Issue 11.1
Welcome to issue 11.1 of Panorama, which is anchored by cutting-edge scholarship on Black and Brown subjectivities. This content affirms our journal’s unwavering commitment to diversifying the field of American art. At a time when there is a clear and expanding threat to defund and silence government agencies and civil servants, museums, universities, and cultural spaces of all shapes and sizes, we here at Panorama want to assure our readers that we will continue to champion diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI). Our granting agencies—the Luce Foundation, the Terra Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Wyeth Foundation, all private foundations—have made extraordinarily generous commitments to this journal so that we can continue to engage in the difficult and sometimes challenging work of publishing against the grain of accepted ideas and historical bias.
We pledge that will continue to offer editorial space and our collective intellectual resources to righting historical wrongs through a continued interrogation of structural racism, genocide, and violence imparted by centuries of colonialization and exploitation of non-white people in the United States, including Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Chicanx and Latinx, Indigenous Peoples, enslaved Africans, and their descendants. Histories of migration, immigration, refuge, and statelessness have long been integral to art history, and they will continue to be welcomed in these pages. Likewise, we are committed to queer and transgender makers and scholars and the work they produce. These are just some of the identities and content newly contested at the federal level. To use a metaphor borrowed from the sci-fi television series Stranger Things, under this new administration we have entered “the upside down.” The twenty-first century’s progress and hard work of anti-racism and anti-trans activism is now being suppressed, with the activist term “woke” now perversely serving as a catch-all epithet and routinely censored, deleted, and dismissed. As an editorial team, we will fight against these reversals.
This issue has a single, groundbreaking feature article, “Disability and Creativity: David Drake’s Vessels and the Art of Collaborative Craft,” by Jennifer Van Horn and Natalie E. Wright. Authored collaboratively, this piece itself wades into contested territories, calling into question the singularity of the enslaved potter David Drake’s ceramics practice, reconsidering his practice through the lens of disability studies, and examining his subjectivity as, in their words, “a multiply marginalized disabled maker,” given the loss of one of his legs. They question long-held interpretations that embrace a mythic solo status in making large-scale vessels and think instead about issues of collectivity, agency, and the long-term consequences of violence enacted on his body as an enslaved person.
Likewise, the group of essays in this issue’s In the Round are also trailblazing, tackling blatantly racialized imagery and ideologies of white supremacy that pervade artworks created within the fin de siècle Ashcan School movement in New York. Co-edited by Jordana Moore Saggese and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “Blackness, the Ashcan School, and Modern American Art” draws together scholarship by a range of art historians, from emerging to senior, offering new perspectives rooted in archival research to reassess a foundational group of American artists long praised for their attention to so-called downtrodden or lower-class subjects. This collection of essays upends the conventional narrative of artistic empathy and instead reassesses the harmful imagery perpetuated by these painters, many of whom also worked at least part-time as illustrators in the popular press.
The Digital Dialogues section considers the often-underrecognized power that cataloging practices have to privilege some narratives while obscuring and suppressing others within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM organizations). The opening essay, by Digital Dialogues editors Tracy Stuber and Jennifer Way, introduces the growing practice of critical cataloging as an emerging collective effort among several GLAM organizations engaged with histories of American art. The essays that follow by Stefanie Hilles, Martien de Vletter, Christina Ayson-Plank and Rihoko Ueno, and Rose Paquet, along with a roundtable from Bree Midavaine, Rosalie Hooper, and Sophia Meyers, also recognize that critical cataloging practices require resources that are currently threatened by executive orders and the legislation enacted to carry out “anti-woke” ideologies.
The Research Notes in this issue introduce an array of perspectives on artists both well-known and emergent in the field of American art: Julia Hamer-Light explores how generosity functions as a methodology for the Oglala Lakȟóta artist Arthur Amiotte; Robin Owen Joyce troubles the line between fine art and bureaucratic labor by examining an obscure but revealing portrait made for the WPA/FAP; and Julia A. Sienkewicz offers new ways of knowing Edmonia Lewis through the correspondence of Florence Freeman, a member of Lewis’s peer group of women sculptors in Rome.
Book reviews cover a wide range of new scholarship on topics from the evolving legacies of memorials to the emergence of hairdressing as an ephemeral but culturally significant practice. The section also includes reviews of books that expand our understanding of the full impact and scope of the Harlem Renaissance and nineteenth-century American genre painting. Our exhibition reviews focus on two cutting-edge West Coast exhibitions, on left-coast counterculture and the connection between art, medicine, and disability.
Lastly, Katie Jentleson’s term as an Executive Editor comes to a close. We thank Katie for her strong leadership over the past three years, in which she spearheaded the establishment of Panorama’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit status distinct from (but still strongly linked to) our parent organization, the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA). Katie has been a key architect in guiding Panorama’s embrace of diversity and equity initiatives. Succeeding her is Elizabeth “Liz” McGoey, Ann S. and Samuel M. Mencoff Curator, Arts of the Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago. Serving first as a Research Notes editor at Panorama, Liz has demonstrated a rigorous commitment to new scholarship and the journal’s unique capacities for supporting it. Welcome to this new leadership role, Liz! We also welcome Corey Piper of the Chrysler Museum of Art, who has filled the vacancy left in Research Notes, and Mary Soylu of Alabama State University, our newest Exhibition Reviews Editor.
Cite this article: Katherine Jentleson, Jenni Sorkin, Cyle Metzger, and Elizabeth McGoey, “Editors’ Welcome,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 1 (Spring 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20000.
About the Author(s): Katherine Jentleson, Jenni Sorkin, Cyle Metzger, and Elizabeth McGoey are the Executive Editors of Panorama.