Editor’s Note

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NotePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue opens with an essay on the aesthetic and political potential of the modern scrapbook. Makeda Best’s argument focuses on a unique object at the Archives of American Art, one that artist William H. Johnson created through careful selection, transformation, and recombination. I must admit feeling kinship with the scrapbooker when I collect and assemble the content for each issue of the journal. Diverse research materials intersect on our pages, bringing together multiple art-historical contexts, artistic media, and interpretive methods. At its best, the resulting arrangement—in this case, a sequence of articles concerning African American modernist painting and politics, the social practice of gift-giving in the art world of the 1960s, and the economics of nineteenth-century art—exceeds the sum of its parts. Taken together, this research by Best, David McCarthy, and Diana Seave Greenwald presents new ways of reading artworks and primary sources in the field of American art history.In “Archive Matters,” two essays apply inventive methodological questions to American aestheticism, focusing on personal papers at the Archives. Elizabeth Lee revisits her research on Abbott Handerson Thayer by considering what the diary of the artist’s physician-father and period letters might say (or not say) about medical themes in Thayer’s paintings. While archives can appear to their modern users as incoherent or incomplete, Lee advocates for subjecting them to a critical, indeed clinical, gaze that reanimates their contents and thereby an artist’s oeuvre. Erica E. Hirshler brings Thayer into her own reflection on archival absences by looking to the letters he exchanged with fellow painter John Singer Sargent. Hirshler is interested in the gaps in this, like most, archived letters. How do we creatively approach these gaps, Hirshler asks, while remaining critical of the interventions into the historical record that doing so necessitates?With this issue, the journal welcomes curator of African American manuscripts Erin Jenoa Gilbert. This new position is part of the Archives’ African American Collecting Initiative (2018–21), supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. We look forward to Gilbert’s expansion of the collections by and about African American artists, and to the exciting research opportunities her work will surely provide our authors and readers. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 58, Number 1Spring 2019 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703658 © 2019 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.