Midterm - Key Artists/Artwork

Question 1

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

John Lewis Krimmel - Quilting Frolic - 1813 (painting)

lecture note Sept 14

Compare Tanner & Krimmel

Answer 1

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• First painter of genre scenes
• nostalgia art.
• German painter
• first artist to try free blacks
• illustrate crowd members with humorous observations.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. Pre-Civil War, Civil War started in 1861.
   2. The presence of large numbers of peoples of African descent on the North American continent since the sixteenth century has had a profound effect on the development of social, political, and economic structures in the U.S. For example, African slave labor made possible the growth of a plantation economy in the South in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while African American wage labor contributed to the expansion of industrialization in the North in the late nineteenth century.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. colonists from Northern Europe attempted to justify their destruction of Native Americans through the construction of myths such as the “noble savage,” so too did these same colonists and their
   2. descendants try to justify their enslavement and exploitation of Africans and African Americans through representations of them as inferior to white Europeans.
   3. On the one hand, Africans were childlike and in need of care; on the other, they were savage and in need of disciplining (they were not, however, “doomed to perish,” for their labor was central to the country’s economy).
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​The Civil War forced a re-evaluation of the image of the African American in the art and literature of the U.S.
   2. Prior to the Civil War the dominant nineteenth-century stereotype of African American men was the high-stepping, banjo-playing “darkie,” happy and childlike, who, when not working contentedly in the fields, performed either for his family or for his white owners.
   3. African American women were “mammys,” protective of the white children they cared for, and proud of their place as servant, maid, and nanny within the white household.
   4. Enslavement was “good” for Africans, who were inherently “savage” and had to be domesticated through slavery. To free them, therefore, would actually do them a disservice, for they would lose their childlike innocence (which some argued was achieved through enslavement and others claimed was “innate”) and revert to savagery.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 2

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Frederick Douglass - January 21 - 1863-1863 (photograph)

lecture notes Sept14th

Compare Douglass & Keppler & Opper

Answer 2

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

The most important black American leader of the

nineteenth century, and the most photographed man of his time. He sat for more portraits in the 1800s than even Abraham Lincoln. He saw the newly invented medium of photography (1839) as a wonderful critique to counter the proliferation of racist caricatures.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. Born a slave on Maryland’s eastern shore in 1818, the son of a slave woman and probably her white master, Douglass escaped at age 20 in 1838 and became a world -­‐ renowned anti-­‐slavery activist.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. e was a pervasive speaker and writer, embracing the anti-­‐slavery cause in thousands of speeches and editorials throughout his lifetime -­‐ from abolitionist campaigns in the 1840s to anti-­‐ lynching crusades in the 1890s
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​Pictorial representations of Africans and African Americans played an integral part in the

construction and perpetuation of these beliefs and in the defining of a national culture.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 3

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Edmonia Lewis - Forever Free - 1867 (sculpture)

Answer 3

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• Sculpted to commemorate the ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States, the idealized figures of “Forever Free” convey a message of triumph over adversity and hope for the future.
• depicts an idealized male figure lifting his arm–off of which hangs a broken chain–triumphantly. He has been freed from slavery, and the title of the sculpture points to the words of the Emancipation Proclamation. The idealized representation of the artist’s feelings about the institution of slavery, as the man is stepping on the ball and chain that can be seen to represent his life as a slave.
• American sculptor who worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy
• first woman of African-American and Native American heritage to achieve international fame and recognition as a sculptor in the fine arts world
• known for incorporating themes relating to black and American Indian people into Neoclassical style sculpture.
• emerged during the crisis-filled days of the Civil War, and by the end of the 19th century, she was the only black woman who had participated in and been recognized to any degree by the American artistic mainstream
• Lewis was inspired by the lives of abolitionists and Civil War heroes. Her subjects in 1863 and 1864 included some of the most famous abolitionists of her day: John Brown and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.[19] When she met Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of an African American Civil War regiment from Massachusetts

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. start of the Civil War
   2. Industrial Revolution: the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840.
   3. Reconstruction: the period following the Civil War of rebuilding the United States, 1865- 1877.
   4. Reconstruction Amendments: 13th, 14th, 15th amendments to U.S. constitution, adopted between 1865-1870, extend civil and legal protections to former slaves.
   5. World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago: world’s fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. ?
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. Genre painting - scenes of everyday life
   2. Neoclassicism - popular artistic style that favored classical, biblical, or literary themes
   3. Harriet Hosmer 1830-1908
      Was important to Lewis
      She provided a supportive environment to work in Rome
      As an artist, she provided examples of images that addressed images of slavery and rebellion

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
  
  • ​Lewis turned her attention to the struggles of African Americans against the institution of slavery in the US
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 4

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

John Gast - American Progress - 1872 (painting)

Answer 4

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• Gast seems to indicate, the smooth and uplifting transformation of wilderness into civilization. When looking at the painting, this claim certainly seems to hold true
• By creating the heavenly woman in the center, who bears the innovative telegraph wire in her left hand, Gast introduces the main argument of the painting: the idea that it was the heavenly duty of Americans to expand the country all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This idea surely resonated with people at the time
  
  • Looking at a kind of historical encyclopedia of transportation technologies
  • groups of human figures, read from left to right, convey much the same idea. Indians precede Euro-American prospectors, who in turn come before the farmers and settlers.
  • The idea of progress coming from the East to the West,
• The Indians flee from progress, unable to adjust to the shifting tides of history.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. Migration west after Civil war
   2. Indians were being displaced and intigrated into euro/american life
   3. West viewed as a serious economic opportunity for people seeking to exploit
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. Reconstruction era (1865–1877)
   2. Manifest destiny
   3. propaganda began surfacing portraying the West and the American expansion west in a very positive light
   4. printed in traveling guides at the time
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. The Gast painting allows one to demonstrate the ways in which painters, too, could engage large historical questions, cultural stereotypes and political ideas, by using a visual vocabulary that viewers found both familiar and persuasive

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
  
  • Effects and rising socal awarness of the extermination of the indian culture. vrs painting Portrays western expansion by Americans as a glorious and righteous thing.
• Consider current creative idiums
  
  • Muralistic Naratives??? City murals of phila??
• Compare social and community issues.
  
  • Reviving interest in American Indian Culture

Question 5

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Thomas Eakins - The Gross Clinic - 1875 (painting)

Answer 5

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• Thomas Eakins’s deep connection to his birthplace (Philadelphia) remained a theme throughout his career. Most well-known and ambitious work for the city of Philadelphia is The Gross Clinic, a painting spotlights the local physician Samuel David Gross.
• Always a portraitist, Eakins calculated the work as a visual record of all the individuals present in the medical amphitheater.
• Eakins inserted his own likeness among the audience
• Eakins showcases his academic training and—in a style that has been dubbed “scientific realism”—reveals an uncompromising desire to portray honest details of form, depth, and proportion.
• Completed for the Centennial Exposition, the work was rejected. Some critics lashed out against its gruesome subject matter, seemingly vulgar treatment, and inherent melodrama (note the near-swooning, hysterical woman in the left middle ground), viewers were nonetheless captivated by the work’s theatricality. The Gross Clinic as a statement of his artistic skill and as a way in which to affirm himself as a hero of Philadelphia.
• EAKINS MAY HAVE FOUND INSPIRATION IN REMBRANDT.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. Medically, surgery was transitioning from a (amputation culture) to more nuance surgical techniques.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. Rembrandt and others who came before had depicted doctors working on cadavers. Few dared to portray the act of surgery on a live patient.
   2. 3. What was happening in the creative community?
   3. ​Admired for its uncompromising realism
      
      • ​​engagement with the present ​
      • Admired for its uncompromising realism, The Gross Clinic has an important place documenting the history of medicine—both because it honors the emergence of surgery as a healing profession (previously, surgery was associated primarily with amputation), and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century.
   4. Other artists of the period painted pictures portraying “The good old days” before the civil war.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 6

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• *Joseph Keppler - A Picture for Our Employees**
• *- published in Puck 1878**

lecture note (Sept19th)

COMPARE CONTRAST :
Opper & Keppler

Answer 6

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• classically trained German immigrant artist’ adamantly anti Irish ‘ in both political and racial terms.
• He believed strongly in the melting pot concept of American culture and felt that the Irish would not or could not assimilate to their new home
• cartoons rely on the animalistic type established in Punch (19th century British humor periodical Punch)

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. Anti-Catholic propaganda, social Darwinism, physiognomy (ˌfizēˈä(ɡ)nəmē/ the supposed art of judging character from facial characteristics.), phrenology (freˈnäləjē/ the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities.) - pseudoscientific theories
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. Irish - most recently arrived immigrant group - were scapegoats: this gives dominant ‘white’ culture an opportunity to define itself in positive contrast to a laughable minority on the margins.
   2. Irish held in contempt because they were Catholic (thus lacking the essential Protestant work ethic needed to survive in American);
   3. because they spoke English in a manner that seemed unschooled to Anglo ears;
   4. because they tended to resist full assimilation, sticking to their traditions and ethnic circles; and because they only seemed qualified to engage blue-collar work.
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​In the 19th century ethnic caricature was one of the most popular genres of comedy in humor magazines in the U.S.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.
  
  • Today we’ll look at how artists deployed visual codes to signal sexual difference. We will consider the relationship of homosexuality to the other deviant identities in urban American contexts (such as immigrants and sailors).
  • Sexual orientations and identities were very different in the pre-WWII era, especially for men. As George Chauncey details, it was acceptable for men and considered normal for them to have same-sex relations, as long as they held the dominant position.
  • Another interesting concept relating to having same sex relations (but not being considered gay) was the idea that your sexuality depended on if you took the dominant or passive position in sex. Men were freely allowed to have sex with other men and no one thought anything of it as long as they were the dominant person. For example, ‘trades’ were typically rough, working class laborers, often sailors, who had sex with fairies. They treated and viewed the fairies as they would view a female prostitute.

Question 7

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• *Frederick Burr Opper - The King of A-Shantee
• published in Puck, February 15, 1882.**

lecture notes Sept 21st

lecture notes Sept 19th

COMPARE CONTRAST :
Opper & Keppler

Answer 7

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• cartoons rely on the animalistic type established in Punch (19th century British humor periodical Punch)
  
  • his caricature from Punch gained ground in the U.S. in the 1870s and 1880s. Many people in the dominant Anglo-American culture shared the biases of the London elite (i.e. anti-Catholicism and a belief in “white” racial and cultural superiority.
• Irish caricature: according to artists, the average Irishman had an ape-like posture, slanting forehead (indicating small frontal lobe, the part of the brain that gave a person the ability for rational, civilized thought and behavior), an extended jaw (another sign of evolutionary backwardness), and a small, upturned nose.
• In male caricature of Irishness, baldness, a chin-beard, and a pipe are common, as are suggestion of laughable habits including drunkenness, laziness, violence, and stupidity.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. Anti-Catholic propaganda, social Darwinism, physiognomy (ˌfizēˈä(ɡ)nəmē/ the supposed art of judging character from facial characteristics.), phrenology (freˈnäləjē/ the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities.) - pseudoscientific theories
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. Social control: used to justify active abuse or passive neglect of minorities Racial ranking.
      • Readers of these images would have embraced the idea that racial stereotypes were truthful distillations of an entire ethnicity’s defining physical and character traits. These visual ideas were founded on principles of racist pseudosciences such as phrenology and physiognomy.
   2. 19th century immigrant families often lived in terrible poverty
   3. Irish laborers were seen as expendable ‘dogs’
   4. 6 years was the average lifespan of one of those laborers after arriving in America
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​In the 19th century ethnic caricature was one of the most popular genres of comedy in humor magazines in the U.S.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 8

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Henry Ossawa Tanner - The Banjo Lesson - 1893 (painting)

Answer 8

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• Henry Ossawa Tanner was the United States’ first African-American celebrity artist.
• Training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (under the guidance of Thomas Eakins and at Académie Julian in Paris (with Jean-Léon Gérôme) put him in the unique position of having experienced two vastly different approaches to painting— American Realism and French academic painting
• The two characters concentrate intently on the task before them. They seem to be oblivious to the rest of the world, which enlarges the sense of real contact and cooperation.
• The skillfully painted portraits of the individuals make it obvious that these are real people and not types.
• a meaningful exploration of human qualities
• Tanner undertakes the difficult endeavor of portraying two separate and varying light sources. A natural white, blue glow from outside enters from the left while the warm light from a fireplace is apparent on the right.
• The figures are illuminated where the two light sources meet; some have hypothesized this as a manifestation of Tanner’s situation in transition between two worlds, his American past and his newfound home in France.
• In The Banjo Lesson, Tanner’s desire to show us his vision of the resilience, spiritual grace, and creative and intellectual promise of post-Civil War African-Americans is fully realized.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. The United States had abolished slavery only twenty-four years before, in 1865, and the physical and psychological wounds of that brutal institution would continue to be a palpable presence in African-American communities—especially so in the South.
   2. Tanner’s mother Sarah had been born a slave and had escaped north to Pennsylvania through the Underground Railroad.
   3. His middle name, Ossawa, was chosen by his father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a Methodist minister and abolitionist, after Osawatomie, Kansas—the site of the abolitionist John Brown’s bloody confrontation with pro-slavery partisans on August 30, 1856.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. images were often reduced to a minstrel-type portrayal – This is a departure.
   2. the legacy of slavery haunted Tanner as he tried to establish a niche for himself as painter to be regarded on his own terms
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​Style is Realism
   2. images were often reduced to a minstrel-type portrayal but this is a porture
   3. The Banjo Lesson has its roots in the genre paintings of African-Americans by William Sidney Mount and Thomas Eakins (above) and in Renaissance and Flemish paintings, notably Domenico Ghirlandaio’s An Old Man and His Grandson and Johannes Vermeer’s Woman with a Lute

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 9

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Charlie Chaplin - The Immigrant - 1917 (film)

http://tinyurl.com/gopbrw4

Answer 9

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. World War I
   2. Economic upheavil in europe
   3. Migration to US
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. ​Persecution
   2. Poverty
   3. Starvation/Repression
   4. 3. ​What was happening in the creative community?
   5. ​Silent Films
   6. Charlie Chaplin created a seminol charachter

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 10

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Archibald Motley Jr., Portrait of My Mother, 1919 (painting)

Lecture note (9/26)

Answer 10

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• classically trained modern artist Chicago painter
• shunned Harlem Renaissance leaders He felt their assessment of what constituted an African American was too doctrinaire, that they focused too much on this vague myth of Africa and not enough on their unique American heritage.
• father worked as a Pullman railway-carriage porter
• declining a scholarship to study architecture at Chicago’s Armour Institute, Archibald was accepted at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

with George Bellows (where, it is interesting to note, the Armour Institute’s president paid his first-year tuition fees)

• Motley’s ability to view the world around him from simultaneously different vantage points and to embrace contradictions was somehow postmodernist avant la lettre [The definition of avant la lettre is before a concept was invented or before a term was coined. An example of avant la lettre is a philosopher explaining the concept of gravity before it was a widely accepted scientific principle.]
• He worked in the genre of portraiture but retooled so

me of its conventions - replacing “permissible” content (white high society figures) with black and mixed -race sitters

• The palette (modulated earth tones) is a metaphor for the mixed racial backgrounds of its subject, a woman who grew up on a Louisiana plantation and whose father was white.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. 1919 segregation
   2. the first African American artist to have a solo exhibition at a gallery in New York; he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to live and work in Paris for a year. He spent more time there in cafes and music clubs than with other artists.
   3. massive migration to the North after WWI (The Great Migration)
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. extreme racial violence of the 1920s, fueled by postwar employment competition
   2. “New Negro” movement the belief that racial advancement depended on the recognition of African American aesthetic contributions, rather than on political or economic action
   3. Literature, music, and photography were vocational options for African Americans, but less often - painting and sculpture.
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​Harlem Renaissance: the most important event in 20th century African American intellectual and cultural life.
   2. Harlem Renaissance was partly an attempt to cultivate racial tolerance by promoting the cultural accomplishments of African Americans.
   3. Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist,
   4. In 1910s - dance and music important elements in construction of American cultural identity; after WWI they are synonymous with it (Jazz, the Charleston)
   5. Like other Harlem Renaissance artists of the 1920s, 30s, he was also interested in the multidimensional nature of black racial identity and the forms of social and cultural expression that were associated with it.
   6. Subtle tonalism - The artist emphasizes the variety of colors associated with African American skin. He calls out his mother’s mixed racial heritage

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.
  
  • A week ago, 12 Years A Slave won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first time in the history of the Oscars that the top prize went to a film made by a black director
  • New York voters elected a white man who is married to a black woman;
  • Harlem - contained more African Americans per square mile than any other place on earth,

Question 11

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

James VanDerZee - Evening Attire - 1922 (photograph)

No lecture notes found?

Compare Parks & VanDerZee & Lange

Answer 11

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• VanDerZee is best known for the studio portraits he made in Harlem after World War I.
• documenting Harlem’s growing black middle class and celebrities, such as entertainer Florence Mills, dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, boxer Joe Louis, minister Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and Powell’s son, politician Adam Jr.
• images project a sense of glamour, sophistication, and prosperity.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. post World War I & World War II
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. ?
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​Harlem Renaissance
   2. With the advent of personal cameras in the middle of the century, the desire for Van Der Zee’s services dwindled; he procured less and less commissions, though he maintained an alternative business in image restoration and mail order sales.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 12

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Grant Wood - American Gothic - 1930 (painting)

lecture note sept 28th

Answer 12

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• proponent of cultural nationalism
• American Gothic was submitted to the 1930 annual exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it won a bronze medal and a $300 prize.
• the painting sparked a backlash. This dour portrayal was not how the locals saw themselves, and they resented being presented this way to the world. One farm wife was so enraged by the painting that she threatened to bite Wood’s ear off. Another suggested he have his “head bashed in.” Wood was stunned by the acrimony, insisting he was a “loyal Iowan” who meant no offense, only homage.
• Wood was an unknown 39-year-old aspiring artist
• The article identified Grant Wood as the “chief philosopher and greatest teacher of representational U.S. art.”
• Wood became famous with this painting American Gothic, when he was 39 years old, living in the attic of a funeral-home carriage house that he shared with his mother and his sister.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. Pre Great Depression.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. ?
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​American realist modern art movement that shunned urbanism in favor of the glories found in rural settings, Regionalism (or American Scene painting) hit the peak of its popularity in the 1930s thanks to Wood’s works as well as those of Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton and Kansas’s John Steuart Curry.
   2. He was a proponent of cultural nationalism (The idea that the nation is defined by a shared culture) In his art he draws upon American legends and myths in the belief that they united people and gave them a sense of shared experience.
   3. allied himself with other regionalist painters like John Steuart Curry and the virulently jingoistic Thomas Hart Benton, who railed against the “control” of the East Coast art world

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 13

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Paul Cadmus - is The Fleet’s In! 1934 (painting)

Lecture note (9/28)
Lecture note (9/21)

Answer 13

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• Regionalism (also known as American Scene painting): An American art distinct from European standards; a concept of artistic nationalism; based on values, history, and patterns of behavior of agrarian America; a focus on finding renewal and affirmation in the frontier and the collective national past

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. 1930s: Great Depression - severe worldwide economic depression.
   2. Post Mexican Revolution (1910-1920)
   3. first four months of 1934, the PWAP (Public Works of Art Project) hired 3,749 artists and produced 15,663 paintings, murals, prints, crafts, and sculptures for government buildings across the country (an average of $75.59 per artwork)
   4. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) was a better-known successor to the
      PWAP that supported young artists Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and others before
      they became famous.
   5. PWAP only last 6 months; the first time in the country’s history that artists were officially viewed as performing a valuable service to the community.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. Roosevelt elected 1933
   2. 2 federally funded art programs during the Depression era: Public Works of Art Project (1934) and The Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934-1943)
   3. Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) went from unknown to scandalous in the 1930s with this risqué and much publicized painting.
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​The Fleet’s In! controversial for its portrayal of sailors.
   2. Authors and artists sought to evaluate the emotional trauma and social disorder that accompanied the economic collapse, for example in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath (the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers who are forced from their home as drought, economic hardship, changes in the agricultural industry occur during the Great Depression).
   3. Mexican muralism - promotion of mural painting in the 1920s, generally with social and political messages, as part of efforts to reunify the country under the post Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) government
   4. What are its sexual connotations? Prostitutes, homosexual man (red tie a signal).
      
      1. Cadmus painted it from his own experience of watching sailors come in to the piers at 96th Street. Due to controversy over its content officials from the Navy had it pulled from an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Cadmus working for U.S. Government for Public Works of Art Project created during the Great Depression. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 14

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Dorothea Lange - Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California - 1936 (photo)

Answer 14

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. The Depression had placed more than a million rural families on relief rolls, families that even in good times lived in or on the edge of poverty. The rural poor suffer out of sight of most Americans.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. ?
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​Concurrent to the FSA project, in the 1930s photography emerged as a dominant medium. “Picture-Taking” became a popular activity. Flash units and small-format cameras were becoming readily available, while photojournalism burgeoned.
      The first picture magazines - Life (1936) and Look (1937) emerged.
      By the late 1930s both the widely disseminated images of the FSA and photography in general had become an important part of American life. FSA photographs aim to show the human consequences of poverty - not its human causes. “A man may have holes in his shoes, and you may see the holes when you take the picture. But maybe your sense of the human being will teach you there’s a lot more to that man that the holes in his shoes, and you ought to try and get that idea across.”

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 15

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Jacob Lawrence - The Migration Series - 1940-41 (painting)
http://tinyurl.com/qgskd3c

59 paintings in the series.

LECTURE NOTES SEPT 28

Answer 15

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• Jacob Lawrence celebrate African American individuals and events from historical past
  
  • inspired by contemporary Mexican murals (Diego Rivera)
  • combination of image and text in photo-essay books
  • he painted stories using multiple panels, each accompanied by a narrative caption
  • earliest narratives focused on individual African American heroes and heroines: the abolitionist Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman, slave-turned-revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, who established Haiti as the first independent black-ruled republic in the New World.
  • Lawrence used exaggerated perspective, flat shapes, and primary colors
  • he transformed these historical figures into iconic symbols of perserverance and triumph over social and political adversity
  • 1940 The Great Migration series

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. ?
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. ?
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​Harlem Renaissance

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 16

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Gordon Parks, American Gothic 1942 (photo)

lecture notes Sept 30th
lecture notes Oct3rd

Compare Parks & Lange

Answer 16

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• Gordon Parks (1912- ) is one of the most provocative and celebrated photojournalists in the United States.
• images of such celebrities as Duke Ellington, Gloria Vanderbilt, Muhammad Ali, Ingrid Bergman, and Malcom X helped to make these famous people into enduring elements of American iconography.
• best known as the pioneering director of the 1970s blockbuster Shaft
• overriding legacy is probably Essence magazine, which he helped launch during the turbulent Black Power movement
• image was shot during one of his first assignments for the FSA, and it has endured as one of his signature images. Purposefully posed as an ironic counterpart to Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic, it is part of a touching photo essay that documented the textured and taxing life of Ella Watson, a government charwoman (housekeeper). According to Gordon Parks

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. Depression
   2. early years of World War II
   3. fierce isolationism that permeated almost all of American society.
      • both conservatives and progressives agreed that the U.S. should resist involvement in European affairs. It was not until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 that the Communist-controlled American Artists’ Congress called for American participation in the war.
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. Segregation
   2. the Anglo population still sought to marginalize the African American population through a policy that came to be known as Jim Crow.
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​he became part of the legendary South Side Community Arts Center, which birthed the so-called Chicago Renaissance during the 1940s.
   2. an important period when luminary artists and scholars such as Katherine Dunham, St. Clair Drake, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Catlett, Richard Wright, and Nat King Cole flourished amid one another’s creative genius.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 17

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Chiura Obata - Silent Moonlight at Tanforan Relocation Center - 1942 (painting)

lecture notes Oct5th

Compare Parks & Obata

Answer 17

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• The works from internment., best-known Asian American artworks to date
• Chiura Obata was one of California’s most distinguished artists before the war.
• He had taught art at the University of California, Berkeley since 1932 and before closing his studio he stored his art with the University president.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. World War II
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. During the war years, individual artists and the camp art schools regularly sent exhibitions of work for display throughout the country.
   2. often included internment camp subject matter, helped to humanize the Japanese Americans, just as art was used at times to help demonize or encourage fighting will on the home front
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​During internment with his family he Tanforan and then Topaz, Utah he captured his experiences, creating over 200 paintings and sketches.
   2. The entry of the United States into World War II presented American artists with several choices: to use their art to celebrate American values, [to remain detached from world affairs and pursue pure abstraction], or to bear witness to the unsettling realities of the time. Artists during the war used strategies such as
      
      1. “deployment” - the purposeful efforts to influence sentiment on the home front during the war - and
      2. “engagement” - an interaction of aesthetics and politics, art with the purpose of expanding the artistic visions and social identities of Americans.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
• Compare social and community issues.

Question 18

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?: & How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

Marlon Riggs - Ethnic Notions - 1986 (film)

http://tinyurl.com/gog2foa

lecture note Sept 14

Answer 18

How does this artwork reflect the time period in which the artist made it?:

• Ethnic Notions is a 1987 documentary film directed by Marlon Riggs. It examines anti-Black stereotypes that permeated popular culture from the ante-bellum period until the advent of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s
• Pictorial representations of Africans and African Americans played an integral part in the construction and perpetuation of these beliefs and in the defining of a national culture.
• The documentary touches upon issues of servility, sexuality, appearances, the “noble” savage, and most evidently the impact of mass media on the image of the African Americans—especially the exaggerated physical image of a very dark person, with very bright large lips, very white eyes and large unkempt hair—and how this affects the self-image of the African American. The insidious images exacted a devastating toll on Black Americans and continue to undermine race relations.

1. What was happening in history?
   
   1. But they also played an integral part in the challenges to these beliefs and to this definition of national culture, challenges which grew in number and intensity by the middle of the nineteenth century and led to armed conflict between the North and the South (The Civil War 1861 -­‐ 1865).
2. What was happening politcally or socially?
   
   1. attempted to enforce the myth of the child savage
   2. Ethnic Notions exposes and describes common stereotypes (The Tom, The Sambo, The Mammy, The Coon, The Brute, The Pickaninnies, The Minstrels) from the period surrounding the Civil War and the World Wars.
3. What was happening in the creative community?
   
   1. ​shed light on the origins and devastating consequences of 150 years of these dehumanizing caricatures.

How and in what ways is this artwork relevant today:

• Compare contrast political views
• Consider current creative idiums
  
  • Song of the South
  • Amos ‘n’ Andy
  • etc.
• Compare social and community issues.