anthony, Mary, and Bettie.⁹⁸ Once again, this group of enslaved individuals was invoked simply as property, fully dehumanized and enumerated along with the horses, cows, sheep, and pigs on the farm.

The Schuyler Flatts burial plot was not used for members of the wealthy Schuyler family, who were buried elsewhere. Rather, the burials found in Colonie, dated to the 1700s or early 1800s, were modest in nature, and the bioarcheological data presented signs of physical stress consistent with lives of hard labor.⁹⁹ Of the seven adults from whom viable MtDNA evidence was drawn, six were of African descent and one was likely of both Native American Micmac and African descent. The burial referred to as number 9 included the remains of a woman who was likely from Madagascar, as indicated by the MtDNA analysis, and died between the ages of fifty and sixty.¹⁰⁰ Dental records show that her teeth were worn, consistent with smoking a pipe during her lifetime. She was around five feet four inches tall, with a “robust” build and “vertebrae fused from arthritis after years of hard work.”¹⁰¹ Burial 12 included remains of a younger woman, who died between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five and was “probably born in New York but her DNA analysis indicates that her maternal ancestry was from Madagascar.”¹⁰² Standing at a height of around five feet two inches tall, this woman was, by contrast, “not quite muscular as the others but still had the early stages of arthritis in her back and joints,” which indicates that her tenure on the farm may have been shorter. All of the human remains from the excavation site, located along a busy commercial thoroughfare, were reburied respectfully in custom-designed burial containers at an official ceremony at the Saint Agnes Cemetery in Albany in 2016.¹⁰³

It is tempting to suggest that the Bettie mentioned in 1711 at Schuyler Flatts was the same Bette who lived in Flatbush in 1695, or to surmise that the Bettie (or Mary) named at Schuyler Flatts in 1711 may be associated with the remains of one of the two Malagasy women unearthed near Albany. But we will probably never know what happened to Bette after Cornelia reached adulthood, or to Bettie and Mary after 1711. We also may never be able to confirm this proposal of Bette’s Malagasy origin. Rather, these stories are offered in parallel as a means to envision possible futures for Bette after she left Flatbush, even if they may have been bleak. Particularly, the Malagasy woman whom we can identify only through her remains, and the arbitrarily assigned burial plot number 12, presents a biographical profile that would be consistent with someone like Bette of Flatbush, whose life of enslavement could have shifted from domestic work and caregiving to the more demanding physicality of agricultural labor, until her life was cut short at a young age. These parallel stories also point to the far-reaching impact of the North American investment in the Madagascar slave trade, which extended far beyond New York City in the 1690s. Margrieta’s silver coins from Yemen compel us to ask more targeted questions and to seek evidence of Bette and the dispersed community of enslaved Malagasy people within these larger stories of bondage and oppression.

I have referred to the historic characters that are featured in this essay, such as Margrieta and Bette, by their first names. On one hand, this approach to naming helps to reduce confusion between Margrieta and her many family members with the same surname. Yet more pointedly, I follow the strategy presented by Maskiell, who intentionally levels the status of historical actors in her writing by referencing everyone on the terms by which enslaved people have been remembered, thereby consciously inverting the imbalanced conventions of the archival record.¹⁰⁴ I have also followed Maskiell’s compelling model by pursuing a longer biography for Bette than Margrieta’s will or inventory provides, and by suggesting at least one possible trail out of Flatbush, while also recognizing the profound limits of our knowledge.¹⁰⁵

Conclusion: A Trail of Coins

It is not easy to make claims about how any item reached its point of destination without a precise record of its historic itinerary. In this case, Margrieta’s inventory lists hundreds of goods; each would have traveled its own distinct journey to Flatbush and would have continued to move after leaving her estate. Many scholars before me have imagined Margrieta or one of her two husbands acquiring some of these goods in the Asian port cities of Surat or Malacca before transferring them to the Dutch Republic and eventually New York. Holland itself was a rich repository of goods from the east, where Chinese porcelain vessels in blue and white, ebony furniture, and calico cloth could have been procured before Margrieta’s family moved to Flatbush. Moreover, major trading centers such as Amsterdam and London re-exported items from the Asian trade to the other side of the Atlantic, another possible channel that could bring such goods into Margrieta’s hands while she lived in New York.

The Yemeni khamsiyya coins that appear on her inventory as “Arabian . . . silver money” offer a different yet very specific line of conveyance, from the port of Mocha in Yemen, out of Bab al-Mandab, and into the Arabian Sea. We can imagine one of these coins carried in the pouch of a pilgrim, who had newly acquired the title of hajji in Mecca, heading back home to India via the port of Surat. After leaving the Red Sea, the pilgrim’s ship, and thus the itinerary of the khamsiyya, would have been diverted from its intended route and seized by pirates, along with many other coins of much higher value. The coin’s journey would then have shifted toward the south, bringing it to Madagascar, possibly Saint Mary’s Island, where it would have been among the loot divided up by the crew. There it may have passed from a pirate’s hand to that of a merchant from New York, perhaps in exchange for a pair of scissors. This exchange would have sent our tiny silver coin on a path around the Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic, likely on a boat that also would have carried enslaved people from Madagascar to the colonies, possibly to toil on a farm like Schuyler Flatts. The movements represented in this hypothetical telling were spurred on by acts of maritime violence, extreme brutality, and a disregard for human life, largely motivated by the desire for profit and personal gain.

In this essay, I have made the case for a new understanding of how some of the Indian Ocean goods in Margrieta van Varick’s estate may have ended up in her possession. While drawing on the important 2009 Bard exhibition that first spotlighted and elucidated Margrieta’s biography, I diverge from its focus on her travels to the east. Rather, I argue that some of the items on her inventory—namely those proposed to be silver coins from Yemen but also some of the bulk products that she sold in her store—arrived in New York via a maritime route plied by pirates and enslavers and were acquired by Margrieta after her arrival in the colony. By doing so, I assert Margrieta’s role as a shop owner, a businesswoman, and an enslaver, rather than focusing primarily on her identity as a niece, wife, widow, or mother.

I have also shed light on these maritime channels of procurement and transport as active processes, rather than ruminating on the static dimensions of ownership that an inventory, by nature of its genre, is meant to represent. Ultimately, this portrait depicts Margrieta’s New York not as a “Dutch” city, but rather as one node in an evolving Anglo-Dutch world that was deeply imbricated in contested Indian Ocean networks of piracy, plunder, illicit trade, and the brutality of enslavement in the 1690s, precisely at the time of her death. This moment marks a key maritime turning point when the rising interests of company and state expanded, thereby causing the English to seek greater maritime authority and overseas trade protection.

Coins of various types serve as the interpretational lynchpins of this study, powering the central argument in distinct ways and deflecting the assumption that such tokens operated as neutral media of exchange. In fact, Hoover stated how gold Arabian chequins became so associated with the illicit activities of pirates that they were eventually seen as tainted currency in the colonies.¹⁰⁶ By extension, they also became associated with enslavement, to such an extent that the first published antislavery pamphlet in the colonies, The Selling of Joseph, written by Samuel Sewall in 1700, mentions in its opening lines “Arabian gold” as a recrimination to those who profited from the sale of human life.¹⁰⁷ But I have also pursued Jennifer Morgan’s quest to decenter the seemingly empirical premises of economic history by providing alternative ways to think about the transactional relationships between money and enslaved African men, women, and children.¹⁰⁸ To that end, Islamic coins of various types serve here as storytellers, occupying a central but improbable place in narrating occluded episodes from colonial American history.

This story of pirates, plunder, and enslavement also diverges from the standard account of Margrieta van Varick’s biography, which has been previously mapped on to the accepted vectors of Dutch expansion, highlighting the intimate domestic life of a colonial woman and her family. Indeed, the scattered silver and gold coins that appear in her inventory, covered with words in Arabic script, illegible to Margrieta herself, were material markers of her own imbrication in these increasingly contested circuits that stretched from Yemen to New York, threaded through the islands of the southern Indian Ocean. This essay has elucidated how some relatively small finds, dug out of the ground by archaeologists and hobbyists carrying metal detectors, can reorient our reading of Margrieta’s inventory. My hope is that it will bring into focus a short-lived moment in colonial North American history and encourage us to see the maritime spheres of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans as materially intertwined at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Cite this article: Nancy Um, “A Trail of Coins from Yemen to New York: Pirates, Plunder and Enslavement in the World of Margrieta van Varick, ca. 1695,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20342.

Notes

For someone who generally works in the Eastern Hemisphere, this essay represents an unusual foray into the world of colonial North America and its vast scholarship. I embarked on this unlikely journey in order to better understand the story behind a curious corpus of seventeenth-century Yemeni coins that began appearing at colonial sites in New England over a decade ago. I offer thanks to those who helped me along the way, including many audiences who heard versions of the talks that led to this essay at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, the European University Institute in Florence, UCLA, University of East Anglia, Yale, and the New Netherland Institute Scholars’ Seminar. I thank Deborah Krohn and Meredith Martin for their friendship and for commenting on drafts of this essay; the editors and anonymous reviewers for Panorama, who provided excellent suggestions for the improvement of this article; and Lidia Ferrara for her generous assistance with research, sources, editing, and development. Nevertheless, I must accept my relative dilettantism as a necessary condition of doing work that is unruly in its global scope and of studying interactions that refuse to be bound by the kinds of subfields that order our discipline today. I take responsibility for any errors of interpretation, and possibly also of fact, while also inviting those who hold expertise in this field to build on my preliminary proposals and to see this modest contribution as a mere spark for what I hope will be further studies.

Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Linda S. Ferber and Margaret R. Laster

The Frick Collection and the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024. 240pp.; 72 color illus.; 26 b/w illus. Hardcover: $89.85 (ISBN: 9780271095240)

Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century is the sixth and final volume in the beautifully produced series Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America, published by the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick, New York. This volume evolved from a 2017 conference featuring papers by scholars with deep knowledge of American patrons and institutions during the “long nineteenth century.” The title indicates a broad interpretation of collecting, encompassing those individuals who purchased paintings (collectors) and those who shaped public taste through other means (patrons and tastemakers). The editors are explicit about their goal to expand the scope of study beyond individual collectors and collections. The eleven essays and accompanying introduction touch upon questions of taste, cultural influence, art as marker of social status, and the history of cultural institutions.

Each of the books in the Frick series considers a geographically defined subset of artworks as acquired by American collectors. The previously published volumes cover Dutch, Flemish, and Italian seventeenth-century paintings, Italian Renaissance objects, and colonial and modern Latin American art. Tastemakers defines American art as the art of the United States; most of the objects discussed are paintings, not other forms of visual or material culture. The volume presents the collections chronologically, from the early years of the United States through the interwar explosion of cultural institutions. Unlike the other books in the series, which primarily explore American collectors’ acquisitions of secondary-market objects, Tastemakers documents individuals who collected the artistic production of their own time and place, responding to and often influencing contemporary artists.

Tastemakers is an extremely valuable contribution to the field, particularly in its effort to establish a more comprehensive picture of American collecting and to explore how collecting is defined and studied. In important new research, the authors deftly navigate two inherent challenges of the project. The first is an effect of the overarching organizing principle of the series. Investigating subsets of collections according to the national origin and chronological period of the artists inevitably presents an incomplete account of most collections. The second challenge is common to studies of patronage: scholars typically are forced to rely on textual (rather than visual) evidence and incomplete archival accounts in an attempt to reconstruct collecting patterns. The authors navigate these restrictions by alluding to works in the collections by artists who are not American while still maintaining the focus on US artists and artworks. For example, the tantalizing archival information that well-known patron Robert Gilmor Jr., displayed Thomas Cole’s paintings opposite two seventeenth-century Dutch works in his dining room helps to clarify that Gilmor did not solely collect American artworks. It also points to the fact that collectors of the period rarely displayed works according to time period or national origin, which is the organizational principle of the Frick series.¹ In addition to providing information that refers to the broader scope of the collections, many of the authors explore varied ways in which collectors interacted with contemporary artists and shaped artistic production, considering a notion of influence beyond object acquisition.

The majority of the book’s essays are structured around collectors’ biographies, including factors that may have informed their aesthetic taste, such as financial resources, social connections, and incentives to engage with visual culture. During and after the nineteenth century, art critics and scholars of American art have primarily analyzed collections in light of the impulse of the collectors. Although some recent authors have moved away from biography-based studies of collecting—looking at corporate and institutional patronage as well as broad data-derived trends—the emphasis on the individual is consistent with nineteenth-century writings on the subject.² The texts of James Jackson Jarves, publications such as Earl Shinn’s Art Treasures of America, and criticism in journals like the Crayon and Cosmopolitan Art Journal all focused on the role of the socially prominent individual who had the financial means to assemble a private collection. In an era before government sponsorship, independent associations and museums, or commercial ventures such as sales galleries, the regular exhibition of art was dependent upon private collections, such as those documented in this volume. As a result, many scholars and critics have investigated the identity of the collector as a way to understand taste and acquisition patterns. There is a generally accepted trajectory that pre–Civil War collectors were motivated by nationalism, while industrialists of the later part of the century sought social prestige. This volume follows a similar trajectory: starting with the pre–Civil War roots of artistic production and consumption in the United States, exploring the growth of art institutions, and concluding with those collectors who founded museums.

Seven tightly focused biographical essays offer case studies of individual collectors. Lance Humphries’s essay on Robert Gilmor, Jr., of Baltimore (1774–1848) explores the small number of American works in Gilmor’s collection and his artistic patronage in the context of contemporaneous support for a national school. Margaret Laster writes on another well-known collector, Luman Reed (1785–1836), whose collection is largely (and unusually) intact, now held at the New York Historical. Laster focuses on Reed’s legacy, raising interesting questions about his practice of opening his collection one day a week to visitors (albeit those who were “properly introduced”) and the posthumous stewardship of his collection as a public collection. Elizabeth Kornhauser organizes her essay according to place and documents the influence and collecting of the Hartford, Connecticut, collectors Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848) and Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt (1826–1905). Kornhauser implies that the two collectors were motivated by different incentives: Wadsworth aimed to instill public virtue in the new republic by establishing a cultural heritage, while Colt’s collection served as a prestigious display of her fortune. Lynne Ambrosini’s essay moves the discussion from the Northeast to Cincinnati in her analysis of Nicholas Longworth (1782–1863). Seeing cultural patronage and civic activities as a way of sanitizing wealth, Ambrosini presents Longworth as an interesting case study of expansive civic and artistic patronage. Sarah Cash writes about William Wilson Corcoran (1798–1888), who founded the nation’s first purpose-built art museum with a permanent collection. She argues that his taste reflected that of other collectors but that philanthropy and patriotism motivated his interest both in educating artists and in displaying a national collection in his institution. Barbara Dyer Gallati also focuses on the influence of collectors’ taste. She finds New York attorney Samuel Untermyer (1858–1940) to be motivated by competitiveness and social ambition. His preference for acquiring works from well-known collections at auction introduces the role of provenance as a commercially valuable attribute of an artwork. Ilene Susan Fort’s account of William Preston Harrison’s (1869–1940) curatorial role in Los Angeles and his effort to build a museum collection rather than a personal one further touches upon the challenges of forming a collection outside of the art-world epicenter of New York. She presents his cultural philanthropy as a new century’s path to social status.

Four authors move away from biography and instead analyze the role of cultural or commercial institutions in shaping public taste. Sophie Lynford investigates the efforts by a small group of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic thinkers in the United States to influence the American public through essays, exhibitions, and criticism. Her chapter intersects with the history of scientific thought and aesthetics. Kimberly Orcutt studies the market conditions and efforts in tastemaking that both motivated and unraveled the short-lived American Art-Union (1838–52). She examines the way in which the organizers negotiated public taste, simultaneously trying to educate the people and attract members. She argues that the American Art-Union marks a shift from associations controlling art sales to a market-driven system. Richard Saunders’s analysis of the taste of early twentieth-century collectors for eighteenth-century portraits also engages with market conditions and the opportunity for forgeries and deception in the secondary market, and it implicates art historians and scholars as either uninformed or deceitful. Julie McGinnis Flanagan considers questions of cost, display, and transportation logistics in fascinating new material about the art galleries above Grand Central Station in New York. She investigates how organizers used commercial business techniques in an attempt to expand the public market and interest in art. The last two essays, which bring the volume’s material into the early twentieth century, introduce the influence of scholars, art historians, dealers, and museum professionals. Although the authors do not analyze the professionalization of these roles or their social, economic, or educational roots, the emergence of professions that did not exist in the earlier period covered by the collected essays leads the reader to reflect on the role of similar figures in tastemaking and collecting in today’s art world.

As patronage studies (of both private and public collections) overlap with reception and market histories, scholars in this subfield continue to investigate the psychology of collecting, personal taste, economics, and entertainment. Studies in the history of collecting have expanded in the last decades alongside studies of the market. Currently there are several other series in production, including Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets (Brill), Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 (Routledge), and Contextualizing Art Markets (Bloomsbury). Although questions of economics, globalization, and transcultural influence, as well as other varied methodologies, have informed recent publications, Tastemakers’s approach to the deciding role of the collector in artistic production and collection formation mirrors that of the nineteenth century itself. It also mirrors an emphasis on a single “top-down” direction of influence guided by important individuals. (My own interest in reception makes me wonder about other ways in which taste is shaped.) The volume echoes the excellent research program of the Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting, particularly its emphasis upon the importance of archives. The exhaustive archival evidence and exploration of both well-established and less well-known figures is a valuable addition to the documentation of American collecting and the role of patronage in the development of American artistic production. It provides an excellent historical foundation for future scholarship about less-studied areas of collecting. For example, the editors have a forthcoming volume on female collectors, and it is exciting to consider how new scholarship may develop the field beyond the prominent and wealthy individuals who purchased paintings in the European tradition.

Importantly, the volume also begins to expand the idea of collecting beyond who and what was collected to include an examination of the purposes of collecting and the definition of the term. Most of the authors confine their discussion to the aesthetic goals and development of the collections; they avoid exploring negative associations of collecting that are familiar to today’s readers, including the social and economic impact of the production of the wealth, and negative trends, such as racial or gender discrimination or questions around intellectual property. While institutional and private collectors of our own moment find themselves under increased scrutiny for their ownership of works of art, and scholars and museum professionals navigate an uncomfortable relationship with art as a commodity, art’s existence in the twenty-first century is often justified for its social and political role. This volume raises interesting questions about the canon as it was shaped by early tastemakers, alluding to different sets of values motiving collecting and the function of art; the role of financial and market considerations, such as government regulations, price, and tax laws; and the differences in medium on the potential for circulation—all of which continue to influence today’s art world.

Cite this article: Melissa Geisler Trafton, review of Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century, by Linda S. Ferber and Margaret R. Laster, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20507.

Notes

When asked about the value of federally funded art programs, I think of the experiences of Sargent Johnson (1888–1967), a San Francisco artist who worked for the New Deal and about whom I am writing a book.¹ Johnson was hired as a supervisor for three major projects under both the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP; 1933–34) and Works Progress Administration (WPA; ca. 1935–42) in Berkeley and San Francisco.² At a time of severe economic hardship during the Great Depression, Johnson’s New Deal commissions and assignments to supervise other artists provided validation and employment, as well as, importantly, opportunities to experiment with new styles and mediums, reach broad audiences, and participate in a creative community.³ When hired for his first federally funded art project in 1933, Johnson was already known as one of the nation’s leading Black modernists, and his work celebrated what Johnson himself described as “the natural beauty and dignity” of Black Americans—“that characteristic lip, that characteristic hair, bearing and manner.”⁴ Given his reputation and his stated artistic aims, it is curious that his three most important federally funded artworks feature no figures who are obviously Black. There are different sets of answers as to why this is the case for each of his projects, but in this brief reflection, I offer some insight into the issue of race in Johnson’s monumental frieze Athletics (1942; fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Sargent Johnson, Athletics, 1940–c. 1942. Cast stone, 12 x 185 ft. George Washington High School, San Francisco. Video by César Rubio Photography, “Sargent Johnson’s Athletics,” posted February 6, 2024, by The Huntington, YouTube, 6:13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cvK5DV9Yyc&t=3s

I will first consider how Johnson responded to the strictures of the commission, which specified creating a monumentally scaled frieze depicting sport and fitness. To what degree did the directives, location, scale, and intended audience of Athletics liberate or limit Johnson? Did he feel empowered—able to create what he wanted—or constrained? What prompted him to experiment with a new stylistic approach here, which differed from both the style for which he had become known prior to his work for the PWAP and the WPA and from that of his earlier public artworks?

Johnson sculpted Athletics on the wall behind one endzone of the football field at George Washington High School (GWHS), opposite a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge. In March 2025, I led an onsite tour of this artwork as part of the Living New Deal convening titled “Forgotten Federal Art Legacies: PWAP to CETA.” This meeting enabled me to share and test ideas about Johnson’s work with scholars and CETA artists deeply informed about the history of public art in the United States. On the tour, I pointed out Johnson’s combination of male and female figures engaged in sports and other activities demonstrating athletic prowess. In a frieze depicting signifiers of athletics, especially the Olympic rings, graceful allusions to Classical Greek art might be expected, yet Johnson condemned another artist’s preceding design for the commission as “too Greeky.”⁵ Instead, refusing the classicism of academic sculpture, Johnson carved the figures in Athletics with hard outlines and almost no roundness to their limbs and torsos.⁶ He delineated muscle edges crisply and depicted the figures in profile as if flattened against the wall, so that, while the carvings rise inches above the surface plane, they appear to be in low relief. The athletes’ enlarged, lozenge-shaped eyes lack pupils; they show little emotion, and there is almost no eye contact among them. While the clothing, hairstyles, and sports equipment likely appeared familiar to San Francisco teenagers in the 1940s, the figures’ stiffness recalls the pre-Classical relief sculptures of ancient Assyria, Predynastic and pharaonic Egypt, and archaic Greece.

Is it possible that in Athletics Johnson intentionally evoked artistic traditions of the ancient world prior to Classical Greece in order to represent race ambiguously and raise questions about how figural representation in art—since at least the early modern era—has always been either implicitly or explicitly racialized, much like competitive sports? When Johnson received the GWHS commission, four painters had completed murals at the school, and three of these included Black figures. Ralph Stackpole’s library fresco, Contemporary Education (1936; fig. 2), for example, depicts the school’s multiracial community of students engaged in everyday activities.⁷ Rather than represent a variety of differently racialized figures to suggest a harmoniously diverse community, I think Johnson purposely reimagined his earlier archaism—one that he had previously used to represent beautiful Black children and mothers as progeny of an illustrious Black past. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Johnson had developed an elegant style that drew on artistic traditions understood as archaic or “primitive”—not classical—to create idealized and racialized sculptures celebrating the beautiful physiognomy of Black people. For example, in Chester (1931, terracotta, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Johnson used a sharp incision to define and emphasize the outer edges of a Black boy’s lips—his modernization of a technique Egyptian artists used when carving the Old Kingdom “reserve head” sculptures of Giza.⁸ In Forever Free (1933, painted plaster over linen and wood, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Johnson used similar methods to sensitively define the forms of a Black mother’s face. In contrast, by making the figures in Athletics appear generally archaic in form, with no clearly racialized features, was Johnson experimenting with the stylization of archaic ancient art and its stiffness to present racialization as an unresolved—perhaps irresolvable—dilemma?⁹

While Johnson, like many Black artists of the New Deal era, made art that explored innovative ways of representing Black people and their history, culture, and experiences, Athletics is important evidence that, like some of his contemporaries, Johnson also created artworks that reflect critically on his artistic goals and methods. Having navigated whatever constraints federal sponsorship entailed, Johnson developed his project for GWHS into an opportunity to pose important questions about racialization, inclusion, and universalism facing modernist artists of the era—especially those engaged in making public art—in a dramatically scaled if understated conceptual experiment.

Cite this article: John Bowles, “Sargent Johnson’s Athletics: A Modernist Experiment in Public Art,” in “Why Federally Funded Art?” ed. Jacqueline Francis and Mary Okin, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20570.

Notes

I am grateful to Jackie Francis and Mary Okin for giving me the opportunity to share ideas about Sargent Johnson’s artworks with a gathering of well-informed and enthusiastic artists and scholars; for their generous thoughts and suggestions as I developed this essay; and for Mary’s gracious offer to photograph Ralph Stackpole’s mural. I would also like to express my admiration for the dedication of Lope Yap and the George Washington High School Alumni Association in their efforts to preserve the school’s important artworks.

Since 2017, we have been researching the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and its generative but often overlooked impact on artists and cultural workers in the United States.

Our curatorial project ART/WORK began as an oral history initiative and grew into a multiyear national inquiry into the legacy of CETA’s cultural programs. In 2021–22, we presented an exhibition of the same name focused on the CETA-funded arts projects of the 1970s in New York City. The show opened in the shadow of the Omicron variant, as artists and arts institutions struggled to recover from the economic losses of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that moment, CETA’s story—a history of federal investment in cultural labor—felt both urgent and unfamiliar, an alternative to the scarcity-driven frameworks we have come to accept as the norm.

ART/WORK seeks to reposition CETA not as an anomaly but as a continuation of the political, aesthetic, and civic momentum of the 1960s and early ’70s. Revisited through the lens of CETA, the pluralism of that era takes on a new dimension: artists working across media, in public spaces, in community centers and city agencies, often outside the market and beyond the museum. Many were at the vanguard of institutional critique and reform, challenging the absence of artists of color, queer artists, and women in mainstream arts leadership, collections, and exhibitions and imagining new forms of cultural infrastructure. CETA did not invent these practices, but it sustained them at scale and in public (fig. 1).

Since 2022, with funding from the Mellon and Warhol foundations, we have built an extensive oral history archive documenting the impact of CETA arts programming in case-study cities, including New York; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, DC; Baltimore; Whitesburg, KY; Atlanta; and Kingston, NY. The archive includes more than 160 historical and contemporary audio and video interviews with former CETA artists, administrators, and cultural workers, as well as present-day advocates working to reimagine artist workforce programs today. This growing body of research will inform the first major traveling exhibition on the national impact of the CETA arts programs, along with an accompanying publication.

The exhibition will visualize and explain how CETA played a critical role in scaffolding a cultural infrastructure across the country. Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were established in 1965, less than a decade before CETA funds were mobilized to support culture workers. In several of our ART/WORK case-study sites, where we conduct archival and oral history research, federal funds enabled the creation or expansion of local arts councils, many of which still sustain local practitioners and organizations. Our research reveals how CETA helped seed an infrastructure for cultural work that has outlasted its brief window of federal support.

Our curatorial and research practices are grounded in the values that shape our institutional work. At Artists Alliance Inc. (AAI; Waynberg), an artist-founded organization, and at City Lore (Garfinkel), a cultural advocacy and education nonprofit, we support artists and cultural workers whose practices are embedded in place, memory, and civic life.

At AAI, this includes presenting exhibitions at Cuchifritos Gallery inside Essex Market in New York (fig. 2), a New Deal–era site of daily neighborhood activity and exchange. This setting reflects a core tenet of our approach: that culture work is most impactful when it is supported in communal spaces. In many ways, AAI’s mission echoes the civic commitments of CETA arts programs, advocating for the visibility and sustainability of artistic labor within everyday life and valuing experimentation outside market conditions.

City Lore, founded in 1985, serves as New York City’s center for urban folk and traditional culture (fig. 3). Its mission—to foster living cultural heritage through public programming, education, and advocacy for cultural equity—resonates deeply with the pluralism at the heart of CETA. Through initiatives such as the People’s Hall of Fame, the POEMobile, citywide arts education, and a community gallery, City Lore documents and uplifts grassroots knowledge ways, amplifying the practices, stories, and traditions of historically marginalized communities. This work reinforces our understanding of cultural labor as a form of public memory and civic belonging.

ART/WORK builds on these approaches and on the legacy of CETA itself. Our research is shaped by the wisdom of previous generations of artists and arts advocates who organized for public investment in cultural labor and by the conditions that continue to structure our own work. The values that guide this project—mutuality, cooperation, decentering, and the belief that all labor is valuable—are not just interpretive tools. They are working principles that shape how we collaborate, advocate, and locate ourselves within a continuum of cultural stewardship.

A central aim of ART/WORK is to resurface these CETA histories and records with care: to amplify the voices of those who shaped and benefited from the program and to ask what public investment in cultural labor could look like now. In a moment when arts workers face increasing precarity and when histories of government support are at risk of political erasure, we believe it is essential to revisit and retell this story.

The legacy of CETA continues in community arts practices, in artist-led organizing, in the ongoing struggle to define cultural work as civic work. ART/WORK draws a throughline from the New Deal to CETA, and to the present moment, insisting that these histories are not closed chapters but working propositions. The project serves as a live inquiry, one that asks what a durable, publicly supported arts and humanities workforce might require and what it could make possible.

Cite this article: Molly Garfinkel and Jodi Waynberg, “ART/WORK: Civic Imagination and the Legacy of the CETA Arts Programs,” in “Why Federally Funded Art?” ed. Jacqueline Francis and Mary Okin, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20497.

Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy

By Ruth E. Iskin

University of California Press, 2025. 344 pp.; 99 color illus. Hardcover: $49.95 (ISBN: 9780520355453)

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) was the only American to exhibit with the celebrated French Impressionists, yet today’s museum visitors are unlikely to see her works installed alongside those of her colleagues. Instead, they will typically find her paintings in permanent collection galleries dedicated to American art. In her attentive book on the artist, Ruth E. Iskin investigates what is at stake in the “multiple identifications” (1) of Cassatt—in her lifetime and in the century since her death—and sheds light on the artist’s complex allegiances that defy strict categorization. As a corrective to conventional accounts on Cassatt, which have claimed her primarily as either an American artist or a French Impressionist, Iskin foregrounds her transatlantic endeavors.¹ In doing so, the author offers a new perspective on Cassatt’s contributions as an artist and art advisor, specifically her role in “bridging the Parisian and New York art worlds both through her own artistic reputation and in the unique impact she had through advising American collectors on acquiring contemporary French art” (1). As the first comprehensive study of Cassatt to employ a transnational framework, this book questions the tensions, challenges, and opportunities that arose from Cassatt’s coexisting identities. Tracing these queries through an introduction and seven chapters, Iskin arrives at a revised understanding of Cassatt’s life, career, and posthumous legacy.

The introduction provides an overview of the transatlantic system that shaped the international art markets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the demand for French art among American collectors to specifically address Cassatt’s central role in this movement of objects and ideas. Iskin argues that Cassatt’s persistent efforts to encourage Americans to collect European art, particularly French modern painting, “should not remain external to her artistic legacy but should be recognized as an important part of it” (9). This ongoing project to enrich the cultural holdings of her homeland correlated with the other causes Cassatt passionately supported: French Impressionism, artistic independence, and feminist aspirations to expand women’s opportunities to participate in the public sphere. Iskin reveals not only the extent of Cassatt’s sustained advocacy for each cause but also the interconnectedness of these pursuits.

Surveying Cassatt’s personal and professional networks, the first chapter demonstrates her rootedness in American social circles throughout the decades she lived in France. Fitting the definition of neither expatriate (which suggests not merely leaving but renouncing one’s native country) nor cosmopolitan (a “citizen of the world” without national allegiance), Cassatt held fast to her American identity while she resided in France for over fifty years. Iskin traces Cassatt’s social ties to the United States by focusing on five key individuals: banker and art collector James J. Stillman, artist Sarah Choate Sears, architect Theodate Pope, curator Sara T. Hallowell, and critic Forbes Watson. The chapter emphasizes her friendships rather than family relations, pushing back against the narrow, domestic scope to which historical accounts still relegate women artists. In doing so, Iskin recognizes the artist as an active agent in her transatlantic network. By maintaining her relationships with friends who primarily resided in the United States, Cassatt both sustained contact with her homeland and remained engaged in American culture and politics, exerting an influence from afar.

Iskin devotes a separate chapter to Cassatt’s most significant personal and professional connection to the United States. Chapter 2, “Cassatt and Louisine Havemeyer: Collaboration, Suffrage, Alliance, and Affective Bond,” sheds light on the understudied friendship between the artist and Louisine Havemeyer: Cassatt’s patron, collaborator, and confidante. Iskin argues that the two friends’ shared dedication to promoting the cause of women’s suffrage merits equal consideration to their project to build an exemplary collection of modern French art in America. The author gained considerable insight into Cassatt’s concerns, motivations, and allegiances from her in-depth study of hundreds of unpublished letters from Cassatt to Havemeyer held in the archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is also the home of the Havemeyers’ art collection.² These decades of correspondence reveal ongoing conversations on the topics of art, current events, and their personal lives. Cassatt’s political sentiments and patriotic attachment to the United States, as attested in these letters, underpin not only this chapter but the entire book. Notably, Iskin characterizes these missives as having “the candidness of a diary” (56) and claims that the artist had “no notion that they might be published” (3). Given the volume of letters over the decades—and Havemeyer’s evident dedication to preserving them—it would have been worthwhile for Iskin to interrogate further whether Cassatt composed with posterity in mind. Such a notion would not necessarily undercut the sincerity of affection expressed within the correspondence, and it might underscore the deliberateness of Cassatt and Havemeyer’s joint project.

Chapter 3, “Cassatt and Degas: Camaraderie, Conflict, and Legacy,” likewise concentrates on one of Cassatt’s most important friendships. Among her French colleagues, her closest relationship was with Edgar Degas (1834–1917). Iskin briefly reviews the literature on the two artists to reveal the persistence of a one-sided dynamic, which tends to wrongly characterize Cassatt as Degas’s follower or protégé. As a corrective to previous scholarship, this chapter demonstrates the mutual encouragement and respect between the two artists. Iskin’s revisionist narrative of their friendship reasserts Cassatt’s own agency as well as the crucial role she played in supporting Degas by providing critical feedback and promoting his work to American patrons. The author ultimately foregrounds the centrality of this dynamic to Cassatt’s transnational endeavors: “Cassatt’s choice to advise American collectors to acquire Degas’s art was integral both to her friendship with him and to her passionate dedication to developing her homeland’s art collections” (125).

Having established the significance of Cassatt’s transatlantic network in the first three chapters, Iskin shifts focus to the interplay between her art and politics. The fourth chapter analyzes Cassatt’s feminist positions on the issues of women’s suffrage, citizenship, marriage, financial independence, and the freedom to pursue a career. Cassatt honed her political outlook while living in France and supported women’s voting rights everywhere. Nonetheless, she directed her attention and efforts toward developments in the United States. She never abandoned her American citizenship, and in her letters, she always referred to her native country as her “home.” Citing the artist’s correspondence, Iskin addresses Cassatt’s more progressive principles but also the racism, xenophobia, and other prejudices she shared with much of the American upper class, including many suffragists. Born into an affluent family, Cassatt benefited from considerable privilege and financial security. Nevertheless, Iskin reveals how the artist was committed to economic self-sufficiency, lived on the income from selling her own artworks, and promoted women’s professional ambitions.

Chapter 5, “Cassatt’s Art and the Suffrage Debates of Her Time,” argues that Cassatt’s feminist values are integral to the meaning of much of her work, thus building upon the author’s claim that her political and artistic pursuits were as entwined as her American and French allegiances. In her critical reassessment, Iskin analyzes examples from Cassatt’s celebrated depictions of mothers and children as well as paintings that treat themes less discussed by scholars: representations of older women, American fatherhood, and the bonds between women across generations, beyond the nuclear family. The passages on Woman with a Sunflower (fig. 1) stand out in this chapter. Acknowledging and elaborating on the insights of art historian Nicole Georgopulos, Iskin highlights the pro-suffrage symbolism of this painting, emphasizing the sunflower as a prominent symbol of the movement.³ She further contextualizes the canvas within broader discourses on women educators and children’s agency in both the United States and France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Iskin convincingly argues for the feminist significance underlying Cassatt’s compositions, she does not address questions of how such works were received in France or the United States. Since Cassatt depended on the sale of her art, as discussed in chapter 4, did she intentionally veil her political beliefs within saleable depictions of women and children? As demonstrated in the next chapter, women’s suffrage remained a polarizing subject in early twentieth-century America, even among Cassatt’s peers and patrons.

Although she frequently advocated for women’s suffrage in her private letters, only once did Cassatt explicitly support the cause in a public setting. Chapter 6, “The 1915 Cassatt and Degas Exhibition in New York,” investigates the history of an exhibition organized by Havemeyer, with Cassatt’s input, as a fundraiser for the New York suffrage campaign. As demonstrated by Iskin’s close reading of archival photographs, the show featured dozens of paintings by Cassatt and Degas that were presented equally, as well as a smaller selection of works by Old Masters in adjacent rooms. The critical reception was mostly positive, yet the show was boycotted by antisuffragists, including members of Havemeyer’s upper-class social circle and Cassatt’s own relatives. Iskin situates this fundraising endeavor within the historical context of pro-suffrage exhibitions organized by women artists and within the trajectory for exhibiting modern art in the United States. She argues that this show presaged New York’s rise as a cultural rival to Paris in the twentieth century.

The final chapter contends with Cassatt’s parallel afterlives in the United States and in France, focusing specifically on how museums have crafted her posthumous legacy. Distinct national interests have driven French and American museums to develop different strategies for displaying her art, resulting in two dissimilar narratives: Cassatt as a French Impressionist and as an American artist. Assessing the gallery installations of various museums in each country, Iskin considers how these choices influence the perceptions of their visitors. She argues that the competing national claims over Cassatt are a direct consequence of the artist’s own transnational allegiances. The tendency of most museums to divide their holdings by artists’ nationality fails to account for the complex dynamics of an individual like Cassatt. The chapter also reflects on the lasting impact of Cassatt’s work as an art advisor in shaping American museum collections.

Throughout the book, Iskin provides a nuanced analysis of Cassatt’s personal and professional lives in the context of her transatlantic networks, collecting activities, and politics. The transnational framework brings new insight into the career of this celebrated artist. Nevertheless, between her French and American identities, the book’s balance tips toward the latter. Implied in the text but rarely addressed is how Cassatt’s artistic success in Paris legitimized her work and cultural standing; this credibility enabled her to better advocate for her favored causes. Given that many American artists, collectors, and museum professionals regarded French art—and, by the early twentieth century, Impressionism in particular—as a paragon, Cassatt’s membership in this avant-garde circle was key to her influence in the United States. The artist herself recognized the importance of her achievements in France to her mission. Upon receiving the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) from the French state in 1905, she wrote: “Perhaps it will help me to a little influence with Museum Directors at home” (245). This brief passage, quoted in the seventh chapter, demonstrates that Cassatt’s dual national ties were not merely entwined but rather inextricable.

Offering an astute reevaluation of Cassatt’s accomplishments, Iskin sets the stage for further consideration of how nationalist influences have shaped women artists’ careers and legacies. This book arrives in advance of the many Cassatt exhibitions that will open in 2026, the centennial of her death. Iskin’s readers will surely recognize the lasting impact of the artist’s transatlantic endeavors in those installations.

Cite this article: Allison Perelman, review of Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy, by Ruth E. Iskin, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20503.

Notes

Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome

By Gloria Jane Bell

Duke University Press, 2024. 264 pp.; 16 color illus.; 47 b/w illus. Paper: $26.95 (ISBN: 9781478030881); hardcover: $102.95 (ISBN: 9781478026617)

In Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome, art historian Gloria Jane Bell provides a powerful critique and overdue analysis of the Vatican Missionary Exposition (VME) of 1925. The VME was a group of themed exhibitions on view in Vatican City over the course of one year. Pope Pius XI sponsored the VME to celebrate Catholic missionary work and display materials from “the Americas, Oceania, and Africa” that missionaries had acquired and sent to Rome (4). Dioramas with wax figures representing people from missionized Indigenous communities also appeared within the exhibitions, including those featured in the Hall of the Americas, which is the focus of Bell’s book. Bell does not concentrate on the missionaries who collected the materials; instead, she argues that the celebration of missionary work and treatment of Indigenous Peoples as a “vanishing race” throughout the VME denied “the modernity of the makers and their artistic, cultural, and spiritual ancestries and iconographic traditions” (62). She addresses the misleading messaging of the VME and offers a counternarrative that centers the experiences of Indigenous Peoples who lived in or visited Rome before, during, and after the VME of 1925. Utilizing her perspective as a Métis scholar and community member, Bell confronts a difficult history that continues to haunt Indigenous communities. Her discussion of the VME speaks to issues that scholars in related fields are also confronting, especially regarding the ongoing generational trauma of genocide and the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples at Catholic missions. Eternal Sovereigns dignifies Indigenous voices that are missing from colonial archives.

Bell draws upon the art-historical method of visual analysis as well as Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies. She not only re-stories the VME by centering Indigenous perspectives, but she also presents the story of her own research experience. Bell’s insight into the challenges of navigating archives and museum collections that remain largely inaccessible underscores the realities of research that scholars rarely make known to their readers. In doing so, Bell makes her work accessible beyond an academic audience and opens it more broadly to Indigenous community members. Eternal Sovereigns is an engaging text that undergraduate and graduate students across art history, museum studies, and Indigenous studies will also find useful.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a specific topic related to the Vatican Missionary Exposition and the Vatican Ethnological Museum, which was founded after the exposition’s closing, as they relate to Indigenous communities in Turtle Island (modern-day Canada and the United States). At the start of each chapter, the author shares a personal story from her research journey, describing how she felt while navigating the archives and reflecting on the lives of Indigenous artists, activists, and travelers who came before her. Bell explains that she uses storytelling as a method for “shifting the narrative” (18).¹

The introduction begins with Bell describing her first visit to the Vatican Museums and laying the scene for the 1925 VME and the Missionary Ethnological Museum, which changed its name to the Ethnological Museum Anima Mundi in 2019. Interestingly, she does not capitalize the title of pope when referring to Pius XI by name. Though she does not explain why, this may be read as part of her goal to deconstruct and disempower what she terms “pope culture,” which drove the VME and its “ethos of conquest and plunder that harkens back to the exploitation of Indigenous peoples since the Renaissance” (4).

Bell situates the Ethnological Museum collections as “cultural belongings and travelers that were sent to Rome but never returned home” (5). Her choice of words reflects the shift in the field of Native American art studies toward using the term “belongings” when referring to Indigenous cultural materials.² Similarly, Bell uses terms that recognize these objects’ worth in her book’s title—Eternal Sovereigns—to “reclaim, restore, and re-story Indigenous visual and material culture” while also examining “the competing sovereignties of settler, Indigenous, and papal visual culture” (6). She underscores the necessity of her effort by noting the fact that no Native makers’ names were recorded in the Vatican collections and that Indigenous voices are missing from the Vatican archives (7–8, 11).

In addition to addressing the absence of past voices, Bell confronts the “structural violence” she and other Indigenous scholars have faced in trying to access Vatican materials (11). Bell encountered “reticent and reluctant” Vatican representatives whose gatekeeping of Vatican archives she deems “unethical” (11–12). While it is unfortunate Bell had to encounter these obstacles in her research pursuits, her willingness to not give up her project and address institutional challenges is a powerful step forward for the Indigenous community.

Chapter 1, “Unsettling the Indian Museum in Rome: Ferdinand Pettrich and Edmonia Wildfire Lewis,” looks at the prehistory of the VME and provides a comparative analysis of the lives and work of a Native (Edmonia Lewis) and non-Native (Ferdinand Pettrich) artist who both worked in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. Pettrich was a German artist and creator of the “so-called Indian museum,” which he operated from 1837 until 1857. He received a papal commission and donated the collection to the Vatican in 1858. Pettrich’s sculpture “conformed to the myth of the vanishing Indian,” and his museum placed Indigenous Peoples in the past (30). Lewis was an Ojibwe African Haitian artist who was in Rome from 1866 to about 1895. Bell considers Lewis’s artistic experiences from an Indigenous perspective. She postulates that Lewis never returned to her ancestral homelands in part due to the “multiple forms of trauma Lewis faced on Turtle Island” (40) and grants her greater agency and awareness of her circumstances. Noting that her art was not “merely autobiographical,” Bell argues that Lewis’s marble sculptures of Indigenous subjects made visible the existence of people whom genocide threatened to erase (46–47).

In chapter 2, “‘The Most Exhaustive Record of the World’s Progress Ever Displayed’: Pope Pius XI’s Culture of Conquest and Visitors’ Experiences at the Vatican Missionary Expedition,” Bell unpacks the VME through a decolonizing lens. She argues that “all the publications and the visual culture produced by the Vatican for the VME formed part of this papal culture, an ethos of conquest that continues the exploitation of Indigenous peoples,” noting that the VME exhibits used terms such as “grotesque” and “pagan idols” to describe Indigenous material culture, including baskets, beadwork, and dolls (57). To process the trauma that the Vatican and its archives embody, Bell draws on Dian Million’s “felt theory,” which addresses the experiences of Native women scholars (61). Million argues “that academia repetitively produces gatekeepers to our entry into important discourses because we feel our histories as well as think them.”³ The inclusion of felt theory is a useful model for other scholars of Indigenous art.

Bell ends chapter 2 by highlighting parallel strategies employed at contemporaneous fairs and expositions, such as the 1911 The World in Boston and the 1927 Native and Modern Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art. She identifies shared attitudes across these shows, such as the treatment of Indigenous practices as ethnographic or “primitive” rather than on par with Western fine art (84) and the celebration of imperialism and missionary work. Bell then pivots to the Venice Biennale of 1932, which was the first to treat Native art as fine art, recognizing the creators “as artists rather than anonymous makers” (85).

Chapter 3, “‘A Window on the World’ of Colonial Unknowing: Dioramas, Children’s Games, and Missionary Perspectives at the Vatican Missionary Exposition,” provides a fascinating view of objects not typically seen as art. The chapter examines dioramas within VME exhibitions that were aimed at young audiences and games marketed to children at the gift shop, which Bell argues contributed to the goal of celebrating “missionaries as heroes” (94). Before delving into a visual analysis of board games, Bell reflects on her visit to the Societas Verbi Divini, which is where she encountered the papers of Father Wilhelm Schmidt, who curated the VME. Bell notes that his papers include no mention of Indigenous cultural belongings from North America (92). The discussion of gaps in the written record also foreshadows the next chapter’s emphasis on the material record as evidence for understanding Indigenous experiences.

Chapter 4, “Eternal Sovereigns and Ancestral Art: Ancient Archives, Relatives, and Travelers at the Vatican Missionary Exposition,” begins with Bell’s experience at Rome’s Propaganda Fide College library, where Indigenous language dictionaries are housed among many VME materials and other documents. She reflects on how Pablo Tac studied at the same college nearly two centuries earlier (127). He was a young man from the Luiseño (Payomkáwichum) community of what is now Oceanside, California, who was pursuing the priesthood in Rome in the 1830s until his untimely death. Bell finds inspiration in researching in the place where other Indigenous Peoples like Tac had before her (128).

Bell’s interventions in the archive is also evident in her illustrations. In her analysis of a statue of Father J. Marquette, a Jesuit missionary who worked in Michigan and Illinois in the seventeenth century, Bell includes an image that she altered with her own writing as part of her attempt to obscure “the lens on Marquette” and privilege Indigenous artworks instead (128, pl. 10). In the plate titled Marquette move out the way, the author superimposed a photo of Marquette’s sculpture with pink lettering that reads “Hall of the Americas, Lakota, Yupik, Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Cree, Apache, Sac and Fox, Textiles, Baskets, Octopus Bags, Belongings, Ancestors, Move out of the Way, Overflowing Cases.” Bell lists the names of the Native communities whose belongings were overshadowed by the statue of Marquette that occupied a central position within the Hall of North America at the VME; her illustration draws our attention away from the glorification of missionary efforts and toward the belongings that contain Indigenous knowledge.

Centering belongings as sources of information is the strength of Indigenous art history, which Bell successfully demonstrates through her analysis of a wampum belt, a Passamaquoddy birch cross, a Lakota Sun Dance drawing, a pair of Cree moccasins, and a Kwakwaka’wakw ancestral sun mask. In her discussion of the belt, Bell describes its materials and construction, underscoring the importance of materiality and process to Indigenous practices that venues like the VME overlooked. Bell acknowledges previous studies of the belt but notes that they do not recognize the cultural significance that wampum belts still hold for Indigenous communities (133). Bell addresses the Vatican’s refusal to repatriate the wampum belt, calling it a “prisoner of the Vatican Museums” that “should be rematriated” (135). Bell’s use of the term “rematriate” is another instance of her engagement with Indigenous studies, which employs the term to account for women-led efforts seeking the return of Native land and belongings to Native communities and the dissemination of Indigenous knowledge to counteract colonial narratives.⁴ Bell’s reading of the beadwork on the moccasins stands out because of the personal connection and insight she brings as a Métis person and beadworker, writing that “they remind me of the beadwork practices of my sisters and me, and of my Métis ancestry” (149). She sees the beadwork on the moccasins as “an ongoing archive of Indigenous experience and care for the community” (150).

Rather than ending with a formal conclusion, Bell includes an epilogue titled “Deus Ex Machina: An Indigenous Protestor at the Vatican Missionary Exposition,” in which she discusses the Australian aboriginal man, Anthony Martin Fernando (Dahrug People), who protested the VME in 1925. The story about Fernando’s arrest and deportation resonates with the frustration Indigenous community members continue to face today. For instance, Bell quotes Norman Yakeleya, a member of the Dene Nation of the Northwest Territories who was among the delegation that visited the Anima Mundi collection in 2022: “For God’s sakes, give them [the belongings] back to our people” (158). The museum’s refusal to return ancestral Indigenous belongings sustains the centuries’ long legacy of ignoring and attempting to silence Indigenous voices. Maybe Bell’s book will be the call that the Vatican needs to finally listen.

Cite this article: Yve Chavez, review of Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome, by Gloria Jane Bell, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20524.

Notes

The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) funded artists and culture workers from 1974 to 1982.¹ In San Francisco, the work of its beneficiaries uniquely served to visualize and create space in the public sphere and in the public record for local communities and their diverse cultures. I moderated the panel “The Artivism of CETA” as part of the “Forgotten Federal Art Legacies: PWAP to CETA” convening of 2025, speaking with CETA artists Dewey Crumpler, Nancy Hom, Bob Hsiang, and Devorah Major.² Listening to them was like connecting the dots of my past growing up in San Francisco, where the concept of cultural labor was familiar. CETA was an integral part of my world, even if I did not know it at the time. I grew up sitting on the grass in the park, watching the Pickle Family Circus. From posters in people’s homes, you knew Spanish words like “La Raza,” and on the street you heard about International Women’s Day. Someone was always doing a reading at a cultural center somewhere around town. Though the centers often had specific affiliations, their intersectionality taught us to see local culture in the context of the global. When CETA workers sought training and brought it back to San Francisco, just as Crumpler did in order to make his murals (fig. 1), they expanded our world through the visual motifs and styles they incorporated.

I took a school bus home in the afternoons, and one of our first stops was Ping Yuen on Pacific, and then we would head down Columbus, passing Kearny Street—a street name I recognized from eavesdropping on grownups. Before dawn on August 4, 1977, San Francisco’s law enforcement agencies launched a coordinated action to break through the human barricade of nonviolent protestors on Kearny Street in order to evict the mostly elderly residents of the International Hotel (I-Hotel). The raid on the residential hotel—a vital option for low-income residents—marked the end of a nine-year-long, anti-eviction campaign by more than one hundred Filipino and Chinese tenants, supported by labor unions, students, and community organizations (fig. 2).

I was thinking about the story of the I-Hotel after the panel as an example of the way CETA work was not always apparent when it was present. I did not know that the photographs and posters I remembered from the Kearny Street protests were not just made by protesters themselves but that they were part of the organized effort to use art as a political tool. In the storefronts of the I-Hotel were a handful of community organizations, including the Kearny Street Workshop, directed by printmaker Nancy Hom. During the campaign, Hom and her photographer husband, Bob Hsiang, were two of the many CETA artists who coordinated, visualized, documented, and amplified the outcry and cross-cultural solidarity inspired by the threat of eviction at the hotel.

Beyond the I-Hotel situation, where the community unified with artists to speak up for the Asian communities of Kearny Street, CETA funded other workers who sought to protect culture around San Francisco. This was a core aspect of CETA work in the Bay Area, which included the formation of newsletters to write and document cultural history and the promotion of training and production of arts, like mural making, evident in the work of Las Mujeras Muralistas and Precita Eyes Muralists in the Mission District. The I-Hotel situation was a perfect example of how CETA arts workers engaged in the labor of cultural activism: making photographs; speaking with tenants, artists, and activists; documenting the poetry inspired by the standoff; and conducting oral histories. But this was not just happening at the I-Hotel. Across town, Devorah Major was working to create and preserve a different kind of community archive as the librarian at the Western Addition Cultural Center (where Dewey Crumpler served as Executive Director).

Looking back, I realize that CETA workers reminded us young people that the fight for civil rights was ongoing. Through their work, they showed us what it looked like in our everyday lives. The CETA program and CETA artists were part of the dynamic confluence of historic factors in San Francisco: a changing and expanded local labor movement committed to worker solidarity, the rise of neighborhood arts centers and cultural activism, and an intersectional justice movement. These factors called for a new kind of justice movement. The I-Hotel campaign is an example of how CETA work can be difficult to trace and of how it is best understood when articulated by those who lived it. We can look at the posters and photographs and see evidence of presence and action, but we need the participants’ words to tell us how they came together, where they found creative inspiration, and what drove them to create new visual languages. The participants in the “The Artivism of CETA” panel that I moderated offered important insights into how being employed by CETA gave local artists, many representing communities historically excluded from the art world, the means to learn, design, pursue and perform community-based arts labor that transformed the arts, politics, and neighborhoods of San Francisco, as well as their own career trajectories and professional networks.

Cite this article: Makeda Best, “Growing Up in a CETA City,” in “Why Federally Funded Art?” ed. Jacqueline Francis and Mary Okin, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20475.

Notes

Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism

By Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy

Princeton University Press, 2025. 272 pp.; 74 color illus.; 88 b/w illus. Hardcover: $65.00 (ISBN: 9780691206691)

In 2016, the architectural historian Despina Stratigakos published a slim yet remarkable volume called Where Are the Women Architects? Following the success of her participation in the 2011 launch of the themed toy Architect Barbie, Stratigakos’s book not only asked where the women architects were (among us, it turned out!) but also offered a framework for questioning the role historians, scholars, and fellow practitioners have played in the seemingly eternal mystery asked by her title.

That line of questioning is deeply felt throughout Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism, a rigorously researched, exhaustively methodical book by architectural historians Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy. The text begins with the sentence: “Collaboration is at the heart of this book.” The remaining 207 pages (excluding notes) do a phenomenal job of demonstrating multiple modes of collaboration—between editors and architects, male bosses and female underlings, husbands and wives, designers and salespeople, and, fundamentally, women architects and other women architects.

The book is divided into eight chapters that each attempt to corral an astonishing amount of primary research. We begin with “Early Experience and Education,” emphasizing the role of the modernist-oriented Cambridge School of Architecture, and then move to “International Exchanges” and “Forging Networks” before shifting from a storytelling mode into a more analytical and interpretive one. Chapter 4, “Collaboration as a Primary Strategy,” outlines the necessity of many women to shoehorn themselves into some sort of collaboration with a man, whether that be a husband (as in the case of Aaino Marsio-Aalto), a boss (as in the case of famed SOM architect Natalie Griffin de Blois), or a mode of thinking (as in the dynamic and egalitarian The Architects Collaborative organized in 1945)—often a collaboration she may not have otherwise have chosen. The chapter “The Enterprising Spirit” showcases the work of women such as Alice Morgan Carson and Anne Tyng, while “Houses and Housing” explores the embrace of women as great theorists on housing, if not accepted architects. Chapter 7, “Creating Community,” moves beyond the Cambridge School and the big firms to explore the role of design in other types of places, like Sag Harbor and rural Massachusetts communities. The last chapter, “Singular Statements,” positions the work of female architects against the typical path of the male architect, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of why, at times, the lack of well-known female architects can appear like a tech-industry pipeline problem.

The structure of Women Architects at Work is propulsive, and its assembled facts are legion. Halfway through the book, Hunting and Murphy include three schematic illustrations of networks—“Educational Ties”; “Professional Ties”; and “Social Ties.” Featured in each diagram, as visualized by Scott Weingart, are figures such as Ethel Power, the editor of House Beautiful, whose role, many (including Hunting and Murphy) have argued, was critical to the acceptance of modernism in America. Another focus is Power’s partner, Eleanor Raymond, an architect who received a remarkable level of acclaim, largely due to Power’s attention. The two lived together, professionally and romantically, and appear to be at the heart of a remarkable network of women. Most notable, to this reader at least, is the relatively peripheral nature of many of the women whose names are more familiar. Anne Tyng, renowned for her collaborations with Louis Kahn, is diagrammatically depicted quite off to the side and disconnected, for instance, while names like Edith Cochran, Louise Leland, and Laura Cox occupy center stage.

If that seems like a lot of names, wait until you read the book. About halfway through, I made the note, “There are really a lot of people in this book!!!”—indicating Hunting and Murphy’s incredible skill at unearthing previously unheard-of women architects as well as their almost overwhelming and relentless drive to include everyone. “Networks, or contacts, were so ubiquitous and central to architectural practice in the mid-twentieth century that they have scarcely warranted comment in discussion of the profession,” the authors write (77). And yet, as they point out, it is precisely the dual lack of access to male networks and deep access to other women that is perhaps one of the stronger explanations for women architects’ incredible accomplishments and equally incredible lack of fame.

This brings us to the heart of the project. I will confess some skepticism about this book’s necessity when I was first asked to review it. I have seen, over the years, attention continually being brought—and seemingly just as quickly abandoned—to the often dismal plight of women in architecture. Books about women architects as a category abound, including: 100 Women: Architects in Practice; Women in Architecture: From History to Future; The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, 1960–2020; Designing Women; The Women Who Changed Architecture; and, with perhaps my favorite title, Raising the Roof: Women Architects Who Broke Through the Glass Ceiling. However, I was delighted to see that my skepticism was unwarranted and that this book takes seriously not only its subjects’ lives and careers but the many structural issues they had to navigate as well. It showcases through its depth and thoroughness how many women architects have done truly pivotal work, changing not only their own immediate surroundings but architectural culture as a whole.

Chief among the challenges women architects have faced is that of the perception that women are inherently domestic. In wonderful moments throughout the book, Hunting and Murphy describe the ubiquity of the notion that women have an innate sense for the home and should contribute their intellectual effort accordingly: “Cultural and architectural critics claim that women in architecture have an innate sensibility for domestic architecture. . . a perception that evolved from the gendering of the home as female in the nineteenth century” (91). The authors also acknowledge the material realities facing women. Unlike the male architect Philip Johnson, who “designed and funded for himself” his first major realized house, women often had other, more pressing matters to attend. Ellamae Ellis League, for example, wrote of her own remarkable career: “I had an incentive you can’t beat; I had two children that I wanted to educate and it was up to me to make a living for them and raise them and just do it” (102). Meanwhile, Catherine Bauer Wurster, the extraordinarily accomplished urban planner, housing theorist, and wife of William Wurster, was described in a 1948 Museum of Modern Art press release as a “housewife, housing expert,” which Hunting and Murphy archly editorialize as “an incompatible description at best” (159).

This brings me to my minor quibble with the book, which is that I wish Hunting and Murphy had editorialized a bit more. Of course I understand the scholarly desire to let the evidence to speak for itself—and there is voluminous evidence in the text. Moments of real judgment and acutely shrewd commentary do appear throughout, dropped in around wry comments, like one from Elizabeth Cross Barnes, wife of Edward Larrabee Barnes, which is worth reproducing here:

It’s impossible to work on marriage and collect receipts, investigate gardenias, observe behaviors of pregnant women, think about the education of children, the margin of a house, gardening, holidays, and everything that I’ve been doing with half my mind and all my heart—and at the same time to work just hard enough to be paid (59).

As the book comes to a close, Hunting and Murphy begin to articulate its structure and argument, referring to it as a “group portrait”(193). They argue that oversight—the problem of people just not knowing enough about women architects—comes from the scholarly field of architectural history, in which “the preferences of scholars for certain kinds of life stories and careers are equally to blame: scholarly interpretations are preoccupied with artistic genius as well as with practitioners whose prolific output demonstrates a familiar pattern from early development to resolution, to a mature style, to late mannerism. This arc is seldom visible in the lifetime work of women architects, who typically lacked the patrons and hence the opportunities to design a string of buildings until they arrived at a signature style” (193).

The problem, then, is twofold. On the one hand, the material limitations hindering women have been structural: women have not been able to become architects because male architects and a male-oriented culture has kept them squarely in the domestic sphere, even when they have managed to get themselves into the architecture office. On the other hand, and as this book’s very existence makes clear, the issue is one of past attention: there was very little contemporaneous documentation, and when there might have been, it was not carefully preserved by large and well-funded institutions and instead relegated to dark closets or lost altogether. The architect Eleanor Raymond, thinking presciently, created her own archive before her death, which may be why her life is so much more easily analyzed today. Others had to be discovered through less straightforward methods. Hunting and Murphy point out the value of scrapbooks, a culturally accepted method for women to create something approximating an archive. But structural issues remain. Most of these women’s papers, unlike those of Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph, or Philip Johnson, were not collected by major educational institutions and therefore not deemed “worthy” of study. The question this book could pose now is: are women architects today acknowledged and documented any better?

The book is not a polemic; rather, in its almost overwhelming firehose of information about the many women who worked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were central to the project of “making American modernism,” as the book’s subtitle indicates. Yet it is also a subtle indictment of twentieth- and twenty-first-century architectural culture and the constricting narratives that remain around the roles of women.

This book is well worth reading and stands out from the crowded field of books about architecture with “women” in the title due to its specificity, clarity, wealth of research, and narrative propulsion. It fits well within a nascent “feminist canon,” if we can call it that—a series of books that includes Stratigakos’s Where Are the Women Architects?; Alice T. Friedman’s groundbreaking 1998 book Women and the Making of the Modern House; and Almost Nothing, Nora Wendl’s newly published and phenomenal biography and analysis of Edith Farnsworth. Hunting and Murphy’s contribution is more wide-ranging and sprawling than these others, but the sheer volume of research, documentation, and close analysis of so many women architects and their work demonstrates that it is, in fact, still possible and necessary to write a new history of this topic. I await the day, perhaps decades in the future, when we will be asked to read Men Architects At Work. In the meantime, Women Architects at Work will serve us well.

Cite this article: Eva Hagberg, review of Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism, by Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20519.

Listening to the speakers at the “Forgotten Federal Art Legacies” convening in March 2025, I was staggered by the scope of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA)’s legacy in San Francisco. So many artists and groups I knew from my upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area and from my later scholarly study of its art history had received funding through CETA: Ruth Asawa’s Alvarado Arts Workshop, painter Bernice Bing and the Scroungers’ Center for Reusable Art Parts (SCRAP), and, most significant to me, the Kearny Street Workshop and curator-activist-silkscreen artist Nancy Hom. As I learned through the convening, San Francisco leveraged CETA to support a system of grassroots art making already in place. As arts administrator John Kreidler, one of the architects of the first proposal to use CETA Title VI funding to hire artists, noted, when CETA job interviewers asked artists to share their vision for serving their community, the few with good answers were often already doing so. With CETA funds put to that work, federal funding was deliberately keyed into the local, and it became, for art history, a key to understanding the local.¹

At the convening, I was intrigued to meet Hom, a former director of the Kearny Street Workshop (KSW), the “multidisciplinary Asian Pacific America arts workshop” and community activist group.² In 1976 Hom curated an exhibit at KSW on Angel Island, where Chinese migrants were detained from 1910 to 1940 under the Chinese Exclusion Act.³ Hom’s exhibition, which leveraged art for Asian American activism, was held in KSW’s Jackson Street Gallery. It featured casts of the Chinese-character poems that detained migrants had carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station. The casts were hung on boards from scavenged crates, creating an immersive, tactile approach to raising awareness about history. The exhibition helped generate momentum and community support for Angel Island’s historic preservation. While I knew something about this exhibition and the artists’ efforts to preserve the history of Angel Island and commemorate the people held there, I did not know that KSW received CETA funding at this time, nor did I know that Hom subsequently worked for CETA as a curator and educator.

While Hom is frequently identified with Asian American cultural spaces, her position as a CETA-funded curator-at-large for the San Francisco neighborhood cultural centers gave her an opportunity to work in solidarity across communities, forging connections that strengthened her ongoing practice of public service and activism (fig. 1). At the Sargent Johnson Gallery of the Western Addition Cultural Center (now the African American Art and Culture Complex), the subjects of the first exhibitions under Hom’s tenure were selected by the Black community: the sculptor Sargent Johnson, himself a federal artist under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and photography by Black theater artists. Hom’s third exhibition, in spring 1979, presented four Japanese American artists (Hisako Hibi, Takeshi Sugimoto, Chikara Takaha, and Kyoko Yamanouchi) and addressed the difficult history of Western Addition, including the neighborhood’s division by the redevelopment of Geary Street in the 1960s.⁴ Local work in these neighborhood centers was not insular, and it challenged how American art was often siloed along gender, class, and racial lines, creating space for what the “Forgotten Federal Art Legacies” convening identified as the “Radical Artivism of CETA.”

Learning about CETA’s local impact through the convening inspired me to connect my research topics to broader art histories of the Bay Area. I began to think about a further idea: teaching a class on the art of the Bay Area for Bay Area students, with whom I could share and further develop my research. Such a site-specific, local teaching experience would engage the rich art tradition hiding in plain sight and function not as an exercise in canon insertion but as an investigation guided by a different paradigm. Through field trips to public art sites and to community arts and historic preservation organizations, students could engage with distinct and local stories that have been left out of mainstream US art history and explore more expansive praxes. CETA could guide us. Asawa, for instance, as both an advocate of arts education and a well-known artist, managed one of the largest local CETA projects, which put not only artists but also gardeners in schools, intertwining philosophies of art, teaching, growing, and living.⁵ Moreover, CETA offered opportunities to women artists who sought employment outside the home to support their families—and whose families participated in their work—such as the transformational performing artist Rhodessa Jones and muralist Susan Cervantes.

Looking at CETA and New Deal art in San Francisco with students, as we did at the convening, would introduce younger generations to histories of federally funded art and to the two pivotal and prolific eras of art making that emerged out of the specific texture and logic of the Bay Area itself. As we reckon with this year’s devastating cuts to federal funding for the arts and its knockdown effect on state and local efforts, learning about how previous funding landscapes made opportunities for local vibrant art legacies is more important than ever.

Cite this article: Elizabeth Fair, “Federal Funding, Local Practice, and Teaching Art History through CETA in San Francisco,” in “Why Federally Funded Art?” ed. Jacqueline Francis and Mary Okin, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20588.

Notes

Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa

By Nick Mauss and Angela Miller

Ed. Anthony W. Lee. University of California Press, 2023. 168 pp.; 40 color illus. Paper: $28.95 (ISBN: 9780520394629)

In an installation photograph that George Platt Lynes (1907–1955) took of his last solo exhibition, held at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in 1941, a large piece of driftwood anchors the center of the room. The dramatically backlit found object feels both at home and out of place in the exhibition of hundreds of photographic portraits. Turned and twisted by the tides and serendipitously discovered on the shores of Fire Island in New York, this driftwood “figure” serves not only as an evocative prop in some of Lynes’s staged photographs but also as an index of the tumultuous lives and rebellious spirit of Lynes and his friends in midcentury America. Appearing in Lynes’s personal scrapbook images and public-facing fashion photographs as well as the collectively produced photographs by his friends in the artistic trio PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French), the uncanny piece of driftwood is one of many connecting elements found in the photographs examined by Nick Mauss and Angela Miller’s in their recent book Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa. As Mauss observes, the driftwood “served as a proxy for Lynes’s multiple lives as a photographer, and for the web of intimacies that bound his portrait subjects together” (65). Organized into two chapters—the first by Mauss on Lynes, and second by Miller on PaJaMa, along with a short introduction cowritten by the authors and the series editor, Anthony W. Lee—the book weaves together a compelling narrative about these artists’ intersecting bodies of work.

In Body Language, Mauss and Miller draw connections between these artists’ photographs that speak to their intertwined personal and professional lives and underscore their innovative approaches to photography, which pushed against both the artistic conventions and the enforced heteronormativity of the early twentieth century. As Miller, Mauss, and Lee state in their introduction, these artists’ “ritualized gestures and actions with symbolic props invent a new kind of queer social enactment taking shape beyond existing genres and practices” (4). Rather than use photography as a tool of individual self-expression, PaJaMa and Lynes saw it as a means of enacting their shared lives and interconnected creative practices. Their photographic collaborations are queer not simply because they speak to their unconventional intimate lives of love triangles, homoerotic desire, and nonbinary gender but also because these works disrupted restrictive categories of authorship, identity, and photography by framing the self as mutable and multiple and by actively blurring the lines of photographic genres, like documentary, fashion, portraiture, still life, and landscape.

As the first in-depth analysis of the relationship between the works of Lynes and PaJaMa, Body Language offers a rigorous and enjoyable study that features the authors’ extensive archival research, sensitive close analysis, and fruitful conversations with one another. Exploring the grammar of these photographers’ staged images, the authors examine how the embodied actions in these photographs disrupted social binaries of male/female, gay/straight, individual/collective, self/other, and animate/inanimate. Building on the publications of scholars such as Richard Meyer, they stress how social constraints and legal regulations in the United States in the decades before Stonewall did not simply suppress queer visual cultures but also fostered inventive approaches to queer world-building by Lynes, PaJaMa, and other figures in their network.¹ The authors draw on the fullness of their artists’ archives to situate their practices historically in ways that account for the forces of heteronormativity and homophobia in 1940s America while also stressing the imaginative ways that these artists disrupted the restrictions of the closet and exceeded the limits of their temporal moment in order to map what Lynes presciently called a “future history of art” (11).

As a recent New York Times article attests, the works of Lynes and PaJaMa have inspired new generations of queer artists, from those of the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 1980s to present-day artists Paul Mpagi Sepuya and TM Davy.² Similarly, when reading David Getsy’s latest book, Queer Behavior: Scott Burton’s Performance Art, I found it striking how much Lynes’s and PaJaMa’s photographs resonate with images of Burton’s 1970s performances in which he used his queer experience as a key primary source for investigating the body language of his day, which Burton (1939–1989) claimed “can be very subtle, very subversive, and very secret.”³ As Mauss and Miller demonstrate, PaJaMa and Lynes make clear how artists’ intimate lives can vitally inform their aesthetic performances, and they did so in ways that “anticipate postmodern and contemporary modes of artistic production, collaboration, and self-presentation” (13). However, many of Lynes’s photographs and all of PaJaMa’s production were shared privately among their network of friends, because they could not be staged and circulated in public in the way photographs of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century could. And yet, as Body Language effectively shows, Lynes and PaJaMa’s works for public viewing share many aspects of their more personal pictures. As Mauss so convincingly argues in his chapter on Lynes, the photographer’s public-facing portraits and fashion photographs clearly echo the images that he produced for private scrapbooks, photocollages, and collections shared with friends.

In the first chapter, Mauss explores the work of Lynes, a high-profile fashion, celebrity, and fine art photographer who rose to prominence during the 1930s by shooting for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and by capturing the dancers of the New York City Ballet. Known for his use of theatrical lighting, surreal props, and refined poses, Lynes also produced an extensive body of homoerotic male nudes that he bequeathed to the Kinsey Institute before his death in 1955. While these erotic nudes, which Lynes shared privately, have historically been treated as existing in a separate and “closeted” category of image making from his published fashion photographs and commissioned portraits, Mauss demonstrates that these bodies of work were mutually informing and their distinction porous. The sense of fantasy, sensuality, and high-key artifice extends across his photographs, which often used the same sets, props, and poses. With the studio acting as a parallel space in which “the intimate, the social, the imaginary, the commercial, and the personal coexisted,” Lynes, Mauss argues, created “new hybrid image types” that not only combined photographic genres but also questioned photography’s claim to truth and objectivity, stressing instead the medium’s potential for “theatricality” and “intersubjectivity” (53, 64).

Both Mauss and Miller highlight how the “intersubjective nature of PaJaMa’s and Lynes’s queer artistic production blurred the boundary between self and other, public and private worlds, transforming the very subject of photography by implicating the photographer as much as the photographed subjects as co-conspirators in the making of images” (5). As Miller writes in her essay on PaJaMa, “Their performed actions, rather than expressing anterior emotions, actively scripted the raw material of their shared lives. The photographs they made were trace, or record, of this collective process” (77). From 1937, and for more than a decade after, the artists Paul Cadmus (1904–1999), Jared French (1905–1988), and Margret French (1906–1998)—under the playful moniker PaJaMa (which was formed using the first syllable of each of their names)—summered by the sea, where they staged photographs that spoke to their queer domesticity. These “performed actions” creatively structured and preserved their private lives, documenting the “delicate negotiations among three people, driven by a complex alchemy of love, desire, longing, resentment and envy” (85). In Miller’s analysis, key terms such as “triangulation” and “symbolic action” serve as useful frameworks for analyzing how PaJaMa choreographed the theater of their everyday lives while also engaging critically and creatively with historical forces. Additionally, Miller looks at how they engaged artistic movements from Surrealism and Symbolic Realism to the emergent ideas of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike the heroic individualism and hypermasculinity of Abstract Expressionism, their campy staged photographs on the shores of Fire Island, Provincetown, and Nantucket evidence cross-pollination and collaboration, enacting a collective vision rather than asserting individual expression as they ironically quote a wide range of sources, from tableaux vivants and family photo albums to surrealist paintings and film noir.

Although more attention could have been paid to their engagement with other prominent American photographers and the wider political struggles to which their photographs speak, Miller and Mauss do well to situate these images among period philosophies, visual cultures, and figures in the artists’ milieu. Following the model of David Leddick’s Intimate Companions,⁴ the authors explore the interconnected influences of Lynes’s and PaJaMa’s dense network of friends and lovers, including the writer Glenway Wescott; publisher and exhibition director of the Museum of Modern Art Monroe Wheeler; choreographer George Balanchine; artists Pavel Tchelitchew, Bernard Perlin, George Tooker, and Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein; and Fidelma’s husband, Lincoln Kirstein, who cofounded the New York City Ballet. However, the authors of Body Language push this contextualization further by analyzing how PaJaMa’s and Lynes’s photographs served as a connective tissue among friends that actively dramatized, circulated, and preserved their nonnormative intimacies while also staging a critical investigation of agency, visibility, and narrative that anticipate contemporary artistic practices.

Like the contours of the driftwood that appears so differently depending upon the lighting and scene, the photographs explored in Body Language have had many lives as documents, mementos, gifts, sources of inspiration, and art objects that have now received multiple waves of reception. As many of these images were not publicly shown until decades after their making, they arrive like messages in a bottle to our contemporary art world, in which they feel at once of another world and eerily familiar. As Mauss states of Lynes photographs, “They were made for those closest to him and those furthest away, the viewers of the future” (74).

Cite this article: Miriam Kienle, review of Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, by Nick Mauss and Angela Miller, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20513

Notes

In March 2025 I had the honor of moderating the culminating panel of a three-day exploration of public art and art in public service called “Forgotten Federal Art Legacies: The New Deal to CETA in San Francisco,” organized by Jacqueline Francis, Dean of Humanities and Sciences at California College of the Arts, and Mary Okin, Assistant Director of The Living New Deal Project. The afternoon discussions emphasized themes of memory, momentum, and the interconnected legacies of public art in San Francisco, exploring the labor history and impact of federally funded art from the periods of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) in the 1970s. In the 1970s, thousands of artists across the country were offered jobs through CETA. In San Francisco, everything changed because the city pioneered CETA funding for the arts, investing in artists who then caused a ripple of return that would shift culture and leave a lasting impact.

A few examples. Poet and scholar Devorah Major took a CETA job that led to notable residencies at the local, regional, and state levels.¹ The legendary Rhodessa Jones (fig. 1) took a CETA job working with children that led to the founding of two iconic performing arts organizations: Cultural Odyssey (with Idris Ackamoor) and the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, which touched thousands of women and people living with HIV across the globe.² Artist Susan Cervantes took a CETA job that led to an expansion of mural painting in the Mission District. She cofounded the world-renowned Precita Eyes Muralists center, which has manifested more than 750 public murals in the city of San Francisco alone, including the CETA-funded and recently restored Family Life and the Spirit of Mankind (fig. 2) at the Leonard R. Flynn Elementary School in the Mission District.³ Artist Nancy Hom and photographer Bob Hsiang took CETA jobs and fueled lasting impact through the Kearny Street Workshop and across the Asian American arts community in the Bay Area.⁴ Hom was also a curator-at-large for CETA and supported the expanded representation of other communities, their art, and their history, while Hsiang documented both the work of CETA artists and their involvement in local activism. Painter and educator Dewey Crumpler started working for CETA following his completion of the response mural cycle Multi-Ethnic Heritage (1972–74) at George Washington High School in San Francisco, which boldly opened and modeled new understandings of how art can respond to difficult American history and dated American art.⁵

These are just a few examples of what happens when modest federal investment enables younger artists to be hired to serve local communities. As the stories of CETA alums demonstrate, such formative experiences encouraged artists to invest deeply in community throughout their careers. The impact of CETA, too often forgotten, continued for decades and deserves greater recognition.

These histories, and the artists who took government jobs in order to infuse the city with art and creativity, radically transformed San Francisco’s arts organization ecosystem and have informed just about everything I have done in my career, from serving as the executive director of Intersection for the Arts to leading Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) as the chief executive officer.⁶ At Intersection, I was mentored by John Kreidler, whose influential essay “Leverage Lost” helped catalyze the development of an innovative organizational model that moved away from transacting with artists and audiences and focused on nurturing long-term relationships and creating conditions for artists to realize their full potential and impact in society.⁷ “Leverage Lost” continues to inform my work today. At YBCA, we piloted one of the first Guaranteed Basic Income programs for artists and, inspired by the CETA Arts Legacy Project, we helped propel the California Creative Corps during the COVID-19 pandemic.⁸ Today at Stanford Arts, we are piloting a Cultural Policy Fellows program focused on meaningfully integrating arts and cultural practices and ways of thinking into the strategies, policies, programs, and infrastructures of government and policy-focused agencies.⁹

This work contributes to a national network of artists and arts leaders who have long advocated for integrating the arts into policymaking. Initiatives like Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) have effectively stabilized artists’ livelihoods and developed a cultural policy infrastructure for cross-sector engagement.¹⁰ Guaranteed Basic Income Pilots, including those by YBCA, CRNY, and Springboard for the Arts, demonstrate that stabilizing artists’ livelihood leads to greater creative output and community investment.¹¹ At the federal level, former National Endowment for the Arts Chair Maria Rosario Jackson advanced a bold policy agenda that linked arts and culture across government agencies, benefiting local communities.¹² We now have evidence that artists uniquely engage diverse communities, foster trust and social cohesion, and empower community members to imagine and design their own solutions to the challenges they face.

Today, as we navigate a harsh and complicated world, it feels ever more pressing to lift up and preserve this public work as essential to the landscape of our communities. Federally funded artworks, often cocreated with communities whose stories and traditions have been omitted from dominant narratives, are not discrete to a moment in time. These public projects form a story of people and place connecting us to the past, whether good or bad, while inspiring a sense of what is possible. Perhaps more important in today’s context, they offer an anecdote to historical erasure. Woven into the fabric of our cities, these works and the public policy that funded them remind us of who we are. If we are willing to lose them to time, to overlook or even disremember these histories, we simply will not know who we are, where we have been, and where we are going.

Cite this article: Deborah Cullinan, “Investing in Artists: Ripples of Return,” in “Why Federally Funded Art?” ed. Jacqueline Francis and Mary Okin, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20580.

Notes

Curated by: Elaine Y. Yau with Matthew Villar Miranda

Exhibition Schedule: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA, June 8–November 30, 2025

Exhibition catalogue: Elaine Y. Yau, ed., Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, exh. cat. DelMonico Books, 2025. 272 pp.; 280 color illus. Hardcover: $65.00 (ISBN: 9781636811598).

The exhibition Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California featured more than one hundred quilts by approximately eighty artists. It is the second of two exhibitions showcasing a bequest of nearly three thousand African American textile works donated to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2019. The collection is believed to be the largest of its kind and was assembled by Oakland, California, resident and self-taught quilt scholar Eli Leon. The first exhibition inspired by the bequest, Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective (February 19, 2020–July 18, 2021), presented seventy quilts by Tompkins (pseudonym for Effie Mae Howard; 1936–2006) and received international acclaim.

Routed West took a wider lens, charting the relationship between quilt-making traditions and the history of Black migration to California from the southern United States. Playing on the words “route” and “root,” the exhibition’s title evoked the movement of hundreds of thousands of African American families who left the South during the Second Great Migration in search of economic opportunities and freedom from racial violence. Quilts and quilt making migrated with the families who established roots in California, as seen in the nearly twenty-five quilts represented in the exhibition that were made in the South before 1950. The exhibition opened with maps of the southern United States and San Francisco Bay Area, marking the geographic locations of the quilts, which were described as “containers for ancestral memory, tethers to mothers and grandmothers, and emblems of cultural survival.”¹ As the exhibition’s curator Elaine Yau points out, “This notion of rootedness . . . home place, of knowing where one’s origins are, is so much a part of African American quilt history in terms of the ways that quilts begin in the home.”²

Just after BAMPFA received Leon’s bequest, Yau was hired as the collection’s steward, and her work has involved cataloging, conserving, and researching the donation, which now comprises nearly one-fifth of BAMPFA’s total holdings. In 2024, Yau was promoted to the full-time position of associate curator and academic liaison at BAMPFA, and her new role is evidenced by the exhibition’s deliberate and innovative focus on collaboration and engagement. When I entered Routed West, a student gallery attendant kindly informed me that I was not allowed to touch the quilts but should interact with “touch labels” throughout the show. These special labels, as a wall text explained, offered physical samples of quilts created by the exhibition’s preparators and prompted visitors to “explore how certain quilts are made and how they feel” while protecting the collection on view. Each touch label highlighted a quilting pattern, technique, or material, like “summer spread,” “fan appliqué and ties,” or “denim and cotton sacks.” When the visitor pulled a sample away from the wall and held it, another wall text was revealed underneath, prompting reflection on how quilts are made and used.

The touch labels seemed to respond to the opening lines of Sarah Hotchkiss’s review of Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective: “The most difficult thing about visiting the Rosie Lee Tompkins retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is maintaining self-restraint . . . the scintillating tactility of Tompkins’ work—70 dazzling pieces of textile art and assemblages—just begs to be embraced.”³ Unlike Joe Washington’s (1879–1963) Untitled (Fifteen Patch Variation) (fig. 1), a rich example of a work quilt comprised of varied blue and beige fabrics, backed with repurposed cotton sacks and batted with old blankets, the touch labels can be handled and felt. Visitors were asked to consider the softness of quilting materials, like well-worn denim pockets that suggest “how the wearer moved through the world.” Interacting with the touch labels informed visitors that quilts are often made from textiles that belong to bodies and the world—they hold memories. The samples allowed visitors to experience the physicality of the quilts firsthand and feel a variety of materials and stitching patterns, just as quilters do while quilting.

A touch label on “hand quilting” described the variety of floral and square-diamond designs in Alice Neal’s (1916–1985) remarkable portrait of her mother, Mary Bright Commemorative Quilt (with Dresden Plate, Monkey Wrench, Wild Goose Chase, Fan, Basket of Flowers, Star of Lemoyne, Nine Patch Blocks) (fig. 2). Hand pieced and quilted from cotton, buttons, a woven hat, and leftover materials from the dress her mother wore in the photograph that served as a reference work, Neal pays homage to the woman who taught her how to quilt by representing her likeness. Mary Bright Commemorative Quilt was featured in a section of the show called “Carried and Kept,” which shared that “the quilt is a medium for carrying deeply personal resonances, connections to others, and meaning echoing between past and present.” References to the collaborative and multigenerational nature of quilt making were woven throughout the exhibition, evident on labels that commemorate multiple names associated with a single quilt, like Untitled (Medallion), which was pieced by Thomas Covington (1877–1975) in Grand Bay, Alabama (c. 1965), quilted by Irene Bankhead (1925–2023) in Oakland (1997), and kept by Carlena White in Oakland until 1997. The exhibition honored quilt makers alongside quilt keepers who have been “vital to the quilts’ survival, and, by extension, the histories they carry forward.” As a wall text observed, visible signs of mending often show the care quilt keepers have taken to extend the life of the quilts.

Many of the quilts and other textile works in Routed West did not inertly hang against the museum’s walls; instead, they were propped, draped, and suspended, allowing visitors to imagine them in the homes they once occupied and also experience them in the round (fig. 3). Cora Lee Hall Brown’s (1900–1981) Untitled Top (String Medallion with Newspaper Backing) (fig. 4) was shown in a display case, partially folded over to reveal its newspaper piecing on the back. The newspaper backing of the unfinished quilt would have eventually been removed, but its current state gave the viewer a sense of 1970s life through comics and grocery advertisements in the paper. In the same gallery, Isiadore Whitehead’s (1914–2005) Double Wedding Ring Room (c. 1970) also immersed the visitor in everyday life: The reconstructed Oakland guest bedroom included quilts, drapes, floor mats, and a seat cushion, all quilted using the challenging Double Wedding Ring pattern (fig. 5). Leon purchased the entire bedroom from Whitehead, even the furniture and jewelry bottles on the vanity. Whitehead was born in Arkansas and spent time in Louisiana before moving to the Bay Area in 1942, where she was a certified welder in the Richmond shipyards and earned a nursing credential.⁴ While working as a school bus driver, she received gifts of fabric from teachers and parents, which she used to adorn the room. Whitehead’s guest room, reassembled from photographs, chronicles community and friendship through the embroidered names of fabric contributors on her drapes.

The collaboration involved in quilt making and quilt keeping mirrors the research efforts of Yau and curatorial associate Matthew Villar Miranda, who formed relationships with quilt artists and their surviving family members, making possible the valuable and nuanced narratives shared in the exhibition and its catalogue. This work was continued through exhibition programming like “Quilt Documentation Day,” an event where community members were encouraged to bring their family quilts to the museum to be photographed, documented, and recorded in the national African American Quilt Registry.⁵ A graduate student serves as the digital archivist for the African American Quilt Documentation Study Group, recording information from participants into the organization’s database. In fact, undergraduate and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, were engaged throughout the exhibition’s research and organization processes, pointing to Yau’s role as academic liaison.

The final section of the exhibition showcased the work of local individuals and collectives active today, such as the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland, the African American Shipyard History Quilt Project, and the Heritage Quilters Guild of Fresno. A display case of archival material showed publications, awards, and photographs vital to the efforts of sustaining African American quilt making traditions in California. Ora Clay (b. 1945), one of the artists included in this section, learned the practice of quilt making after retiring from her position as a school librarian and taking classes with expert quilter and National Endowment for the Arts–recipient Marion Coleman (1946–2019)at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco (MOAD). Both Clay and Coleman were represented by story quilts in Routed West, and they were featured in We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women Artists (February 21–June 22, 2025), an exhibition recently organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC.

Clay describes her inspiration for creating story quilts in an artist statement: “Quilting not only allows me to create beautiful art, working with different colors and textures, but also enables me to use the beauty of the quilting medium to draw the viewer into thinking about serious issues facing our world.”⁶ Clay’s My Migration (2025), displayed in the final gallery of Routed West, is repurposed from a quilt originally made by her mother, Minner Lampley. Lampley created the quilt in the early 1950s using Clay’s outgrown clothes and cotton from their family farm in Alabama. Clay brought the quilt with her when she traveled alone to California at the age of sixteen and used it for years, extending its life and narrative by transforming it into a story quilt that chronicled her migration. Representations of the Oakland Pullman train porters (who assisted her on her journey and helped her feel at ease), her own photograph, and the shoebox lunch that sustained her are stitched on top of Lampley’s heavily worn quilt, with its cotton batting partially revealed. In a way, the multigenerational layers of My Migration—its roots and routes—may serve as a symbol of the larger exhibition and its message that “each quilt carries with it a layered capacity to connect everyday experiences and environments to worlds of beauty, healing, remembrance, belonging, repair, renewal, legacy, building, and possibility.”

Cite this article: Berit Potter, review of Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20590.

Notes

Curated by: Jonathan Stuhlman, Mint Museum; and Martha R. Severens, independent scholar

Exhibition schedule: Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, June 17–December 10, 2023; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, January 26–April 28, 2024; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN, July 14–September 29, 2024; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC, October 26, 2024–February 2, 2025

Exhibition catalogue: Jonathan Stuhlman and Martha R. Severens, Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, exh. cat. University of North Carolina Press, in association with the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC, 2023. 272 pp.; 196 color illus. Cloth: $65.00 (ISBN: 9781469674087)

In the spring of 2020, Panorama published a special issue dedicated to the art and visual culture of the American South, guest edited by art historian Naomi Slipp. Her opening essay, outlining the South’s long elision from accounts of American art, took its title from the words of Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Joseph Downs, who in 1949 declared that “little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.”¹

These words also introduce Southern/Modern, a bracingly revisionist survey of art made in the South, which recently ended its four-venue tour at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. Joining Slipp and many other scholars in challenging the South’s long dismissal, the exhibition took on a particularly neglected passage in the art histories of the region—the early twentieth century—making the case that seeing the South as meaningfully modern might also allow it to be seen as artistically important. Both are views made possible, emphatically and repeatedly, across Southern/Modern, a survey big and bold enough, one hopes, to put the question of the South’s “artistic merit” to rest once and for all.

And survey it certainly was, in scope as well as in ambition. Comprising more than one hundred works, made by artists working in nearly all parts of the South, Southern/Modern was substantial by any measure, the scale itself a crucial argument for the region’s cultural richness. The exhibition’s curators, Jonathan Stuhlman and Martha R. Severens, were upfront about this magnitude. They announced, in the exhibition’s introductory text, their purposefully inclusive approach to everything from where the South is located (loosely bounded by the Mason-Dixon Line to the north and the Mississippi River to the west, although frequently reaching beyond these borders to places like the Ozarks) to who makes Southern art (those born in the region but also transplants and repeat visitors) and even what “modernist” art looks like (ranging from figurative American scene painting to pure abstraction). In Charlotte, the first gallery, a “sampler” of the exhibition to come, previewed this breadth visually (fig. 1). Offering visitors a glimpse of the complications, rather than tidy resolutions, that would unfold, it also functioned as a space to prepare for the complex terrain ahead.

The South that emerged in the galleries that follow is indeed complex—“a land of tremendous contradictions,” to use the phrasing of Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), who visited the region in the late 1920s.² Benton’s sole work in the exhibition, Ploughing It Under (1934, reworked 1964), summarizes a dominant view of the region at the time—one rooted in the fact that the South was largely agrarian and rural for much of the period the exhibition considered (between 1913 and 1955). Picturing a Black agricultural worker walking slowly behind a mule-driven plow, Benton’s painting speaks of the South in a familiar language, taking up what the art historian Anna Arabindan-Kesson has called the “fetishized figure” of the Black sharecropper, which had by then become an icon of the South’s intertwined racial and economic orders.³ Yet, other works in the show gestured to the changes that were already threatening this order by the time Benton visited. The South’s rapid if uneven and often halting industrialization, for instance, is seen in works like Frank Hartley Anderson’s (1890–1947) Iron Furnace (c. 1934) or Roderick MacKenzie’s (1865–1941) Spirit of the Furnaces (Hydraulic Lift, Steel Mill at Birmingham) (1922). Depicting the industrializing Southern landscape from a range of perspectives—the crisp lines and neatly ordered smokestacks in Anderson’s woodcut are starkly different from the red-hot liquid metal in MacKenzie’s pastel—these works speak to Southerners’ varied reactions to the industrializing landscape, from deep anxiety to full-throated embrace. The result is a narrative of the South defined not by a unified landscape or consolidated economic system but by the set of combustible tensions that define life there: a region as inchoate and potentially explosive as the molten metal in MacKenzie’s work.

This emphasis on complexity is important, given the tendency to view the South as a (usually backward) monolith in the manner of Downs. But it is also critical because of the response that this dismissal engendered among some Southerners, who, in their eagerness to defend the region’s culture, often emphasized its sameness or excused its basis in exploitative social and environmental relations.⁴ In other words, the question of what a “missing” Southern modernism looked like could easily have garnered a single, simplified answer, one that might have glorified the South or covered over its violent realities.

This, however, was not the case in Southern/Modern, whose title, in its either/or formulation, acknowledged the tension between the two sides, posing questions about the possibility of their reconciliation. Could a place rife with violence and regressive mores be the birthplace of anything considered progressive? Could the Jim Crow South give rise to a modern art? These are questions prompted by works like Eldzier Cortor’s (1916–2015) Southern Souvenir No. II (c. 1948), which introduced a gallery dedicated to the Jim Crow South (fig. 2). The painting’s eerie light and fragmented Black female bodies deploy the strategies of Surrealism to depict the South as a dark, brutal alternative world. In Loïs Mailou Jones’s (1905–1998) Mob Victim (Meditation) (1944), a single Black figure gazes upward into a tree, his far-off expression so absorbing that the viewer only belatedly notices the rope binding his hands, producing a shock difficult to shake. Ultimately, as art historian Rebecca VanDiver aptly puts it in her essay in the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, “One is left wondering, southern or modern?”⁵

Notably, Southern/Modern did not limit its searching, unsentimental approach to the South to this gallery. One of its most trenchant contributions, in fact, was its revelation of a cohort of Southern artists who launched acerbic critiques of intersecting forms of racial, economic, and environmental exploitation. Works like Hale Woodruff’s (1900–1980) Southland (1936; fig. 3), Lamar Baker’s (1908–1994) Textile Tangle (1938), or Lamar Dodd’s (1909–1996) haunting Copperhill (1938) condemn the unrelentingly extractive approaches of agricultural and industrial entities alike, showing the depleted soil and wasted bodies that resulted from these practices. Together with many stark images of abject poverty—the futile scratchings of the hunched figures in Crawford Gillis’s (1914–2000) Potato Diggers (1941), for instance, or the desolation of Alexander Brook’s (1898–1980) Georgia Jungle (1939; see fig. 3)—these works put the lie to images of the South as a lush tropic or landscape of plenty.

These images, though, are not only harsher in their condemnation of the South but also more interesting—offering views into those corners of the region not usually included in its cultural imagining. There was Carroll Cloar’s (1913–1993) stark, striking The Lightning That Struck Rufo Barcliff (1955), based on a story the artist heard as a child in the Arkansas Delta; Claude Howell’s (1915–1997) abstracted Jetty (1955), inspired by scenes on the North Carolina coast; or the sweeping vista of the West Virginia Appalachians in Blanche Lazzell’s (1878–1956) The Monongahela at Morgantown (1933, printed 1935). This last print might be considered an example of what art historian Alison Printz has recently termed “Appalachian modernism.”⁶ The other two, like many works in Southern/Modern, offer glimpses of other compelling veins of experimentation, which await similar recognition and careful study.

Southern/Modern, for the most part, maintained a bird’s-eye view, but it did mark points from which these offshoot modernisms might be explored further. Here it built on the work of its organizing institutions, the Mint and the Georgia Museum of Art, which have, along with many other innovative museums in the region (the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans) been at the forefront of mapping the region’s cultural topography. As the exhibition itself made clear, in fact, these institutions are the inheritors—in ethos and, in some cases, in actual objects—of the colonies, schools, and individuals who worked to establish a place for progressive art in the South.

The influence of these figures and institutions made themselves felt across Southern/Modern in, for example, the presence of works by many artists who were also teachers, administrators, and curators, from Hale Woodruff to Gregory Ivy (1904–1985), to take just two examples. Both Woodruff and Ivy were intrepid experimenters with form, innovating their own modes of abstraction while also establishing art departments, teaching and mentoring students, and founding important university museums and collections (at Atlanta University, now Clark Atlanta University, and the Women’s College of North Carolina, now University of North Carolina at Greensboro, respectively). Their success is palpable in the exhibition, a meaningful proportion of which features the work of their students, friends, and collaborators. Southern/Modern was so emphatic in its celebration of these efforts and their success, in fact, that it allowed their stakes to fade somewhat; we were reminded of the resistance, even hostility, to abstraction in the South only obliquely when we learn that Charles H. Walthur (1879–1937), a faculty member at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art, was fired over it, for example.

But there was a larger and, to my mind, more urgent elision within Southern/Modern—one related to its somewhat hermetic focus on the schools and figures named above. For all the exhibition’s purposeful breadth, its choice of media was strikingly limited. All the works in the exhibition were either paintings or works on paper; there was no presence of photography, sculpture, or assemblage, let alone objects that might be categorized as craft. This curatorial decision excluded vital veins of Southern creativity that flourished outside of high art spaces that curator and art historian Valerie Cassel Oliver has called “key tributaries of American modernism.”⁷ But this choice also narrowed our understanding of the works within the exhibition, many of which evidence deep interest in Southern material culture, noninstitutional making traditions, or the work of artists without formal training. We might think here of Walter Anderson (1903–1965), whose painting and craft practices informed each other; Joseph Cain (1920–1980), who took inspiration from the work of enslaved artisans in his paintings; or the many artists whose experimentation with “faux-naïf” styles were part of their exploration of modernist form. Examining such points of connection might have revealed how these figures reshaped supposedly hard and fast categories—art, folk, craft—into new, Southern forms.

If Southern/Modern largely skirted these questions, however, it remained a revelatory, surprising, and ambitious show, highlighting the need and the surfeit of material for future exhibitions. Plenty of artistic merit, it made clear, was made south of Baltimore.

November 20, 2025: A minor edit was made to clarify the boundaries of the Mason-Dixon line.

Cite this article: Claire Ittner, review of Southern/Modern, Mint Museum, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20535.

Notes

Curated by: Jessica Todd Smith, Elisabeth Agro, Dilys Blum, Amanda N. Bock, and Lily F. Scott

Exhibition Schedule: Philadelphia Art Museum, April 12–September 1, 2025

Exhibition Catalogue: Alison McDonald and Jessica Todd Smith, eds., Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s, exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2025. 80 pp.; 91 color illus.; b/w illus. Paper: $25.00 (ISBN: 9780876333068)

Exhibitions drawn entirely from permanent collections rarely receive the same critical attention as blockbuster displays touting loaned masterworks, but Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s should be an exception. An impressive multimedia showcase of the Philadelphia Art Museum’s holdings, the exhibition offered an expansive and timely look at a decade in which artists held crisis and creativity in tension.¹

Featuring more than 250 works from the museum’s permanent collection, Boom demonstrated how collaborative curatorial strategies and innovative object pairings can facilitate rich and nuanced storytelling across media. Led by Jessica Todd Smith, the curatorial team that imagined this display included resident specialists in contemporary craft and decorative arts, costumes and textiles, and photography. Although not strictly an exhibition of American art (works by artists of many nationalities, including Cuban, Russian, Japanese, and French were represented), Boom’s scope reflected the museum’s long-standing investment in artwork made in the United States. However, there was no shortage of variety: the cross-departmental collaboration required to mount this exhibition was evident not only in the curators’ emphasis on multifaceted, transnational stories but also in their wide-ranging selection of artistic media.

In the largest gallery, wartime posters were placed in dialogue with photographs of air raids, antifascist prints, scarves, and a bathing suit fashioned from a flexible acetate “escape and evade” map produced for soldiers during World War II. In works such as this distinctive bathing suit, novel materials and modes of making converge with the realities of wartime. Due to the rationing of supplies, ranging from fabric to metal requisitioned for military manufacture, working and thinking across media was a necessity in the 1940s. In addition to material lack, urgent political and social issues influenced artistic production, animating the work of artists like Florence Kent Hunter (1917–1989), whose print Jewish Refugees (c. 1938–39) pictures those fleeing the violent Nazi regime. Nearby, Leopoldo Méndez’s (1902–1969) Deportation to Death (1942), one of the earliest prints related to the concentration camps of the Holocaust, represents Mexican collaboration with European artists and lays bare the horrors of “deportation.”

Working within the boundaries of their collection, the curators championed a relatively diverse group of artists, including African American and Asian American artists who are too often marginalized in art-historical narratives. Such varied perspectives are essential to telling the many stories of this decade, rather than espousing a singular, authoritative narrative. Among the works that visitors encountered shortly after entering the exhibition were Claude Clark’s (1915–2001) painting Jam Session (1943) and Beauford Delaney’s (1901–1979 ) portrait of a young James Baldwin (1945). These pieces pulsate with vibrant colors and energetic potential, speaking to the perseverance of Black joy in a segregated America, whose promises of freedom and prosperity remained unevenly fulfilled. By placing Clark’s and Delaney’s works near a Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958) radio designed to evoke the American flag and promote patriotism, curators juxtaposed complex, even unresolved, ideas about national pride and social justice (fig. 1). The work of Japanese American artists was necessarily represented in Boom, such as furniture pieces by George Nakashima (1905–1990), who was incarcerated at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho during World War II. Nakashima’s works were essential companions to propaganda posters and aspirational prints, such as a series by Hugo Gellert (1892–1985), in which people of various backgrounds and identities work together to fight fascism. Commendably, the curators did not shy away from addressing the real inequities and injustices that persisted on the home front and abroad, even as patriotic messaging dominated American mass media.

Although numerous works created before 1945 offered salient examples of innovation born of wartime stringency and advocacy, the sections of the exhibition that explored postwar consumerism and design also encouraged thinking across media and artistic backgrounds. In one gallery, prints by Bauhaus color theorist Josef Albers (1888–1976) shared space with two women’s suits by Irene Lentz (1901–1962) and the Bubble hanging lamps (ancestors of the famed IKEA fixtures) by George Nelson Associates of New York. Viewed together, the prints, garments, and lamps offered a masterclass in geometric design and midcentury silhouettes (fig. 2). Though formally compelling, the cross-media connections in Boom extended beyond the visual. In a nearby grouping, works by Charles (1907–1978) and Ray Eames (1912–1988) demonstrated how even the most iconic postwar designs reflect the social and material impacts of World War II. Having bested metal shortages by designing a wooden leg splint for injured soldiers in the early 1940s, the Eameses put their resourceful approach to work again in 1948, when they used fiberglass, a plastic developed for tactical gear, in the construction of the lightweight LAX armchair. Displayed together in a section of the exhibition titled “For Modern Living,” the leg splint and armchair suggest that trauma lived on in the bodies and furnishings of modern life. Multidimensional displays such as these function as powerful reminders that, for those living, working, and designing in the 1940s, the decade vibrated with the multifaceted meaning of the exhibition’s title. Alongside advances in technology and design, as well as a postwar population increase, the 1940s were marked by the deadly boom of atomic warfare and its aftershocks.

Conceptually layered and visually engaging, the display strategies deployed by the curators of this exhibition also posed a challenge to the restrictive hierarchies of artistic media that have long structured museum presentations and reinforced the worn-out division between high and low art. Though less prevalent in contemporary exhibitions and scholarship, these taxonomies continue to inform the organizational structures of museums, where curatorial departments cordoned off by culture or media make exhibitions like Boom challenging to realize. While the exhibition certainly includes established examples of so-called fine art by well-known modernists, such as Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and Joan Miró (1893–1983), these works are placed in conversation with objects that might previously have been relegated to “decorative” or “utilitarian” realms—or dismissed altogether. I was delighted to encounter, alongside the work of painters and sculptors, a plate (1941) and bowl (1946) by the ceramicist duo Gertrud (1908–1971) and Otto Natzler (1908–2007), a fiber abstraction (c. 1952) by Mariska Karasz (1898–1960), examples of streamlined industrial design (like the Petipoint iron that debuted in 1941), and the genre-defying Landscape Sculpture scarf (1947) by Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975). Wonderfully, works of various media stood on equal footing, shirking cliché arrangements that render industrial or decorative arts mere accessories.

However, the gallery focused on the emergence of Abstract Expressionism (fig. 3) could have benefited from a more creative approach to displaying canonical works of art. Although this section, titled “New Directions in Abstraction,” featured a striking collage by the queer Filipino American artist Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), the work hung on the edge of a wall where the movement’s more famous representative, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), was centered. A large work by sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) further anchored the gallery, but I found myself wondering what additional narratives of abstraction might have enhanced this section. What about the important contributions to abstraction made by Indigenous artists in the 1940s? Presumably, such works are not represented in the collection. Moreover, might there have been space to critically reconsider the role that Abstract Expressionism and its early champions played in the exportation of ideas about Americanness, masculinity, and freedom?²

An additional improvement to this generally thoughtful exhibition would have been the inclusion of relevant information about the history and scope of the Philadelphia Art Museum and its activities in the 1940s. All collections have strengths, weaknesses, and gaps, and the stories of how artworks come to live in museums are as important as what slips through the cracks. That the Philadelphia Art Museum’s inaugural curator of prints and drawings was hired in 1941 and that the museum’s first costume galleries opened in 1947 are among several fascinating details omitted from the gallery text.³ With this history close at hand, visitors might have better contextualized the exhibition’s strong display of garments, ranging from an American Red Cross volunteer uniform to haute couture by Christian Dior. Similarly, it might have been instructive to foreground which prints and posters were acquired by the nascent prints and drawings department in the 1940s and which thereafter. An essay discussing the museum’s collection and history during the 1940s can be found in a magazine-style booklet produced in conjunction with the exhibition, but the publication was not available in the galleries or a nearby gift shop at the time of my visit.

Nevertheless, Boom is an important case study for those interested in telling expansive, textured stories about American art and history. In a praiseworthy example of cross-departmental curation and imaginative thematic framing, the curators—perhaps taking cues from artists represented in the show—worked within limitations to create something exceptional. Additionally, as this review and the exhibition itself have gently suggested, it is worth lingering on the resonances between our time and the 1940s. The 1940s, not unlike the 2020s, were characterized by global catastrophe. In an era in which the lives and well-being of millions of people were under threat, in which war and hatred devastated people and culture, and in which authoritarian governments were on the rise, artists created through and because of adversity. As we mark eighty years since the end of World War II and find ourselves midway through another tumultuous decade, we might learn from these bold designers, artists, and makers.

In the exhibition’s final gallery, two clock faces peered out from adjacent walls. One, represented in Shomei Tomatsu’s (1930–2012) 1961 photograph of a watch that stopped the moment that the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, is an uneasy yet thought-provoking companion to the other, a stylized 1947 Ball wall clock designed by Irving Harper (1916–2015). Representative of atomic-age horrors and innovations, these timepieces are also markers, witnesses, and observers. While contemplating these two very different clocks, it was difficult not to be reminded that the past is ever present.

Cite this article: Maggie North, review of Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s, Philadelphia Art Museum, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20559.

Notes

Curated by: Mary Lee Corlett and Rashieda Witter, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Carla Forbes and Catherine Morris, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum; and Dalila Scruggs, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Exhibition schedule: Brooklyn Museum of Art, September 13, 2024–January 19, 2025; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 9–July 6, 2025; Art Institute of Chicago, August 30, 2025–January 4, 2026

Exhibition catalogue: Dalila Scruggs, ed. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies. Exh. cat. University of Chicago Press in association with the National Gallery of Art and Brooklyn Museum, 2024. 304 pp.; 240 color illus. Cloth: $65.00 (ISBN: 9780226836577)

A mere two miles from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the historic Barnett-Aden Gallery—one of the first art galleries in the United States dedicated to exhibiting Black artists—opened Elizabeth Catlett’s (1915–2012) first solo show in December 1947. Coming full circle on the occasion of the updated retrospective Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist, the National Gallery displayed the brochure that accompanied the Barnett-Aden show in its first interior gallery. Visible was Gwendolyn Bennett’s prescient foreword heralding Catlett as “a Negro woman whose interest in other women and other peoples will deepen and grow as her work develops and matures.”¹ The exhibition proves Bennett’s early words indisputable, showcasing the strength of Catlett’s unwavering vision, talent, and ideals over seven decades of her artistic production.

Symbolically and physically situated outside of the interior gallery spaces and visible from multiple angles across the expansive East Wing atrium, the first installation—representing Catlett’s public art—served both as a thematic opening and chronological endpoint of the show. This framing reminds us that Catlett’s ultimate goal was never simply to earn acclaim from the art establishment, to fetch the highest price, to have her work privately collected, or to have it exhibited behind closed doors; indeed, she recognized with piercing insight the “class character, racist characteristics, and commercial base” of the art world.² Her intention, in contrast, was emphatically clear: “Art needs to be public to reach the majority of Blacks.”³

The galleries followed a primarily thematic, loosely chronological organization that addressed the central ideas that animated Catlett’s life and work. Explanatory wall text introduced the sections “The Personal as Political,” “Roots and Awakenings,” “Prints for the People,” “El Pueblo,” “Global Solidarity and Ancestral Legacies,” “Motherhood and Family,” and “Black Women.” A highlight of the first gallery included the prominent display of the full suite of prints in Catlett’s foundational Black Woman series, which explicitly champions the myriad intellectual, creative, political, and mundane actions of Black women that have enriched the fabric of modern life. Catlett cared to represent the multiplicity of Black women so often overlooked, flattened, exaggerated, or demonized in visual culture. It was apparent that the curatorial team thought carefully about ways to expand visitors’ understanding of Catlett in all her own multiplicity as an artist, activist, teacher, one-time student, and loving wife and mother. Throughout the exhibition, community labels written by Catlett’s former students, family friends, and contemporaries accompanied select artworks, providing authorial perspectives beyond the typical (singular) museological voice. Vitrines housed ephemera that spoke to Catlett’s creative influences and surroundings; these objects included, among others, a Gordon Parks photograph, a Richard Wright novel, a photograph of her art club at Howard, and a brochure of the community classes she offered at the George Washington Carver School. All these items established the broader tradition of the progressive, socially engaged Black art communities within which she learned and worked.

The “Roots and Awakenings” gallery primarily exhibited Catlett’s student work—from design work completed under Loïs Mailou Jones’s tutelage at Howard to early paintings in watercolor, gouache, and pastel. A photograph of Negro Mother and Child, the stone sculpture (now lost) she had submitted for her master’s thesis at the University of Iowa in 1940, provides evidence of Catlett’s developing, sophisticated eye for compact, reduced form, sinuous contour lines, and architectonic planes that continued to typify her work in both print and sculpture. The two-figure composition of a monumental woman wrapping an infant child in a close embrace—evocative of religious scenes of the Virgin Mary and Christ—became prototypical for Catlett.

Her recurrent iterations on the theme of Black motherhood (highlighted in the later gallery “Motherhood and Family”) addressed the profound intimacy of Black maternity in tandem with its overwhelming terrors. In the powerful print Torture of Mothers (1970), for instance, Catlett appropriated an image of a wounded Black boy, a victim of police brutality, from an issue of Life magazine. Lying prone in a bloody inferno, the boy’s body stretches across the length of a woman’s head in profile, operating as a visual representation of the fearful preoccupation experienced by Black mothers concerned for the safety of their children. Torture of Mothers, in addition to other works on display, imparts Catlett’s incisive commentary against the state violence experienced globally by youths of color.

The third gallery, “Prints for the People,” explores Catlett’s initial residency at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), a leftist print collective in Mexico City that she joined as a guest while traveling on a Julius Rosenwald fellowship. Less than a year later, due to shared values on collective political action and the social utility of freely accessible art, she joined as a permanent member. The TGP’s prints, which were collaboratively produced, cheaply made, and distributed directly to the people, addressed a wide range of sociopolitical inequities and global conflicts, from workers’ and Indigenous rights in Mexico to anti-Blackness, antifascism, and anti-imperialism. Other members of the collective, including Alberto Beltrán, David Alfaro Siquieros, Francisco Mora (Catlett’s future husband), Mariana Yampolsky, Pablo O’Higgins, Fanny Rabel, Celia Calderón, Francisco Luna, Guillermo Rodriguez Camacho, and guest artist Margaret Burroughs had work displayed in the exhibition.

Catlett received Mexican citizenship in 1962, but due to her history of political activity, she was deemed an “undesirable alien” by the United States and denied entry to the country for over a decade. Catlett maintained her connection to the United States through her art, supporting and reflecting on the Black revolutionary wave through several key pieces on display in the “Ancestral Legacies and Global Solidarity” section of the exhibition. The 1971 sculpture Political Prisoner, created in response to the arrest of Angela Davis, anchored the space. The figure’s manacled hands are not visible when viewing the sculpture from the front, where Catlett prominently painted the Pan-African tricolor flag, a symbol of Black liberation. The figure’s upright posture and upturned gaze strike a picture of hope, resolute determination, and defiance—undercurrents that were present throughout the majority of the work in the gallery. Examples like the sculpture Mask for Whites (c. 1970) and the print Vendedora de periódicos, Collage Version (c. 1958/75) exhibit Catlett’s increased use of collage as an opposition technique, collecting newspaper clippings from the Black Panther newspaper, Mexican periodicals, and other sources that lambasted police and state brutality, fascism, and imperial overreach in the United States and other authoritarian or colonial regimes. The exhibition underscored Catlett’s understanding of the interlocking and interrelated demands of global liberation.

A small auditorium adjacent to the first gallery screened two films. La Obra de Elizabeth Catlett (The work of Elizabeth Catlett), created by Catlett’s son Juan Mora Catlett in 1977, documents the creation, fabrication, and installation of Catlett’s sculpture of Louis Armstrong in New Orleans, overlaid with Catlett’s reflections on the value and necessity of art. The other film, Print Like a Great: Elizabeth Catlett featuring LaToya Hobbs, was produced by the National Gallery of Art to accompany the exhibition. It chronicles Hobbs, a contemporary printmaker and portraitist who claims Catlett as one of her artistic idols, on a research trip to Mexico in preparation for the creation of Dahlias for Naima (fig. 2), a monumental woodcut portrait of Catlett’s granddaughter that was commissioned for the exhibition. An abridged version of the film showcasing the process was screened in the gallery next to the piece. While Catlett’s own work, Naima: My Granddaughter (fig. 3), a portrait bust modeled when Naima visited her grandparent in Cuernavaca as a teenager, was included in the last gallery of the exhibition, it was a regret that the pieces were not installed next to each other. Taken together, the two artworks provide a poignant image of Catlett’s maternal and artistic legacies that continue to flourish in her memory.

The exhibition catalogue, Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, is essential reading. It offers a collection of critical scholarly essays by leading voices in Black American, Mexican, and feminist art histories, as well as a compendium of new and updated reproductions of her artwork. In it, curator Dalila Scruggs describes Catlett as pursuing the “mutually reinforcing” pillars of social justice and formal rigor in her work, eschewing the discourse of her time that claimed art should either be for art’s sake or serve a social purpose—not both.⁴ This vital exhibition affirmed that Catlett pursued both tracks with precision and great accomplishment, producing a body of work across sculpture, print, and paint that made no compromises in either form or content. While rightfully celebrating Catlett’s achievement by all standard metrics, Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist simultaneously honors Catlett by the standards she set for herself, highlighting her dogged community spirit and her commitment to creating an accessible, legible, and democratic art dedicated to the peoples she claimed as her own.

Cite this article: Ebonie Pollock, review of Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20529. 

Notes

Curated by: Maggie Adler, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; and James Glisson, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA

Exhibition Schedule: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, May 12–October 27, 2024; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA, December 8, 2024–May 25, 2025

When two waves collide, they undergo a series of transformations: amplifying where they align and dissolving where they contradict. Respectively known as constructive and destructive interference, the resulting waves bear the layered traces of each other’s passage. Waves of any difference in amplitude undergo this process: the squeak of a mouse reverberates in the trumpeting of an elephant, and the flap of an insect’s wings joins—however faintly—the great grindings of the earth. Although such interference quickly escapes the threshold of human perception, it nevertheless endures, spun into the threads of connection weaving all things together. This attunement to the delicate interplay occurring across disproportionate scales, where the small nestles into the large and the distant collapses into the near, echoes through the recent exhibition Dario Robleto: The Signal. Spanning works of art ranging from lithographs of human vital signs to butterflies with antennae fashioned from thin strands of cassette tape, the exhibition takes the waveform as an ethereal material and casts it into the real.

Upon entering the exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas (fig. 1), I found myself flanked by a series of images lining all but one of the gallery’s walls. Entitled The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life, 1854–1913) (2017), these eighteen lithographs bear the hazy traces of heartbeats captured over a century ago using one of the earliest devices capable of recording human vital signs: a sphygmograph. Invented in 1853 by German physiologist Karl von Vierordt, the sphygmograph is a device that uses a single human hair to inscribe delicate cardiac oscillations into a layer of soot. While standing before a print of someone’s heartbeats as they smelled a fresh sprig of lavender in 1896, I felt my own pulse quicken and wondered if my palpitations were bending to match—like a metronome synchronizing to the swaying bodies of others or a shard of glass humming along to a resonant tuning fork—in a fleeting hope of union across space and time.

Stretching the desire for connection to a cosmic scale, the heartbeats’ procession concluded on the final wall with Robleto’s triptych Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens (2012). In this work, Robleto trades sonic oscillations for waves of celestial light gleaned from the cosmos’s deepest reaches. Amber golds and somber blues glimmer across a black expanse, referencing images created by the Hubble Space Telescope as it peered back into the fires of creation. Yet these motes of illumination are, in fact, no galaxies: closer scrutiny reveals them to be stage lights lifted from jazz, blues, and gospel album covers, their glow a human hymn masquerading as starlight. The viewer is left, then, to wonder about these new signals as they traverse the gulf of the cosmos. As we beam radio waves beyond Earth’s reach, sometimes even the same songs performed under the pallid stage lights of Robleto’s triptych, do they brush against and subtly bend the ancient light of distant worlds? Might they tinge the cosmos with the faintest traces of unrequited hope and longing along the way? In Robleto’s hands, connection is interference, with each individual action but another ripple melding into the roil.

Holding the works dotting the walls in its gravity, the sculptural work American Seabed (2014) at the center of the room deposits their myriad waveforms into layers of terrestrial matter. Here, a kaleidoscope of butterflies dances among an array of fossilized whale ears perching on slender pedestals of brass (fig. 2). The butterflies’ antennae, formed from filaments of cassette tape bearing Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Desolation Row,” rise above a tessellated surface of concrete undulating like the surface of the ocean. Stalactites of bleached coral hang in the cavernous depths beneath the sedimentary waves like roots seeking the past. The piece evokes the concept of deep time, first theorized by James Hutton while gazing on the striated cliffs of Siccar Point, Scotland, in 1788, where geological strata revealed Earth’s ancient, submerged histories. Much like those layers, Robleto’s work compresses history’s rubble into a single monument to annihilation, yet one still shimmering with hope: Perhaps, when I turn away, the butterflies will be on the wing. Fragile antennae holding a lament recorded less than sixty years ago curl above bodies resplendent in the light of the present, while below waves of undifferentiated matter lap against bones fossilized across eons. In this work, the wreckage of time compresses under the slow, irreversible pull of entropy; the moving finger, having writ, moves forever onward.

The final work in the gallery, Unknown and Solitary Seas (Dreams and Emotions of the 19th Century) (2018), invited the viewer to reflect once more on the recorded signals of humans long since past. Here, Robleto transmuted ten sphygmographic waveforms from centuries distant into tangible forms of brass-plated stainless steel and laid them to rest in a box of black-lacquered maple. With gilded captions such as “Religious guilt, 1877” and “Name softly called while sleeping, 1877,” I imagined myself picking one up and clasping around my neck a distant murmur of yearning. These once-ephemeral waves, now wrought into near-eternal golden luster, serve as a prelude to the exhibition’s other half: the third and final feature-length film of Robleto’s meditation on the Golden Record created by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Affixed to the Voyager spacecraft and cast beyond the solar system in 1977, this record endures as humanity’s furthest emissary, a beacon of hope on a fool’s errand into the cosmic deep. The record’s pictorial content thrums with a resounding sense of optimism as it ranges from idyllic scenes of dolphins leaping above tropical waters to the birth of a child. Yet, these images exist only as soundwaves encoded into the grooved ridges spiraling toward the record’s center. What might at first sound like fuzzy static engraved on the record’s obverse side is instead a string of data denoting the location and color of each pixel comprising the images. To parse this data, one must standardize it with the twenty-one-centimeter-long electromagnetic wave loosed by hydrogen (the background hum of the universe) as its single electron changes spin, yet again predicating connection on the interference of waves.

Cowritten and narrated by art historian Jennifer Roberts, the seventy-minute film, Ancient Beacons Long for Notice (2024), unveils the Golden Record’s dual function as a time capsule and, perhaps more crucially, a carrier of love and longing (fig. 3). For an art historian who has championed the importance of making as embodied research and an artist whose practice is built on deep archival engagement, Roberts and Robleto’s collaboration represents a rare and natural convergence. This interdisciplinary approach allows their film to explore a deeper kinship between the arts and sciences, framing both as practices seeking, as Roberts describes, to “perceive and represent phenomena that are not available to habitual forms of understanding.”¹ Nowhere is this more evident than in the heretofore-untold story of an act of subversion forever etched into the surface of the record.

Ann Druyan, the creative director of the team at NASA who compiled the record’s audio track in the 1970s, proposed including the first-ever battlefield recording—captured by the American soldier Will Gaisberg during a World War I gas attack in 1918—as a way to present a more complete profile of humanity, flaws and all, to those who might one day access it. NASA rejected Druyan’s suggestion, fearing the potential for extraterrestrial listeners to perceive such an inclusion as threatening. As a result, the five hours of audio contained on the Golden Record appears at first glance to be little more than a message of kinship and welcome. And yet, such complexity remains embedded within the record’s aureate furrows. Roberts and Robleto present groundbreaking research based on interviews with Druyan, revealing her subversive response to NASA’s censorship. Unwilling to let the Voyager depart without bearing an earnest account of the human condition, Druyan included an electropherogram (a recording of her brainwaves, akin to the pulses seen earlier in the gallery) captured while she meditated on the full spectrum of humanity: suffering and war alongside hope and love. As the film describes, Druyan “has smuggled the memory of love and war out of the solar system.”

The film draws the viewer back to a central conceit of Robleto’s work: actions of any scale hold the capacity to influence all around them. As the film points out, the Voyager spacecraft’s usage of Jupiter as a gravitational slingshot to escape the confines of the solar system left its mark on the planet’s orbit, delaying its transit around the sun by about one foot per trillion years. The film thus asks viewers to consider the influence all actions have, noting that “if there had been an elephant roar instead of a cricket chirp” on the audio track of the record, “this difference in mass would have been revealed” not only in the velocity of the Voyager but in the ensuing delay the spacecraft imparted to Jupiter’s orbit. As Roberts and Robleto explain, Druyan’s reflection on the shades of complexity inherent within human experience became inscribed in the trajectory of the Voyager: perhaps each pulse of love removed ever so slightly more material from the record than one of despair and thus shifted the weight of the record. Drawn out over the astronomical distances and timescales that the Voyager will traverse, such small differences in weight will alter its course—and in turn our own—forever.

Known as a Fourier transformation, mathematics offers a way to unravel complex amalgamations of waves into their constituent parts. The original signals caught in the cosmic turbulence are still there, waiting to be uncovered. Leaving the exhibition, I stepped out into the Texas sun and found myself slowly unspooling the interference of all the waves I experienced inside: Here the flap of filigree as I watched an orange-gold butterfly flit among sunlit flowers; there the beat of my own heart returning, however imperceptibly, from its fall into synchronicity with palpitations centuries distant. And I wondered if these waves, too, radiated out, interfering and connecting with everything around me: every thought caught in the gravity of Jupiter, every step felt in the rings of Saturn.

Cite this article: Alexander Betz, review of Dario Robleto: The Signal, Amon Carter Museum of Art, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20541.

Notes

Curated by: TK Smith

Exhibition schedule: Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, June 28–September 7, 2025

Exhibition catalogue: 2025 Mississippi Invitational: Call Home (digital catalogue), Mississippi Museum of Art, last modified July 29, 20025, https://www.msmuseumart.org /exhibition/test-2025-mississippi-invitational

Before a single artwork came into view, the exhibition Call Home surrounded the viewer in sound. A dial tone stretched into static. The beep of an answering machine followed. Then disembodied, intimate voices could be heard from Emma Lorenz’s installation You Have XX Messages (2025). “Call me back,” one voice said, “Just wanted to check in.” This layered sonic prelude lingered in the gallery like memory itself: partial, repeated, unresolved. It ushered the listener into an exhibition attuned to delay, interruption, and the residual architectures of longing. Here, listening became the first gesture, an act of attention and of care. This review traces three themes of the exhibition that explored the unsettled and permeable conditions of home: domestic labor, the body as vessel and process, and the archive of ancestral presence.

The 2025 Mississippi Invitational framed Call Home as both an open invitation to reflect on belonging and an insistence on confronting the complexities that make home fragile. Held biennially at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, the Invitational is a platform for recognizing and supporting outstanding contemporary artists living and working across the state. In this iteration, curator TK Smith brought together twelve artists whose practices reflect and reshape the unstable meanings of home. This review is based on a visit to the exhibition on July 2, 2025, and includes installation photographs (figs. 1–2) and quotes from wall texts reviewed at that time.

Call Home foregrounded a generation of artists whose practices reveal the layered, evolving nature of contemporary art in the South. Their works bring forward perspectives rooted in intergenerational memory, Black life, queer intimacy, and environmental precarity. They refuse the neat binaries of past and present, local and global, instead drawing connections between Mississippi’s material landscapes and its conceptual, often contested, meanings. Here I highlight a selection of works rather than surveying all twelve participants, although the themes I discuss are echoed throughout the show.

Call Home presented an exploration of home as both material and ephemeral. Home is grounded in the clay, rust, wood, and fabric of lived environments, yet it also takes shape through memory and the intangible. What emerged is a curatorial vision that refused nostalgia. Instead, the exhibition moved through dislocation, grief, intimacy, and return. It asked how we reach across silence, how we hold onto what slips away, and how the impulse to connect persists even when the line has gone quiet. It included a layered sound environment and low-light projections, as well as sensitive imagery of birth and decay. Wall texts, seating, and clear pathways helped mediate these sensory conditions for visitors.

Across Call Home, the theme of the domestic emerged as a permeable and emotionally charged environment, where care, memory, and nature intersect. Through works that evoke laundry, dishes, cleaning rituals, and the slow encroachment of decay, the exhibition reframed the home as a site of accumulation. Material and emotional residue settles into surfaces, and the ordinary becomes a vessel for grief, intimacy, and quiet transformation.

Christina McField’s photographic series Where Time Stands Still (2021–ongoing; fig. 3) draws the viewer into the suspended temporality of interior life. Her archival inkjet prints document not action but its aftermath: a window-lit kitchen counter, a sink filled with vessels and utensils, the overlooked rhythms of domestic labor. These images resist narrative closure. They are not concerned with order or disorder but with presence.

A similar sensibility informs Ashley Gates’s Housesitting (2022–ongoing), a series of black-and-white archival pigment prints centered on the interiors of borrowed homes. Her compositions linger on bathroom sinks, cluttered vanities, and kitchen counters. These spaces feel intimate and tender and are not curated. Gates offers attention to these rooms, but she does so from the position of a visitor. She is not at home in them, and neither are we. In documenting the traces of provisional caretaking, her work gestures toward the shared routines that undergird domestic life, even in the absence of permanence or possession. Jerrod Partridge’s handmade paper paintings enter this thematic constellation with quiet restraint. His depictions of domestic vignettes, such as a pile of laundry or the sink of dishes, do not disrupt; they rest. His textured surfaces and understated compositions reflect a reverence for the mundane.

If the domestic is often figured as a space of order and stability, Sue Carrie Drummond’s The Mold Garden (2024) foregrounds its porousness and susceptibility to change. The installation, composed of monotypes and pochoir prints (a stencil-based printmaking technique) arranged as architectural fragments, sprawls across the floor as if growing outward. The sequence begins simply, accompanied by the wall text: “Week one. Just a smell.” A later label noted spots that “spread, gather, and multiply,” marking the slow incursion of decay. Viewed alongside these labels, the work invites reflection on the relationship between growth and rot, and the home as a living system marked by change and time.

These works propose that the domestic is not fixed. It is porous, affective, and alive. Memory collects in its corners. Nature enters through its seams. In the spaces between clean and dirty, empty and full, seen and remembered, Call Home located its most intimate terrain.

The second theme I identify for the exhibition turns to the body, not as a singular entity but as a vessel, metaphor, and process through which home is felt and transformed. It is rendered across a broad material spectrum that holds memory, transition, and transformation in tension. Through steel, ceramic, velvet, bone, and binder clip, the works gathered in Jackson reflect on how the body anchors the most intimate experiences of home, labor, and loss.

Betty Press’s documentary photographic series Born at Home (2000–2003) grounds this exploration in the literal act of emergence. Her black-and-white images chronicle the work of midwife Karen Kennedy, capturing home births across six Florida families. The series attends to birth as both ritual and labor, miracle and exhaustion. Press’s lens remains focused on hands, faces, sweat, and relief. Perhaps the home in these photographs functions not only as a backdrop but as a participant. It can be seen as sheltering bodies in transition and bearing witness to the threshold between pain and life.

That sense of embodied transformation continued in Jason Kimes’s sculptural trilogy. Veni (2025) presents a translucent epoxy infant, curled and spectral, a figure that feels newly arrived. Around a corner, Vidi (2025) stands in contrast. Constructed from Cor-Ten steel, its rusting layers evoke solidity achieved through corrosion. Vici (2025), a towering skull in polished steel, completes the arc. With its mirrored surface, the form literalizes reflection on time, on decay, and on the afterimage of the self. Kimes’s suite moves from softness to monumentality, from infancy to icon, and it can be read as marking the body through the passage of time and material change.

In Passage of the Spine (2025; fig. 4), Allen Chen, too, takes on the body through vertebral ceramic forms suspended across the gallery in quiet procession. Each piece, cracked and pigmented, implies both skeletal structure and geological form. A spine suggests a landscape; the body suggests terrain. Chen’s artist statement notes, “Home is no longer a fixed point. It is a process.” His installation reflects this condition. The work indicates movement, vulnerability, and the necessity of recalibration across memory and geography alike.

Some works approach the body obliquely. Rylee Brabham’s Junk Drawer (2025) arranges a testosterone vial, syringe, and child’s note in a velvet-lined drawer, invoking private rituals of transition and becoming. Connor Frew’s Poem for Daniel Buren (Flags) (2024) suspends risograph banners (a stencil-based digital duplicator process) printed from scans of his own skin, so that the body can be read as rhythm, repetition, and light.

A final theme within the exhibit considers the archive of home as fragile yet resonant terrain, where memory and ancestral presence persist in partial, layered forms. These works dwell in the aftermath of home, in what has been carried forward and what is still longed for. They ask how we hold space for what we inherit.

Ashley Gates’s Diamond Ring (2024; fig. 5) sets the tone with intimate domestic imagery projected from a vintage slide carousel. The wall text identifies her use of photographs of her late mother alongside images of the 2024 total solar eclipse, which merges celestial cycles with familial memory. Using a handmade pinhole camera to trace the moon’s path across the sun, she overlays eclipse projections onto archival photographs, some taken before her birth, creating constellations of grief, memory, and reverence. The work invites a meditation on loss and continuity, reframing the photographic archive as both personal relic and cosmic register. In an accompanying Polaroid, the solar eclipse is frozen in a moment of suspended celestial time, and Chen’s sculptural installation Moon Rocks is visible in the reflection on the photograph’s glass. That unintentional layering of works, one image ghosted into another, suggests how memory operates: never clean, always overlaid with new meaning and with what is just out of frame.

A more documentary tone appears in Betty Press’s Storefronts in Kenya and Mississippi (2001–3). These paired photographs offer a visual dialogue across continents, presenting storefronts as sites of commerce, culture, and community. Their mirrored composition suggests both connection and distance. Though rooted in ethnographic practice, the diptychs (two-part images) ask the same questions that animate the exhibition: what is inherited, what persists, and how do we recognize ourselves across spatial and temporal differences.

Powerful work by Alexis McGrigg articulates the sacred dimensions of home, memory, and ancestral relation. In A Personal Constellation (2025), McGrigg overlays family photographs with gold leaf and pigment, obscuring faces while also sanctifying them. Some figures are rendered in silhouette; others remain legible but distant. This gesture protects what memory has begun to fade, offering reverence rather than resolution. Her treatment of the image can be interpreted as an affirmation of the idea that to remember is also to transform.

In her video installation Alterity: Unknown Histories (2023; fig. 6), McGrigg returns to her familial land in Utica, Mississippi. The film centers on a figure clothed in ritual costume, designed in collaboration with her mother, Donna McGrigg. The figure moves slowly through woods and fields, enveloped by the landscape but never fully absorbed into it. The work layers performance, prayer, and absence into a meditation on belonging. As curator TK Smith observes in his curatorial essay on McGrigg’s work, it becomes a spiritual return to land and water by someone who has never had the opportunity to know precisely where she is held or how her thread runs through the larger weave of intergenerational memory.¹

McGrigg’s work does not present the archive as whole. It treats it as active, unfinished, resistant to closure. Her constellations of the known and unknown do not seek to resolve memory’s gaps but instead refuse erasure while acknowledging that recovery is always partial. In that refusal, the call at the heart of the exhibition returns once more.

Call Home makes listening itself into a curatorial method, a way of attending across distance and memory.

Call home. I need to hear your voice.

Cite this article: Brittany Myburgh, review of Call Home, Mississippi Museum of Art, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20547.

Notes

Posted: November 19, 2025

PDF version: CFP Semiquincentennial 2025

Panorama (journalpanorama.org), the online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA), is calling for special content for issue 12.2 (Fall 2026) that engages with the United States’ Semiquincentennial. We seek scholarship that examines how artistic practices, exhibitions, interventions, and more have impacted narratives of American identity and nationhood, especially perspectives that address commemoration and counter-commemoration. Topics may include, but are not limited to: foundational histories of colonization and displacement; diasporic art practices; collective memory; territorial transformation; the shaping of personal and collective identities; revivalisms; and the visual development of national myths and symbols.

Proposals may come in many forms, either following the journal’s standard format of Feature Articles, In the Round, Colloquium, Research Notes, Book Reviews, Exhibition Reviews, and Digital Dialogues, or offering new avenues of critique, interpretation, and knowledge building related to this national milestone.

For Feature Article or Research Notes submissions, please use our online submission portal and consult the guidelines on our Submissions page. Indicate that your submission is geared toward this special issue in the “Comments to the Editor” field.

For all other proposals to help shape this special issue of Panorama, please send a CV and brief proposal to journalpanorama@gmail.com with the subject line “SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL ISSUE PROPOSAL.”

This is a rolling deadline; submissions and proposals will be considered as they come in.

Questions? Contact us at journalpanorama@gmail.com.

Posted: November 19, 2025

PDF version: CFN DD 2025

Panorama (journalpanorama.org), the online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA), is seeking two Digital Dialogues editors to join the journal for a three-year term beginning with our June 2026 issue. This position comes with a stipend of $500 per completed issue.

The Digital Dialogues section of the journal reviews born-digital resources, virtual initiatives, and data-driven scholarship in and concerning the field of American art history. Digital Dialogues also captures conversations about the impact of digital content and communication across professional work in the field, in research, education, collections, curation, publishing, and activism. These shorter-form pieces (500-1,000 words) can take a more informal tone and should include one high-resolution image. In addition to text submissions, we also encourage submissions in alternative formats and media (such as audio and video).

In alignment with our mission to “embrace the study of the diverse artistic production that circulates within and beyond the constructed geographies of what is now the United States” and “model collaboration, inclusivity, and dialogue,” we encourage applications from diverse scholars, including those who may be new to the Association of Historians of American Art and/or Panorama readership. Museum professionals, independent scholars, academics, and those who work in adjacent or interdisciplinary fields grounded in art-historical inquiry and visual and material culture study are welcome, as are international scholars or others living and working outside the continental United States.

Ideal candidates will be organized and detail oriented with an excellent record of scholarship and must be members in good standing of AHAA. Successful candidates should be comfortable with MS Word and Google Docs; Panorama will provide training in OJS, our online submission management system.

To apply for this position, please send a CV and statement of interest by January 15, 2026, to journalpanorama@gmail.com with the subject line “DIGITAL DIALOGUES EDITOR APPLICATION.”

Questions? Contact us at journalpanorama@gmail.com.

SEEKING CONTRIBUTIONS FOR NEW IN MEMORIAM SECTION 

Posted: November 19, 2025

PDF: CFP In Memoriam

As the field of American art matures, the editors of Panorama invite submissions from solo or groups of authors seeking to commemorate a cherished mentor in the field who has recently passed away. We are seeking to be a responsive digital space both for celebration of life and public memory.

Submissions can be individual or collaborative, should not exceed 2000 words, and may include images. In Memoriam is not peer-reviewed, but submissions will go through review by the Executive Editors as well as light copyediting. Accepted submissions will be published on a rolling basis in a special In Memoriam section under Panorama’s About menu. Comments will be open for others to add their commemorations and remembrances.

To submit to In Memoriam, please use our online submission portal and consult the guidelines on our Submissions page.

With the release of our latest issue, Panorama—the open-access, peer-reviewed journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA)—celebrates the vibrant diversity of perspectives shaping the field today.

From groundbreaking essays to thoughtful reviews and creative dialogues, Panorama continues to serve as a vital, inclusive platform for innovative scholarship in American art history.

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Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art
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