Queer Reproductions in Vergil’s Georgics and Brian Britigan’s Golden

Pairing Vergil’s Latin poem, the Georgics, with Golden, a 2012 painting by Brian Britigan, I explore the sexualities and ecologies of animal bodies. First, I argue that Golden responds to the “bugonias” of the Georgics, scenes in which a dead ox spontaneously generates bees. Through the image of one species emerging from another Vergil and Britigan queer straight ideas of reproduction in different ways. Vergil’s queering is processual, describing bugonia as a collision of human and nonhuman bodies and practices. In Britigan’s paintings, which omit human figures, queerness is stylistic. Britigan pays homage to the foundational work of Thomas Hart Benton while reworking Benton’s beliefs about sex/gender and sexuality. Painted just a few years after CCD devastated the world’s honeybees, Golden poignantly represents the hope of life even after extinction. While earlier criticizing Britigan’s human-less nature, I conclude by considering that the regeneration of life may require our absence.

John McCrady’s “Southern Eccentric” Regionalism

This chapter examines a 1948 lithograph entitled Negro Maskers by New Orleans-based Southern Regionalist painter John McCrady (1911-1968), who produced the image for Mardi Gras Day, a book project completed with fellow artists Ralph Wickiser and Caroline Durieux. It documents McCrady’s conception of the southern US, in the decade following the Depression, as a site of singular “folk” distinction, rendered unique by picturesque scenery, African American cultural expressions, dockside scenes along the Mississippi, and carnivalesque traditions such as the Baby Doll masqueraders. Negro Maskers’ stylistic references to EI Greco, Mannerism, American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, and dream-like Symbolism will be discussed, charting how the image fits snugly into McCrady’s cultivation of a “Southern Eccentric” aesthetic. Above all, McCrady's print will be examined within the context of other sentimentalized, yet often subversive, images of southern, vernacular U.S. culture that distinguished his work from that of Midwestern-centered American Regionalist painters.

Nebraska

This chapter discusses the discovery of the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains and its impact on western expansion. It also looks at the growing sectional divisions over slavery’s expansion, the congressional debate over the route for the first transcontinental railroad, and Stephen Douglas’ efforts to organize the Nebraska territory. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political feud between Missouri’s two senators, David Rice Atchison and Thomas Hart Benton, and its impact on the future organization of Nebraska.

Migration, Class, and Black Religiosity

Chapter 3 examines the ways in which Motley, alongside numerous black and nonblack artists and scholars, explored religious affiliation as an indicator of socioeconomic class. While Motley renders demonstrative forms of worship through genre scenes of modernist abbreviation and stereotypical figuration, two delicate portraits position his paternal grandmother and himself as contemplative Catholics surrounded by the accouterments of middle-class life. Analyzing Motley’s attention to religiosity alongside the appearance of demonstrative religion in works by Thomas Hart Benton and Jacob Lawrence, the chapter considers the ways in which artistic focus on religious practices spoke to the desire to preserve and respect indigenous customs, while also positioning them as possessing an emotional power at odds with a modern society deemed rational and progressive. The chapter thus considers how Motley contributes not only to an occasionally problematic articulation of Old and New Negroes, but also to a larger discussion of class, regional difference, and bias within American scene art.