Immigrant Artists Research Articles

Public Art at the Global Crossroads: The Politics of Place in 1930s Los Angeles

The relationship of art to place is pronounced in Los Angeles, a world center for the production and projection of visual culture. The historical pursuit of a unifying civic identity grounded in both the arts and assumptions of white Anglo homogeneity led to a fraught public art history as excluded cultural groups fought for a vital stake in Los Angeles's self-representation. As an era when civic resources were challenged and the Federal Arts Project infused new life into public culture, the decade of the 1930s provides an especially ripe opportunity to examine the clash between a conservative, booster vision of Los Angeles and the city as imagined by foreign, ethnic and immigrant artists. This article focuses on artworks by David Siqueiros, Myer Shaffer, and Sabato Rodia and argues that in trying to project a specific (and narrow) image of Los Angeles globally, civic elites ultimately provoked these artists into fundamentally reinterpreting the local. Localized art meant something valuable and they resisted a flawed and false separation of art from place. In laying bare the significance of local places and local histories, these artists produced, in effect, poignant monuments to radical visions of social equality, economic justice, and cultural diversity.

Scenic Spaces in the Diaspora: Theater from Immigrant Artists in Barcelona

Scenic Spaces in the Diaspora: Theater from Immigrant Artists in Barcelona

Ethnic Modernism, 1910-1950

African Americans, European immigrants, and members of other minority groups were, as immigrants and ethnics, part of modernity, as they lived through experiences of migration, ethnic identification, and often, alienation. In many ways, they also participated in, and significantly advanced, the course of modernism in the US; Afro-American artists, including Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, were central to the development of the new American music; modern composers Arnold Schdnberg and Kurt Weill escaped to America from fascist Europe; immigrant artists like Joseph Stella, Max Weber, Ben Shahn, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp helped to establish modernist art; European exiles like Josef Albers were prominently active in such institutions as Black Mountain College while Hans Hoffmann taught the principles of modernist art and abstract expressionism in New York. Important modern art collectors and curators like Leo Stein, Etta Cone, and Juliana Force were the children or grandchildren of immigrants. participation of these immigrants, children of immigrants, exiles, and African Americans among other marginalized groups helped make possible the breakthrough of modernism and its ultimate acceptance as truly American. Looking back at modernism, Harry Levin marveled at the fact that The Picasso could have become the name of a New

Magnùs Einarsson, (Folklorist)

Pauline Greenhill, University of Winnipeg On January 11, 1999, friends and colleagues gathered at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation (CMC) in Hull, Quebec to honour and enjoy our memories of Magnus Einarsson. Magnus had worked at the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies (CCFCS), the folklore division of CMC, since 1969. He had taken early retirement from his position just over a year before his death on December 7, 1998, at age 57, of Wegener's granulomatosis, an extremely rare autoimmune disease. In keeping with Magnus' wishes, the CMC gathering was quite informal; we talked about Magnus' importance to us as a scholar, mentor, and intellectual gadfly. Magnus was born in Iceland, and was raised by his grandparents until the age of ten. He spent his youth in the United States and Italy with his aunt and her American husband who adopted him so that he could stay in the U.S. He completed an M.A. in Folklore at Indiana University, under the supervision of Linda Degh. Shortly after the conclusion of his doctoral research there, where he had also served as Folklore Institute archivist and designed its legend index, Magnus was invited to join the CMC (then National Museum of Man) staff by Carmen Roy, successor to Marius Barbeau. There, Magnus divided his attention between the recording of Icelandic-Canadian folklore and collecting, researching, and curating the Museum's first permanent (1977-1987) exhibit of Canadian folklife and ethnology, Heritage, as well as compiling and publishing a book of photographs, Everyman's Heritage: An Album of Canadian Folk Life (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, 1978), reflecting the exhibit's themes. He was also a significant collaborator in the exhibition and book From the Heart: Folk in Canada (Toronto/Ottawa: McClelland and Stewart/National Museum of Man, 1983), the first all-Canada exhibition of art, which was displayed in museums across the country In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Magnus recorded the life histories and documented the repertoires of immigrant artists, and began work on his three volume magnum opus of Western Icelandic traditions: Icelandic-Canadian Oral Literature (Ottawa, CCFCS Mercury Series #63, CMC, 1991), Icelandic-Canadian Memory Lore (CCFCS Mercury Series #64, CMC, 1992), and Icelandic-Canadian Popular Verse (CCFCS Mercury Series #65, CMC, 1994). At the new CMC facility, he planned and executed three exhibits, including Just For Nice: German-Canadian Folk Art (with Helga Benndorf Taylor, Hull, CMC, 1993). Magnus was critical of CMC's rigid dichotomisation of folk and ethnic culture (the responsibility of CCFCS) from the cultures of Canada's French and English founding peoples (the responsibility of the History division) and aboriginal peoples (the responsibility of Ethnology). One internal memo by Magnus states: We are in the business of recording/studying the cultures of various communities (ethnic, religious, regional, Canadian occupational, social organisations, etc.). Our primary interest is in expressive and symbolically charged communication. …

Editors' welcome, PORTAL, Vol 7, No 2, July 2010

This issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies comprises five articles in its general essays section, and two works in its creative works section. We are delighted with the inclusion of the first three essays: “‘A Bit of a Grope’: Gender, Sex and Racial Boundaries in Transitional East Timor,” by Roslyn Appleby; “Undermining the Occupation: Women Coalminers in 1940s Japan,” by Matthew Allen; and “Pan-pan Girls: Humiliating Liberation in Postwar Japanese Literature,” by Rumi Sakamoto. These essays were presented in earlier formats at the two-day workshop, “Gender and occupations and interventions in the Asia Pacific, 1945-2009,” held in December 2009 at the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS), University of Wollongong. The workshop was convened by Christine de Matos, a research fellow at CAPSTRANS, and Rowena Ward, a Lecturer in Japanese at the Language Centre, in the Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong. The editorial committee at Portal is particularly grateful to Christine and Rowena for facilitating the inclusion of these essays in this issue of the journal. 
 
 Augmenting those studies is “Outcaste by Choice: Re-Genderings in a Short Story by Oka Rusmini,” an essay by Harry Aveling, the renowned Australian translator and scholar of Indonesian literature, which provides fascinating insights into the intertextual references, historical contexts and caste-conflicts explored by one of Indonesia’s most important Balinese authors. Liliana Edith Correa’s “El lugar de la memoria: Where Memory Lies,” is an evocative exploration of the newly emergent Latin(o) American identifications in Australia as constructed through self-conscious memory work among, and by, a range of Latin American immigrant artists and writers.
 
 We are equally pleased to conclude the issue with two text/image works by the Vancouver-based Canadian poet Derek Symons.
 
 
 Paul Allatson, Editor, PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies.

Portraits of Julius Caesar

A Number of statues representing early national heroes, and presumably quite imaginary as portraits, were, according to the ancient sources, erected in Rome before the second century b.c. But our earliest reference to honorific portraits of contemporary, or near-contemporary, public persons relates to the year 158 b.c., when an order was issued, so the elder Pliny informs us, for the removal from the Forum of all statues of magistrates which had not been officially authorized— populi out senatus sententia statutae. What these second-century honorific statues of magistrates were like we do not know for certain, since none of them has survived. It would, however, be a fairly safe conjecture that they were the work, not of Romans or Italians, but of immigrant Hellenistic artists. We have no knowledge of any school of specifically Roman portrait-sculptors of this period; while from Greek lands, and particularly from Delos, comes abundant evidence that Greek portraitists, natives of Athens and of other east-Mediterranean centres, were carving portrait-statues of Roman officials and of other contemporary individuals precisely at this time. Some of these statues carried on the ‘baroque’ tradition of the idealized, heroized, or heaven-inspired Hellenistic ruler-portrait that began with Alexander's likenesses. Others, on the other hand, exemplify a new and highly realistic, one might almost say prosaic, development in Hellenistic iconography.

Anequín De Egas Cueman, a Fleming in Spain

Spain was the haven of many northern artists in the fifteenth century. Architects, sculptors, and painters went there seeking employment in a country then rising to the status of a great international power. Flemish art held a pre-eminent position in Europe, and its influence on the art of Spain soon became paramount—not a surprising phenomenon in view of the naturalism inherent in the aesthetics of both countries.2 Toledo like Burgos and Seville had her full quota of immigrant artists.