Terra Foundation Lectures in American Art 2017: Picturing a Nation: (1) Riding into History, Marching into Oblivion: The Civil War, Racial Justice, and the Shaw Memorial
History of Art: Terra Foundation Lecture Series in American ArtShow Notes
Professor David Lubin gives his first Terra Lecture in American Art on the Shaw Memorial in Boston. David M. Lubin is the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor 2016-17 at Oxford University, as well as the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Professor Lubin is the author of Act of Portrayal (Yale, 1985), Picturing a Nation (Yale, 1994), Titanic (BFI, 1999), and Shooting Kennedy (California, 2003), which was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Eldredge Prize for distinguished scholarship in American art. His most recent book is Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War (Oxford, 2016). He also co-edited World War I and American Art (Princeton, 2016), the exhibition catalogue for a blockbuster show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and later the New-York Historical Society.
More from History of Art: Terra Foundation Lecture Series in American Art
The 2022 Terra Lectures in American Art centre on Latinx art, with an emphasis on Chicanx (Mexican American) artists, and the theme of migration – of people, ideas, and artworks, from the seventeenth century to today. Art and activism converge as these lectures move across disciplinary, chronological, and geographical borders. We consider new approaches to “American” art, its borders, and contact zones. By posing strategic questions, these four talks demonstrate avenues of inquiry to decolonise art history.
The 2022 Terra Lectures in American Art centre on Latinx art, with an emphasis on Chicanx (Mexican American) artists, and the theme of migration - of people, ideas, and artworks, from the seventeenth century to today. Art and activism converge as these lectures move across disciplinary, chronological, and geographical borders. We consider new approaches to "American" art, its borders, and contact zones. By posing strategic questions, these four talks demonstrate avenues of inquiry to decolonise art history.
Dr John Blakinger speaks about iconoclasm in American history and the vandalism of Confederate monuments. Iconoclasm is an enduring American value. In 1776, a mob destroyed a statue of King George III in Bowling Green, New York, establishing the new American Republic as a nation built on image destruction. More recent acts of visual violence have targeted Confederate monuments, transforming them both physically and digitally. Images of vandalism that circulate online are powerful enough to re-cast bronze and shatter stone.
Dr John Blakinger discusses 'Scaffold', Sam Durant's contentious sculpture. Sam Durant's controversial sculpture Scaffold, a wooden structure recalling specific gallows from American history, ignited a firestorm at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2017. The work resembled the scaffold used in nearby Mankato, Minnesota, where 38 Dakota men were executed just days after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation - it was the largest mass execution ever held on American soil. This historical reference prompted a backlash from Native communities, who called for the work's removal. Can art help us dismantle the past and loosen its shackles? Or are we always forced to remember?
Dr John Blakinger speaks about the controversy surrounding Dana Shutz's painting of the body of Emmett Till exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennnial. Who has the right to see in an age of image overload? At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a painting by the artist Dana Schutz depicting the body of Emmett Till, a fifteen-year-old African-American boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955, incited outrage. The artists Hannah Black and Parker Bright condemned the work as "black death spectacle." The episode resuscitated debates over the use and abuse of traumatic pictures, and the way visual images propelling the Civil Rights movement also exploited their subjects.