Re-envisioning the Everyday

Re-envisioning the Everyday
Author: John Fagg
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2023-09-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271095814

Often seen as backward-looking and convention-bound, genre painting representing scenes of everyday life was central to the work of twentieth-century artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence, and others, who adapted such subjects to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art. Re-envisioning the Everyday asks what their works do to the tradition of genre painting and whether it remains a meaningful category through which to understand them. Working with and against the established narrative of American genre painting’s late nineteenth-century decline into obsolescence, John Fagg explores how artists and illustrators used elements of the tradition to picture everyday life in a rapidly changing society, whether by appealing to its nostalgic and historical connotations or by updating it to address new formal and thematic concerns. Fagg argues that genre painting enabled twentieth-century artists to look slowly and carefully at scenes of everyday life and, on some occasions, to understand those scenes as sites of political oppression and resistance. But it also limited them to anachronistic ways of seeing and tied them to a freighted history of stereotyping and condescension. By surveying genre painting when its status and relevance were uncertain and by looking at works that stretch and complicate its boundaries, this book considers what the form is and probes the wider practice of generic categorization. It will appeal to students and scholars of American art history, art criticism, and cultural studies.

Shaping North America [3 volumes]

Shaping North America [3 volumes]
Author: James E. Seelye Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1028
Release: 2018-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN:

This fascinating multivolume set provides a unique resource for learning about early American history, including thematic essays, topical entries, and an invaluable collection of primary source documents. In 1783, just months after the United States achieved independence from Great Britain, General George Washington was compelled to convince his officers not to undertake a military coup of the Congress of Confederation. Had the planned mutinous coup of the Newburgh Conspiracy gone forward, the American experiment may have ended before it even began. The pre-colonial and colonial periods of early American history are filled with accounts of key events that established the course of our nation's development. This expansive three-volume set provides entries on a wide variety of topics and themes in early American history to elucidate how the United States came to be. Written in straightforward language, the encyclopedic entries on social, political, cultural, and military subjects from the pre-Columbian period through the creation of the Constitution (roughly 1400–1790) will be useful for anyone wishing to deeply investigate the who, what, where, when, and why of early America. Additionally, the breadth of primary documents—including personal diaries, letters, poems, images, treaties, and other legal documents—provides readers with firsthand sources written by the men and women who shaped American history, both the famous and the less well known. Each of the three volumes also presents thematic essays on highlighted topics to fully place the individual entries within their proper historical context and heighten readers' comprehension.

The Cultural Life of the American Colonies

The Cultural Life of the American Colonies
Author: Louis B. Wright
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0486136604

Sweeping survey of 150 years of colonial history (1607–1763) offers authoritative views on agrarian society and leadership, non-English influences, religion, education, literature, music, architecture, and much more. 33 black-and-white illustrations.

Lessons in Likeness

Lessons in Likeness
Author: Estill Curtis Pennington
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2011
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813126126

Between 1802, when the young Kentucky artist William Edward West began to paint portraits while on a downriver journey, and 1920, when the last of Frank Duveneck's students worked in Louisville, a large number of notable portrait artists were active in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley. In Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802-1920, Estill Curtis Pennington charts the course of those artists as they painted a variety of sitters drawn from both urban and rural society. The work is illustrated, when possible, from The Filson Historical Society collection of some four hundred portraits representing one of the most extensive holdings available for study in the region. Portraiture involves artists and subjects, known as sitters, and is an art that combines elements of biography, aesthetics, and cultural history. Private portraits often attract an oral history that enlivens the more colorful aspects of local tradition and culture. Public portraits of towering figures such as George Washington, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln were often reproduced in printed format to satisfy popular demand and subsequently attained an iconic, timeless status. Lessons in Likeness is organized in two parts. Part One, the cultural chronology, serves as a backdrop to the biographies of the portrait artists. This section identifies stylistic sources and significant historical moments that influenced the artists and their milieus. Rather than working in isolation, portrait artists were connected to the world around them and influenced by prevailing trends in their trade. Early in the nineteenth century, for instance, Matthew Jouett journeyed to Boston for study with Gilbert Stuart, and upon his return to Kentucky painted in a style that subsequently influenced an entire generation. Later artists, notably Oliver Frazer and William Edward West, studied the lessons of Thomas Sully in Philadelphia. Sully popularized the lush, warmly colored, and highly flattering style of portraiture practiced by many of the itinerant artists whose careers were facilitated by the introduction of steam and rail travel. The Civil War provoked a dramatic shift in the cultural terrain, further augmented by the rise of photography and the emergence of academic art centers. Painters who had previously worked with a master painter, or learned on their own, were now able to study at established schools, especially in Cincinnati, which became one of the leading centers for the teaching of art in late nineteenth-century America. Several of the teachers there, Frank Duveneck and Thomas Satterwhite Noble in particular, had firsthand experience with avant-garde European styles, notably the realism and naturalism practiced in Munich and Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and then taught in the art schools of New York and Philadelphia. Part Two profiles the artists from this area and period who have appeared in previous art historical literature and have an identifiable body of work represented in public and private collections. Individual biographies provide details of the artists' lives, sources for further study, and locations of works in public collections.

The Bone Lady

The Bone Lady
Author: Debra Darnall
Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1938441834

“It’s ironic, I know, that when I put on a costume I finally learned how to just be myself. But that’s what happened. I created the Bone Lady out of my passion for football and the Browns. I did it for fun, never thinking it would change my life. But it did . . .” In this unusual new memoir, NFL Ultimate Fan Debra “Bone Lady” Darnall tells about the wacky, bumpy, and ultimately wonderful ride of self-discovery she found herself on after deciding one day to put on an outrageous costume and start rooting like crazy for the Cleveland Browns. The struggling artist suddenly and surprisingly became one of the most visible women in football and a spokesperson for fans of all kinds. Now, she shares her offbeat and candid personal story to inspire others to discover their own passion. Debra writes with enthusiasm about becoming an “empowered fan” and taking joy where you can find it—even when your team’s on-field performance is less than rewarding. (She offers tips for how to watch a Browns game without smashing your TV in frustration.) “Women love football, too,” Debra says. She embraces the idea that fandom is open to everyone. (Just don’t get her started on “stripper cheerleaders!”) Browns fans looking to inspire a spouse, a friend, or or even a teenage daughter to share their love of the game will find THE BONE LADY a friendly guide for the journey.

Thomas Moran

Thomas Moran
Author: Thurman Wilkins
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 518
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780806130408

This extensively revised edition of Thurman Wilkins’s masterful and engaging biography - well illustrated in color and black-and-white - draws on new information and recent scholarship to place Thomas Moran more securely in the milieu of the Gilded Age. It also portrays more fully the controversies that surrounded the art of Moran’s time, as he became "the Dean of American Painters." The American West was the subject of Thomas Moran’s greatest artistic triumphs - Yosemite, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, Zion Canyon, the Virgin River, Colorado’s Mountain of the Holy Cross, and the Grand Tetons - but his travels with Ferdinand V. Hayden’s geological surveys of the Upper Yellowstone were matched by trips to his native Britain and to Venice, Florida, the Spanish Southwest, and Old Mexico. These scenes inspired memorable landscapes and seascapes, as did the sojourns of the Moran family in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and East Hampton, Long Island, when they retreated from the demands of the New York art scene. In the 1880s Moran and his artist wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, also threw themselves into the etching craze of the period, creating some of the finest prints produced in the United States. Moran was an artist happy in his work. He wrote, "I have always held that the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful in nature, would, in capable hands, make the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful pictures." The New York Times said of the first edition of this unique account of his life, "Moran’s mastery comes through clearly and awesomely and often, pleasurably." Readers will find the new edition equally enjoyable.

Making America

Making America
Author: Luther S. Luedtke
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 588
Release: 1992
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780807843703

In this richly interdisciplinary work twenty-eight of the nation's leading critics and scholars offer a comprehensive exploration of American society and culture. Each outstanding in his or her own field, the contributors address "America" from a diversit