By Miguel Tamen (NHC Fellow, 2010–11) What Art Is Like is a comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art. It provides welcome relief from prevailing modes of explaining art that involve definitions, philosophical claims, and critical judgments put forth by third parties. Scrapping all such chatter, Miguel Tamen’s aphoristic lark with aesthetic questions proceeds by taking … Continued
By R. W. B. Lewis (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) and Nancy Lewis This book brings together 160 famous American figures from Pocahontas to Louis Armstrong, providing visual and verbal portraits that illuminate their place in American life. The portraiture – painting, sculpture, photograph, or cartoon – is paired with literary images taken from eyewitness accounts, memoirs, … Continued
By Joanne Rappaport (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) In Beyond the Lettered City, the anthropologist Joanne Rappaport and the art historian Tom Cummins examine the colonial imposition of alphabetic and visual literacy on indigenous groups in the northern Andes. They consider how the Andean peoples received, maintained, and subverted the conventions of Spanish literacy, often combining them with … Continued
Edited by Mary Armfield Hill (NHC Fellow, 1981–82)
By Gianna Pomata (NHC Fellow, 2003–04)
By Gregory Maertz (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) From the early years of the Weimar Republic until the collapse of Hitler’s regime, demonizing modernist art as a symptom of the corruption of German culture was a standard trope in National Socialist propaganda. But how consistent and thorough was Nazi censorship of modernist artists? Maertz’s pioneering research unearths … Continued
By Joanna Woods-Marsden (NHC Fellow, 1995–96) The autonomous self-portrait, a central mode of expression in Western art, was a Renaissance invention. This book explores for the first time the genesis and early development of this important genre as it took place in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Joanna Woods-Marsden examines a series of … Continued
By Martha Woodmansee (NHC Fellow, 1982–83) Analyzing the rise of art in the 18th century, this treatise demonstrates how painting, sculpture and literature were not regarded as valuable art forms before the emergence of a new bourgeois culture. The author reveals how Romantic poets and philosophers invented art as we know it today.
By Terry Smith (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public? Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today’s multifaceted definition, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that an historical approach offers the best answer to the question: What is Contemporary Art? Smith argues … Continued
By Brenda Murphy (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) The importance of Native American realism is traced through a study of the evolution of dramatic theory from the early 1890s through World War I and the uniquely American innovations in realistic drama between world wars.