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69 books match the query 'Art, American' and 2 start with b

cover of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963

Between You and Me

Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963

Gavin Butt

Duke University Press, 2005

In the decades preceding the Stonewall riots—in the wake of the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s controversial report on male sexuality and in the midst of a cold war culture of suspicion and paranoia—discussions of homosexuality within the New York art world necessarily circulated via gossip and rumor. Between You and Me explores this informal, everyday talk and how it shaped artists’ lives, their work, and its reception. Revealing the “trivial” and “unserious” aspects of the postwar art scene as key to understanding queer subjectivity, Gavin Butt argues for a richer, more expansive concept of historical evidence, one that supplements the verifiable facts of traditional historical narrative with the gossipy fictions of sexual curiosity.

Focusing on the period from 1948 to 1963, Butt draws on the accusations and denials of homosexuality that appeared in the popular press, on early homophile publications such as One and the Mattachine Review, and on biographies, autobiographies, and interviews. In a stunning exposition of Larry Rivers’s work, he shows how Rivers incorporated gossip into his paintings, just as his friend and lover Frank O’Hara worked it into his poetry. He describes how the stories about Andy Warhol being too “swish” to be taken seriously as an artist changed following his breakthrough success, reconstructing him as an asexual dandy. Butt also speculates on the meanings surrounding a MoMA curator’s refusal in 1958 to buy Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts on the grounds that it was too scandalous for the museum to acquire. Between You and Me sheds new light on a pivotal moment in American cultural production as it signals new directions for art history.

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cover of Boundless: Native American Abundance in Art and Literature

Boundless

Native American Abundance in Art and Literature

Lisa A. Crossman and Heid E. Erdrich

Amherst College Press, 2025

Boundless expands conversations on Native and Indigenous art and literature by presenting words and images in kinship. Starting in the collections of the Mead Art Museum and the Collection of Native American Literature at Amherst College and centered on the creative production of Native peoples of the Northeast, the project follows relationships between Indigenous authors and artists across the United States and beyond borders. Boundless presents an engagement of Indigenous curatorial methods as practiced by guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) in an exhibition in two iterations hosted by the Mead in 2023 and 2024. Advisors to Boundless include Mohegan, Nipmuc, Shinnecock, and Wampanoag artists and scholars, along with others, who supported Erdrich in her urge to center the project in the Northeast. Advisors contributed both visual art and writing to the exhibition and publication. Collaborative co-creation between artists, students, faculty, Mead staff Lisa Crossman and Emily Potter-Ndiaye and the guest curator are also explored in this illustrated volume.

Amherst College’s Collection of Native American Literature contains thousands of Indigenous-authored works spanning centuries. The Collection’s abundance of books, prints, music, ephemera, and artist-made works, all by Native people, provide rich selections for Boundless. Crosscurrents of Indigenous visual art and literature are considered in this broad and interdisciplinary project. Boundless crosses generations to explore relatedness, kinship, and collegiality.

Boundless brings artists and writers together across generations, often drawing together works by members of the same tribe or even the same family to show the history, presence, and futurity of Native American creative and intellectual production.
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