In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people, resources, and services are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals: Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer, Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier’s camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.
This collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more that that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, Frazier’s stunning images evoke the brilliance of Robert Frank’s The Americans.
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Dumbarton Oaks houses the extraordinary art collection begun by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. In this book the museum publishes the specialist collections in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, along with examples from the Blisses’ superb European collection, for the first time.
When Robert Bliss recalled handling a jade Olmec figurine in 1913, he said, “That day, the collector’s microbe took root in—it must be confessed—very fertile soil.” The Blisses’ passion for art bore fruit in a remarkably diverse collection: Flemish tapestries, Renaissance furniture, and paintings by the likes of El Greco, Renoir, and Degas. The celebrated Byzantine collection includes floor mosaics from late antique Antioch, sumptuous jewelry, carved ivory reliefs, liturgical silver, and a comprehensive coin and seals collection. The Pre-Columbian collection showcases fine jade carvings, gold jewelry, monumental sculpture, ritual weaponry, colorful ceramics, and intricately woven textiles.
The publication of this new guidebook coincides with the complete refurbishment of Dumbarton Oaks and the creative reinstallation of the galleries. The curators offer highlights of the collection, accompanied by a lucid and thought-provoking text. Dumbarton Oaks: The Collections is intended as a valuable resource and a pleasure to read for scholars and nonspecialists alike.
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