Issue 8.2
PDF: Editors’ Welcome 8.2
Welcome to our fall 2022 issue (number 8.2), complete with a brand-new look and website redesigned to make some of the best scholarship in the field ever more accessible to readers all over the world.
In addition to the insightful, cutting-edge essays you’ve come to expect from Panorama, this issue underscores our commitment to the digital format with a fresh and exciting new website design and logo. We have listened and responded to how readers and contributors use our site, and as a result you’ll find a stronger focus on images, improved display on mobile devices, social sharing buttons attached to each article, and enhanced navigation tools, including a new “Explore” page that lets you easily browse by subject and refine your results by section, author, or issue. By highlighting the most frequently used subject tags throughout our site, we hope to encourage readers to explore narrative threads throughout our past issues and help educators to develop reading lists and thematic lesson plans. Yes, all of our past content is available on this new site—adapted as if by magic, but really through the hard work of Managing Editor Jessica Skwire Routhier and the team at the University of Minnesota Libraries, including Emma Molls, John Barneson, and Laureen Buotang, who led the redesign project.
This rare opportunity to reflect on and improve our born-digital platform coincides with the launch of an exciting new section, Digital Dialogues, which features reflections on digital work (widely defined) impacting American art history. Thanks to our Digital Dialogues Editors, Tracy Stuber and Jennifer Way, for making this new section a reality. Inaugural contributions from Ellen Tani on the Maryland Institute Black Archives and Jennifer van Horn on “Imperfect History,” an online exhibition by The Library Company of Philadelphia, demonstrate the topics we can expect from this section in future.
In addition to the new section and design, this issue includes three feature articles spanning the years 1857 to 2022 that critically engage with the values and meaning of “community.” Collectives can stimulate creativity and scholarship and be significant fomenters of individual and collective identities. Community can also reflect conflict and division. Examining issues of community, Mary Okin and Celie Mitchard offer a compelling and complex history of New York’s Tenth Street Studio Building. The second of three articles in the series “Toward a More Inclusive Digital Art History,” funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the article is enhanced by a suite of data visualizations and interactive tools. “Mining” available data about the architects who designed the building, the property investors who commissioned it, and the artists who lived there, Okin and Mitchard develop a rich account of the creative clusters living in this space across a century.
Similarly interested in histories of community mobilization, Kristina Borrman explores how Dwight James Baum’s 1934 public monument to Christopher Columbus structured social relations between groups sharing physical space, legal and political representation, and other resources in Syracuse, New York. Through her interdisciplinary engagement with critical legal studies, Borrman shows how this statue has been a lightning rod for opposing grievance disputes by members of the local Italian American community and Onondaga Nation for nearly a century. Max Tolleson explores how Anders Krüger’s Casa de los Valientes (1994) occupies a charged liminal physical position beyond the Chinati Foundation’s official grounds in Marfa, Texas. Tolleson considers how the work speaks to Marfa’s larger geopolitical position just sixty-seven miles north of the United States-Mexico border as well as to the complexities of Donald Judd’s attempts to dissolve boundaries between public art and private life at Marfa. Each author examines the complex social interactions that arise within nontraditional exhibitionary and artistic work spaces. Because of this, each article engages deeply with the interaction of communities and art in public or private spaces—and those that bridge the two in interesting ways.
Putting into action the unique ability of Panorama to address current events through timely scholarship, Colloquium contributors reflect on the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which denied a constitutional right to abortion. Patricia Cronin, Kéla Jackson, Michelle Millar Fisher, Kristin Taylor, Karen Irvine, and Frederica Simmons consider art, artists, and exhibitions that engage issues of visibility and advocacy around reproductive rights. Some underscore the complicity of art-world institutions in contributing to a national culture that made overturning Roe v. Wade possible.
Time is a key methodological axis of this issue’s In the Round, guest-edited by Hélène Valance and Tatsiana Zhurauliova. Essays on portraits by John Singleton Copley and John Singer Sargent, Indigenous activism at the Mohawk-run newspaper Akwesasne Notes, Lorraine O’Grady’s power-dynamic shifting performances as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, the repetitive photographic practices of Irina Rozovsky, and an interview with artist Fabiola Jean-Louis forge “renewed perspectives on the concept of time in American art.”
Three research notes engage the diverse practices of twentieth-century modernists. Erika Schneider studies a recently recovered personal scrapbook of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, which gathers published responses to her realist sculpture. Natalie Zelt examines a 1911 Lewis Hine photograph of a Richmond, Virginia street, arguing that it reflects the reformer’s critique of child labor and demonstrates how his images uphold American racial hierarchies. Michaela Rife uses a 1939 New Deal–era post office mural by Joe Jonas as a way to think through how audiences might see crises reflected in works of visual culture.
Book and exhibition reviews offer vital perspectives on recent work that adds dimension to our field. Reviewers cover publications on Tlingit beadwork traditions and modernist interventions, anthropological museum display, the Spanish influence on American culture in world’s fairs, mid-twentieth century materials pressed into service by avant-garde architects and sculptors, and the influential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Alexander Gardner. Exhibition reviews address the installation of works by Marta Peréz Garcia and Cathy Lu, the dynamic oeuvre of the late Wayne Thiebaud, and Venetian glass and its presence in historical American culture.
Outside our pages, the editorial team had a busy fall that included hosting a workshop at the Seventh Biennial Symposium of the Association of Historians of American Art in October in Northwest Arkansas. In “Fostering Inclusive Methodologies in American Art Scholarship,” editors reflected on past publishing trends and future directions and asked probing questions about the discipline and publishers’ responsibilities to the communities they serve. In this issue, Lauren Caskey summarizes the entire three days of engaging symposium panels and events. Earlier in the fall, we also convened a virtual workshop, “How to Publish With Panorama,” which was recorded and is accessible here.
Finally, this issue marks the last for Executive Editors Naomi Slipp and Jacqueline Francis, Research Notes Editor Erin Pauwels, and Exhibition Reviews Editor Caroline Riley. We have greatly valued their contributions to the journal as well as their generosity, professionalism, and collegiality. The production of Panorama is only made possible through the efforts of our volunteer editorial team, Managing Editor, Project Manager, and Copy Editor, and via the financial support of grants and contributions from readers like you.
So, as we near the end of another year at Panorama, we ask you—our readers and valued community—to support our operations in three ways. First, please share our content—in your classrooms, on social media, and in conversation—and encourage colleagues to subscribe! Second, as we aim to advance our mission, we need to better understand the community we serve and the perceived value of our own publication to that community. We ask willing readers to submit letters of support to the editorial team that reflect on Panorama’s place in the field. Letters may be used to support grant applications or fundraising activities. Finally, we ask readers to support and sustain our annual operations by making a donation today. Small or large, your gift keeps the journal going and publishing, allowing us to deliver high-quality, open-access content on “American art” writ large.
Thank you for being a part of our community—and, in reading this issue, for engaging in thoughtful dialogue about what that constructed, valuable, and often fraught concept might signal. Please join the conversation by reaching out to the editors through the Talk Back section of the journal.
Cite this article: Naomi Slipp, Jacqueline Francis, Keri Watson, and Katherine Jentleson, “Editors’ Welcome, Issue 8.2,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8, no. 2 (Fall 2022), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.15398.
About the Author(s): Naomi Slipp, Jacqueline Francis, Keri Watson, and Katherine Jentleson are Panorama's Executive Editors.