Terra Foundation Lectures in American Art 2017: Picturing a Nation: (2) Buried Treasure: America’s Great Book Illustrator Howard Pyle and the Silver Screen

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 second lecture in the series, titled “Collapsing Time with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz”, presented by Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black, brings contemporary art by Chicana (Mexican American) women artists into dialogue with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, collapsing and questioning art history’s chronological and geographical frameworks and borders. I examine portrayals of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), famed writer, intellectual, and proto-feminist nun in colonial Mexico. How can recent visual imaginings by Chicana feminist artists illuminate earlier, historical portrayals of Mexico’s “Tenth Muse”? Can the tools of Chicanx studies force a reconceptualization of art history? Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the University of Oxford 2021-2022, Professor Villaseñor Black is a leading expert on a range of topics related to contemporary Latinx art, the early modern Iberian world and Chicanx studies. She is currently Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2016, she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence for exceptional teaching, innovative research, and strong commitment to university services. Professor Villaseñor Black is also editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (UC Press). Her most recent books include Renaissance Futurities: Art, Science, Invention and Knowledge for Justice: An Ethnic Studies Reader (both from 2019), the new 2020 edition of The Chicano Studies Reader, and Autobiography without Apology: The Personal Essay in Latino Studies, which she co-edited. See Download Media menu on the right for Transcript and List of artworks.

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.

Dr John Blakinger talks about demonstrations against the Whitney Museum of American Art related to its connections with the tear gas manufacturer Safariland. In November 2018, an image of migrants fleeing tear gas at the US-Mexico border ricocheted across the internet, inspiring protests against the Trump administration’s immigration policies but also against a more unlikely target: the Whitney Museum of American Art. The artist-activist collective Decolonize This Place stormed the museum in demonstration against the Whitney’s connections to Safariland, a manufacturer of tear gas. Andy Warhol’s silkscreen canvases, then on view for a major retrospective, took on new meanings during these events. The artist’s “Death in America” paintings depicting turmoil in the 1960s came to life in the gallery.

Professor Miguel de Baca gives his final Terra Foundation Lecture in American Art on Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished painting of George Washington.

Professor Miguel de Baca gives his third Terra Foundation Lecture in American Art on the works of Georgia O’Keeffe and Martha Graham. Miguel de Baca joins the History of Art Department as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art in 2017-18 from Lake Forest College, where he is the chair of the Department of Art and Art History. Miguel studies modern and contemporary American art; he is especially interested in issues of memory-making and the representation of history as they intersect the history of abstraction. Among his other interests are video and digital art, culture jamming, protest, artistic collaborations, and critical studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Miguel’s monograph, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture, was published by the University of California Press in 2015. His current book project, Video Art and Public Culture, is about activist uses of video and digital art from the 1960s forward. Miguel was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for his contribution to “Digital Chicago,” a multimedia online platform investigating Chicago’s cultural history from 1892 to 1933. He is an Advisory Editor for the American National Biography online, published by the Oxford University Press with the support of the American Council of Learned Societies, and serves as the Co-Chair of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Professor Miguel de Baca gives his second Terra Foundation Lecture in American Art on the work of Dave the Potter. Miguel de Baca joins the History of Art Department as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art in 2017-18 from Lake Forest College, where he is the chair of the Department of Art and Art History. Miguel studies modern and contemporary American art; he is especially interested in issues of memory-making and the representation of history as they intersect the history of abstraction. Among his other interests are video and digital art, culture jamming, protest, artistic collaborations, and critical studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Miguel’s monograph, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture, was published by the University of California Press in 2015. His current book project, Video Art and Public Culture, is about activist uses of video and digital art from the 1960s forward. Miguel was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for his contribution to “Digital Chicago,” a multimedia online platform investigating Chicago’s cultural history from 1892 to 1933. He is an Advisory Editor for the American National Biography online, published by the Oxford University Press with the support of the American Council of Learned Societies, and serves as the Co-Chair of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Professor Miguel de Baca gives his first Terra Foundation Lecture in American Art on two depictions of suicide. Miguel de Baca joins the History of Art Department as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art in 2017-18 from Lake Forest College, where he is the chair of the Department of Art and Art History. Miguel studies modern and contemporary American art; he is especially interested in issues of memory-making and the representation of history as they intersect the history of abstraction. Among his other interests are video and digital art, culture jamming, protest, artistic collaborations, and critical studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Miguel’s monograph, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture, was published by the University of California Press in 2015. His current book project, Video Art and Public Culture, is about activist uses of video and digital art from the 1960s forward. Miguel was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for his contribution to “Digital Chicago,” a multimedia online platform investigating Chicago’s cultural history from 1892 to 1933. He is an Advisory Editor for the American National Biography online, published by the Oxford University Press with the support of the American Council of Learned Societies, and serves as the Co-Chair of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Professor David Lubin gives his final Terra Lecture in American Art on the Kennedys. 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.