Panorama Submission Portal

The Medicine of Art

2023-10-11T10:42:24-05:00

Spiritual Moderns

2023-10-12T14:42:24-05:00

All That She Carried

2023-09-05T02:40:32-05:00

Book review

MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938

2023-10-25T11:27:21-05:00

Painting the Inhabited Landscape

2023-09-11T12:26:05-05:00

This is a review of a recent monograph published in the field of nineteenth century American art.

A Collaborative Creation of Home

2023-01-27T12:34:03-06:00

Scholarship on the African American painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, continues to focus on the artist’s relationship with religion and racial identity, however, my research examines the artistic strategies Tanner developed to recognize the contributions and complexity of women, which coincided with his marriage to Jessie Macauley Olssen in 1899. While helping to advance his career and cultivate a home in France, Jessie also modeled for the artist’s biblical canvases appearing as the Virgin Mary, Salome, Rachel, and Martha. This essay explores how Jessie Tanner did more than simply support her husband’s artistic career. She served as an inspiration and active collaborator in Tanner’s early twentieth century religious narratives, which celebrated biblical women as a means to promote modern women’s inclusion and equality in Belle Époque society.

Looking In, Looking Out

2023-07-10T17:56:25-05:00

This paper focuses on a photographic collage (c. 1902) printed using the cyanotype process onto silk. It contains images of and around San Francisco: the Pacific Ocean, white families at Ocean Beach, Sutro Heights, and Chinese individuals in Chinatown. After first identifying a potential maker, I show how attending to the specificities of this object’s format, process, and materiality allows surprising histories to surface. The photo collage, cyanotype process, and silk manifest the intersection of tourist photography, blueprinting, domestic decoration, the global silk trade, and the Pacific telegraph cable. Reading this object in the context of Chinese Exclusion and US imperialism, I interpret the photo-cloth as a conceptual map that deploys the logics of race and landscape to create a sense of belonging for an assumed white viewer. Conceived as domestic decoration, the photo-cloth looks simultaneously inward and outward, containing the racialized subject while manifesting an expansionist ideology.

Philly Necrofutures

2023-03-02T14:05:29-06:00

Philly Necrofutures is a research initiative and collaborative project between Dr. Synatra Smith, CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American Studies at Temple University, and Hilary Whitham Sánchez, Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College SUNY, to address the lacuna in public and scholarly knowledge around the western and central African artworks held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). Combining art historical research with data curation and visualization, we have created a robust virtual exhibition that centers African makers by directly grappling with colonial archives. Philly Necrofutures demonstrates the way scholarly research and digital humanities can be used as complementary tools to disrupt the white supremacist, patriarchal paradigms of the galleries, libraries, archives, and museum (GLAM) industry and their attendant lack of support for scholarship on African and diasporic arts by scholars of color, instead centering anti-racist collaborative initiatives.

Who Supports American Art Museums?

2023-08-18T15:27:43-05:00

The rise of open data sources, such as the tax filings by nonprofits, and digital publication of museum annual reports, has enable the compilation and collection of such data in a systemized manner. Here, we use such data sources to track board members and donors involved in supporting art museums in the US, with a specific focus on museums exclusively involved in American Art. We compile three main data sources: (i) tax filings that list overall financial information for museums and their board members, (ii) tax filings by foundations that list their donations to various organizations including art museums, and (iii) scraped annual reports of museums where they list key donors. Using these sources we show that several large US museums receive the bulk of support and that American Art museums are a small subset of the US museum space. Interestingly, we find that few individuals serve on more than one museum board, and that most foundation support for museums tends to be from local supporters. Finally, we look at specific foundations focusing on American Art, and find that while they do support museums focused exclusively on American Art, they also support numerous other museums.

The Nature and Sources of American Art Museum Funding

2023-09-20T14:16:41-05:00

None

Who Funds American Art? Everyone Does.

2023-10-02T22:06:42-05:00

Against the Private Museum

2023-09-21T13:12:19-05:00

Reflecting on “Toward a More Inclusive Digital Art History”

2023-09-27T18:57:31-05:00

Learn from the Purple Flower Girl

2023-10-08T18:41:59-05:00

The Art of Jean LaMarr is a traveling exhibition curated by the Nevada Museum of Art’s Ann M. Wolfe. It is on view from Friday August 18, 2023, to Sunday January 7, 2024, at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is LaMarr’s (Northern Paiute/Achomawi) first solo museum retrospective.

Celia Alvarez Muñoz

2023-09-11T12:48:11-05:00

The text is clarifies the operations of the linguistic breaks and plays in Celia Alvarez Munoz's work, and locating their cultural importance through my personal narratives, demonstrating the implications of her work in Latinx as well as in wider bilingual cultures in the US, while also connecting her projects to contemporaries in Conceptual Art.

Hear Me Now

2023-10-08T18:10:35-05:00

Shaped by the Loom

2023-08-07T11:56:43-05:00

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

2023-09-15T12:28:24-05:00

Exhibition review of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Pepe Mar

2023-09-28T13:38:38-05:00

Holy Rollers

2023-09-28T11:17:13-05:00

Roadside California

2023-10-04T10:04:23-05:00

On The Road Reconsidered

2023-10-04T08:08:43-05:00

"It happened"

2023-10-04T19:37:37-05:00

This paper argues that French artist Sophie Calle and American director Greg Shephard’s grainy, shaky, road trip film, Double Blind (No Sex Last Night) (1992) offers a way to understand Calle’s artistic relationship to truth and autobiography - which is often difficult to discern in her ouevre. The couple travels so far but show viewers so little of their trip, save for stilled images, unmade motel room beds, and sad roadside diner hamburgers. The tension between what seems like a documentary and deflective visual and aural strategies can lead viewers to question what is really true - and if we should even care. However, vision is always partial. On road trips this is especially true: we look through rear-view windows and side mirrors, camera lenses and playback screens, foggy windshields and tired eyes. Using the concept of an embodied feminist road trip vision, this paper presses on the potential productiveness of partial, situated knowledge from the space of the road.

In Search of Asian-ness in America

2023-10-04T09:28:37-05:00

Born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, Wing Young Huie (b. 1955) is the youngest of six children, and the only of his siblings not born in Guangdong, China. In August 2001, Huie and his then wife Tara set out on an extended road trip for nine months in their green Volkswagen Bug. Huie’s photographic road trip is at times reminiscent of the long tradition of seeing and picturing America on the road, as exemplified by his predecessors, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, and Baldwin Lee, among them. This article revisits Huie’s “ethnocentric tour” across America, situating his work in this genre of American road photography, focusing on the Asian-ness he encountered and documented during the trip. Through the serendipitous yet ongoing search for Asian American subjects, spaces, and communities on the road, Huie was able to identify things that he might share with his subjects. Huie’s work invites the viewer to contemplate on the duality, fluidity, and hybridity between the foreign and the familiar, a hyphenated America encountered and experienced during a cross-country road trip.

Sensing Pollution

2023-03-05T07:46:42-06:00

Inspired by recent art historical discussions of environmental justice, this article examines images of the New York City waterfront, specifically the areas around the urban waterways of Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal, to examine how industrial air pollution became a major topic of concern in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. While the toxic legacy of the heavy industry that shaped this area—most prominently petroleum refining and fertilizer production—remains in its water and sediment, during the nineteenth century the “bad air” produced by the sites was the largest concern. This article explores how air may be rendered artistically in both painted and popular media. In particular, it explores how the visual depiction of “bad air” around New York City attempted to render the multisensory, dangerous experience of inhaling airborne pollution in a period when it became increasingly difficult for New Yorkers to avoid the environmental consequences of the city’s rapid industrial expansion.

Placed within a larger discussion of the visual culture of air in the late nineteenth-century United States, this essay juxtaposes painted representations of New York’s industrialized harbor by the celebrated artist William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) with more polemical journalistic illustrations and texts that attempted to make visible the sensory experiences and consequences of breathing “bad air.” The result shows how nineteenth-century responses to the effects of air pollution differed according to the aesthetic and cultural goals of visual producers, from “fine art” painters to more socially-oriented journalists and illustrators.