Chief Curator Research Articles

NEW FACTS ABOUT THE LIFE AND WORK OF THE FIRST RUSSIAN RESTORER A.F. MITROKHIN (1765-1845)

Restoration is one of the most important areas in preserving the world’s cultural heritage. Th e 19th century is a landmark in the history of restoration. At that time, it turned from a private practice of self-taught artists into a real scientifi cally based discipline. Many European countries have faced the problems of cultural heritage preservation, and everywhere they were solved in diff erent ways, depending on local peculiarities and experience. Th is article deals with previously unknown facts from the life and activity of the fi rst Russian restorer Andrei Filippovich Mitrokhin, who was born and studied painting in the town of Toropets. He served as a simple soldier, then on duty he ended up in Saint Petersburg, where he was soon granted a valet at the Hermitage. His career developed under Franz Ivanovich Labensky, who assumed the position of chief curator of paintings in the Hermitage Gallery in 1797. Mitrokhin’s role in the history of Russian restoration and, in particular, the Hermitage cannot be overestimated. He not only restored paintings and trained several apprentices, but also worked independently on the development of new methods of restoring paintings. By mastering new techniques and methods of mechanical restoration, Mitrokhin and his students managed to preserve more than a thousand paintings from the Hermitage collection, many of which are painting masterpieces. Unfortunately, some aspects of Mitrokhin’s biography, especially his life outside the Hermitage, have long been overlooked by scholars. This paper examines the problem of his alleged date of birth, family and friendship ties, etc. Th e archival data cited by the author allow us to take a fresh look at Mitrokhin as a restorer, and also shed light on some socio-cultural aspects of his time.

Review: This Must Be the Place: An Oral History of Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, by Aimé Iglesias Lukin

Book Review| April 01 2023 Review: This Must Be the Place: An Oral History of Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, by Aimé Iglesias Lukin This Must Be the Place: An Oral History of Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, edited by Tie Jojima and Karen Marta. New York: Americas Society and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, 2022. 431 pages. Paperback $35.00. Niko Vicario Niko Vicario Amherst College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2023) 5 (2): 153–154. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2023.5.2.153 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Niko Vicario; Review: This Must Be the Place: An Oral History of Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, by Aimé Iglesias Lukin. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 April 2023; 5 (2): 153–154. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2023.5.2.153 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search This book, published at the tail end of the two-part exhibition of the same name, expands on the doctoral dissertation research of Aimé Iglesias Lukin, the director and chief curator of the Americas Society. Both the exhibition and the book make valuable contributions to the study of art made in and in relation to New York City, to the history of art made by artists from Latin America, and to the body of scholarship tracing the transnational networks artists from the region circulated through during the late sixties and early seventies. As Uruguayan artist César Paternosto says, with ambiguous affective and political inflection, “It was in New York that I discovered that I was Latin American” (245). The idea that a Latin American identity and culture could be distilled among immigrants in a place outside the geographical boundaries of Latin America proper (13) resonates with studies by Michele Greet and... You do not currently have access to this content.

The History of Posters Is the History of Printing: An Interview with Angelina Lippert

Abstract: This article presents a series of videos featuring Angelina Lippert, the Chief Curator and Director of Content of Poster House in New York City. Poster House is the first museum in the United States dedicated to the art and history of the poster. The museum's goal is to exhibit all types of posters, from silkscreen to letterpress, from all over the world. Lippert details her career, which she began by interning at a New York poster auction house; there, she learned about the inner workings of the poster collection trade, from contracts to historical insights. Lippert shares her expert opinion on what posters are: a public-facing notice meant to persuade that marries word and image. She notes that the history of posters is the history of printing and that posters are a tool or byproduct of commerce with a very close relationship to advertising and commercial art. The discussion explores the history of posters globally, including the importance of the 1860s and stone lithography, the unique style used by New England literary advertisers in the 1890s, the work of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, Blaxploitation posters from the 1970s, and Air India's Maharaja posters from 1946–1972, among other Poster House exhibitions. Poster House also features unique and vibrant programming online, which Lippert explains through a description of her favorite must-watch sessions. She also provides information and advice on how to conduct research involving posters as well as tips on how and why to preserve posters for posterity.

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Documentary archive of Alexander Gaush (1873–1947) in the Simferopol Art Museum collection. Letters of Igor Grabar

This article classifies the archive of Alexander Gaush in the Simferopol Art Museum funds and studies the texts of individual documents. Alexander Gaush (1873–1947) was an artist and graphic artist, participant of exhibitions of the Academy of Arts and the World of Art artistic movement, one of the founders of the New Society of Artists, curator of the Museum of Old Saint Petersburg, professor of painting, a talented teacher. A number of archive documents were previously studied by the chief curator of museum funds Leonarda Rybnikova, the Crimean art critic Sergey Pushkarev; individual pages of the artist’s biography were illuminated by the employee of the State Museum of Saint Petersburg History Lyudmila Aksenova. The archive documents can be classified into two sections: the first includes letters and handwritten documents authored by Alexander Gaush; the second includes letters addressed to A.Gaush and various documents related to the life and work of the artist and his wife Lyubov Gaush (1873–1943). Among A.Gaush’s correspondents are prominent artists: Eugene Demmeni (1898–1969), Nikolay Root (1870–1960), Alfred Eberling (1872–1951), Igor Grabar (1871–1960). The letters of Igor Grabar, sent in 1946–1947, allow us to see a picture of the artistic life of this time. The text of these letters sheds light on the history of the portrait, which A.Gaush, with the assistance of Igor Grabar, tried to transfer to the Russian Museum through the Leningrad Purchasing Commission. A number of facts suggest that this work of art was the Portrait of Lyubov Gaush created by Alexander Sokolov, which was transferred by A.Gaush for temporary storage to the Simferopol Art Gallery in 1946 and accepted into the main fund in 1949.

The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985

The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985

On the Translatability of Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary: A Critical View from the Twenty-First Century

On the Translatability of Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary:A Critical View from the Twenty-First Century Susan H. Gillespie (bio) Scene 1. Moscow, Russia, and Princeton and Philadelphia, USA. September 2015–January 2016. The Moscow Biennale and American Slought Foundation hold a series of events under the title "Straying. An itinerant project exploring urban errors, discrepancies, and territories in Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary (1926)." The project begins with an exhibition and accompanying events in Moscow and continues with symposia in New York and Princeton, and an exhibition and several events at Slought's Philadelphia gallery, featuring historical artifacts, projected media, and research. Scene 2. St. Petersburg, Russia. December 2016. Donald Trump has just been elected President of the United States. The "Critique of Humanities" and "Human Rights" Joint Seminar of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University holds a conference: "Art and Political Engagement. Walter Benjamin's thought in XXI century." The paper reprinted below is presented, in an earlier version, at that conference. Scene 3. St. Petersburg, Russia. November 2022. The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University is in the process of being closed; some of its professors and students are already in exile, others are just getting ready to leave the country. [End Page 871] Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary is a uniquely personal document full of candid reflections on the author's relationship to the 1917 Russian revolution and its reactionary aftermath, his unrequited love for Latvian revolutionary theater-maker Asja Lacis, his career as a bourgeois intellectual and critic, and the future possibility, for him, of writing. First published only in 1980, the journal provoked a spike of interest in 2015–16, in the form of an international series of art events hosted by the Moscow Biennale and the Philadelphia-based Slought Foundation. Does the Moscow Diary have something important to say to contemporary thinkers? The American sponsors of the series of events and exhibitions certainly thought so: Slought Foundation Executive Director and Chief Curator Aaron Levy found it "incredibly contemporary, a manual or a toolbox to navigate the current situation."1 In the following, I will draw on Benjamin's earlier essay "The Task of the Translator" (1923) to think with him about the translatability of the diary, and the experiences it reflects, into contemporary readers' understanding of the historical reality we confront now, almost exactly one hundred years later. "The Task of the Translator," I will argue, offers an approach to thinking about meaning in history that we can use to construe for the diary a uniquely and persuasively contemporary significance. We may do this, Benjamin would have insisted, only by paying explicit, concrete attention to the work's historicity. In employing one of Benjamin's most cited and difficult works to unpack the contemporary significance of a relatively obscure and personal text, I also hope to shed light on underappreciated aspects of the essay on translation. Method, here, is to think through the content of the diary based on the context of its creation and of what I deem to be Benjamin's understanding of the translatability of experience into thought and art, and the readability of the resulting works across time. The fact that, for Benjamin, this time is conceived as "eternal" and that the truth of "pure" language has a redemptive character, is paradoxically what allows him—and his sympathetic readers today—to make philosophical and ethical sense of the crisis Benjamin experienced in the 1920s and of the crisis that faces intellectuals a century later, as we confront the implosion of global capitalism and the violent aggression of Russia within its historical sphere of influence. In his opening salvo in "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin insists: "Nowhere, when it comes to cognition of a work of art or an art form, is consideration of the recipient fruitful. For no poem is meant for the reader, no painting for the viewer, no symphony for its listening audience."2 Nor, for Benjamin, do artworks communicate content. Other forms of writing—journalism, advertising, popular literature—communicate content. Artworks do something greater, and the measure by which we recognize their...

After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival

After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival

This Is for Everyone

After founding and directing the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, and briefly leading The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, Lesley Lokko founded the African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, Ghana, in the spring of 2021. The AFI is a physical, digital and conceptual laboratory of the future. It offers a new model of education that breaks down inherited disciplinary boundaries, brings together the arts, humanities and sciences, and shifts the axis of influence from the global North to Africa and the African Diaspora. Among other important questions, AFI asks: “What if Africa and the African Diaspora held the key to overcoming so many contemporary challenges of race, environmental justice, new forms of urbanism?” In December 2021, Lesley Lokko was announced as the chief curator of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, opening in 2023. Ana Miljački, Jay Cephas, and Igor Marjanović gathered on February 23, 2022 (on Zoom) for a conversation with Lesley Lokko about her work on AFI and the future of architectural pedagogy.

The "Soul" of the Museum of Archeology and Ethnography of the IEI UFIC RAS (in Memory of Natalia Georgievna Rutto)

The article is devoted to the bright memory of the permanent head of archaeological funds, chief curator of the Museum of Archeology and Ethnography of the Institute of Ethnological Research named after R. G. Kuzeev, Honored Worker of Culture of the Republic of Bashkortostan, archaeologist, Candidate of Historical Sciences Natalia Georgievna Rutto, who died prematurely 15 years ago in May 2007. The publication examines the main stages of N. G. Rutto's life path (1946-2007). Special attention is paid to the period of her work at the MAE, where she worked her way up from laboratory assistant to deputy director for accounting, storage and exposition of museum funds (1977-2007). Analysis of archival documents and scientific publications, written, among others, by Natalia herself, indicate that she was at the origins of the acquisition of the museum collection of the MAE, made a huge contribution to the formation of archaeological funds and to the development of the exposition and exhibition activities of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography. N. G. Rutto was not only engaged in accounting and storage, but also cataloguing the museum collections of the MAE. In addition, she went on various expeditions and replenished the funds of archeology with new materials. Natalia Georgievna conducted successful research activities. Studying the Srubno-Alakul interaction in the Southern Urals in the Late Bronze Age, in 2000 she defended her PhD thesis, published several dozen scientific articles and a monograph. This publication is based on documents from the Scientific Archive of the Ufa Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, many of which are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, as well as personal memoirs of the author.

Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta

Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta

Doran H. Ross: Generosity. Intellect. Passion.

Doran H. Ross: Generosity. Intellect. Passion.

Doran H. Ross: His Fabulous Fowler Years

Doran H. Ross: His Fabulous Fowler Years

The undervalued power of museum-guided tours: a case study of Xuhui Art Museum in China

ABSTRACT Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, how to attract back visitors has been a major problem for museums across the world. Among diverse museum activities, human-guided tours remain under-studied to date. A post-hoc case analysis on Xuhui Art Museum provided empirical evidence demonstrating the potential power of guided tours. Quantitative methods in content analysis and semantic network analysis were employed to identify general features of visitor comments from both visitor books and social media. An in-depth interview was also conducted with the Chief Curator. Results reveal that the work of ‘jiangjie’, or tour guiding, is greatly appreciated and plays a vital role in improving visitor experience and satisfaction. This study calls for re-evaluation of the functions, potential and effects of tour guiding, and a renewal of live tours for better on-site experience in a post COVID-19 period.

МІНЦ-КАБІНЕТ УНІВЕРСИТЕТУ СВ. ВОЛОДИМИРА У ПЕРШІ РОКИ ІСНУВАННЯ. 1834–1842 рр.

The article is devoted to the first years of existence of the Mints cabinet of the University of St. Volodymyr. Kyiv University of St. Volodymyr was created by decree of Emperor Nicholas I on November 8th (20th) 1833. However, back in September 1833, the State Trustee of the Kyiv Educational District Egor Fedorovich von Bradke issued an order according to which all collections, including numismatic ones, from the Kremenets Lyceum and Vilnius University, closed after the Polish uprising of 1830–1831, should be moved to Kyiv. Actually, this date can be considered the beginning of the existence of the Mints cabinet of St. Volodymyr. In early 1834 M. Y. Yakubovych brought numismatic collection of Kremenets Lyceum from Vilnius to Kyiv. Since at that time Kyiv University did not have its own building, several private houses in Pechersk were rented for this work. M. Y. Yakubovych reported to the University Council that the Kremenets collection consists of 8636 of ancient coins and 9200 coins and medals of the new age. In January 1834, P. O. Yarkovsky was appointed to the post of chief librarian and curator of Mints cabinet. In 1834 he was sent on a business trip to Vilnius, where he had to accept the property and library of the University of Vilnius. In September 1835, along with the library and property, the numismatic collection of Vilnius University, consisting of 2783 coins, arrived in Kyiv. In the following years, the collections of of Theophilpolskyi nobility county school, Uman basilian county school, Lutsk gymnasium were also transferred to the Mints cabinet. In April 1835, the first addition in the «new» Kyiv collection was recorded. Among the donors – the first rector of the University M. O. Maksymovych, governor G. S. Loshkarev, amateur researcher of ancient Kyiv O. S. Anenkov, etc. By the end of 1836, the collection received more than 500 coins and medals. Since 1838, one of the important sources of replenishment of the numismatic collection were treasures, which, by order of Kyiv, Podolskyi, Volyn Governor-General began to come to the university for consideration. During the period from 1838 to 1842, about 20 treasures were examined in the Mints Cabinet. In the new university building, the Mints cabinet received room № 21 on the third floor for arranging the exposition and storing coins. In fact, the Mints cabinet became the first museum institution in Kyiv.

Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art ed. by James Glisson

Reviewed by: Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art ed. by James Glisson Jennifer Van Horn (bio) Folk art, Jonathan Fielding, Karin Fielding, Decorative arts Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art. Edited by James Glisson. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 2020. Pp. 264. Cloth, $50.00.) There is something wonderfully refreshing about this volume, which documents, analyzes, and celebrates the folk art collection that Jonathan and Karin Fielding donated to The Huntington in 2016 for exhibition in the newly constructed Fielding Wing. Perhaps it is the stimulating design, which intersperses scholarly essays with large, color photographs of objects as diverse as quillwork baskets, rachet lighting devices, hearth forks, and top hats. Choreographed before vibrantly hued backgrounds of coral, teal, mustard, rose, and green, artifacts march, swarm, hover, and dance across double-page glossy spreads. The catalogue is a Technicolor spectacle, its sensorial allure especially gripping to readers facing extended museum closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the book recalls the brightly colored walls and sculptural display of select artifacts from the collection in the Huntington's Becoming America exhibit.1 But the images also make a potent visual argument for the Fieldings' "eye" as collectors: Their discriminating choices about what to purchase built a collection with high historic and aesthetic appeal. As John Demos notes in his essay on the Fieldings' furniture, "there is the matter of its look—its sheer beauty. Damn! These makers, these creators, knew what they were about . . . handmade meant personal, and so, too, is our appreciation personal—that is to say, heartfelt, emotion-driven" (69). The Fieldings' path to becoming major collectors began with their purchase of an eighteenth-century house in Maine. Furnishing it with period-appropriate pieces awakened their passion for "everyday objects that have both utility and beauty" (16). The resulting collection, amassed over [End Page 322] twenty-five years and encompassing some nine hundred objects, consists of artworks and artifacts made between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily in New England, often by rural makers (some self-taught) for middle-class consumers. The Fieldings' belief in the democratic appeal of these artifacts, and their commitment to making them accessible to a large audience on the West Coast (where there are few public collections of early American artifacts), emerges clearly in their essay. Volume editor and former interim chief curator of American Art James Glisson shares the Fieldings' excitement over the potential of objects to tell histories of the everyday lives of middle-class Americans in the past. In their animation and vibrancy, these artifacts belie longstanding assumptions that early American artifacts are stodgy, elitist, and conservative. To some extent those associations are deserved. Many major museum collections of American decorative arts formed through the donations of private collectors who began amassing artifacts in the 1920s. These men and women, such as Henry Francis du Pont, Francis P. Garvan, and Ima Hogg, were guided by principles of collecting shaped by the Anglo American Colonial Revival and a "great white men" version of American history; they sought out high-style artifacts from major urban areas produced by famous craftsmen and used by the eighteenth-century political and social elite. Though sometimes they included provincial styles, typically Pennsylvania German fraktur or chests, the majority of their collections testified to eighteenth-century users' quest for wealth, civility, and the attainment of British style ideals. A coterie of historians, art historians, material culture specialists, and curators have demonstrated that early American artifacts can be read against the grain to tell different stories of transatlantic exchanges, of gendered contest, and of dispossession and enslavement.2 However, many collections continue to preserve a skewed version of the American past through their initial formation. [End Page 323] The Fieldings' collecting interests offer a different model for whose stories can be told through the study of American material culture and which objects are most important for public interpretation. The scholarly essays included in Becoming America offer rich case studies of artifacts organized by media (furniture, textiles, landscape and still-life painting, portraiture), unveiling the multiple...

Életek az életben: megjegyzések Mikó Imréről (1911–1977)

The study presents in brief the life of Imre Mikó, lawyer, author of several significant works of legal literature in the field of minority rights in inter-war Transylvania, who was also, briefly, a member of the Hungarian Parliament. The life and activity of Imre Mikó may be divided into two major periods. Before the Second World War, as a student of law and theology, and later as a minority rights advocate he distinguished himself with a wide array of interests, both in the field of law and politics. He was appointed to the minority protection service of the Hungarian Community in this period. His activity was interrupted by the advent of World War Two. During the war, he fell into captivity, and, after his release from the Soviet Union, he attempted to resume his political and advocacy carrier only to be side-lined, spending almost two decades in the menial occupation of bookshop clerk. His belated and partial rehabilitation following his appointment as chief curator of the Unitarian Church is described in the study. The study also makes mention of the newly discovered information regarding the fact that Imre Mikó, under significant duress, collaborated with the Securitate, while at the same time he was himself under surveillance.

CURATORSHIP PRAXISES TOWARDS ‘DISPLACED ASSETS’ IN POST-1989 MUSEUM PROJECTS: TWO EXHIBITIONS AT WARSAW’S XAWERY DUNIKOWSKI MUSEUM

Two exhibitions at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at the Królikarnia Palace, branch of the National Museum in Warsaw: the ‘Inventorying’ Display-Research Project, which was a kind of a public inventory of the sculpture collection (2012) and the Exhibition ‘The Estate. Sculptures from the collection of the Von Rose family and films and photographs from the archive of Zofia Chomętowska’ (2015) are case studies serving the Author to analyse curatorship practices with respect to the collections whose major part is composed of ‘displaced assets’, first of all from the so-called ‘Regained Territories’. In the words of the Chief Curator at the Królikarnia Museum since 2011 and the Exhibitions’ Curator Agnieszka Tarasiuk: it is a troublesome collection testifying to a difficult heritage and not yielding to conservation. The paper’s methodological basis is the museum exhibits’ provenance research conducted by R. Olkowski, L.M. Kamińska, and M. Romanowska-Zadrożna, while its context is found in the programme assumptions of the Strategy for the Operations and Development of the National Museum in Warsaw 2010–2020 worked out by the former National Museum’s Director Piotr Piotrowski. One of its priorities is to clarify the origins of the collections of unknown provenance, and settling accounts with their former owners. Furthermore, the question related to constructing museum’s genealogy and the memory of history of the period immediately following WWII in the new socio-political situation in Poland after 1989 is posed. The position for dealing with collections’ provenance research introduced by P. Piotrowski was liquidated following the Director’s dismissal in 2012. The paper forms part of a bigger whole.

Art of the West: Selected Works from the Autry Museum ed. by Amy Scott

Reviewed by: Art of the West: Selected Works from the Autry Museum ed. by Amy Scott George Philip Lebourdais Art of the West: Selected Works from the Autry Museum. Edited by Amy Scott. Foreword by Stephen Aron. Afterword by Brian W. Dippie. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. vii + 144 pp. Illustrations, selected bibliography, index. $34.95, paper. Splendidly illustrated and richly varied in perspective, this catalogue represents a timely revision of the Autry Museum of the American West. Originally founded in 1988 by famed Western actor and businessman Gene Autry, the museum has progressively reckoned with the imperialist ideology that once defined frontier culture. Edited by the Autry's chief curator, Amy Scott, this collection of fourteen short essays models more inclusive and critical perspectives of an important collection of art that includes John Gast's iconic 1872 painting, American Progress. That title is apt; as Stephen Aron, the original director of the Autry's Research Institute, writes in his foreword, "Almost from its inception, the Autry Museum was a work in progress" (ix). Having merged with several other museums over the years, the Autry recently reimagined its mission around concepts like "convergence," reframing "the American West as an interwoven tapestry of cultures and peoples" (x). Art of the West puts this most recent incarnation on display while also tracking the evolution of interpretive methods. Prior skirmishes in western historiography echo in Scott's lucid introduction, "The Art of the Shared West," chief among them the mythbusting 1991 Smithsonian exhibition, The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920. One of that show's curators, art historian Alexander Nemerov, contributes an engrossing essay ("The Imp; or, The Madness of Charles Deas"), as does distinguished historian Brian W. Dippie, who reflects on dominant western tropes and their arc within the museum. A case in point: the Autry's gallery once titled "Spirit of Romance" now features three themes—"Religion and Ritual," "Land and Landscape," and "Migration and Movement"—that reappear as section titles for the beautiful color plates in the catalogue. The other texts do their part bucking manifest destiny for multiculturalism. Vital indigenous voices and materials emerge, including in Nancy Marie Mithlo's take on the painting of Harry Fonseca, and Lois S. Dubin's explication of Blackfeet, Sioux, and Pawnee beadworks in Great Plains equestrian cultures. On other topics, one wishes for more. There is scant reference to how the Hollywood wealth that built this Los Angeles museum (mis)represented various "Wests" and their origins. And while compelling stories from disparate geographies arise, the texts can seem too brief or too broad in scope. Even a survey catalogue of this kind could benefit from a bit more thematic "convergence." That said, the diverse viewpoints and artworks in this volume remain resounding strengths. Art of the West is both a handsome tribute to the Autry Museum's past and a symbol of its expanding politics toward western art and culture. [End Page 176] George Philip Lebourdais Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis Stanford University Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Architects in the Eye of the Storm: Reflections on Teaching Southeast Asian Art in a University Museum

Cornell University began collecting Asian art in the 1950s. Today the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (HFJM) contains more than 10,000 works acquired through the generosity of alumni, faculty, parents and friends. As a professor at Cornell, I have the great pleasure to work with Ellen Avril, the Johnson's chief curator and curator of Asian art, to build certain areas of the collection, particularly masks, puppets, textiles and story cloths. The high point of my teaching experience at Cornell has been introducing these objects in my seminars, especially "Shadow Play: Asian Art and Performance" (ARTH 4852/6852, ASIAN 4442/6646), now in its third iteration. With funding from the Cornell Council of the Arts, I was able to invite guest artist Dr Gusti Putu Sudarta, musician, composer, puppeteer and dancer with deep roots in traditional Balinese forms. With Dr Sudarta, I had the students experiment with making their own shadow puppets. My essay, which follows, was inspired by this seminar and by recent gifts to the HFJM.