Life’s Pioneer Painters: Dorothy Seiberling and American Art in Life Magazine, 1949–1968

2018 ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Melissa Renn
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-59

The California missions, whose original church spaces and visual programs were produced by Iberian, Mexican, and Native artisans between 1769 and 1823, occupy an ambiguous chronological, geographical, and political space. They occupy lands that have pertained to conflicting territorialities: from Native nations, to New Spain, to Mexico, to the modern multicultural California. The physical and visual landscapes of the missions have been sites of complex and often incongruous religious experiences; historical trauma and romantic vision; Indigenous genocide, exploitation, resistance, and survivance; state building and global enterprise. This Dialogues section brings together critical voices, including especially the voices of California Indian scholars, to interrogate received models for thinking about the art historical legacies of the California missions. Together, the contributing authors move beyond and across borders and promote new decolonial strategies that strive to be responsive to the experience of California Indian communities and nations. This conversation emerges from cross-disciplinary relationships established at a two-day conference, “‘American’ Art and the Legacy of Conquest: Art at California’s Missions in the Global 18th–20th Centuries,” sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art and held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in November 2019.


2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
ShiPu Wang

This essay delineates the issues concerning AAPI art exhibitions from a curator’s perspective, particularly in response to the changing racial demographics and economics of the past decades. A discussion of practical, curatorial problems offers the reader an overview of the obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of AAPI works in the United States. It is the author’s hope that by understanding the challenges particular to AAPI exhibitions, community leaders, and patrons will direct future financial support to appropriate museum operations, which in turn will encourage more exhibitions and research of the important artistic contribution of AAPI artists to American art.


Author(s):  
Mark Byers

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.


Author(s):  
Peter Lurie

This introduction orients this book’s argument surrounding history’s visibility. It points to a tradition of visualizing history initiated by D. W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation and suggests links between it and a later critical tradition of falsely presuming history’s accessibility. It takes up recent challenges to politicized cultural scholarship and identifies the book’s investment in examining the terms on which so-called American art and culture have been defined. Edgar Allan Poe’s Pym and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” offer templates for the later discussions of writers’ and filmmakers’ choice to eschew direct representations of history. It links these moves to New Formalist methodology and places the study’s approach within this field, describing the book’s moves from treating modernist writers to discussing the postmodern cinema of Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers. It takes up a tenet of modernist scholarship that questions notions of a putatively transcendent, disembodied subject.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-324
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Schwartz

AbstractIn the early years of the twentieth century, Life magazine had only approximately one hundred thousand subscribers, yet its illustrated images (like the Gibson Girl) significantly influenced fashion trends and social behaviors nationally. Its outsized influence can be explained by examining the magazine’s business practices, particularly the novel ways in which it treated and conceptualized its images as intellectual property. While other magazines relied on their circulation and advertising revenue to attain profitability, Life used its page space to sell not only ads, but also its own creative components—principally illustrations—to manufacturers of consumer goods, advertisers, and consumers themselves. In so doing, Life’s publishers relied on a developing legal conception of intellectual property and copyright, one that was not always amenable to their designs. By looking at a quasi-litigious disagreement in which a candy manufacturing company attempted to copy one of the magazine’s images, this article explores the mechanisms behind the commodification and distribution of mass-circulated images.


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