Art History & Archaeology
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Item Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907): Reconstructed Rebel(2007-05-09) Fleming, Tuliza Kamirah; Promey, Sally; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Thomas Satterwhite Noble was a Southerner, a member of slave-owning family, a confederate soldier, and an artist who painted history paintings relating to slavery and freedom in the United States. Between 1865 and 1870, Noble created a series of paintings that directly confronted white America's ambivalent feelings with regard to the issues of slavery, emancipation, and integration--earning him the moniker "reconstructed rebel." The American Slave Mart, 1865 was the first monumental treatment of a slave auction by an American painter and effectively launched his career as an artist of national recognition. Noble was strongly influenced by his French teacher and mentor, Thomas Couture, and his seminal painting Decadence of the Romans when he painted The American Slave Mart. Two years later, buoyed by his success of his first history painting, Noble created the contemporary history paintings Margaret Garner and John Brown's Blessing. Both paintings featured individuals who risked themselves and those they loved in the pursuit of freedom and liberty. In 1868 Noble The Price of Blood, A Planter Selling His Son, a painting which revealed the Southern practice of slave owners selling their slave/children for profit. In 1870, Noble painted a simplified replica of The American Slave Mart titled, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis. This painting was created at a very difficult time in the artist's career and represents a desire for him to be seen as part of the greater Cincinnati community. Thomas Satterwhite Noble: A Reconstructed Rebel examines how Noble's African American imagery reflected and interpreted issues concerning slavery in the upper South, the internal slave trade, miscegenation, and abolition. This study shifts the scholarly emphasis on Noble's oeuvre from discussions relating to the manner in which African Americans were portrayed before and after slavery to how these images were perceived by contemporary reconstruction audiences.Item Making God: Incarnation and Somatic Piety in the Art of Kiki Smith(2006-01-19) Wilkerson, Margaret Randolph; Withers, Josephine; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the ways in which the art of Kiki Smith (b. 1954) implements traditional Catholic material culture and ritual through its propensity, in both subject and materiality, to incarnate spiritual ideas and encourage somatic responses to it. It also considers the ways in which Smith's ambivalent attitudes towards Catholicism inform her work. Born and raised a Catholic, but no longer practicing, Smith values the material imaging of spiritual conditions, and her myriad assessments of the human form affirm her commitment to expressing sacred experience through physical means. However, while embracing Catholicism's incarnational imagination, as particularly manifest in medieval art, Smith also disputes the present-day Church's marked opposition to art that mingles the sacred and profane. The majority of scholarship has positioned Smith's body-based art within the context of the heightening politicization of the American art scene during the late twentieth-century, when arguments over the body and its ideological boundaries dominated political, social, and cultural discourses. While critical to understanding Smith's work and its influences, viewing it from a vantage of body politics and/or feminism alone drastically limits the scope of her work, obscuring the nuanced findings that can be realized when viewing such issues and their dynamic intersections within a framework of spiritual inquiry. Furthermore, this examination of the spiritual significance of Smith's art addresses a significant lacuna in American art scholarship, as scholars recognize the need for further study in the field of the visual culture of American religions. While Smith's work has caught the attention of a wide and far-reaching audience of art critics and scholars, few have thoroughly examined its spiritual dimensions, nor does the literature seriously consider how Smith's work constitutes American religious practice and experience. In articulating the interrelations between a selection of works from Smith's oeuvre and a series of historical and ideological frames, all of which negotiate the recent burgeoning of interest in contemporary art and religion in America and the ensuing debate over art's ownership and public funding, this study develops a fuller, more critical, and more theoretically-driven account of Smith's art production than has previously been assessed.Item Monuments of a Syncretic Society: Wall Painting in the Latin Lordship of Athens, Greece (1204-1311)(2005-11-30) Hirschbichler, Monika; Gerstel, Sharon; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on wall painting in the thirteenth-century lordship of Athens, an area roughly corresponding to modern-day Attica, Boeotia and the Argolid in southern Greece. The lordship was established as part of the Latin Principality of Morea in 1205 when, in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, Frankish forces moved outward from the fallen city of Constantinople to conquer former Byzantine lands. More than twenty monuments painted in the region during the thirteenth- and the first decade of the fourteenth century still preserve all or part of their original decoration. Notwithstanding the informative potential of such an extensive body of evidence, there has been no systematic investigation of the decorative programs in light of the particular socio-cultural conditions of Latin Greece. The present study is intended to fill this gap and begins by outlining the scope of artistic production in the lordship in the years between 1204 and 1311. Addressing Greek- and Latin-sponsored religious and secular programs, the murals are examined in the context of their multicultural setting. Particular attention is given to social, religious and political ideas as well as to artistic practices that found their way into the art of the period as a result of the socio-cultural environment created by the historical circumstances. Highlighting issues such as Church union, liturgical practice and cultural identity as they are reflected in the paintings, the study attempts to add clarity to the modes of cultural interaction in Frankish Greece. Thus evaluated, the murals disclose a striking range of opinions and responses. They bring to light religious boundaries and reveal attempts at cultural and political re-definition, but they also display points of convergence and mutual recognition. Combined, the painted programs in the Latin lordship of Athens are physical testimonies of a syncretic society whose multicultural factions lived, if not in a state of completely peaceful agreement, at least in a state of pragmatic tolerance.Item Iconography and Continuity in West Africa: Calabar Terracottas and the Arts of the Cross River Region of Nigeria/Cameroon(2005-04-18) Slogar, Christopher; Eyo, Ekpo; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent archaeological investigations conducted jointly by the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments and the University of Maryland, under the direction of Ekpo Eyo, yielded a large number of decorated terracotta vessels, headrests, and anthropomorphic figurines at Calabar, Nigeria, which date to the fifth-fifteenth century A.D. The decoration includes a variety of discrete geometric motifs, such as concentric circles, spirals, lozenges, and cruciforms, among others. This iconography is described and compared to information available in historical sources in order to locate the terracottas within the broader narrative of visual culture in the Cross River region. The decoration of the terracottas reveals strong correspondences to modern art production across a variety of media, foreshadowing in particular the ideographic script called nsibidi (or nsibiri), which has been the subject of scholarly interest since the early twentieth century. Calabar gained international prominence in the seventeenth century due to the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade, was later named the seat of the British colonial government in Southern Nigeria, and is today the capital of Cross River State, Nigeria. While the accounts of traders, missionaries, colonial officials, and modern researchers offer much information about Calabar during this time, its earlier history remains largely unknown. Thus, the terracottas offer valuable new insight into the period prior to the initiation of the transatlantic trade and reveal a continuity of artistic traditions that is significantly deeper and more widespread than previously considered.