scholarly journals Collecting Haudenosaunee Art from the Modern Era

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Scott Manning Stevens

My essay considers the history of collecting the art of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) artists in the twentieth century. For decades Native visual and material culture was viewed under the guise of ‘crafts.’ I look back to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on Haudenosaunee material culture. His writings helped establish a specific notion of Haudenosaunee material culture within the scholarly field of anthropology in the nineteenth century. At that point two-dimensional arts did not play a substantial role in Haudenosaunee visual culture, even though both Tuscarora and Seneca artists had produced drawings and paintings then. I investigate the turn toward collecting two-dimensional Haudenosaunee representational art, where before there was only craft. I locate this turn at the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s. It was at this point that Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker recruited Native crafts people and painters working in two-dimensional art forms to participate in a Works Progress Administration-sponsored project known as the Seneca Arts Program. Thereafter, museum collectors began purchasing and displaying paintings by the artists: Jesse Cornplanter, Sanford Plummer, and Ernest Smith. I argue that their representation in museum collections opened the door for the contemporary Haudenosaunee to follow.

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...


Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.


Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-290
Author(s):  
Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom

Abstract The practice of medicine and healing is always accompanied by a range of paraphernalia, from pillboxes to instruments to clothing. Yet such things have rarely attracted the attention of historians of medicine. Here, I draw on perspectives from art history and religious studies to ask how these objects relate, in practical and symbolic terms, to practices of healing. In other words, what is the connection between medical culture and material culture? I focus on craft objects relating to medicine and healing in Lanka during the Kandyan period (ca. 1595–1815) in museum collections in Canada and Sri Lanka. I ask what the objects can tell us, first, about early modern Lankan medicine and healing and, second, about late nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct tradition. Finally, I explore what studying these objects might add to current debates about early modern globalization in the context of both material culture and medicine.


2018 ◽  
pp. 25-65
Author(s):  
Anna Dahlgren

Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-509
Author(s):  
Adriana Russi ◽  
Astrid Kieffer-Døssing

Currently, ethnographic collections are at the center of a debate about the new meaning of museum collections, which questions the actuality of the preserved material culture. These issues also refer to the promotion of otherness and protagonism of the ‘collected people’ in museums, which trigger the interest of both researchers and indigenous people. The same is happening with the collections of the Amerindian Katxuyana. These collections count more than 700 objects collected by different expeditions at different moments in time and the collections have been preserved for more than 50 years in European and Brazilian museums. Despite this long timespan the objects are material records from everyday life, rituals and festive moments, and they reveal a little about the life of this people in the first half of the twentieth century. Some parts of these collections have been the source of dialogical experiences between researchers and Katxuyana in order to evoke memories and knowledge. This paper describe a bit about this course of approximation between Katxuyana and the collections.


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-391
Author(s):  
Mirjam Brusius

This afterword comments on the articles gathered together in this special section of History of Science (“Disassembling Archaeology, Reassembling the Modern World”). Criticizing the consistent lack of institutional infrastructure for histories of archaeology in the history of science, the piece argues that scholars should recognize the commonality of archaeology’s practices with those of the nineteenth and twentieth century field sciences that have received more historical attention. The piece also suggests avenues to help take this approach further, such as combining expertise from historians of the biological sciences and of antiquarianism and archaeology to look at the history of the understanding of human variation and race. Finally, the afterword suggests that scholars should reconsider the idea of archaeology’s reliance on institutionalised practices, thinking about the use and re-use of material culture in more diverse and pragmatic social contexts.


2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON COOK

Today the economic diagram is employed universally in teaching and research by professional economists. Yet the history of its construction shows that much that has been regarded as distinctive of twentieth-century visual culture was prefigured in the nineteenth. This paper will place the construction of the first economic diagrams by Alfred Marshall in the context both of contemporary visual technologies developed in other moral sciences, and of his wider theory of industrial production. The paper will argue that an understanding of the background to the historical graphs, constructed by the Cambridge political economist from the late 1860s onwards, will necessitate a revision of the narrative of modern visual reasoning, as recently advanced by Lev Manovich.


Museum Worlds ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-195
Author(s):  
Jennifer G. Kahn

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the process of refinding the initial location of the Bishop Museum’s hale pili (Hawaiian pole and thatch house) and an archaeological investigation of the site’s surface architecture, use of space, and subsurface activities. The study touches upon themes relevant to representations of culture and place in museum exhibits, analysis of existing museum collections to holistically interpret material culture, and the history of anthropological collecting. The hale pili represents a “hybrid” form, with elements of precontact Hawaiian folk housing and European concepts introduced in the postcontact period. This problematizes the notion of “traditional” when used in relation to indigenous cultures in settler societies and the practice of exhibiting unique examples of “authentic” housing in isolation. Such analyses increase our interpretive abilities for museum collections and exhibits in the long term, particularly in reunifying folk housing and other material culture with location, a sense of place, and locale.


Author(s):  
Eleonora Mattia

Eleonora Mattia: Three Italian illuminated Cuttings in the Royal Library of Copenhagen Some observations on the history of collecting illuminated cuttings serve to introduce three unpublished Italian fragments that are part of a collection of illuminated fragments conserved in the Royal Danish Library. The miniatures are described from the point of view of their liturgical and art-historical content and are presented in the form of entries in a catalogue raisonné. The Master B. F., who grew up under the shadow of Leonardo de Vinci, was among those miniaturists most sought-after by collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century because of his evident stylistic debts to the great painter. The beautiful miniature in Copenhagen can now be added to the other known works of this Master and is critical not only to the reconstruction of his corpus, but also for the history of collecting, as it comes from the prestigious Holford Collection. It was already correctly attributed when it entered the collection of the Royal Library; it is here inserted into the activity of the artist, a dating is proposed, and a provenance is suggested from the series of choir books in the monastery of Santi Angelo e Nicolò a Villanova Sillaro in Lombardy, which were broken up around 1799. The Danish cutting here attributed to Attavante has a specific iconography that demonstrates an originality and an independence from models followed by contemporary Florentine painting, qualities not always acknowledged to the well known miniaturist whose extensive figurative production has sometimes been considered repetitive. A third fragment is here attributed to the Pisan Master of Montepulciano Gradual I. This anonymous miniaturist is at the centre of the most recent and innovative studies of fourteenth-century Tuscan painting: his activity belongs to the diversified texture of artistic production between Florence and its nearby cities, with expressive modalities independent of the tradition of the more strictly Giottesque masters. The miniature attributed to him here is to be added to the catalogue of his works, dispersed as they are in many European and American collections.


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