Editor’s Note

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NoteTanya SheehanTanya Sheehan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt is with deep gratitude that I acknowledge this as the final issue of the journal overseen by Liza Kirwin, interim director of the Archives of American Art from 2020 to 2023. It was Liza, as deputy director, who led a comprehensive review of the journal’s operations resulting in its relaunch as a peer-reviewed publication distributed by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. When she hired me as executive editor that year, Liza challenged me to prioritize innovative thinking about primary sources in selecting research articles and reach a broader audience than ever before, while providing her unwavering support and excitement for the work. In every issue we produced together, managing editor Emily D. Shapiro and I relied on Liza’s deep knowledge of the Archives’ collections and the artworld figures represented in them, built over a remarkable forty-three-year career at the institution. Liza’s wisdom, however, extends far beyond the facts of American art. She possesses a unique combination of critical acumen, generosity of spirit, and sensitivity to the human relations at the heart of any collection. Emily and I dedicate this issue to her.“New Research” opens with efforts to think about American art history as a network of relations. Engaging material in the Archives related to Polish-born painter Henryk Stażewski, Marta Zboralska asks how we can better understand American art through a non-American’s work. Martyna Ewa Majewska underscores the collaborative structure of art-making and artistic development through her exploration of the relationships among Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, and other Los Angeles-based artists in the late twentieth century. Majewska’s essay also reflects on the roles of medium and intermediality in defining American modernism. Writing about holographic art in the 1960s and 1970s, Elizabeth Johnson shares this interest in how medium can serve as a critical tool with aesthetic and political implications.In this issue we debut “Out of the Box,” which invites responses to a single collection at the Archives. In collaboration with Amelia Groom, who introduces the feature here and edited it with me, we asked seven contributors to each select and meditate on one object from the Beverly Buchanan Papers—a recent acquisition that poses timely questions about environmental and racial justice.Similar questions are explored by Ken Gonzales-Day, whose commissioned artwork redraws the flora and fauna in artistic depictions of lynching found in the records of a 1935 antilynching exhibition. As Shawn Michelle Smith observes in her introduction to the work, Gonzales-Day shows how the natural landscape served as unwilling witness to racial violence. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 62, Number 1Spring 2023 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725118 © 2023 The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.