Editor’s Note

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NotePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe editorial team wishes to acknowledge the artists and art historians whose lives have been lost in the coronavirus pandemic. The Archives is honored to help preserve their legacies. Our upcoming issues will feature responses from the art world to the pandemic and its social effects as well as highlight Black artists whose work paved the way for the current calls for racial justice.This issue foregrounds how the Archives can support innovative arguments about the performance of gender and sexuality. Two research articles, authored by Katie Anania and Miriam Kienle, explore this subject. Anania examines the artistic teachings of Kimon Nicolaïdes at the Art Students League, as documented in the papers of his student Mamie Harmon. Engaging in a queer reading of the archive, Anania concludes that Harmon’s experiments in drawing and work editing her mentor’s 1941 drawing manual enabled a complex negotiation of her lesbian identity. Kienle digs deeply into Ray Johnson’s practice of creating portraits that imagine identity as fluid and relational rather than fixed and absolute. Her analysis centers on a portrait by Johnson of Sam Wagstaff, elements of which are preserved in the curator’s papers, which Kienle links to Johnson’s (and Wagstaff’s) queerness and the homophobic US art world of the 1960s. Additionally, the commissioned essay in “Archive Matters” reflects on Tirza True Latimer’s decades of research on lesbian portrait painter Romaine Brooks and on her recent efforts to look queerly at archival materials. Latimer calls for the critical examination of ephemera, especially that associated with so-called minor artists and artistic genres, as part of a larger effort to rewrite the history of modernism.This issue also includes an essay by ShiPu Wang that mines the recently acquired papers of Chiura Obata. Focusing on the artist’s correspondence, it sheds new light on the relationship between his visual production and the US government’s forced incarceration of Japanese Americans—including Obata and his family—during World War II. We hope that readers will similarly find rich fodder for future research in new collections, a selection of which Archives staff introduce in each issue.New York-based painter Josh Dorman becomes the latest artist to produce original work for the journal inspired by the Archives’ collections. He transforms a seemingly innocuous watercolor—on a 1933 holiday card sent by landscape painter Charles Burchfield—into a poetic meditation on loss, longing, and regeneration. Dorman’s artwork is a powerful statement for the contemporary moment as we reexamine our responsibilities to nature and to one another. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 59, Number 2Fall 2020 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711969 Views: 136 © 2020 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.