The artistic is always political, even if not overtly so—each work carries with it the histories of the artist, the means of production, the subject matter, and the many art historical precedents that overlap and diverge to constitute the theoretical circumstances surrounding it. Since I began translating my lived experience into artworks, I have become interested in the ways in which my personal politics have affected the choices I have made in material and narrative substance. This is a deconstruction of the politics of representation as a method for better understanding the art historical context in which contemporary materials- and performance-based art work exists and to conceptually develop the work I want to produce in the future.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis and his primary photographic body of work, The North American Indian, within the context of the art and visual culture that informed and influenced Curtis in his image making process. Within the history of photography, an understanding of who Curtis was is complex. Depictions of Curtis have included various roles including photographer, businessman, philanthropist, artist, ethnologist, capitalist, and profiteer. Until the last twenty years, much of the scholarship surrounding Curtis was focused on his biography, without consideration to the similarities Curtis's work had to contemporary photographers or to American art depicting Native Americans prior to him. My research will examine this prior scholarship and focus on two different frameworks The North American Indian fits into in terms of how the Native subjects are depicted. The first framework is within the influential artwork of American painters and the Native American as incorporated into American art. I will compare Curtis's depiction of Native Americans to those by Benjamin West, Thomas Cole, and George Catlin. All three of these painters included Native Americans in their work at varying levels and for various purposes. While Curtis was working in a different medium, the ways in which he framed and posed his subjects exhibits his awareness in continuing the expected Native American image. The second framework considers The American Indian and its parallels to missionary albums (used to promote missionary work among non-Christian people) as well as a Carlisle School yearbook (used to promote the school's mission in educating and acclimating its students from tribes across the country). In addition to the three types of objects being created in the first two decades of the twentieth century, they also share a relationship through the use of photographs and words to convey a meaning the images alone could not accomplish. Native Americans have been used to symbolize the American continent since the first Europeans laid claim to the land. Curtis is only one of many artists who turned their attention to native subjects and attempted to create an understanding of who they were. A more nuanced understanding of Curtis and his work surfaces through acknowledging the ways in which The North American Indian functions similarly to other works depicting Native Americans.

In the 1960s, art and business engaged in a sweeping but now largely forgotten romance. Corporations rushed to install art in their foyers and on their urban plazas. Many bought or commissioned works of art to display inside their factories and offices. They reproduced art in their advertisements and annual reports, and profiled it in press stunts and photo ops. They developed promotional art exhibitions that toured across the country and around the world. This dissertation considers how such artworks supported – but also sometimes disrupted – the marketing, public relations, lobbying and personnel strategies of large-scale corporate enterprise. By reconstructing this diverse field, this dissertation contends that art was a key tool for the burgeoning ‘persuasion industry’ of the sixties. Both in the United States and further afield, artists and businesses worked together to make artworks function as ‘forms of persuasion’, instruments by which the consensus of the corporation’s constituents – workers, consumers and regulators – could be secured. The case studies focus on range of companies active in this field, exploring the phenomenon in three thematic chapters, covering the use of pop art by the packaged goods business, the role of abstract painting in the workplace and the value of metal sculpture for the steel industry. It is argued that the practices described through these examples represent a defining cultural phenomena of sixties art, one that challenges the conventional art historical alignment of its avant-garde with the decade’s famed radical politics, protest and counterculture.

There are two principle arguments in this thesis. First, this thesis will show that Félix Bracquemond had a profound impact on late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century ceramics in America. Second, this thesis will illustrate how John Ruskin’s principle that pottery is “more permanent than the Pyramids” encouraged reform of the ceramic arts and shaped the Art Pottery Movement of the late nineteenth century. After this thesis introduces Bracquemond as an innovator in ceramic decoration and the dissemination of Ruskin’s principle, the thesis will examine two instances in the American Art Pottery Movement in which Bracquemond’s and Ruskin’s influence can be detected. The first is Theodore Davis’s 1879 design for the Haviland-Hayes Service, the White House dinner service for Rutherford B. Hayes. The second case study is the Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati, which represents the apex of Bracquemond’s influence in America and Ruskin’s principle of the permanence of pottery.

This dissertation examines six major points: 1) it argues that Jefferson is an architect of the United States Capitol, having direct and final say over its design; 2) it asserts that Jefferson set two nationally influential models of architectural taste as part of his movement to reform American architecture, first in Richmond as the Virginia State Capitol and second in Washington as the United States Capitol; 3) it explores those models to define what Jefferson called “cubic” and “spherical” architecture; 4) it suggests that Jefferson used his political appointments to maximize his influence over the design of the United States Capitol in order to ground the building in classical sources; 5) it surveys the sources Jefferson looked to for inspiration, both printed texts and images as well as extant buildings in Europe and America; and 6) it proposes that Jefferson and B. Henry Latrobe worked hand in hand to execute a design for the United States Capitol that subdued and at times even replaced the official plan adopted from William Thornton’s winning design. This dissertation starts with the idea that Jefferson’s architectural reform consisted of conjoining vernacular building custom with architecture of the classical tradition. Most of what Jefferson knew about classical architecture came from books. Chief among them are Claude Perrault’s 1684 French translation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture and the three London editions of Giacomo Leoni’s versions of Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture in English translation. Using these print sources, Jefferson reinterpreted many of the standard public buildings of Virginia into temple forms. In addition, Jefferson’s plan to reform public architecture rested on two overriding principles: erecting buildings with masonry and organizing those buildings using the classical orders. Furthermore, this dissertation proves that, like the ancients, Jefferson wanted to build on a monumental scale. Jefferson’s own plan for a national capitol shaped like the Roman Pantheon, long misunderstood, clearly reinforces this interpretation. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that Jefferson and B. Henry Latrobe worked in concert to execute a design for the United States Capitol that subdued the official plan adopted from William Thornton’s winning design.

This thesis focuses on an African-American female artist, Valerie Maynard, examining how she synthesizes African and American elements in her works. It provides detailed formal and iconographical analyses, revealing concealed meanings and paying special attention to those works with which the artist mirrors the Black experience in the United States and Africa on the other side of the Atlantic. In the process, the thesis sheds new light on the significance of Valerie Maynard's work and how she has used some of them to embody the Black quest for freedom and social justice during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.

David Gilmour Blythe's street urchin paintings created during the 1850s are disturbing and often grotesque. The image of childhood that he created was quite different from that of his American contemporaries who adapted the romantic notion of the child from eighteenth-century English painters. Previous scholars have noted the contrast between Blythe's vision of America's street children and the optimistic view offered by other American painters but have not offered a sufficient explanation as to why they differed so radically. This thesis will examine several of Blythe's urchin scenes, as well as his poetry and writings to reveal the clear presence of anti-immigrant sentiment in his painting. Such an analysis will posit Blythe's political beliefs about immigration as a plausible explanation for his peculiar view of the children who occupied Pittsburgh's streets.

This dissertation examines the powerful role that museums played in constructing national art-historical narratives during the 1930s. By concentrating on Three Centuries of American Art—the 1938 exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for viewing in Paris—I argue that the intertwining of art, political diplomacy, and canon formation uncovered by an analysis of the exhibition reveals American art’s unique role in supporting shared 1930s cultural ideologies. MoMA’s curators created the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the history of American art with works from 1590 through 1938, and with over five hundred architectural models, drawings, films, paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and vernacular artworks. With World War II on the horizon, these artworks took on new meaning as the embodiment of the United States. Adding complexity to notions of display, five chapters trace in chronological order how curators, politicians, journalists and art critics reimagined American art in the display, canonization, and reception of Three Centuries of American Art. Chapter 1 gives a synopsis of the exhibition, places it within the larger discourse of American art exhibitions in Paris, and documents how American and French relations developed during this pivotal time. Chapter 2 explores the different meanings ascribed to the artworks during loan negotiations and maps the works’ transportation to Paris. Chapter 3 elaborates on the notion of a unified American art in the 1930s by examining the histories of art created by each of MoMA’s departments. Chapter 4 offers the first substantive historiography of 1930s publications that examined American art across media to determine instances when MoMA curators echoed prior histories and when they deviated from them at a moment when scholars disputed the merit of such disciplinary histories. Chapter 5 grapples with the means by which audiences first learned about Three Centuries of American Art and unearths what American and international critics wrote about the exhibition. In sum, Three Centuries of American Art provides a model to understand how MoMA curators inserted their histories of American art into the emerging art historical discourse and how government agencies invested them with political meaning during the critical interwar period. / 2018-08-11T00:00:00Z

The aim of this dissertation is to understand and analyze the museum location decision, defined as where museum founders choose to establish or relocate their institution. The empirical case is the museum population of New York City from 1910-2010. In three substantive chapters, I explore this complex decision process from the organizational-level, the population-level, and the audience-level. In the first chapter, I argue that the museum location decision has evolved over the past century, and has experienced three major paradigm shifts. Out of each era, a new model of the museum location decision has taken hold, resulting in the current organizational landscape. I demonstrate how these eras emerged through historical, comparative case studies of two New York museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In second chapter, I show that the location decisions illustrated through the histories of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art are representative of New York's museum population overall. Using a dataset of all museums that have existed in New York City (and all of those museums' relocations), I chronicle the aggregated movements of the museum population between 1910 and 2010. I argue that the three eras of the museum location decision interacted with key demographic changes to create the unique distribution we observe today. The insights from these findings indicate that the spatial diffusion of museums in New York is systematically patterned in relation to demographic changes. The final substantive chapter is devoted to exploring the possibility that institutional location impacts audience composition. I argue that proximity to museums and other kinds of arts institutions is a significant, yet understudied determinant of attendance. The introduced concept of institutional exposure suggests that local access to arts institutions has cognitive, behavioral, and interactional consequences. Although directly testing the effect of institutional exposure is beyond the parameters of this dissertation, I show that there is a strong correlation between exposure and attendance. I illustrate the increasingly unequal access to arts between white and African American New Yorkers, which correlates highly with still-unexplained low attendance rates of African Americans. The observed evolution of the museum location decision explains when and how New York institutions adopted and then abandoned each institutionalized practice of museum location. In the Conclusion, I highlight several implications of this work, both of sociological theory and on current cultural policy.

Nessa dissertação, a viagem-expedição ao Rio Negro, realizada por Pierre Restany, Frans Krajcberg e Sepp Baendereck em 1978, e a análise das circunstâncias que levaram à escrita do Manifesto do Naturalismo Integral, são tomados como ponto de partida para refletir sobre a atuação do crítico Pierre Restany no processo de internacionalização da arte latino-americana nos anos 1960 e 1970. Com foco no contexto brasileiro, concentrado no eixo São Paulo - Rio de Janeiro, a recepção negativa do manifesto pela classe intelectual brasileira será analisada a partir de documentos da época conservados no Fundo Pierre Restany dos Archives de la Critique dArt (Rennes-França) e das matérias jornalísticas publicadas nos jornais da época. Procuramos analisar as diferentes representações de paisagens presentes nos documentos desaminados e as subjacentes visões da arte: por um lado, a floresta exótica e sublime evocada por Restany através do conceito de choque amazônico e sua inserção na teorização de uma arte planetária e internacional e, por outro, a Amazônia enquanto território de luta e resistência no processo de construção da identidade brasileira nos escritos daqueles autores que, como Francisco Bittencourt, Mário Pedrosa e Frederico Morais, pleitearam a afirmação de narrativas historicamente subalternizadas, contribuindo à criação de uma gnose liminar, ou seja, de um novo lugar de enunciação na história da arte. / In this dissertation, the voyage-expedition to the Rio Negro, realized by Pierre Restany, Frans Krajcberg e Sepp Baendereck in 1978, and the analysis of the circumstances which led to the writing of the Manifesto of Integral Naturalism, is taken as a starting point for reflecting on the performance of the critic Pierre Restany in the process of internationalization of Latin American art in the 60s and 70s. With a focus on the Brazilian context, concentrated in the São Paulo - Rio de Janeiro axis, the negative reception of the manifesto by the Brazilian intellectual class will be analyzed from original documents preserved in the Pierre Restany Fund dos Archives de la Critique dArt (Rennes-France) and chronicles published in the newspapers of the time. We aim to analyze the different representations of landscape present in the documents examined and the underlying differents views of art: on the one hand, the exotic and \"sublime\" forest evoked by Restany through the concept of \"Amazonian shock\" and its insertion in the theorization of a planetary and internacional art, and, on the other, the Amazon as a territory of struggle and resistance in the process of constructing the Brazilians identity in the writings of those authors who, like Francisco Bittencourt, Mário Pedrosa and mFrederico Morais, undertook to the affirmation of historically subordinate narrations, contributing to the creation of a \"border gnosis\", that is, of a new place of enunciation in the history of art.