This account of Naquayouma’s role as a collaborator in 1937 is also an account of our own collaboration as researchers: with each other, with other scholars, and with the Hopi community, which is at its center.
Category: Research Notes
The pages of this book are part of a long-standing tradition of conscientious iconoclasm, in which altering or damaging a picture or object constitutes a considered form of political protest, while they also provoke further reflection upon questions about the ethics of viewing or showing scenes of pain and suffering.
If I looked closely and recognized my own cultural biases, as Jules Prown wisely recommends, could I understand how [Henry] Tuckerman’s experience shaped a response that was so different from mine?
Newly surfaced documents . . . serve to elucidate our understanding of Oller’s artistic endeavors as he navigated the political waters of the US imperialist regime.
By pictorially aligning the ruins of Chicago with those of the ancient civilizations of Europe, especially, these representations offered the potential for the recent past to be reframed as storied history.
I was struck that contemporary viewers of Weber’s painting apparently did not mind the vagueness of the image’s relation to the American land it was thought to depict. . . . Weber was thought to ably capture a quintessential national identity through nature, even if he appeared unwilling to brand his work as a glorification of a strictly American spirit.
By depicting a celebrated African site singled out by African Americans at an 1843 state convention in Michigan as proof that “we are worthy of the name of American citizens,” as asserted by Committee Chairman William Lambert, Duncanson was expressing race pride and alliance with African Americans seeking enfranchisement.
This resource also offers a model for sharing the background research that is often too detailed, wide-ranging, and extraneous to be published in a conventional format, as well as too inaccessible in museum archives or scholars’ homes for general use.
Taking cues from the critique of institutional racism sharpened by the Black Lives Matter movement and from more recent scholarship, I consider here how Hopper’s work was promoted in a time of cultural nationalism, as well as how his art should be reassessed in the light of today’s attention to cultural diversity.
“Did you know Peale’s mastodon is in Germany?!,” I asked in emails and in a post on social media. No one seemed to have known, with responses generally disbelieving.