American Art Research Articles

Tokenized and Tactile: Frank Stella’s Geometries (2022)

On 8 September 2022, the American artist Frank Stella launched a series of twenty-two digital art works minted as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in collaboration with Arsnl, the in-house platform by the Artist Rights Society (ARS). Titled Geometries, each “package,” included the NFT that would affirm ownership and the corresponding geometric model designed by Stella in JPG (image), MP4 (video), SLS (3D printing), GLB (virtual reality and model manipulation), and USDZ (augmented reality). This range of digital formats alludes to two of Stella’s innovations in this space: the license to remix and manipulate his models, and the ability to 3D print Geometries at any color, scale, and material. Taking Stella’s foray into the NFT-space as a starting point, my article focuses on an emergent trend by artists engaging with Web3: the effort to bridge the physical and the digital by giving tangible form to NFT artworks and what this suggests for the future of digital materiality. The paper at its core seeks to examine the relationship between the physical referents to NFTs at the very moment when new media returns to historical forms.

Teaching Art through Engaging Anti-racist Viewpoints: Privileging an Indigenous Lens

Art teacher educators have obligations to prepare preservice art teachers and researchers to be culturally competent, to understand how to respectfully and knowledgeably include silenced voices into the classroom. Through this paper, we share a collaborative project we engaged with two arts-based researcher student groups toward approaching art learning from an anti-racist perspective using the lens of an Indigenous Pedagogy We demonstrate an Anti-Racist teaching cycle we applied that begins with cultural competency and leads to cultural relevancy. The project culminated with the development of anti-racist lesson plans toward a museum exhibition that utilized recommendations shared by four contemporary Native American Artists. Our purpose was to explore a method for changing the narrative by inserting multiple Indigenous artists’ voices into the classroom conversation.

From a Native Worldview: The Concept of the Traditional in Contemporary Native American Art Practices

This article explores tradition and ceremony in contemporary Native American art. Indigenous scholars and artists use traditional knowledge to navigate contemporary contexts. Shared perspectives challenge binaries, problematic due to Indigenous peoples’ relationship to colonization. The study used Indigenous research incorporating critical theory (Grande, 2015), decolonizing and Indigenous Research Methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021), and Indigenous research rooted in relationality (Wilson, 2008). We examined traditional meanings for Native Americans in contemporary art through reflection and dialogue. Research components included a historical overview, an examination of literature, interviews, and oral histories. Transforming Our Practices: Indigenous Art, Pedagogies, and Philosophies (Ballengee Morris & Staikidis, 2017) was consulted, in which Indigenous artists described artmaking as regenerating collective memory. Suggestions were made to reconsider traditions in Native American art to promote new outcomes in visual arts research and pedagogy informed by Indigenous epistemologies.

Diaspora Modern

Abstract Diaspora is a defining condition of the history of the past century, a prehistory to our disastrous moment in time and also the foundation of our political landscape. Yet it is notably absent in much art-historical discussion of modernism, despite the fact that the experiences of diaspora and migration are often embedded in the lives of modernist artists and other actors; in the formations, networks, and dispersals of modernist institutions and group affiliations; and in the deployment of characteristically modernist artistic strategies (temporal fragmentation, collage, montage, and the readymade) that manifest a dialectical entanglement of self and other. This essay ponders the disconnect between the historical structures of modernism in art and its theorization, and considers the questions: Can diaspora and diasporic thinking help further our understanding of the twentieth century in art? Can it help us in reconsidering modernism from a diasporic perspective today? As prompts for further thought, the text considers four historical episodes in which ideas of diaspora, modernity, and modernism are entwined: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First Universal Races Congress in London 1911; Georg Simmel, Du Bois, and Alain Locke in Berlin and the emergence of a matrix of modern sociological thinking; Mikhail Bakhtin in exile in Kazakhstan and the formation of his dialogical philosophy of language; and Aaron Douglas and Meyer Shapiro at the First American Artists’ Congress in 1936 and in the pages of Art Front.

Research on the Application of the US Cornerstone Assessment Model proposed by National Core Art Curriculum Standards in 2014 in the Performance Evaluation of Music Literacy

The United States issued the latest National Core Art Curriculum Standards in 2014, which address the issues of the overall design and planning of the five art courses of music, dance, drama, and media art. Compared to the 1994 edition of the National Standards for Art Education in the United States, it provides a new content for art courses. Essentially, it proposed cornerstone evaluation model. The American art curriculum has the following characteristics: focusing on artistic literacy and developing students' academic abilities, enabling students to achieve artistic success and achievement through creative practice, and a reverse curriculum design. These have certain enlightening effects on further improving the courses of music in China. This paper mainly discusses the implication of Cornerstone Assessment Model and its application in music teaching and evaluation process.

Ceratum Galeni: An old eponym honoring Galen and his cold cream

Ceratum Galeni is an old eponym honoring the name of Galen of Pergamum (129 to cca 216 CE) and a cold cream he described more than 1,800 years ago. We traced this eponym back to the 14th and 16th centuries in published medical texts by Guy de Chauliac (ca 1300-1368) and Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564). We also found a 4th-century reference in a medical work by Oribasius (ca 320-403 CE) to a mixture of wax and oil of roses based on Galen's cold cream formula. We present the images of a 19th-century apothecary white porcelain jar from Paris, France, on which appears the words Cerat Galeni, as well as a 20th-century oil painting by the American artist Robert Thom (1915-1979), which shows Galen administering his cold cream to a woman. Today, the composition of cold cream is formulated differently from Galen's original version, although the basic concept of cold cream as an oil and water emulsion remains the same. The widespread mention of Ceratum Galeni across the centuries and the popularity of cold creams today are striking examples of Galen's enormous influence on medicine as one of its founding fathers.

Qatipana: cybernetics and cosmotechnics in Latin American art ecosystems

Qatipana: cybernetics and cosmotechnics in Latin American art ecosystems

Scaling Up, Scaling Down

This article explores the shifting perceptual scales of racial epistemology and anti-blackness in predictive policing technology. Following Paul Gilroy, I argue that the historical production of racism and anti-blackness has always been deeply entwined with questions of scale and perception. Where racialisation was once bound to the anatomical scale of the body, Thao Than and Scott Wark’s conceptualisation of “racial formations as data formations” inform insights into the ways in which “race”, or its 21st century successor, is increasingly being produced as a cultivation of post-visual, data-driven abstractions. I build upon analysis of this phenomena in the context of predictive policing, where analytically derived “patrol zones” produce virtual barriers that divide civilian from suspect. Beyond a “garbage in, garbage out” critique, I explore the ways in which predictive policing instils racialisation as an epiphenomenon of data-generated proxies. By way of conclusion, I analyse American Artist’s 21-minute video installation 2015 (2019), which depicts the point of view of a police patrol car equipped with a predictive policing device, to parse the scales upon which algorithmic regimes of racial domination are produced and resisted.

Cultural Awareness Through Music Study: Fostering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Higher Education Vocal Music Curriculum

The educational research study explored ways to bring history into musical art fostering a deeper attentiveness to diversity, equity, and inclusivity in higher education music studies in North America. It explored the historic narrative of the Indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada through music. The study focused on the opera Shanawdithit by Canadian composer Dean Burry, and Indigenous Canadian librettist, Yvette Nolan as an example of how music curriculum can be reconsidered and reimagined. The anthropological and archeological history of the Indigenous Beothuk people - as was taught in Canadian history was filtered through a Western European lens. The musical work reconceptualized the story of Shanawdithit - considered the last of the Beothuk people in Newfoundland and was told from an Indigenous perspective. As well, other notable works by Canadian Indigenous will be presented in this study. As both Canada and the United States explore Indigenous reconciliation, bringing works of underrepresented composers to higher education music study and performance offers a means to foster DEI and more cultural awareness in North American arts curriculum.

Sharon Lockhart's Philosophy of the Casual: Toward an Eco-Cinema of Sociability

Abstract This article considers the cinematic works of the contemporary American artist Sharon Lockhart in the context of what it identifies as philosophies and practices of “the casual,” from the impact of Emersonian aesthetics on post – World War II American avant-garde cinema to Lockhart's unique version of “hanging out,” which resonates considerably with how Leo Bersani defines sociability. Viewing Lockhart's aesthetic signatures (her use of extreme long takes, static long shots, the natural settings of the majority of her films, and the anonymous identity and relations of her subjects, many of whom are children) first as manifestations of Emerson's and Heidegger's efforts to avoid the violence of Western thinking that they call “clutching” and “grasping” at the world, and then as instantiations of Bersani's notion of sociability as “a form of relationality uncontaminated by desire,” the article argues that her films manifest an eco-cinema that proposes living less invasively in the world. It goes on to show that, for Lockhart, this environmental ethos emerges from her use of the casual to delicately craft a cinema of social care that allows its subjects the freedom of not having their relations or identities defined by or within the cinematic frame. Lockhart's cinema is thus unique for deploying an aesthetics that can be described as casual, oblique, and nonchalant, toward ethical ends that have both sociological and environmental implications, what Bersani terms “queer ecology.”

TVOŘIVOST A JEJÍ VNÍMÁNÍ STUDENTY V CZ/USA SPOLEČNÉM VÝTVARNÉM SEMINÁŘI: VÝZKUMNÁ STUDIE ZALOŽENÁ NA UMĚNÍ

Creativity is one of the most emphasized competencies in education. Despite the consensus on its importance, the concept of creativity is understood differently in various cultures. This study presents selected aspects of research on the perception of creativity among Czech and American art students in a joint online class. The project was realized by Art Based Research (ABR) method during the winter semester 2022/23 at KVKTT PdF, UHK, with 11 Czech students and 10 American students of Bc. studies. The project findings show different evaluations of creativity, self-efficacy, and creativity of artworks between the two groups. They make visible the formative influence of cultural context and education on creativity, even within the art discipline. The chosen method demonstrates the possibilities of action research, which, through the process, enables the participants' knowledge to be shaped through active participation. The mutual confrontation or overlapping of different concepts of creativity thus offers inspiration for teaching creative disciplines.

An interdisciplinary framework for evaluating 19th century landscape paintings for ecological research

AbstractAs we contemplate the future of forest landscapes under changing climate conditions and land‐use demands, there is increasing value in studying historic forest conditions and how these landscapes have changed following past disturbances. Historic landscape paintings are a potential source of data on preindustrial forests with highly detailed, full‐color depictions of overstory and understory environments. They display key details about forest community composition, microhabitat features, and structural complexity from a time well before the advent of color photography. Despite these paintings' potential, their scientific applications have been impeded by questions of validity. How truly accurate are the images portrayed in these paintings? How much of an image is an artist's manipulation of a scene to best illustrate an allegory or romanticized view of nature? Following an established assessment model from historical ecology for evaluating resource validity, we demonstrate how scholarship on art history can be integrated with ecological understanding of forest landscapes to follow this model and address these questions of image veracity in 19th century American art. Further, to illustrate the potential use of these historic images in ecological studies, we present in a case study assessing microhabitat features of 10 different paintings. While this paper explores 19th century landscape art broadly, we focus our art historical review in particular on Asher Durand, a prolific and influential artist associated with the so‐called “Hudson River School” in the mid‐1800s. Durand left clear records about his perspectives on accurately depicting nature, and from a review of images and writings of Durand, we find support for the potential use of many of his paintings and sketches in historic forest ecology research. However, we also identify important caveats regarding potential ecological interpretations from these images. More broadly, because 19th century landscape paintings are not always directly transcriptive, and because regional art cultures differed in the 1800s, we cannot within this paper speak about landscape image veracity across all 19th century landscape art. However, in following established methods in historical ecology and integrating tools from art history research, we show that one can identify accurate historic landscape paintings for application in scientific studies.

She Did Know a Few Things: Georgia O’Keefe as an Intellectual

Despite the fact that Georgia O’Keefe is one of the most biographized, analyzed and interpreted modern American artists, her writings, which include voluminous correspondence, numerous artist statements and an autobiographical narrative, remain underrated. Taking at face value the painter’s disclaimers about her intellectual interests and ambitions and her insistence that she was “quite illiterate,” art historians and critics all too often fail to note that even when, as the only prominent female member of the Stieglitz circle, she seemed to accept the role assigned to her by “the men,” she retained her intellectual integrity. Even though she sometimes seemed to confirm such a perception, a closer look at her texts reveals that, well-educated and well-informed, she possessed literary skills on par with her plastic sensibility and imagination. Her use of verbal language, even more than her paintings, testifies to her unique intuition, intelligence and aesthetic sensibility as a quintessential American modernist.

“The Hum of the Conversing Audience”: Ordinary Criticism and Film Culture in American Early Film Theory

AbstractThis article seeks to explore the early stages of American film theory, wherecinephiliabecame a site of aesthetic interest and criticism thanks to the theorization of cinema as a conversational medium. Following Stanley Cavell’s analysis of a distinct form of moviegoing in America, based on the casual conversation about movies, I argue that a reinterpretation of Emerson’s ordinary aesthetics has been at the core of early film theory, especially in Vachel Lindsay’s writings. In order to illustrate the relation between the defence of a new medium and the attempt to define a quintessentially American art form, this article focuses on the concept of “conversation” that Lindsay uses to describe film spectatorship and to provide a new critical apparatus to grasp the specificity of film aesthetics.

Una nuova arte per un nuovo mondo. Martin Heidegger e Barnett Newman


 
 
 Part I
 
 
 
 
 A new art for a new world Martin Heidegger and Barnett Newman
 Stefano Esengrini stefano.esengrini@unicatt.it
 
 
 
 
 François Fédier's contribution to the understanding of Martin Heidegger's thought represents the point from which we start to clarify the meaning of the path taken by the philosopher after Being and Time. The phenomenon of Ereignis as Enowning thus constitutes the horizon within which the possibility occurs for man to encounter his world and take root in it as if he were at home. The need to overcome the crisis that threatens the Western world determines the possibility of experiencing the world in a new way and founding new knowledge capable of giving a measure to our existence on earth. From this perspective, America becomes the place that knows how to symbolically embody the possibility that man has of establishing an authentic relationship with his surroundings and of developing a knowledge that is in tune with this opportunity.
 
 
 
 Part II
 Based on the rethinking of the metaphysical essence of art, we will be able to interpret the work of Barnett Newman as an attempt to give form in painting to the thought of a new start. More specifically, the prominence assumed by color becomes the index of the need to give shape to the space and time within which the world occurs. Thanks to the secret symmetry that exists between Newman and the work of Henry David Thoreau, we will thus be able to clarify the nature of the contribution provided by American art to the determination of a new world that America, more radically than other places on earth, has been able to articulate in unheard of forms capable of projecting a new hope for Western man today and for the future that is destined for us.
 
 
 
 
 

ESCALA Collection: A British Collection and its Connections with the Internationalization of Latin American Art

This article analyses the ESCALA collection (Essex Collection of Art from Latin America), maintained at the University of Essex (UK), and its global role in promoting Latin American art. By examining the trajectory and conceptual basis of the collection, the study seeks to illuminate its contribution, in conjunction with other British institutions, to fostering the construction of a more global and less stereotypical perspective of Latin American art, as established from 1970 onwards by the US critical tradition. This research incorporates insights from theoretical and interpretative interdisciplinary literature while benefiting from the author’s visit to the collection in 2022. By combining scholarly resources and firsthand experience, this study aims to deepen our understanding of the collection’s significance and impact, fostering a more comprehensive perspective on Latin American art.

Marguerite Tollemache in Rio de Janeiro

This article presents new research about the Brazilian travels of the Victorian writer and amateur artist Marguerite Tollemache. During her time in Brazil in 1853–5, she produced drawings and watercolours depicting the landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Petrópolis, now in the Instituto Moreira Salles. The article utilises a series of unpublished letters written by Marguerite and herhusband, William Augustus, in Brazil, and which contain references to the drawings in the IMS.

FRANK STELLA’S NFT COLLECTION: GEOMETRIES

NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) artworks are artistic works that are cryptographically recorded in the blockchain, with limited copy numbers. In the field of art, which has always been closely intertwined with socio-cultural, economic, and technological developments, blockchain technology is now being widely used through NFT artworks. This study aims to examine the NFT collection titled "Geometries" by American artist Frank Stella. The collection consists of 22 pieces and is available on Open Sea, one of the most popular NFT art markets. The evaluation of Frank Stella's NFT collection "Geometries" will focus on its form and content, as well as its relationship with the traditional art world.Frank Stella's art career offers one of the most original examples to evaluate the relationship that Modern and Postmodern art will establish with NFT technology. With this aspect, the artist has transferred the ongoing perspective from minimalism to his contemporary works. Although subjectivity is avoided in the collection, there is a unity of ideas and styles. Utopian-dystopian universes, urban phenomenon, biomorphic forms, space-space relationship come to the fore. In the “Geometries” series, form and form precede the subject in the studies.Studies on NFT artworks in the literature generally focus on the art market area. There is a lack of research that examines the content of NFT artworks or focuses on their relationship with art history. For this reason, it is thought that the study will contribute to the literature.

Estrategias para la gestión del arte sonoro vinculado al espacio público latinoamericano

This article is based on the results obtained from a research on the production processes of sound art aimed at public space in the Latin American context. The objective was to determine the common strategic processes of this type of proposals in the region, so that we could understand their interests and aesthetic characteristics from the functional and logistical perspective of cultural management. Throughout this text we present a theoretical framework that supports and contextualizes the object of study in the delimited environment of Latin America, this is configured from a methodology with qualitative interests based on literary references and personal experiences of contemporary Latin American artists. As a result, we present the proposal of a first version of a production model, which consists of a systematization of strategies taken from creative andoperative methodologies of concrete case studies: works of public sound art occurred in five geographical positions of Latin America throughout the XXI century.

The Tree of Abundance: On the Indigenous Emergence in Contemporary Latin American Art

The Tree of Abundance is an origin story for many nations in the Amazon basin. It recounts a time when all people(s) lived under a mother tree, until those with an ax arrived and the tree collapsed. This is the act of coloniality, which produced a new landscape. The story serves as a conceptual metaphor to analyze the production of an emerging generation of contemporary visual makers of indigenous origin. These cultural producers are set in a historical context, which represents long temporalities of cultural-production resistance and re-existence in Latin America (called here Abya Yala). The text introduces a way to rethink contemporary art in the region under conditions of coloniality and names the artists “embodied territories” since they have particular connections to the places they live and work. This article is organized into three parts presenting artwork by several indigenous and intercultural subjects (with emphasis on those living in indigenous territories of Colombia): (1) A short genealogy from modernity to contemporaneity brings indigenous cultural production to the academic space as another source for a critical understanding of the lived experience in Abya Yala. (2) An account of themes derived from the contested histories highlights how indigenous and intercultural artists produce responses to them. (3) The genealogy and themes are then set in spatial terms offering two case studies, on one hand, the toppling of historical figures by indigenous activists as performance in the public space and, on the other, the exhibitions “Visual Sovereignty” and the “Indigenous Salon Manuel Quintín Lame”. The article concludes stressing how this emerging generation builds on long genealogies of sovereign representation, responding with a wide range of contemporary means (visual, textual, bodily, and multimedia) to issues that still affect their communities (land grabs, resource extraction, racialization, marginality, etc.). Adaptation, resistance, and re-existence occur when embodied territories recognize historical realities (time), location (space), and forms of liberation (action) within coloniality.