Object Lessons in American Art

Karl Kusserow

• Publisher: Princeton University Art Museum
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780691978857
• eBook ISBN: 9780691978871
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University's venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more.Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Lenticular: Subject and Object in American Art
• “Race” as Object Lesson: Objects of Rebellion
• Looking Back and Looking Forward: A Feminist Lens on a Collection of American Art
• Oblique Assemblies: Toward Queer Ecologies in American Art
• Intimations of Ecology: Varieties of Environmental Experience in American Art
• Material Echoes, Traumatic Histories, and Liquid Transformations: The Romance of the Sea in American Art
• Learning from Object Lessons: Toward a Curatorial Pedagogy of Unfixing and Defamiliarizing the Past
• Contributors
• Index
• Photography Credits