The Federal Art Project And The Creation Of Middlebrow Culture

Author : Victoria Grieve
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 025203421X
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture written by Victoria Grieve and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art for everyone--the Federal Art Project's drive for middlebrow visual culture and identity

Author : James T. Bennett
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351487728
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Subsidizing Culture written by James T. Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the American mind, state subsidization of writers and artists was long associated with monarchies and, in later years, socialist states. The support these regimes gave to intellectuals was understood to come with a cost, yet, beginning with the New Deal's Federal Writers', Art, and Theater Projects, a new policy consensus asserted that by offering financial support to the arts, the federal government was affirming their importance to the nation.Subsidizing Culture examines the development of and controversies surrounding federal programs that directly benefit writers, artists, and intellectuals. James T. Bennett examines four cases of such support: the New Deal's Federal Writers', Art, and Theater Projects; the vigorous promotion, in the post-World War II and early Cold War eras, of abstract expressionism and other forms of modern art by the US government; the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which has fortified its position as the preeminent arts bureaucracy; and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NEA's less embattled twin, which funnels monies to scholars.Bennett concentrates on the creation of and the debate over these government programs, and he gives special attention to the critics, who are usually ignored. He reminds us that the chorus of anti-subsidy voices over the years has included such disparate figures as writers William Faulkner and John Updike; artists John Sloan and Wheeler Williams; and social critics Jacques Barzun and H.L. Mencken.

Author : Katherine H. Adams
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476662975
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Women, Art and the New Deal written by Katherine H. Adams and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1935, the United States Congress began employing large numbers of American artists through the Works Progress Administration--fiction writers, photographers, poster artists, dramatists, painters, sculptors, muralists, wood carvers, composers and choreographers, as well as journalists, historians and researchers. Secretary of Commerce and supervisor of the WPA Harry Hopkins hailed it a "renascence of the arts, if we can call it a rebirth when it has no precedent in our history." Women were eminently involved, creating a wide variety of art and craft, interweaving their own stories with those of other women whose lives might not otherwise have received attention. This book surveys the thousands of women artists who worked for the U.S. government, the historical and social worlds they described and the collaborative depiction of womanhood they created at a pivotal moment in American history.

Author : Mary Ann Calo
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271095741
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book African American Artists and the New Deal Art Programs written by Mary Ann Calo and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-03-20 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.

Author : Victoria M. Grieve
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190675705
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Little Cold Warriors written by Victoria M. Grieve and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both conservative and liberal Baby Boomers have romanticized the 1950s as an age of innocence--of pickup ball games and Howdy Doody, when mom stayed home and the economy boomed. These nostalgic narratives obscure many other histories of postwar childhood, one of which has more in common with the war years and the sixties, when children were mobilized and politicized by the U.S. government, private corporations, and individual adults to fight the Cold War both at home and abroad. Children battled communism in its various guises on television, the movies, and comic books; they practiced safety drills, joined civil preparedness groups, and helped to build and stock bomb shelters in the backyard. Children collected coins for UNICEF, exchanged art with other children around the world, prepared for nuclear war through the Boy and Girl Scouts, raised funds for Radio Free Europe, sent clothing to refugee children, and donated books to restock the diminished library shelves of war-torn Europe. Rather than rationing and saving, American children were encouraged to spend and consume in order to maintain the engine of American prosperity. In these capacities, American children functioned as ambassadors, cultural diplomats, and representatives of the United States. Victoria M. Grieve examines this politicized childhood at the peak of the Cold War, and the many ways children and ideas about childhood were pressed into political service. Little Cold Warriors combines approaches from childhood studies and diplomatic history to understand the cultural Cold War through the activities and experiences of young Americans.

Author : Sharon Ann Musher
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022624718X
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Democratic Art written by Sharon Ann Musher and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its height in 1935, the New Deal devoted roughly $27 million ($320 million today) to supporting tens of thousands of needy writers, dancers, actors, musicians, and visual artists, who created over 100,000 worksbooks, murals, plays, concertsthat were performed for or otherwise imbibed by millions of Americans. But why did the government get so involved with the arts in the first place? Musher addresses this question and many others by exploring the political and aesthetic concerns of the 1930s, as well as the range of responsesfrom politicians, intellectuals, artists, and taxpayersto the idea of active government involvement in the arts. In the process, she raises vital questions about the roles that the arts should play in contemporary society."

Author : Cory Pillen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351004204
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book WPA Posters in an Aesthetic, Social, and Political Context written by Cory Pillen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-09 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines posters produced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal relief program designed to create jobs in the United States during the Great Depression. Cory Pillen focuses on several issues addressed repeatedly in the roughly 2,200 extant WPA posters created between 1935 and 1943: recreation and leisure, conservation, health and disease, and public housing. As the book shows, the posters promote specific forms of knowledge and literacy as solutions to contemporary social concerns. The varied issues these works engage and the ideals they endorse, however, would have resonated in complex ways with the posters’ diverse viewing public, working both for and against the rhetoric of consensus employed by New Deal agencies in defining and managing the relationship between self and society in modern America. This book will be of interest to scholars in design history, art history, and American studies.

Author : Philip J. Deloria
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 029574524X
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Becoming Mary Sully written by Philip J. Deloria and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was the great-granddaughter of respected nineteenth-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who captured the personalities of America’s first generation of celebrities (including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill). Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, she was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art. And like her great-grandfather Sully was fascinated by celebrity: over two decades, she produced hundreds of colorful and dynamic abstract triptychs, a series of “personality prints” of American public figures like Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, and Gertrude Stein. Sully’s position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times during her life. In Becoming Mary Sully, Philip J. Deloria reclaims that work from obscurity, exploring her stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s. Working in a complex territory oscillating between representation, symbolism, and abstraction, Sully evoked multiple and simultaneous perspectives of time and space. With an intimate yet sweeping style, Deloria recovers in Sully’s work a move toward an anti-colonial aesthetic that claimed a critical role for Indigenous women in American Indian futures—within and distinct from American modernity and modernism.

Author : Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009006231
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists written by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1935, two Soviet satirists, Ilia Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, undertook a 10,000 mile American road trip from New York to Hollywood and back accompanied only by their guide and chauffeur, a gregarious Russian Jewish immigrant and his American-born, Russian-speaking wife. They immortalized their journey in a popular travelogue that condemned American inequality and racism even as it marvelled at American modernity and efficiency. Lisa Kirschenbaum reconstructs the epic journey of the two Soviet funnymen and their encounters with a vast cast of characters, ranging from famous authors, artists, poets and filmmakers to unemployed hitchhikers and revolutionaries. Using the authors' notes, US and Russian archives, and even FBI files, she reveals the role of ordinary individuals in shaping foreign relations as Ilf, Petrov and the immigrants, communists, and fellow travelers who served as their hosts, guides, and translators became creative actors in cultural exchange between the two countries.

Author : Kathleen Berrin
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1538134098
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Exhibiting the Foreign on U.S. Soil written by Kathleen Berrin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-07-21 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The uneasy relationship between the arts, US art museums, and the federal government has not been thoroughly explored by scholars. This book focuses on the development of “national diplomacy exhibitions” during World War II and the early Cold War and explains how the War provided the government with an impetus to create a national arts policy. It discusses how national diplomacy exhibitions on US soil were deployed as persuasive tools to influence public opinion, to reconcile discrepancies between high art and democracy, and to resolve America’s lagging art status and difficulties with “the foreign.” The type of soft diplomacy that art museums provide by initiating national diplomacy exhibitions has not received emphasis in the scholarly community and art museums have essentially been ignored in cultural studies of the early Cold War. Scholarly analysis of museum exhibitions in the last quarter of the 20th century is now a popular topic, but investigations of exhibitions between 1939-1960 have been thin. By scrutinizing major exhibitions during those formative years this book takes a new perspective and examines the foundational development of the so-called “blockbuster” exhibition stimulated by World War II. The book will interest readers in visual studies, history, museums, cultural affairs, government, and international diplomacy.