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ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
AHAA
@ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
3.1K followers 150 following 260 posts
The Association of Historians of American Art, along with its e-journal Panorama, provides a scholarly forum for the study of American art and culture.
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ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
A pleasure as always to be with my #Americanist bffs for another #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover. Dare I say it’s the end of an… #Era? 🐍 But don’t worry; we’ll see you again with a brand-new issue in June. Happy holidays to all! —@jsrouthier.bsky.social
Grid of 9 images representing past social media posts Grid of 9 images representing past social media posts Grid of 9 images representing past social media posts Grid of 9 images representing past social media posts
December 6, 2024 at 9:14 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
#RealTalk for a minute as we close out our #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover. Everything we do, everything we have posted about these past 2-3 weeks, takes funding. #OpenAccess is free to readers but not to us! We are lucky to have amazing grant support, but we also depend on reader support. 1/2
Graphic with Panorama logo, reading "Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art," and the words "Support open-access scholarship in American Art with your year-end gift / ahaaonline.org/donations" in white letters on a green background.
December 6, 2024 at 7:29 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Another touchable moment comes with a larger-than-life carved replica of Johnson’s “Louis Braille” relief, created as an organ screen for the California School for the Blind. It’s accompanied by recorded organ music and a text in the language Braille invented. #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 4/5
Original Louis Braille carving by Sargent Claude Johnson and replica for visitor engagement, with braille didactics below. Installed in the gallery “California School for the Blind Commission,” in Sargent Claude Johnson. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Photo by Christine Garnier Dark gray wall hung with two lunette-shaped wood carvings, one above the other, depicting a group of people around a table. The lower carving is larger. Between them hangs a yellow-orange sign that reads "Please Touch."
December 4, 2024 at 8:17 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Garnier describes as “successful interventions” groupings of children’s portrait heads representing Johnson’s “multiracial yet segregated neighborhood in Berkeley” and small sculptures in an array of “materials from across the Americas,” with touchable samples. #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 3/5
View of “Material Experiments” installation, looking into the “Artist of the Black Renaissance” gallery, in Sargent Claude Johnson. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Photo by Christine Garnier Interior of a museum gallery showing a case with seven small sculptural objects within. Beyond the case a yellow wall reads "Material Experiments" with an illegible text block below.
December 4, 2024 at 8:17 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Sobel’s 1946 “tour de force” Milky Way demonstrates “the famous drip technique that Sobel pioneered,” Zalman states, “though with elements added at different points in her experimental process, it offers another kind of expansiveness—all over but not all at once.” #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 5/5
Janet Sobel, Milky Way, 1945. Enamel on canvas, 44 7/8 x 29 7/8 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of the artist’s family. © Janet Sobel. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY Vertically oriented painting seemingly created with drips and splashes. Predominant colors are muted pinks, yellows, purples, and blue-greens.
December 3, 2024 at 7:48 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Even as critics forgot about her, Sobel continued to create and show major, challenging work from her new home in New Jersey. An untitled work shown at the local Swain’s Art Store “is a quintessential all-over abstraction, with paint spilling from edge to edge.” #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 4/4
Janet Sobel, Untitled, c. 1946–48. Enamel and sand on board, 17 5/16 x 14 in. The Menil Collection, Houston, Gift of Leonard Sobel and family; photograph by James Craven Abstract painting created with drips of periwinkle blue, yellow-streaked aquatic green, black, and red paint. Blues and blacks occasionally marble together, but the colors generally remain separate, even as the drips themselves tangle, overlap, and interleave.
December 3, 2024 at 5:22 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
In 1945, Dupêcher writes, “Sobel dove headlong into pure abstraction” with The Attraction of Pink. Critics cast these new works as a “radical change—a sudden reversal or about-face, occasionally worthy of skepticism”—but Dupêcher sees them as a consistent evolution #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 3/4
Janet Sobel, The Attraction of Pink, 1945. Oil, enamel, and lacquer on canvas, 70 x 32 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund and Gift of Sol and Leah Sobel, 1999 Oil painting with scrawls of pink, periwinkle, and aqua in a webby arrangement.
December 3, 2024 at 5:22 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Just two years later, in The Frightened Bride, “we can see the artist intensifying her engagement with certain stylistic devices present in Spring Festival…pursuing them to what may seem, in retrospect, like something approaching a logical conclusion. #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 2/4
Janet Sobel, The Frightened Bride, 1944. Oil on canvas, 40 x 51 in. Courtesy of The Museum of Everything, London Oil painting with a unified yellow glow, interspersed with incidents of green and lilac. Near-uniform flicks of paint cover the entire canvas like a grassy meadow, with faces occasionally emerging from the dense overgrowth.
December 3, 2024 at 5:22 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Janet Sobol began painting as a so-called primitive with works like Spring Festival (1942). “Look closely,” writes Natalie Dupêcher in the new #JournalPanorama: “the compositional elements are carefully fitted together, almost slotted into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.” #AHAATakeover 1/4
anet Sobel, Spring Festival, 1942. Oil on canvas, 46 x 48 in. Collection of the Spieler family Primitive-style oil painting of a group of people with varied skin tones, some nude and some elaborately dressed, in a landscape with flowering trees and a small tile-roofed house.
December 3, 2024 at 5:22 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
In the new #JournalPanorama, Annelise K. Madsen of the @artinstitutechi.bsky.social offers seven key lessons she has learned in researching and advocating for underrecognized #womenartists like Ellen Emmet Rand. bit.ly/4eV3qxt #AHAATakeover 1/8
Bessie Potter (Vonnoh) in her studio in the Athenaeum Building on Van Buren Street, Chicago. Reproduced in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 9, 1897, 373; Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress Black and white photograph of a woman in a long skirt and full-sleeved blouse seated on a bed in a crowded interior. Behind her are a series of small white figural sculptures.
December 2, 2024 at 6:43 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
“The eerie, faceless solitary shadow figures” on the back of Flickr’s A Generated Family of Man Helen Lewandowski writes in #JournalPanorama, is “one of the many unsettlingly inhuman results that were generated from typing ‘human’ into Image Generator.” #AHAATakeover #AI bit.ly/3CKVCB9 1/3
“Human photo,” from back cover, Flickr Foundation, A Generated Family of Man, 2023. “A Flickr of Humanity Project.” Digital image with four quadrants, showing a bust-length image of a humanoid figure in three of the four quadrants; only one has a legible face. In the lower right quadrant is the flick.org logo and the words "flick.org"
November 25, 2024 at 8:55 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Case in point: a text prompt drafted by humans generates a reasonably faithful image of a dead soldier lying on the ground, but an AI-generated prompt creates an image of a blonde woman in a field, captioned “Taking a moment to connect with nature’s embrace.” #AHAATakeover #JournalPanorama #AI 2/2
Digital image representing a two-page spread of a book, with white text on a black background in the center and narrow vertical photographs on the left and right. To the left is a photograph that aligns with the text shown next to it: "A grainy black and white photo taken in the 1940s on a Pacific Island depicting a dead US soldier lying face down in a deep trench. The soldier’s back is exposed and he is wearing a helmet. Outside of the foxhole is an M1 rifle stuck in the ground. In the distance are gravel and trees that look blurry." To the right is a color photograph of a blonde woman in a light blue shirt, facing to the left. The text accompanying the photograph reads: “Taking a moment to connect with nature's embrace 🌾 #FieldOfDreams #GroundedInTheWilderness #SerenityInTheGrass”
November 25, 2024 at 7:13 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
In the new #JournalPanorama, Helen Lewandowski writes that the suggestion in Flickr’s A Generated Family of Man “that generative AI images can ‘restore historical images’ is worrying, since it can also distort the past in our own contemporary image.” bit.ly/3CKVCB9 #AHAATakeover #AI 1/2
Raphael Platnick, Eniwetok, 1944. In Edward Steichen, A Family of Man (1955), 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1986), 180–81. Open two-page spread of a book with a narrow vertical black -and-white photograph on the far right of a dead soldier face-down on a rocky ground. The remainder of the pages are black, and on the far left are the words "Who is the slayer, who is the victim? Speak. / Sophocles"
November 25, 2024 at 7:13 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
In Flickr’s A Generated Family of Man, students at Goldsmith’s recreated some of the original Family of Man images with AI prompts. They fed screenshots of the original photos into an AI caption generator and used results as the text prompt for Image Creator. #AHAATakeover #JournalPanorama #AI 1/2
Left: Dorothea Lange, Filipinos Cutting Lettuce; Salinas, California, 1935, Farm Security Administration (FSA). In Edward Steichen, A Family of Man (1955), 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1986), 65. Right: “Behold the mighty elephants, creating beautiful footprints in the soft earth. 🐾🌱 #GiantSteps #EarthyVibes #WildernessWonders.” Flickr Foundation, A Generated Family of Man, 2023, 67. “A Flickr of Humanity Project.” On the left, black and white photograph of workers harvesting a field, bent at the waist and leaning down to pick plants from the earth. On the right, a color photograph of a front foot and partial trunk of an elephant atop red earth marked by animal footprints.
November 25, 2024 at 4:37 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
There’s a little Easter egg in the Pacita Abad review we shared earlier today. THREE different artists in the new #JournalPanorama grapple with the Statue of Liberty: Norman Parish, Ben Shahn, and Abad. Stay with our #AHAATakeover next week for more on American Artists x American symbols!
Norman Parish, ‘Gyrations of American Gothic’ (detail), 1969/70. Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in. DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center. Courtesy of the artist’s estate Colorful oil painting featuring a the Statue of Liberty, and to its right, a Black man and woman standing in the same pose as Grant Wood's "American Gothic," wearing the same clothing. Ben Shahn, cover for The Nation, June 28, 1952. From The Nation. © 1952 The Nation Company. All rights reserved. Used under license; © 2024 Estate of Ben Shahn / CARCC Ottawa; Photo: Stephen Lee Taller Ben Shahn Archive, Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University Magazine cover featuring a black-and-white illustration of the head and part of the upraised arm of the Statue of Liberty. Across the top are the words "How free is free? / The Nation / June 28, 1952." Pacita Abad, 'L.A. Liberty' (detail), 1992. Acrylic, cotton yarn, plastic buttons, mirrors, gold thread, and painted cloth on stitched and padded canvas, 94 x 58 in. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo by author Colorful quilt that is a reinterpretation of the Statue of Liberty; the woman's face is dark-skinned, her dress is multicolored, and rays of multicolored light shoot out from her crown.
November 22, 2024 at 7:57 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Ever wondered which artists are most discussed on the AmArt-L listserv? To be honest, there are no big surprises. Gonna take a lot to dethrone Winslow Homer and Asher B. Durand. bit.ly/3ZikybS #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 1/3
Bar graph titled "Most Discussed Artists (by Email Subject Line)." The Y axis ranges from 0 to 25, and the X axis is labeled "Homer, Winslow," "Durand, Asher B.," "Whistler, J.A.M.," "Catlett, Elizabeth," "Kent, Rockwell," "Rauschenberg, Robert," "Sargent, John Singer," "Eakins, Thomas," "Bellows, George," "Peale, Charles Willson," "Huntington, Daniel," "Henri, Robert," "Lawrence, Jacob," "Johnson, Eastman," "Stieglitz, Alfred." Homer has the tallest bar, at about 22; Stieglitz has the shortest, at 9.
November 21, 2024 at 8:12 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
During peak years of activity, writes Keidra Daniels Navaroli in the current #JournalPanorama, “members challenged the role and purpose of AmArt-L…cementing AmArt-L’s value as a resource, a community, and a form of user-driven activism.” bit.ly/3ZikybS #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 1/2
Oval-shaped word cloud in shades of purple, yellow, and green. The largest words, in the center, include "call," "art," "history," "amart," "american," "cfp," "symposium," "new," "papers," and "fellowship."
November 21, 2024 at 6:43 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Andrea Pappas and Sue Luftschein were just graduate students when they founded the now-indispensable American Art Listserv (AmArt-L), writes Keidra Daniels Navaroli in the current #JournalPanorama. It has grown to 1,270 subscribers and remains vitally active. bit.ly/3ZikybS #AHAATakeover
Line graph titled "AmArt-L Annual Activity" with a Y axis ranging from 0 to 800 and an x axis ranging from 1990 to 2025. The highest peaks of activity are in 1995 and 2017.
November 21, 2024 at 4:42 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
We’d like to respond to this one with interpretive word art. We encourage you to similarly share with the group! 😉 #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover #AmericanArt #ArtHistory 2/2
Word cloud derived from the following terms: Exciting, Complex, Political, Anticolonial, Ecocritical, Materially-oriented, Unconventional art objects, Intermediality, Inclusiveness, Interdisciplinarity writ large, Reinstallation, Re-revision, re-re-revision, re-re-re-revision, ad infinitum!, Transdisciplinary, Diverse, Geopolitical, Academia, and beyond (emphasis on beyond!), To ensure a meaningful practice:, generous, empathetic, inclusive, expansive, nuanced, Histories of extraction and efforts to engage in non-extractive research methods, Equity and care, Material culture, craft, and non-hierarchical collaborative practices, Openness to new voices (scholars and artists), Discover more surprising threads, Identity fluidity, Attend to new regions, Fascism/AntiFascism, Earthling, Love, Climate, Crisis, Undisciplined–in all the ways
November 20, 2024 at 9:03 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
#Americanist questionnaire Q4 (last one!): In five words or fewer (list of adjectives or phrases welcome!), what are some words that portend our field’s future? bit.ly/3CxYL7k #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 1/2
Black text on white background reading: “In five words or fewer (list of adjectives or phrases welcome!), what are some words that portend our field’s future?”
November 20, 2024 at 9:03 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
#Americanist questionnaire Q3: Can you name or describe a book, article, lecture, exhibition, or collection installation that you felt was a watershed moment / game changer in the field over the past ten years? What made it pivotal? bit.ly/3CxYL7k #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 1/6
Black text on white background reading "Can you name or describe a book, article, lecture, exhibition, or collection installation that you felt was a watershed moment / game changer in the field over the past ten years? What made it pivotal?"
November 20, 2024 at 8:13 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
#Americanist questionnaire Q2: How do you feel about the social justice direction many humanities fields are incorporating? Is our field doing this, in your opinion? Is this a good direction? Why or why not? bit.ly/3CxYL7k #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 1/4
Black text on white background reading: “How do you feel about the social justice direction many humanities fields are incorporating? Is our field doing this, in your opinion? Is this a good direction? Why or why not?”
November 20, 2024 at 7:15 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Q1: “American art” was initially a defensive term, responding to the prevalence of European art as a primary field of research. What are your thoughts on “US art” as a renamed category of study? Does this offer a more macro view of the field? bit.ly/3CxYL7k #JournalPanorama #AHAATakeover 1/3
Black text on white background reading: “‘American art’ was initially a defensive term, responding to the prevalence of European art as a primary field of research. What are your thoughts on ‘US art’ as a renamed category of study? Does this offer a more macro view of the field?”
November 20, 2024 at 5:31 PM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Our Fall 2024 issue of #JournalPanorama is here! To celebrate, @jsrouthier.bsky.social will be taking over our social media platforms starting tomorrow, November 20th.

In the meantime, please read and enjoy this issue atjournalpanorama.org!

#AHAATakeover #AmericanArt
Headshot of a dark-haired woman with glasses superimposed over a webpage with the header "Panorama / Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art"
November 20, 2024 at 12:15 AM
ahaaamericanart.bsky.social
Always a pleasure to team up with AHAA for a #JournalPanorama takeover! Thanks for all the likes and the conversation. Happy turn of the year to all!

—@jsrouthier.bsky.social
December 1, 2023 at 9:56 PM