The Interpretation Of Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi's Image In The Portraits Of American Artists

The Chinese themes in Early American art have long been obscured under the veil of Japonisme, Aesthetic movement, boundary-pushing modernism and more significantly because of the political circumstances - decline of China as an empire and complicated Chinese-American interconnections. One of the favoured theme of American academism at the period of the late 19th- early 20th centuries were genre scenes, street scenes, portrait d’intérieur , portraits, still life works related to China and Chinatowns. Nonetheless, the American press through the imagery created by illustrators and caricaturists was largely involved in interpretations of Western encounters with Chinese culture from the highlighted negative light, either being deeply affected by anti-Chinese flows or fuelling those xenophobic moods. Consequently, a few American artists featured Chinese people and Chinese settings from the perspective of admiration of their “otherness”. Only two American artists- Katherine A. Carl and Hubert Vos, succeeded to pave their career path to the Chinese court, enriching American arts of the early 1900s with the unprecedented depictions of high rank Chinese and the scandalously renowned empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) in the positive light of fascination. A number of publications have viewed and examined those portraits from the angle of "political self-fashioning”, but our research is another academic attempt to place those oil paintings in the context of China-related subject matter and its extension in the rising American art of the previous century, stressing their artistic value, function and their relations to the intended audiences.

Visual Arts: Abstraction

For avant-garde European and American artists at the turn of the 20th century, a nexus of developments encouraged the rejection of naturalism, which had driven most of Western art for more than four centuries. Despite the increasing secularization of Western society throughout the 19th century, religious beliefs and practices were one important source for artists’ experimentation with abstracting forms from nature. Christianity and other world religions aided artists who sought to shift the focus of their art from description to expression. Around 1910, certain European and American artists pressed forward to make art that they considered to be fully nonrepresentational. Still, the bridge between abstraction and nonrepresentation was a challenging one to cross and artists frequently invoked religious beliefs to justify leaving the natural world behind. The evolution of abstraction in Western visual arts was intimately linked to the modern era. As important as religious concepts may have been to individual artists around 1900, artists had gradually moved to the periphery of society in the 19th century, leaving behind the institutions, including churches, that had been their primary means of support. These changing relationships gave individual artists the freedom to explore new ideas but eliminated stable sources of income previously available to them. On the other side of the patronage divide, mainstream religions were already threatened by the radical modernization of Western society, so even though religious dogma was replete with abstract concepts, churches were reluctant to embrace abstraction in the visual arts. At the same time, while artists were committed to expressions of spiritual truth in their abstract art, their objects were rarely produced with a conventional church setting in mind. Emerging in the 19th century, the complex relationship among modern society, abstract art, and religious practices persisted well into the 20th century.

The Sonic Undercommons: Sound Art in Radical Black Arts Traditions

This chapter responds to Sara Ahmed’s powerful assertion that ‘to account for racism is to offer a different account of the world’ (Ahmed, 2012). Its premise is that artists of colour have been largely neglected within existing accounts of sound art, and that sound art discourses would change substantially if they accounted for the work of such artists as Terry Adkins, Charles Gaines, Jennie C. Jones, George Lewis, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Clifford Owens, Benjamin Patterson, and Adrian Piper, among many others. Focusing in particular on the sound works of African American artists, this article investigates what Lock and Murray (2009) have described as a racially biased ‘selective hearing’ in relation to emerging canons of sound art. It puts under pressure sound art histories—purported traditions, genres, aesthetic lineages, genealogies—and, equally, confronts the philosophical and intellectual paucity that has resulted from the lack of critical and scholarly attention to the work of black artists. What is missing from ‘whiteness-imbued histories’ (Lewis, 2012) of sound art? How does selective hearing limit what we know and understand about sound art, and how we come to know it?

“These murals give life”: revalorization of public space, history and identity in mural art, Martín Fierro Festival, San Martín, Argentina.

The purpose of this article is to analyze a muralism festival organized by the municipality of San Martin, based on the theme of Martin Fierro and the notion of “Encounters at the border”. This study is based on qualitative research carried out between 2017 and 2020. We seek to understand the ways in which the themes of the Muralism festival are interpreted and resignified by Latin American artists. We also examine how these artistic practices transform a deteriorated public space, and how the Muralism festival, which is part of the Program San Martin Pinta Bien, constitutes a vehicle to de-stigmatize the neighborhoods, and generate a positive identification with the history and memories of the space.

Sighting the Sound

Characterized by ambiguous sexual energy and resistance to male domination and objectification, the visual idiom of punk rock communicated feminist prospects through the performance of fashion. This essay interprets the creative agency of Alice Bag, Marina “Del Rey” Muhlfriedel, Trudie “Plunger” Arguelles-Barret, and Helen “Hellin Killer” Roessler as Latina and Hispanic sono-spatial artists in the early days of L.A.’s punk subculture. Situating the performance practices of Hispana (Iberian) women alongside the Latina (hemispheric Latin American) artists, L.A. punk is situated within a Spanish-American borderlands matrix of meaning, where non–Western European roots of women in punk gain coherence as a specifically bordered set of historical circumstances. By embodying musical performativity as creators of a relational theatre of musical experience, the study asserts that women punk fans redefined how alternative music was generated, circulated, and consumed.