Emerging Themes, Emerging Voices

Abstract

As American Art celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year, we can sense a shift in the questions scholars are bringing to the nation’s visual history. Th is issue of the journal is dedicated to identifying some of the intriguing directions newer art historians are starting to explore—from inquiries into science and sensation to a “serious” attention to humor. To preface the rich research articles that follow, I off er some observations and suggestions from my catbird seat as editor of American Art and academic advisor for the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s fellowship program. In my daily work, I have had the privilege to converse with scholars from many universities about dissertations and books not yet written, to read fellowship and grant proposals as well as journal manuscript submissions, and to follow presentations at a variety of professional conferences. From these and other interactions, I highlight here a number of scholarly voices. To begin, let me cite some more reasons to celebrate: studies of American art and artists, once considered “inferior” to research on Greek and Roman sculpture and works by Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso, are fl ourishing. Th e founders of the fi eld chose to research U.S. painting at the peril of their academic careers. And Charles C. Eldredge, former director of our museum, likes to recall that there were doubters when he launched this journal in 1987—colleagues who predicted it could not endure. He commented then that American art history had only come of age with the nation’s bicentennial, noting: “It took a new generation of historians to embrace art that owed as much to the Oregon Trail as to the Appian Way.”1 Subsequent decades have proven their bold gamble successful. Th e journal heads into its third decade amid a wealth of programs and resources related to American art history that could not have been foreseen at the time of its birth. Th e fi eld has more professors, students, fellowships, prizes, publication opportunities, and funds for exhibitions than ever before as well as a growing professional organization, AHAA (the Association of Historians of American Art).2 Just in the last year, the attention paid to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 2006 reopening, with its new Luce open-storage study center and Lunder conservation labs, and to the National Portrait Gallery’s reinvention of itself as a more lively venue for contemporary art has been remarkable. Commentaries