Rockwell Kent Research Articles

Unpublished Counterpublics: H. T. Tsiang’s Ellis Island Poems

Abstract The proletarian writer H. T. Tsiang worked and lived in the US under the constant threat of deportation since arriving in the country under the Johnson-Reed Act. This article examines a cache of poetry that Tsiang wrote in the Ellis Island detention center from 1940–1941 and mailed to the painter, book illustrator, and author Rockwell Kent. These poems, which are preserved among Kent’s papers in the form of a toilet paper manuscript, a make-shift chapbook, and typescript sheafs, were roundly rejected by publishers in Tsiang’s time. Yet they speak to his precarious immigration status and his long-term project of constituting proletarian readerships outside US publishing. Tsiang’s unpublished poems, I argue, composed a counterpublic of early Chinese American writing that grew from, and responded to, the conditions of exclusion.Having been detained on both Angel Island and Ellis Island, Tsiang was willing to take the “crooked path” into US cultural memory.

Or, The Whale by Jos Sances: Ark of the Anthropocene

Abstract: This essay offers the first critical consideration of Jos Sances's 14- by 51-foot scratchboard mural, Or, The Whale (2019–20), a work of panoramic cultural-historical reference and eco-political urgency inspired by Moby-Dick . I set the mural in the context of the series of Moby-Dick illustrations that Sances executed in 2016–2018, showing how they record his formative engagement with Rockwell Kent and document his search for a visual language capable of matching the imagistic density and encyclopedic range of Melville's novel. If Rockwell Kent mediates Sances's portrait-scale encounters with Moby-Dick , C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways provides the keynote for Sances's biopolitical sequel to Melville's epic in mural form, a pictorial history of American capitalism inscribed on the body of a life-size sperm whale. Or, The Whale is a summa of Anthropocene visual art, its sweeping narrative of virtuosic hand-drawn scenes presenting densely layered constellations of images that perform the work of cultural memory, unearthing the damage done to exploited peoples and natural resources.

To “Lure On the Gentle Reader”

Abstract While historical depictions of gender and sexuality propagated by outsiders continue to resonate through contemporary representations of Arctic peoples, researchers have only now begun to unpack these persistent ideas and their role in shaping current struggles for access, inclusion, and equality. This article aims to contribute to this growing discussion by examining the depictions of Greenlandic women and sexuality in Rockwell Kent's Salamina (1935). Drawing on a sensationalism that has long been a fixture of Arctic accounts and later media, Kent described Greenlandic women as childlike and highly sexual but still knowable, reinforcing existing hierarchies of power built on constructions of gender and race. This article interrogates the artist's depiction of Greenlandic women and its relation to broader representation of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic.

An Odd Assortment of Foreigners in Greenland: Towards the Political Implications of Arctic Travel during the Late Interwar Years

The interwar years, 1918-1939, saw an increase in both the number and variety of travelers headed to the Arctic. Employing new technologies that allowed the region to become more accessible, knowable, and visible to the globe, these ventures to the North both reflected and contributed to the widespread geopolitical, social, and economic shifts occurring during this period, laying the foundation for how the Arctic is understood and framed today. However, many of these travelers remain marginal or completely overlooked in discussions of the region. This paper argues that greater attention to the increasingly odd assortment of foreigners traveling to the Arctic between World War I and World War II can offer a more nuanced understanding of both the geopolitical transitions underway in the region during this period and the broader political implications of travel. As an initial investigation of this ongoing research topic, this paper concentrates on three of the slowly increasing number of travelers with direct or close ties to the United States who ventured to Greenland in the late interwar years. It focuses on the travels of American artist Rockwell Kent, wealthy California socialite and amateur scientist Louise A. Boyd, and the Hollywood-sponsored filming expedition of German filmmaker Arnold Fanck, who all traveled to Greenland between 1931-1932. Approached not as singular endeavors but as part of the changing complex of Arctic expedition and travel, this paper argues that attention to these travelers provides greater insight into shifts in colonial policy, increasing cooperation between states, and the upsurge in global interest in the island, as well as the shifting relations between Denmark, the US, and Greenland. It also raises issues about the changing relationship between politics, science, and art.

"And words were images to him": Narrative Remediation in Rockwell Kent

"And words were images to him": Narrative Remediation in Rockwell Kent

North by Nuuk: Greenland After Rockwell Kent, by Denis Defibaugh AND When the Colour Ceases to be Just a Colour: Rockwell Kent’s Greenland Paintings, by Erik Torm

North by Nuuk: Greenland After Rockwell Kent, by Denis Defibaugh AND When the Colour Ceases to be Just a Colour: Rockwell Kent’s Greenland Paintings, by Erik Torm

At Home among Strangers: U.S. Artists, the Soviet Union, and the Myth of Rockwell Kent during the Cold War

After World War II, Soviet institutions organized many exhibitions of the American artist Rockwell Kent that bypassed the U.S. government. Promotion of Kent's work in the USSR was an exclusively Soviet enterprise. This article sheds new light on the Soviet approach to the representation of U.S. visual art during the Cold War. Drawing on U.S. and Russian archives, the article provides a comprehensive analysis of the political and aesthetic factors that resulted in Kent's immense popularity in the Soviet Union. Contextualizing the Soviet representation of Kent within relevant Cold War contexts, the article shows that his art occupied a specific symbolic position in Soviet culture. Soviet propaganda reconceptualized his biography and established the “Myth of Rockwell Kent”—a myth that helped to legitimate Soviet ideology and anti-American propaganda.

Editor’s Note

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NoteFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue introduces an expansion of the journal’s “Art Work” section to include both artists’ and curators’ creative engagements with the Archives of American Art. Reaching across the collections, curator Robert Cozzolino composes a visual argument about the ethics of seeing private, and at times unexpected, materials in artists’ archives. Through his judicious selection, juxtaposition, and display of primary sources, he thinks about how and if researchers should disseminate such materials. Cozzolino asks: Are there aspects of artists’ papers that, once uncovered, can or should ever be unseen?If this curatorial intervention sheds light on what it means to see into archives, the essays in this issue’s “New Research” section grapple with the issue of not seeing. They do so by probing a variety of archival absences and ambiguities. Sarah Gordon considers why a New Deal mural by Rockwell Kent, which offered a controversial message of liberation to Puerto Ricans, has been largely lost to history. Christina Weyl asks, through the case of Worden Day, how scholars might fill in the missing or forgotten details of a woman artist’s life and career. Amelia Barikin and Chris McAuliffe treat the remains of an unrealized film script as both a record and component of Robert Smithson’s artistic practice.“Archive Matters” continues the themes of absence and ambiguity by reflecting on what archival rediscoveries can tell us about American art and its histories. In my own essay, I find that unearthing a lost archive devoted to Maine art reveals a great deal, including the critical revaluation of regionality since the 1960s. Julia Bryan-Wilson, however, argues for not allowing the information we uncover in archives to determine solely the meaning of art. She focuses on her own archival find: notes on possible titles for Louise Nevelson’s abstract sculptures.In closing, I wish to note that Liza Kirwin, deputy director of the Archives, has been integral to the editorial team since we relaunched the journal in 2015, working on every issue alongside me and Emily D. Shapiro. It is in grateful acknowledgement of her efforts and support that we add her name to the masthead. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 58, Number 2Fall 2019 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/706830 Views: 95 © 2019 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A Call for Liberty

In 1937, the United States Section of Fine Arts unveiled two murals by Rockwell Kent in the US Post Office Department headquarters in Washington, DC. Depicting the farthest points served by the pos...

Print Nostalgia: Skeuomorphism and Rockwell Kent’s Woodblock Style

AbstractThis essay explores the oeuvre of Rockwell Kent, focusing on his wood engravings and the black-and-white woodblock-style ink drawings he made for book illustrations and advertising campaign...

Illuminated critique: the Kent Moby-Dick

Rockwell Kent is famous for the near three hundred illustrations he made for two simultaneously released 1930 editions of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). But Kent’s illustrations, while widely praised, also mark a complex intervention that was explicitly designed to critique Melville’s own visuality. Kent spent five years researching and designing his project, during which he discovered many of the nineteenth-century textual and visual sources that had influenced Melville, or that Melville had outright appropriated. These include the illustrated whaling chronicles of William Scoresby, Thomas Beale, Frederick Bennett, and John Ross Browne. Kent’s highly stylized illustrations remediate these chronicles and their attendant imagery through three approaches: by directly copying illustrations that Melville used as sources; by hybridizing Melville’s visuality with its actual antecedents; and by pre-empting the “pictures” that Ishmael—the only surviving crewmember and narrator of the book—hopes to “paint,” thus complicating, if not abrogating, the narrator’s will to ekphrasis. In other words, Kent’s images complete a tripartite, verbal–visual signal jamming that could magnify, reverse, collapse, or ironize Melville’s own visuality. Moreover, because Kent identified Melville’s source imagery decades before anyone else, and then critiqued Melville’s visuality based on these hard-earned discoveries, his illustrations constitute a historiographic origin point for the literary discipline now called “Melville and the Visual Arts.” The Kent Moby-Dick, as well as its many foreign translations, is a novel replete with much more than images: it is a novel saturated with an ongoing, albeit wholly visual, dialogue about Melville’s own visual program. It therefore represents a unique category of production, where illustration becomes literary criticism, or, one could say, illuminated critique.

“Graphically individualized”: visual art and representation in Melvin Tolson’s early poetry

This article examines the frequently overlooked poetry of Melvin Tolson to explore how Harlem Renaissance-era poetry contends with visual technological race bias. Building on cultural criticism from bell hooks and Richard Dyer, it looks beyond the Jazz movement to consider how Tolson’s engagement with older visual forms provides a more complete picture of the 1920s’ and 1930s’ cultural moment. In two poetry collections, Tolson turns to visual forms, the chiaroscuro technique in painting and the woodcut print, to emphasize the pervasive nature of racial bias. This article recontextualizes Tolson’s work within 1920s’ and 1930s’ graphic arts culture: Aaron Douglas, Rockwell Kent, and others, to assert a poetics of hybridity between high and low, modern and vernacular, and visual and literary production. Tolson’s appeals to visual forms structure subsections of poems to envision innovative collaboration predicated on strong African American artistic achievement and self-assertion through visual–poetic forms like silhouettes, etchings, and pastels. Tolson’s manuscripts persist as counter-galleries against stereotypical images of African Americans that overwhelmed more dominant visual forms like photography and painting, and remind us that visualization can resist as well as subjugate.

Seeking a new paradise for mankind: Rockwell Kent in Tierra del Fuego and the creation of a new national image for Chile

¿Es posible que un foráneo desconocido en Chile haya sido parte de la construcción de la imagen país de esta nación? Si. Los ojos del explorador foráneo pueden revelar la nación a sí misma y devolverla gradualmente a través de las percepciones generadas afuera de sus bordes. Un ejemplo es la apropiación en Sudamérica del efecto generado por Humboldt en las audiencias europeas. Este artículo trata sobre cómo un trasmisor foráneo contribuyó en la construcción de la imagen país de Chile. El multidisciplinario y talentoso Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) presentó a los norteamericanos sus imágenes y asociaciones sobre Chile existentes en Tierra del Fuego, zona virgen sobre la cual ellos podrían construir mentalmente el paraíso que habían perdido en el cierre de la frontera Norteamericana.

The quiet world: saving Alaska's wilderness kingdom, 1879-1960

A riveting history of America's most beautiful natural resources, The Quiet World documents the heroic fight waged by the U.S. federal government from 1879 to 1960 to save wild Alaska--Mount McKinley, the Tongass and Chugach national forests, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Lake Clark, and the Coastal Plain of the Beaufort Sea, among other treasured landscapes--from the extraction industries. Award-winning historian Douglas Brinkley traces the wilderness movement in Alaska, from John Muir to Theodore Roosevelt to Aldo Leopold to Dwight D. Eisenhower, with narrative verve. Basing his research on extensive new archival material, Brinkley shows how a colorful band of determined environmentalists created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge just before John F. Kennedy became president. Brinkley introduces a lively gallery of characters influential in preserving Alaska's wilderness resources: the indomitable U.S. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, who championed the Brooks Range; charming Ivy League explorer Charles Sheldon, who led the campaign to create Denali National Park; intrepid Bob Marshall, who cofounded The Wilderness Society; hermit illustrator Rockwell Kent, who lived in isolation on Fox Island like a modern Thoreau; nature photographer Ansel Adams, whose image Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake set off a tsunami of public interest in America's tallest peak; and U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Rachel Carson, who promoted proper ocean stewardship; among many more. Wildlife fervently comes to life in The Quiet World Brinkley tells incredible stories about the sea otters in the Aleutians, moose in the Kenai Peninsula, and birdlife across the Yukon Delta expanse while exploring the devastating effects that reckless overfishing, seal slaughter, and aerial wolf hunting have wrought on Alaska's once-abundant fauna. While taking into account Exxon Valdez-like oil spills, The Quiet World mainly celebrates how the U.S. government has preserved many of Alaska's great wonders for future generations to enjoy.

H. T. Tsiang's Proletarian Burlesque: Performance and Perversion in <i>The Hanging on Union Square</i>

Horizontally, in any space, Things must be done. --H. T. Tsiang (Hanging 161) In January 1941, novelist, poet, performer, and playwright H. T. Tsiang used a roll of toilet paper to write a letter to the well-known and politically progressive artist Rockwell Kent from an Ellis Island deportation cell, where Tsiang was being detained on immigration charges. Tsiang, a Chinese American writer who had achieved some notoriety following his publication of three leftist novels and a volume of poetry, was being held by the US government as Case Number 56019/532, and he was biding his time while the judicial system decided whether he was eligible to stay in the country where he had resided since 1926. Tsiang's detention was hardly unique; the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 had sent many of his fellow immigrants to meet a similar fate. Yet his unorthodox response to his conditions was a predictably bizarre supplement to his offbeat literary career: in spite of his vulnerable circumstances, Tsiang refused to behave as a model US citizen, offering friends and colleagues evidence of neither his respectability nor his decorum. Instead, Tsiang sent Kent's letter on the most vulgar signifier of his conditions imaginable, his small cell transformed into a stage upon which he could perform his radical gesture of refusal. As though to reinforce the intentionality of his scatological performance, Tsiang also included a traditional typewritten transcript of his letter. The enjoyment of low culture was always at the forefront of Tsiang's economy of pleasure. Tsiang's profane scroll, now collected and microfilmed in the US Archives of American Art, stands as a testament to his transgressive literary performances. His letter recounts the banalities of life at Ellis Island a sharp sense of humor and quirky eye for irony. Everything is fine and gay, he assures Kent on his toilet paper scroll, the locked door, guard and uniform. Written in the deceptively simple language Tsiang used tremendous sensitivity to double meanings, puns, and the hidden logic of words, Tsiang remarks upon how he created a writing table by folding blankets atop his toilet (redoubling his scatological staging); his discomfort having to interact with all white people; his infatuation Kent's eyes (your eyes as if something carrassing [sic] or some sort--I have no words to express); and his endless amusement at a photograph Kent sent of himself, in response to which Tsiang tabulated the number of hairs he could count on Kent's shinely balled pate: 4+8=11 (Letter, 18 Jan.). Yet language constituted but one aspect of Tsiang's artistic expression, and his correspondence having been written from atop a toilet on such paper was as significant as any of the mundane thoughts he recorded. Throughout Tsiang's career as a writer and actor, his public and private cultural production emphasized performance as much as description, and paratext was always as important as diegesis. In Tsiang's hands, a quotidian form such as a letter could be transformed into a pungent performance of insubordination, just as under his pen a novel could become a dramatic production of proletarian burlesque, a peculiar sexual radicalism that combined a commitment to leftist politics a perverse celebration of sexual misbehavior's revolutionary potential. Tsiang's Ellis Island letter encapsulates his penchant for curating performative scenes that were multilayered, obscene, challenging, campy, nasty, and provocative. In this article I study Tsiang's novel The Hanging on Union Square (1935) to consider how he used textual and paratextual performances embodying each of these characteristics to articulate leftist politics in his Depression-era radical fiction while refusing to meet the heteronormative expectations often assigned to proletarian literature. Tsiang strategically deployed an aesthetic and ethics of performance that both queered radicalism and radicalized sexual categories by emphasizing political, literary, and sexual performativity, (1) His profound sense of the ironies in American life was uniquely attuned to the difficulties confronting those who wished to challenge the repressive sexual mores, oppressive economic conditions, and racial and ethnic prejudices that made a mockery of American ideals such as freedom, equality, and justice for all. …

Looking Backward for the Avant-Garde

by Xiaobing Tang. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. pp. xii, 310. $75.52 cloth. The cover of Xiaobing Tang's Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde makes his central question clear at a glance. It is a 1935 monochrome woodcut by Luo Qingzhen that shows a line of boat haulers, their backs bent with effort and their faces hidden under identical straw hats. Behind them, under a lower ing sky, lies a river with a few sturdy trees on its opposite bank. Although the image's humble, anonymous subjects and scratchy crosshatching seem simple or even crude at first, a complex pattern of triangles soon emerges in the ropes that link the pullers to one another and suggest their kinship to the trees across the river. One begins to see how subtly the various cuts and lines evoke the textures of earth, rock, water, and sky. Yet it remains a straightfor wardly readable 1930s social realist image that might have come from the hands of Rockwell Kent, Rufino Tamayo, or Franz Masereel. For anyone who expects that an avant garde worthy of the name will de liver the shock of the new, these images seem too familiar, too easy to read, too naively realist to qualify. In what sense, then, were the works of the 1930s Chinese woodcut art

By its cover: modern American book cover design

First ever survey on central subject of American design history. This book contains 200 beautiful full colour images. Famous practitioners are represented from all eras of American design. It covers many great authors including Joyce, Pound, Camus, Roth etc. It has a great cover of its own by hot designer John Gall. It makes a great reference album/idea book for the practitioner. By Its Cover is a survey of American book cover design, from the inception of the modern book industry at the turn of the 20th century to the present day. It is the first ever comprehensive examination of some of the most beautiful and influential works of American graphic design. By Its Cover traces the trajectory of such early masters of illustration as E. McKnight Kauffer, Rockwell Kent, and typographer W.A. Dwiggins. It follows their lead through the modernism of Alvin Lustig, Paul Rand, Roy Kuhlman, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast and concludes with contemporary masters such as Barbara de Wilde, Chip Kidd, and Michael Ian Kaye. As the authors write, Books and their covers are vital, physical manifestations of an evolving American intellectual tradition. The cover is a book's first communication to the reader, a graphic representation not simply of its content, but its moment in history - in the history of American design, in the history of American literature, in the history of American culture.

Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde

The relationship between the anarchist movement and American art during the years surrounding World War I is most often described as a tenuous affinity between two distinct spheres: political and artistic. In Anarchist Modernism - the first in-depth exploration of the role of anarchism in the formation of early American modernism - Allan Antliff reveals that modernists participated in a wide-ranging movement that encompassed lifestyles, literature, art, and even politics. Drawing on a wealth of previously unknown materials, including interviews and reproductions of lost works, he examines anarchism's influence on a telling cross section of artists such as Robert Henri, Elie Nadelman, Man Ray, and Rockwell Kent. He also traces the interactions between cultural figures and thinkers including Emma Goldman, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Pound, and Ananda Coomaraswamy. By situating the evolution of American art in the progressive politics of the time, Antliff offers a richly illustrated chronicle of the anarchist movement and also revives the creative agency of those who shaped and implemented modernism for radical ends.

Toward a Reconstruction of the Legacy of Joseph Schillinger

During the 1930s, JOSEPH SCHILLINGER (1895--1943) may well have been the most popular, if not also the most successful, private teacher of musical composition in New York City. He could boast of teaching George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. Arriving in the United States in 1928, he had already distinguished himself in his native U.S.S.R. as a composer, conductor, and teacher. He quickly joined the New York City musical world, becoming one of the early members of the New York Musicological Society (later the American Musicological Society), moving in circles that included such musical luminaries as Leon Theremin (born Lev Termen), Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Vernon Duke. (1) In 1938 he met and married Frances Rosenfeld Singer, an accomplished woman who had been, among other things, a cover girl, a dancer in the Ziegfield Follies, and secretary to Rockwell Kent and Dale Carnegie. Their brief but happy marriage lasted until Schillinger's early death from cancer in 1943. Following Schillinger's death his widow embarked on a crusade to preserve and to promote Schillinger's work that lasted until her death in 1998. The events in the story that follows occurred late in that crusade. This essay is not an evaluation of Schillinger's significance, nor is it a complete chronicle of all that occurred in Mrs. Schillinger's last years. It is nevertheless a story that should resonate with many librarians who have dealt with the complexities and difficulties of gifts and their donors. ORIGIN OF THE SCHILLINGER COLLECTION AT THE PEABODY INSTITUTE The Frances and Joseph Schillinger Collection at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University began with a set of drawings that accompanied a letter from Harry Lyden, received at the Peabody Conservatory in 1993. The drawings were based on the Schillinger System, a mathematical approach to musical composition devised by Joseph Schillinger. When Lyden subsequently visited Peabody, he was pleased to see his drawings housed in the Arthur Friedheim Library's Rare Book Room. At that time he encouraged the library to contact Schillinger's widow, who, according to him, still had many of Joseph Schillinger's materials in her possession. Some months later, the author wrote to her and received by return mail four printed scores of Schillinger's music and a folder of photocopied articles about him. A cordial correspondence and a series of visits to Mrs. Schillinger's New York City apartment resulted not only in substantial gifts of Schillinger materials but also funds to support maintenance of them. In 1995, the centenary of Schillinger's birth, Mrs. Schillinger inquired as to the possibility of an exhibit. Although a previously established exhibit schedule would not permit mounting a centenary exhibit, the staff members of the Arthur Friedheim Library and the Peabody Institute Archives did succeed in mounting a library-wide exhibit of the new Schillinger Collection for the 101st anniversary in 1996. After receiving a photo album documenting both the exhibit and the gala opening reception, Mrs. Schillinger was so pleased that she contributed a substantial sum which was subsequently used to create the Frances and Joseph Schillinger Endowment at Peabody. The author kept in contact with Mrs. Schillinger by telephone and by correspondence until her death in 1998. Thereafter, Mrs. Schillinger's lawyer reveal ed that there was still more to come, including the papers remaining in her possession at the time of her death and a portion of her estate. At that time it was also learned that Mrs. Schillinger had left portions of her estate to other institutions, including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel. It was as a result of that bequest that Warren Brodsky, a music psychologist on Ben-Gurion University's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, became involved in Schillinger research. On a research trip to the United States in 1999, Brodsky visited the Peabody Institute, the New York Public Library, and Columbia University, where he examined the respective Schillinger collections. …

Rockwell Kent's Distant Shores: The Story of an Exhibition

... Painter, printmaker, illustrator, and architect; a designer of books, ceramics, and textiles, and a prolific writer, [Rockwell Kent] was complex and self-contradictory. ... His major art was inspired by his extended sojourns in remote, sparsely inhabited, and climatically harsh regions, most of them islands, .... In the summer of 1905, when he was 23, he first went to Monhegan, an isolated island 10 miles off the coast of Maine, ..... From 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, until 1915, he and his wife, Kathleen, with their children, lived on the Island of Newfoundland. Then, in 1918, with his nine-year-old son, he spent eight months on Fox Island, Alaska, 12 miles off the coast from Seward, the nearest mainland town. In 1922, he sailed to the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, hoping to sail from there around Cape Horn. The final stage in his odyssey took him to Greenland, first in 1929, and again in 1931 and 1934-35, where he lived on the tiny island of Igdlorssuit. Kent's travels to these far-flung regions, which were in large part journeys of self-discovery, inspired much of his finest work and provided the chronological and geographical structure for the exhibition, Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent. The show was organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts, with me [Constance Martin] as the guest curator. ... After five years of research and travel, I had tracked down over 100 works from private and public collections in many areas of the United States as far away as Alaska, as well as in eastern and western Canada and Russia. Distant Shores opened in June of 2000 and traveled from New England to Ocala, Florida, Chicago, and Anchorage. The most complicated negotiations involved the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Senator Joseph McCarthy, in an attempt to label Kent a Communist, took away his passport and ordered all his illustrated books in overseas government libraries removed and burned .... In retaliation, Kent gave the Soviet Union a major selection of his paintings, watercolours, and drawings in the 1960s. ... With the support and foresight of the Norman Rockwell Museum, I was able to visit the Hermitage collection and make a groundbreaking arrangement for the inclusion of seven Greenland and Tierra del Fuego paintings. ... Kent's artistic imagination was both visual and literary. ... His early reading of Icelandic sagas and his study of the exploration narratives of the various searches for the Northwest Passage provided Kent with the stimulus to experience for himself ...the Far North at its spectacular worst .... The power of his illustrations for Moby Dick comes from both his incisive literary perception of Melville's great novel and his own firsthand encounters with the polar seas. Distant Shores was an exhibition designed to show the art that Kent created in paintings, engravings, and books out of his response to the Far North, the polar seas, and the wilderness that he himself confronted. ...