How has belatedness鈥攆ramed through constructs of being behind, delayed, and not yet arrived鈥攕haped the arts and the historiography of the arts of North America? This series considers how North American art has been both historically denigrated and celebrated through ironically longstanding charges that parts of the continent were young, without history, and without tradition compared with European civilizations. From where did this myth arise, and what are its contours, limitations, and implications? How and in what contexts did this liability become an asset in ways that interweave with fluid ideas of national identity and modernity? How did this assertion shape aesthetic practices? How did these ideas resonate differently related to the cultures of the United States, Canada, Mexico, Indigenous nations, and the Caribbean, as well as in other modern transnational contexts? How has the idea of belatedness shaped the field of North American art history, and the inclusions and exclusions of its canon, within art history鈥檚 attention to narratives of aesthetic progress? Where is it ruptured or challenged? How does it align with or depart from wider discussions of temporalities and the history of art? This set of events proposes to identify and to critique the myths around newness that have constructed a sense of American cultural belatedness from various angles by exploring the impacts the myths have made on art and cultural production, display, criticism, and art historiography.
Organised by Professor Emily C. Burns (Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the 91制片厂 of Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma) and Professor David Peters Corbett (Professor of American Art and Director of the Centre for American Art, The Courtauld).听
Emily C. Burns is Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the 91制片厂 of Art of the American West and an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma. She is a scholar of transnational nineteenth-century art history, with an interdisciplinary research practice that analyzes how mobilities of objects and people shape visual culture in the context of global discourses of nationalism and modernism by focusing on points of contact across multiple communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is author of Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France, published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2018, and co-editor of Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts, published by Routledge in 2021. She has published numerous articles about U.S. art in Paris, the circulation of Lakota performers and art, and U.S. impressionism.
David Peters Corbett is Professor of American Art and Director of the Centre for American Art at The Courtauld.听听His publications include听The Modernity of English Art,听1914-1930听(Manchester, 1997) and听The Geographies of Englishness听(co-ed, Yale, 2002), both of which won prizes and the latter of which was a听Guardian听book of the year;听The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England听1848-1914听(Penn State, 2004);听Anglo-American: Artistic Relations between Britain and the US from Colonial Times to the Present听(co-ed, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and听An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters听(Yale, 2011).
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