Issue 11.2
PDF: Sorkin, Metzger, and McGoey, Editors’ Welcome
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 it 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.
About the Author(s): Jenni Sorkin, Cyle Metzger, and Elizabeth McGoey are the Executive Editors of Panorama