Art Colony Research Articles

Like Drifting Sand Dunes: Noisy Lessons in a Porous Field

AbstractThis paper argues that the teaching of art in Higher Educational Institutions is inherently paradoxical. Informed by the transgressive and interdisciplinary qualities of contemporary artistic practices, education nevertheless is often made to fit into a reductionist, outcome‐oriented and individualistic discourse. Taking a weeklong workshop at the Nida Art Colony in Lithuania as a practical axis for its reflections on the fluid nature of art education, the paper discusses possibilities of extending beyond pedagogical, political, human/nonhuman and other borders and treating ‘noise’ and other ‘interferences’ as opportunities for transgression and dialogue. This workshop with students from the Vilnius Academy of Arts took place in September 2022, at a time characterised by the Russia–Ukraine war. Nida's proximity to Russia's exclave Kaliningrad, its location on the narrow Curonian Spit, and its immediate environment characterised by woods and sand dunes provide this paper with a setting for a discussion about a variety of borders: territorial borders, border pedagogies, perceived borders between human and nonhuman entities, between land and sea, and so on. Borders are described as dominant indicators of power and distinction, while educational standards and instruments of measurement often replicate similar distinctions between the known and the unfamiliar. Yet, borders can also be shifted while new connections and dialogues across real and conceptual borders can be forged in a porous process that is predisposed towards flexible scenarios characterised by the ‘not‐yet’. The surrounding forest and wetlands and huge drifting sand dunes in Nida become analogies for the changing structure of the workshop, silently yet overpoweringly advocating for a mutable pedagogy. Analysed through the work of various contemporary artists, this nonhuman intrusion into a pedagogical and creative experience is both undefined and vulnerable, unlike the preordained structures of attainment targets often associated with contemporary schooling.

Inclusive Contemporary Art Communities in China: From Avant-Garde Songzhuang Art Colony to Poetic Xiangshan Art Commune

Inclusive Contemporary Art Communities in China: From Avant-Garde Songzhuang Art Colony to Poetic Xiangshan Art Commune

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930 ed. by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson

Reviewed by: Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930 ed. by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson Bariş Ülker Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930. Edited by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Pp. ix + 277. Cloth. $103.50. ISBN 978-1-3501-8232-5. This volume, edited by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson, uncovers both the practices of ethnic othering and the resistance mechanisms in these processes, as they emerged within the visual and design arts. Although the essays concentrate on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1920s, during which period the arts were heavily influenced by the rise of ethnography and anthropology, the authors [End Page 379] extend their discussion on the creation of racial inequalities and systems of domination backwards and forwards in time. At the intersection of academic works related to postcolonialism, race, the history of ethnography and anthropology, Orientalism, and memory studies, these essays reflect on the complex relationships between power and knowledge. From a broader perspective, one of the most crucial contributions of this edited volume is its regional focus on Scandinavia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. These regions not only reveal transnational connections in terms of geopolitical identities, but also generate linkages between migration patterns, linguistic developments, and collaborative ethnographic work. Therefore, the eleven chapters in this edited volume intend to go beyond Edward Said's binary model (depicted in Orientalism) by analyzing the fine and applied arts from Eastern and Northern Europe and Russia. In the first chapter, Patricia G. Berman explores how the concept of race, mediated through photography, became a crucial element in Norway's nation-building process. By photographing military recruits and gathering anthropometric data in the eastern and southern regions of the country, military physician Carl Oscar Eugen Arbo—as Berman argues in reference to the photographic theories of Margaret Olin, Deborah Poole, and Elizabeth Edwards—measured the physical capacity of the nation, encouraged a classification system for racial research through international collaborative work, promoted the authentic representation of the Norwegian mountain farmer for the nation-building process, and influenced the foundational arguments for the development of eugenics and racist ideologies in Europe and America. Similarly, Bart Pushaw's chapter considers the representation of colonial subjects within the Danish Empire through the interactions between archeologist Daniel Bruun and artist Johannes Klein, stemming from their expeditions, which would become part of various exhibitions. In contrast, Pushaw also depicts the works of Sámi artist John Savio as an example that challenges the anthropological gaze of the state, narratives of racial biology, and the perception of docile indigenous subjects. Alison W. Chang reflects, in chapter 3, on the oeuvre of Pia Arke, a Greenlandic/Danish artist, who used archival photos, reports, and collections to question untold and forgotten stories of Danish colonization in Scoresbysund, Greenland. Connecting Arke's uses of space, photographs, and stories to Homi Bhabha's understanding of "in-between" spaces, Chang illustrates the reconstruction of narrative and memory through Arke's personal stories, the materiality of images, and a critique of colonial mapping. In chapter 4, Robert Born and Dirk Suckow illustrate the multilayered Orientalist discourses in Transylvania and Hungary during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by juxtaposing representations of Roma people in texts and images with the construction of national identities and music as a platform of mobilization and differentiation. In a complementary manner, in chapter 5, Marsha Morton analyzes the Orientalism surrounding Leopold Carl Müller's paintings of Egyptians, which [End Page 380] she situates between middle-class Viennese liberalism's interpretation of ethnic identities through ethnographic comparisons and the increasing influence of physical anthropology with its emphasis on biological racial difference, nationalist tensions, and prejudicial narratives. Elaborating on the idea of unity in diversity, Rebecca Houze points to the ethnographic interests of the Gödöllö art colony near Budapest (set up by middle-class artists and intellectuals who blended folk art practices and contributed to the production of a rich material culture), while Barbara Larson examines Paul Gauguin's visual representations of the Celts of Brittany through his interest in comparative linguistics...

Review: The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos, by Geneva M. Gano

Geneva M. Gano’s The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos examines how the three titular sites both produced and were produced by modernism. It does more than simply point out that modernism arose beyond the iconic metropolitan zones of Greenwich Village, Bloomsbury, or the Left Bank. Instead, size matters. Modernism’s penchant for going small—the little art colony existed alongside little magazines, little theaters, and coterie salons—was on the one hand a rejoinder to the excesses of capitalism, which enabled art to seem unmoored from the demands of the marketplace. Yet on the other hand, as little art colonies exerted outsized influence on a modernism that surpassed their village boundaries, they were inextricable from the global capitalist networks within which they were unevenly situated.Going small also serves as a provocative methodology, one that allows Gano to unpack some of modernism’s more unwieldy concepts—aesthetics, primitivism, or the idea of the modern itself—in satisfyingly specific ways enabled by attention to the local. Going small means the book is able to go big in its interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, a focus on location allows for paired chapters on each site that skillfully interweave cultural history and literary analysis.For example, in Part I: Carmel, the first chapter provides a history of how the village was built via Chinese displacement after the Exclusion Act of 1882. In the wake of this anti-Asian violence, real estate developers successfully substituted the Chinese with a creative class that became a tourist draw—providing local color at the expense of people of color. This delivers the backdrop for Gano’s analysis of Jack London’s 1913 novel Valley of the Moon, which centers on the nexus of “native” and “neo-native” in the little art colony. In doing so, Gano illustrates the workings of modernist primitivism not as an abstraction, but in granular—and often financial—terms. Part II’s second chapter follows up by contextualizing and analyzing Robinson Jeffers’s 1925 long poem “Tamar,” arguing that its use of the primitive critiques the global forces of capitalism and colonialism upon which the little art colony was predicated.Part II: Provincetown and Part III: Taos do similar interdisciplinary work, historicizing the construction of these places as little art colonies and addressing key texts that both arose from them and aided in their creation. Gano describes Provincetown’s emergence through intimate stories of community formation before turning to Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play The Emperor Jones, which takes place in the Caribbean but is convincingly linked to its place of production. She focuses on the relation between modernist artists and ceremonial Indigenous dance in Taos’s early twentieth-cenutry tourism industry before pivoting to D.H. Lawrence’s 1925 St. Mawr as an appraisal of the little art colony’s complicity with the economic world-system.Well researched, compellingly argued, and lucidly written, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism adeptly speaks to readers across U.S. history, American literature, and modernist art history to urge serious reflection on the imbrication of place, culture, capitalism, and creativity.

Australia in the World’s Art Colonies

Work by Australian artists made during time spent overseas in art colonies before returning, and the work of artists who lived in art colonies overseas and did not return has almost entirely been erased from Australian art history. Therefore the participation of Australian artists in art colonies across the world has largely remained unwritten. This paper presents an outline and framework for further work to be done on the histories of art colonies in Australian art history. It is first of all something of an exercise in an expanded art history, including those artists who should rightly be part of a more widely encompassing account of Australian art, but, more than this it proposes that the art colony as such contests the idea of a national art history: that, beyond the specifics of any particular art colony, the principle of the art colony—of artists from different countries or from different regions of the same country living and working together—challenges the assumption that modern art must come from an identifiable people and place within modern state formations. We argue that the art colony is always international or even transnational in character. Therefore the art colony in modern art might be best understood as a forerunner to contemporary art in its crossing of spatial and temporal borders and its flattening of (if not its complete doing away with) imposed hierarchies.

Disonanca kao koncept očuvanja graditeljskog nasleđa - studija slučaja Beogradskog sajmišta

Belgrade Fairground, built in the 1930s, was the first urban complex designed according to modern principles and the first physical structure built in Belgrade on the left bank of the Sava. During its existence, the complex has undergone radical changes - from a fairground, through a concentration camp during World War II, an art colony in the post-war period, to its current state as a marginalized urban segment inhabited by the homeless, with uncontrolled commercial development . These transformations over time have resulted in the creation of numerous layers of identity, which, from a contemporary point of view, the space itself should testify to. The paper examines the transformations that have taken place in the space, and refers to the mutually opposed events that to some extent have hindered the recovery and development of the former Belgrade Fairground. The paper, in the form of a case study, analyzes the space by exploring the application of dissonance in preserving and revitalizing the architectural heritage, since the concept of dissonance is important for articulating opposing meanings and emphasizing the plurality of values. In order to shed light upon all the characteristic phases of the complex's existence, its morphological transformations and then its functional transformations were analyzed, followed by a presentation of how its social relationship with the Belgrade Fairground has been transformed. Accordingly, the ultimate goal was to find a way to manifest the diversity of the fairground's value and its re-perception as belonging to the urban space.

Ferenczy Károly kettős portréja Schönherr Antalról és Schönherr Gyuláról (1902)

In the autumn of 1902 Károly Ferenczy (1862–1917) painted a double portrait of Gyula Schönherr (1864–1908) and his father Antal Schönherr (†1905) in Nagybánya (today Baia Mare, Romania). Antal Schönherr was the police chief of the town, but his son had long been living in Budapest and pursued a serious career as a historian. After the onset of his career in the Archives of the Hungarian National Museum, he edited the periodical Turul rallying heraldic research, the periodical of book historical research Magyar Könyvszemle, the volumes of the Millennial Hungarian History, and he became the secretary of the National Inspectorate of Museums and Libraries set up in 1897. In 1896, at the age of 32, he became corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He supported the art colony of Nagybánya from its foundation. Károly Ferenczy was a friend of the Schönherr family in Nagybánya; he painted the double portrait as a present to Gyula Schönherr. Gyula Schönherr’s unpublished letters to his family reveal the process of portraiture (with references to the creative methods of the painter), the display and reception of the portrait in Budapest and its subsequent fate, the further contacts between Ferenczy and his painter friends and the Schönherr family. After Gyula Schönherr’s death the painting remained with the family, who donated it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1926, since when it has been in public collections.

Celia Thaxter’s Ecological Realism and the Dawn of America’s Summer Art Colony

Celia Thaxter’s Ecological Realism and the Dawn of America’s Summer Art Colony

The role of art colonies in local development through the example of Cered Art Colony

The current study's topic is the summary of the roles of art colonies in the local example. The theoretical basis of the study was given by the international scientific literature of art colonies and the role of culture in the life of settlements. The matter of research is relevant as an investigation based on a case study has not been made yet on this topic; moreover, it consists of important results for the professionals. On this basis, it can be determined that which factors affect positively the human and natural environment through an art colony. A further advantage of the study can conclude to the possible development ways of culture in the life of villages. The current research, regarding the future, is an ideal starting point to know the role of art in local (and regional) development. The main results of the case study are the tangible effects of the colony on the (natural and human) environment.

The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos by Geneva M. Gano

The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos by Geneva M. Gano

Winslow Homer and His Cullercoats Paintings: An American Artists in England's North East by David Tatham

Reviewed by: Winslow Homer and His Cullercoats Paintings: An American Artists in England's North East by David Tatham Leann Davis Alspaugh (bio) Winslow Homer and His Cullercoats Paintings: An American Artists in England's North East, by David Tatham (Syracuse University Press, 2021), 90 pp. It has been said that Winslow Homer arrived in the English village of Cullercoats in April 1881 an illustrator and departed eighteen months later an artist. This is something of an exaggeration—we have only to see his pioneering works from Reconstruction Virginia—but it is true that the works in Homer's "Cullercoats manner" display a newfound assurance and maturity worth a closer look. The Cullercoats period has typically been regarded as something of a mystery. With relatively little documentation from or about the artist, these months are often considered merely a transition period for Homer (1836–1910), bridging the Barbizon mood of the 1860s with the later, so-called Darwinian works. Homer specialist David Tatham is too experienced a scholar to be entranced by romantic fictions. He establishes in the book's early chapters that we in fact know rather a lot about Homer's movements in the area and can assert quite credibly how the artist arrived, set to work, and quickly adapted to his surroundings. Primed with a three-week stay in London, mainly to examine the British Museum's watercolor paintings, Homer came to Cullercoats intending to stay only three months. Although he was surely aware of the region's rich cultural heritage, he included few examples of the ancient and medieval ruins in the vicinity. That Homer chose to concentrate on a living community rather than a bygone one is a sure sign of a turn toward pictorializing that was motivated more by inquiry into the present than sentiment about the past. Homer, ever the pragmatist, was also attracted to the area for its reputation as an art colony, which meant easy access to painting supplies, studio space, willing models, and exhibition opportunities. (Homer was also attuned to the value of his work in the marketplace and didn't hesitate to take an active hand in its promotion, even suggesting to one art dealer that putting an attractive girl at the front desk might increase foot traffic.) Of course, it was the hardworking fisherfolk of Cullercoats that kept Homer painting in Northumberland for more than a year. Tatham dispels any tendency to romanticize the village by pointing out that although it had a lively fishing population, it had neither docks nor a fishing market. Its denizens were not hardscrabble peasants carving out a brave existence in the face of encroaching industrialization—in fact, the majority of the town's non-fishing population were commuters making the daily trek by rail to Newcastle upon Tyne. Cullercoats itself (the name is thought to derive from dove, or culver, cotes) was cramped and not at all quaint. Its elevated position above Whitley Bay added geographic interest, especially in times of storms, when the fisherfolk stood lookout there. The village's most significant feature was the new Life Brigade Watch House, a waterfront base for the volunteer rescue squad that monitored the bay for vessels or individuals in distress; Homer often depicted its distinctive, russet-colored roof and clocktower in his Cullercoats works. [End Page 632] Since his days as a Harper's Civil War correspondent, Homer had become adept at capturing how groups of people move, separate, form smaller groups, and regroup whether on the battlefields or in the camps. He developed the ability to create a sense of narrative within a static image, deploying a few figures or hundreds to convey story and mood. In addition, he was one of the first American artists to record the interaction of the races with respect and sensitivity and to depict women as individuals rather than as conventional types. By the time he arrived in Cullercoats, Homer was an accomplished watercolorist, master of a delicate and unforgiving medium, and one that he deployed to great effect in his portraits of the fisherfolk, in particular, its women. Tatham notes that Homer's portrayals of the fishwives and fisherlasses as equal partners with the men...

Dwelling in Strangeness: Accounts of the Kingsley Hall Community, London (1965-1970), Established by R. D. Laing

This article explores archival accounts of the experimental community, Kingsley Hall (1965-70), established by R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist. The paper contributes to renewed interest in Kingsley Hall, R. D. Laing's radical psychiatry and UK counterculture. Archival sources enable not only the further exploration of already known figures but also let us hear previously unheard voices. Following a discussion of archival materials, the Hall is analyzed thematically and historically as (i) an inner spaceship; (ii) an embattled middle-class countercultural plantation; (iii) a site of spiritual renewal and development; (iv) a single-building arts colony; and (v) a countercultural experiment. Finally, it is argued that with re-evaluation of 1960s and 1970s counterculture now underway on the Left, the Hall’s experiment in Laingian countercultural psychiatry—as we may fittingly call it—may yet inform future radical projects (in mental health and beyond).

Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media. Edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. vii+289.

<i>Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media</i>. Edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. vii+289.

Искусство мастеров Французской слободы Санкт-Петербурга в разнообразии его видов: к вопросу о параметрах творческой деятельности французской художественно-ремесленной колонии при Петре I

В статье предпринимается попытка видовой классификации произведений искусства, созданных мастерами Французской слободы Санкт-Петербурга в эпоху Петра Великого, на документах прослеживается участие французов в организации и выполнении художествен- ных работ. С помощью метода структурной систематизации, примененного к массиву данных о проектах, осуществленных мастерами слободы, было выяснено, что последние в большей степени реализовались в качестве декораторов. Мастера слободы внесли определяющий вклад в развитие монументально-декоративной и садово-парковой скульптуры в России, архитектуры интерьера и ландшафтного проектирования. Французам не было равных по объемам произ- веденных работ и по видовому разнообразию в декоративно-прикладном искусстве, при этом по своему значению и влиянию в архитектуре зданий они сильно уступали представителям немецкой и итальянской ветвей россики.

Communes in America, 1975–2000 by Timothy Miller

Reviewed by: Communes in America, 1975–2000 by Timothy Miller Devin R. Lander (bio) Communes in America, 1975–2000 By Timothy Miller . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019. 280 pages, 6″ x 9″. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Timothy Miller, professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, has done more important work on the history of intentional communities in the United States than any historian I can think of. Communes in America, 1975–2000 is the third and final book in his series that examines the history and relevance of American communes from 1900 to 2000 and includes the previous volumes The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America (1998) and The '60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (1999). Collectively they represent a groundbreaking approach to the subject by deeply mining the archival record, oral history, and quantitative methods. According to the Foundation for Intentional Community's database, there are currently forty-seven "established" (including four or more adults in residence and in existence for at least two years) intentional communities in New York State, which is more than any other state except California, Washington, and Oregon. 1 New York has a long and varied history as the home of prominent intentional communities ranging from the Shakers settling in New Lebanon in the late eighteenth century, the Oneida Community's founding in 1848, and the establishment of the turn-of-the-century communal art colonies of Roy-croft in East Aurora and Byrdcliffe near Woodstock, to the Gate Hill Cooperative avant-garde artists' commune cofounded by John Cage in 1954 near Stony Point and Timothy [End Page 392] Leary's psychedelic commune residing on a 2,500-acre estate in the village of Millbrook, all of which are touched upon in Miller's series. His most recent work also notes the important communal Hindu ashrams Shree Muktananda Ashram in the Catskills and Shanti Mandir in Walden, as well as the Buddhist communes Dai Bosatsu Zendo and the Zen Mountain Monastery, also both in the Catskill mountains. The number and variety of intentional communities that called New York State home is truly amazing. In the preface of Communes in America, 1975–2000, Miller outlines his criteria for inclusion in his study, which is consistent with the previous volumes and includes the following four "must haves" that a group must possess to be considered an intentional community: 1. The group must be gathered on the basis of some kind of purpose or vision and not simply just people living together by chance or family ties. 2. The group must live together on property that has some clear physical commonality. 3. The group must have some kind of financial or material sharing. 4. The group must consist of at least five adults who are not related by blood or marriage. Miller adds that to be considered for the study, a group also must have "a sense of being withdrawn or set apart from conventional society," which is why he does not include Native American tribes, which he rightfully defines as being of the conventional society of their time and place, not outside it. Miller also does not include groups such as monasteries or convents belonging to traditional religious institutions. Communes in America, 1975–2000 is broken down into seven thematic chapters and two appendices. Chapters 2 and 3 illustrate how intentional communities reacted and adapted to social and environmental challenges in the larger society through such innovations as cohousing communes and ecovillages. Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to intentional communities with a spiritual purpose, and chapter 6 outlines activist and social justice communities, including feminist and LGBTQ groups. Chapter 7 investigates the often negative public perception of intentional communities during the period of 1975–2000 as a result of tragedies such as the mass suicides at Jonestown and Heaven's Gate and the deadly assaults on MOVE and the Branch Davidian compounds. Miller cautions the reader not to paint all intentional communities with the same brush based on these horrifying (but rare) catastrophes. The appendices provide excellent quantitative material drawn from the entire series as well as Miller's other works on the subject. Appendix A uses evidence going back...

From Abramtsevo to Zakopane: Folk Art and National Ideals in Russia and Eastern Europe

Folk art revivals were incubators for modernist movements in painting, sculpture, architecture, applied arts, and performing arts. The upsurge of national sentiment in late Imperial Russia and official economic support of handicraft industries (known as kustar’) promoted the marketing of wood crafts and textiles made at Abramtsevo, Talashkino, and other centers in western Russia and Ukraine. Parallel developments drew upon both folk traditions and patriotic ideals in the central and eastern European countries that had suffered territorial encroachments by Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Artists’ groups and art colonies showed special respect for regional landscapes, peasant communities, and local artistic traditions. Their activities reflected nationalist ideologies, as well as practical, economic, and philanthropic concerns. The variety of circumstances and motivations sheds light on the phenomena of art colonies, new valuations of applied art forms, and the enduring importance of education in traditional crafts

From Abramtsevo to Zakopane: Folk Art and National Ideals in Russia and Eastern Europe

Abstract Folk art revivals were incubators for modernist movements in painting, sculpture, architecture, applied arts, and performing arts. The upsurge of national sentiment in late Imperial Russia and official economic support of handicraft industries (known as kustar’) promoted the marketing of wood crafts and textiles made at Abramtsevo, Talashkino, and other centers in western Russia and Ukraine. Parallel developments drew upon both folk traditions and patriotic ideals in the central and eastern European countries that had suffered territorial encroachments by Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Artists’ groups and art colonies showed special respect for regional landscapes, peasant communities, and local artistic traditions. Their activities reflected nationalist ideologies, as well as practical, economic, and philanthropic concerns. The variety of circumstances and motivations sheds light on the phenomena of art colonies, new valuations of applied art forms, and the enduring importance of education in traditional crafts.

The linear and curvilinear relation between personality and subjective well-being in visual artists: Perceived creation stress as a mediator.

The aims of this study were to investigate the associations among personality traits, perceived creation stress, and life satisfaction in visual artists, as well as examine the mediating role of perceived creation stress. We recruited 201 visual artists in Beijing's Songzhuang art colony to participate in this study and used the Mini International Personality Item Pool-Five-Factor Model measure, the Perceived Creation Stress Scale, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Extraversion and conscientiousness positively predicted life satisfaction, and conscientiousness was negatively associated with creation stress. Positive U-shaped curvilinear relationships between personality traits and life satisfaction (neuroticism, conscientiousness, extroversion, and agreeableness) characterized the nonlinear relationship model. Meanwhile, perceived creation stress mediated the relationship between conscientiousness (both linear and quadratic) and life satisfaction. Our findings highlighted the dark-side traits (e.g., neuroticism, introversion, low agreeableness, and conscientiousness) associated with visual artists' subjective well-being.

Carlotta Speaks: The Letters of Carlotta Monterey O'Neill to Gene Baker McComas, 1918–1952

Carlotta Speaks: The Letters of Carlotta Monterey O'Neill to Gene Baker McComas, 1918–1952

Performing Gender, Class and Nation: Rukmini Devi Arundale and the Impact of Kalakshetra

Rukmini Devi Arundale, herself a choreographer and dancer, is considered one of the key figures in re-creating Bharatanatyam. Through her utopian arts colony, Kalakshetra, started during the movement towards Indian independence, she taught what she deemed to be a classical, religious and aesthetically pleasing form of dance. Her rejection of what she termed vulgarity and commercialism in dance reflects her Theosophical worldviews and her class position in a rapidly changing South India. The article examines the ways in which her understanding of Bharatanatyam developed in the context of contested forms of nationalism as a gender regime that contributed to creating proper middle-class, Hindu and Indian subjects. It also examines the impacts of this form of cultural heritage relating to gender, culture and nationalism in today’s globalised South Asian dance scenario.