<p> During the last half of the nineteenth century, American sportsmen-artists painted hunting-related images that were designed to promote the ideals of sporting behavior, conservationist thought, and the interests of elite sportsmen against non-elite hunters. Upper-class American attitudes regarding common hunters and trappers, the politics of land use, and the role of conservation in recreational hunting played a significant part in the construction of visual art forms during this period, art which, in turn, helped shape national dialogue on the protection and acceptable uses of wildlife. </p><p> This dissertation takes issues critical to mid-century American conservation thought and agendas, and investigates how they were embodied in American hunting art of the time. Beginning with depictions of recreational sportsmen during the era of conservationist club formation (mid-1840s), the discussion moves to representations of the lone trapper at mid-century. These figures were initially represented as a beneficial force in the conquest of the American frontier, but trappers and backwoodsmen became increasingly problematic due to an apparent disregard for game law and order. I explore the ways in which market hunting was depicted, and how it was contrasted with acceptable "sportsmanlike" hunting methods. Subsequent chapters consider the portrayal of the boy hunter, an essential feature to the sportsman's culture and its continuance, and the tumultuous relationship between elite sportsmen and their guides, who were known to illegally hunt off-season. The last chapters address the subject of the wild animal as heroic protagonist and dead game still life paintings, a pictorial type that represented the lifestyle of sportsmen and their concern for conservative catches and adherence to game law. Developments in conservation during the period were significantly tied to class and elitist aspirations, and artist-sportsmen merged these social prejudices with their agenda for game conservation. Their representations of hunting art both responded to and promoted the conservationist cause.</p>

What is the Self-Portrait of Thomas Smith about? In this dissertation I ask that question about a key work in the American art canon. In search of an answer I look for meaning in five outstanding details of the portrait: the subject's powerful blue eyes, the skull beneath his hand, the battle scene on the wall, the poem on the table, and his elegant lace cravat. I find that the painting presents a vivid description of seventeenth-century conflict and emotional as well as spiritual malaise. The artist emerges as an individual philosophically at odds with his peers and disdainful of their of values. Smith's Self Portrait, dated circa 1680, is generally acclaimed as the first known self-portrait painted in the colony and is recognized for its stylistic innovations: Baroque modeling and composition at a time and place when an earlier, linear style prevailed. The painting is also regarded as the first signed canvas in America. These assertions tend to brush aside some troublesome problems: (1) identity of the artist cannot be confirmed; (2) it is not entirely certain the portrait is, indeed, a self -portrait; (3) the signature may not belong to the artist; (4) it may not, in fact, have been painted by a man named Smith; (5) the date assigned to the portrait is conjectural; and (6) its provenance is almost entirely anecdotal. External documentation of this work is clearly unstable, but in spite of, or perhaps because of such uncertainties, when asked to speak for itself the painting is far more remarkable than canonical convention leads us to believe. Research for this painting inspires me to reconsider the question of intention, not in terms of what may have been in the artist's mind, but rather with regard to the intention of the work itself as it interacts with the intention of its observer. The concept of intentionality in this discussion is freed from the onus of intentional fallacy and offers instead a resilient, reflective way of thinking about meaning, especially with reference to the genre of self-portraiture.

<p> In this thesis, I explore two works from Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., <i> A Public Message for Your Private Life </i>(1998) and <i>Mail Order Bride of Frankenstein</i> (2003), that take into account the histories and identities produced within Filipino/a American Communities. I use Sarita Echavez See and Emily Noelle Ignacio's theories on parody to analyze the performative aspects of M.O.B's artworks. According to See and Ignacio, parody can be utilized as a tool to simultaneously form solidarity within Filipino American communities. By examining these ideas, I argue that M.O.B. performs appropriated representations of their ethnic and assimilated cultures by using parody to critique and problematize often-misrepresented individual and cultural identities.</p>

In the late 1980's and early 1990's a series of art censorship cases occurred in the United States. Seemingly out-of-keeping with American culture and policy, these episodes beg much explanation. Censors generally cite obscenity or blasphemy as reasons for the silencing of artists and their work. Beneath these publicly noted justifications exists an alternative explanation; as marginalized populations within American culture gained some degree of power over the last 40 years, the traditionally powerful fought back to maintain their own positions and privileges. I argue that art censorship is a symbolic battle in which the center identifies artists and their work as enemies of the culture, and social problems from which American society needs protection. The data for these assertions is based on case studies and content analysis of recent cases of art censorship. The fields of sociology and cultural studies provide the necessary theoretical framework.

<p> This dissertation focuses on the artwork of J.B. Murray, an African American artist from Mitchell, Georgia. The goal of this dissertation is to explore J.B. Murray&rsquo;s production of protective scripts and spirit figures. Murray created art works that served as the conduit for spiritual healing or protection between his God, his ancestral energies and the recipients or viewers of his work. </p><p> Protection through writing is both an Islamic and indigenous African tradition. Art Historians, after seeing Murray&rsquo;s work, called it masterful art. It is my contention that Murray possessed knowledge that, unbeknownst to him or his ancestors, was passed along to him by his African ancestors. This knowledge is also seen in the work of other African and African American artists in this dissertation, which shows continuity across a wider group as opposed to just one artist. </p><p> Finally, a parallel is draw with African protector and healer, Serigne Bousso, from Touba, Senegal. Murray&rsquo;s experience of visions and protective and healing work parallels the experience of Serigne Bousso within the last 30 years. This parallel is significant in making the connection between Murray, in Georgia, and the possible West African source for his knowledge of visions and protective signs.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines the art and material culture of the Anglo-American cotton trade in the nineteenth century to consider how these transnational processes influenced different modes of production: artistic, industrial and textile. The Anglo-American cotton trade's importance in the nineteenth century rested on the Atlantic slave trade and its aftereffects. Therefore this study foregrounds the centrality of African American history and culture to the trade's structures of exchange, encounter and transmission as they inflected nineteenth-century British and American artistic production and industrial expansion. In four chapters beginning in 1840 and ending at the beginning of the twentieth century, I juxtapose the work of contemporary artists with historical case studies. I argue that these contemporary artists &ndash; Leonardo Drew, Lubaina Himid and Yinka Shonibare &ndash; offer new interpretive frameworks for approaching the transactional and transnational contexts of nineteenth-century British, American and African American art and material culture.</p><p> Chapter one focuses on the relationship between plantations in the American South and New England, using prints, paintings and textiles that reveal the plantation and factory to be connected landscape. I trace how cotton's movement shaped constructions around place, and materialized connections between communities of labor in antebellum America. Chapter two opens with Lubaina Himid's <i> Cotton.com</i> (2002) and expands the historical relationship of plantation and factory out across the Atlantic. Centralizing Eyre Crowe's <i>Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia</i> (1861) and the export of printed cotton from Manchester, it examines the convergence of the trade in cotton with the trade in slaves. It considers how these market relations shaped the commodification of the enslaved body, British experiences of factory labor, and Manchester production of printed cloth for consumers across the globe. Chapter three begins with Leonardo Drew's <i>Number 25</i> to consider the tensions between materiality and abstraction in the production and commodification of cotton and art objects. I then examine paintings by Edgar Degas, <i> A Cotton Office in New Orleans</i> (1873), and Winslow Homer, <i> The Cotton Pickers</i>, (1876) to explore how these artists negotiated the status of cotton as a global commodity and grappled with the changing networks, of labor, production and commerce in postbellum America. Eyre Crowe's painting of factory workers in Lancashire, <i>The Dinner Hour, Wigan </i> (1874) concludes this section, which examines how the international market for cotton was influencing the representation and experience of industry in north west England. My final chapter, commencing with an installation by Yinka Shonibare MBE <i>Scramble for Africa</i> (2003), focuses on the commercial logic and visual rhetoric of three Southern international exhibitions. I examine how these exhibitions constructed the South &ndash; through visions of cotton plantations and black cotton pickers &ndash; as a space for domestic colonial expansion. Alongside this I look at the ways Africa was being constructed as a new cotton market &ndash; both as a site of cultivation and a site of consumption. In both sections I underscore how the language of commerce, colonialism and cotton shaped particular constructions of space and meanings around the African, and African American body. I conclude with the work of Meta Warrick Fuller to briefly examine how black Americans dismantled these tropes of exclusion, signified by cotton, to project claims for equality.</p><p> The project argues that the art works under examination here draw on an economic language to visualize particular ideas and constructions around labor, production and race in three ways. It traces the contours of a market-driven aesthetic in the ways cotton was used to illustrate or materialize connections to a circulating economy of goods. It describes how cotton's movement shaped the construction of imagined geographies around sites of labor and spaces of consumption. And it sketches out the speculative vision that emerged throughout the nineteenth century in the material and metaphorical associations of cotton, commerce and African American identity. In revealing the representational possibilities of cotton in this way, this dissertation looks at understudied objects to consider the nuanced ways that local cultural forms have, historically, intersected with global processes in the Atlantic world. It centralizes the experience of African Americans, within an Anglo-American culture of exchange and its relationship to a global network of trade and transmission. In doing so it seeks to reframe the ways we might approach historical processes of visuality and perception in the long nineteenth century in order to create a more global, or at least transnational, perspective on the art of this period. </p>

<p> This dissertation employs four case studies&mdash;illustrator Alice Barber Stephens in Philadelphia; Louisville-born sculptor Enid Yandell; photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in Washington, D.C.; and the Newcomb College Pottery in New Orleans&mdash;to show how individual women artists from a variety of media utilized collaborative strategies to advance their professional careers. These strategies included mentoring, teaching, and sharing commissions with one another; establishing art organizations; sharing studio and living spaces; organizing and participating in all-female art exhibitions; and starting businesses to market their work. At a historical moment when expectations and ideas towards gender roles and feminine performance were shifting, these women artists negotiated these changes as well as those of a fine art world that was redefining itself in an increasingly consumer-based culture that challenged traditional definitions of the &ldquo;professional&rdquo; artist.</p><p> &ldquo;Sisterhood as Strategy&rdquo; intersects with important work in the fields of American History, Women&rsquo;s and Gender Studies, and Art History. It bridges a gap between broad, cultural histories of women&rsquo;s artistic production and more focused scholarly studies on women&rsquo;s labor and organized womanhood. Indeed, this dissertation brings more specificity to these areas by focusing on particular artists who were highly acclaimed during their lifetime but who have since fallen through the cracks of the art historical canon and by attending to the wide array of genres and media that all artists, men and women, worked with during the era: illustration, photography, public sculpture, and the decorative arts. By analyzing the art produced as a result of collaboration; the artists&rsquo; letters, photographs, and personal papers; and contemporary mass media, particularly art journals and popular ladies&rsquo; magazines, this dissertation recovers the voices of artists who served as professional role models and creates a far more diverse picture of the people and art forms that constituted early modern American visual culture.</p><p>

The cultural productions of Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, Tina Modotti, Maria Izquierdo, and Juanita Guccione represent a distinctive interweaving of gender and class consciousness, national identification and political resistance, as represented in their artistic work. These five women became transnational carriers of a radical realist and modernist thought, culture, and ideology that became transported through their art when their gendered and classed bodies were left otherwise silenced and boundaried. These women, their cultural productions, and the ways in which their art generates a counter discourse to the dominant and institutionalized conceptions of transculturalism, aesthetics, and re-production, are vital to understanding the co-construction of nationhood as well as the self-determined creation of the individual self. From this overarching framework, I will explore how these women negotiated political conceptions of nationhood, artistic genres such as realism and modernism, and then created their own feminist, transcultural and working-class aesthetics to counter otherwise limited conceptions of individual agency.