Seeing High And Low: Representing Social Conflict In America

Description:
This cutting-edge volume presents a sweeping view of the evolution of visual culture in the United States through fifteen absorbing case studies by top scholars of American art that explore visual culture's engagement with social controversy. Written especially for this work in lively and accessible language, the essays illuminate what visual forms - including traditional crafts, sculpture, painting and graphic arts, even domestic and museum interiors - can tell us about social conditions, how visual culture has contributed to social values, and how concepts of high and low art have developed. The only work on visual culture to span American history from the early republic to the present and to delve into issues from ethnicity to geography, 'Seeing High and Low' allows readers to follow the evolution of concepts of 'high' and 'low' art as well as to gain new insight into American history. Arranged roughly chronologically, these generously illustrated essays explore topics including the formative role of visual images in the process of class stratification in the Early Republic; the contribution of media images and paintings to debates on environmental crises, race relations, and urbanization in the late nineteenth century; and the difficulties of engaging with social issues while employing a modernist vocabulary.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction Patricia Johnston 1. Educating for Distinction? Art, Hierarchy, and Charles Willson Peale's Staircase Group David Steinberg 2. Samuel F.B. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre: Social Tensions in an Ideal World Patricia Johnston 3. Cartoons in Color: David Gilmour Blythe's Very Uncivil War Sarah Burns 4. 'Ain't I a Woman?': Anne Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and the Iconography of Emancipation Melissa Dabakis 5. Cultural Racism: Resistance and Accommodation in the Civil War Art of Eastman Johnson and Thomas Nast Patricia Hills 6. Custer's Last Stand: High-Low on Old and New Frontiers Patricia M. Burnham 7. Reenvisioning 'This Well-Wooded Land' Janice Simon 8. At Home with Mona Lisa: Consumers and Commercial Visual Culture, 1880-1920 Katharine Martinez 9. Gustav Stickley's Designs for the Home: An Activist Aesthetic for the Upwardly Mobile Arlette Klaric 10. Handicraft, Native American Art, and Modern Indian Identity Elizabeth Hutchinson 11. Alone on the Sidewalks of New York: Alfred Stieglitz's Photography, 1892-1913 Joanne Lukitsh 12. The Colors of Modernism: Georgia O'Keeffe, Cheney Brothers, and the Relationship between Art and Industry in the 1920s Regina Lee Blaszczyk 13. The Invisibility of Race in Modernist Representation: Marsden Hartley's North Atlantic Folk Donna M. Cassidy 14. Caricaturing the Gringo Tourist: Diego Rivera's Folkloric and Touristic Mexico and Miguel Covarrubias's Sunday Afternoon in Xochimilco Jeffrey Belnap 15. The Norman Rockwell Museum and the Representation of Social Conflict Alan Wallach Contributors List of Illustrations Index

Author Biography:
Patricia Johnston, Professor of Art History at Salem State College, is author of Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography (1997). She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University.