Britany Salsbury – författare

An exploration of Edgar Degas’s laundress works and their significance within broader debates art, urban life, and women’s work in the nineteenth century  Edgar Degas’s depictions of Parisian laundresses are some of the famed Impressionist’s most revolutionary works. In paintings, drawings, and prints throughout his long career, Degas emphasized the strenuousness of women’s labor and highlighted social-class divides in his idiosyncratic avant-garde style. Laundresses washing, ironing, and carrying heavy baskets of clothing were a highly visible presence within late nineteenth-century Paris, and their job was difficult, dangerous, and poorly paid. Indeed, many laundresses were forced to supplement their income through prostitution. Degas’s portrayals of this harsh and complicated life were included in his most significant exhibitions and were praised by artists and critics of his time as epitomizing modernity. Contextualizing Degas’s laundress works with those of his contemporaries, such as Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, this volume also looks at examples by painters that Degas influenced and was influenced by, from Honoré Daumier to Pablo Picasso. Richly illustrated and featuring essays by an interdisciplinary group of authors, this study draws on art history, literature, and history to reveal how Degas’s stunning works take part in a more widespread debate concerning the topic of laundresses during the late nineteenth century.  Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art  Exhibition Schedule:  The Cleveland Museum of Art(October 8, 2023–January 14, 2024)

An exploration of the rich history of printmaking at Cleveland’s Karamu House, a center of Black arts, culture, and community since 1915Winner of the 2026 IFPDA Book Award Karamu House, founded as a settlement house in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1915, is one of the preeminent homes of Black arts, culture, and community in America. Noted for its theater program, Karamu House also hosts a rich legacy in the graphic arts. Printmaking workshops open to artists and community alike launched in the 1930s, allowing a young Langston Hughes—as one notable example—to experiment with print. Linked with printmaking’s ethos of accessibility and democracy, a group including Elmer W. Brown, Hughie Lee-Smith, Charles L. Sallée Jr., and William E. Smith—some of the most prominent Black printmakers of the WPA era—founded Karamu Artists, Inc. Reproductions of works by such artists are accompanied by essays situating the prints, the artists, and this locus of Black arts and culture in the histories it shaped. These writings are complemented by an interview with printmaker and Karamu alumnus Curlee Raven Holton. Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art(March 23–August 17, 2025)

Andrew Wyeth’s expressive watercolor practice and his unique artistic visionBeginning in the 1930s, Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) built a monumental reputation for his watercolors—described by one critic at the time as having a “spectacular freedom.” In the medium, Wyeth depicted the people and places that surrounded him in rural Pennsylvania and Maine in expressive and evocative compositions. Though he later became known for his tempera paintings, he never ceased to work in watercolor, using the medium for both preliminary and finished works throughout his storied career.Exploring Wyeth’s use of watercolors, this richly illustrated volume features rarely seen works from the artist’s estate and considers the role of the medium within Wyeth’s larger oeuvre. It illuminates new aspects of the artist’s formative period by situating Wyeth’s early experiments in the context of an explosion of interest in watercolor and the promotion of the medium as distinctively American, and it includes scholarly essays that reveal how Wyeth—an artist who embraced precise realism at a time when many of his peers favored abstraction—used watercolor to engage with the question of what it means to be both modern and American.Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:The Cleveland Museum of Art(September 20, 2026–January 18, 2027)

Why did collectors seek out posters and collect ephemera during the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? How have such materials been integrated into institutional collections today? What inspired collectors to build significant holdings of works from cultures other than their own? And what are the issues facing curators and collectors of digital ephemera today? These are among the questions tackled in this volume—the first to examine the practices of collecting prints, posters, and ephemera during the modern and contemporary periods. A wide range of case studies feature collections of printed materials from the United States, Latin America, France, Germany, Great Britain, China, Japan, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. Fourteen essays and one roundtable discussion, all specially commissioned from art historians, curators, and collectors for this volume, explore key issues such as the roles of class, politics, and gender, and address historical contexts, social roles, value, and national and transnational aspects of collecting practices. The global scope highlights cross-cultural connections and contributes to a new understanding of the place of prints, posters and ephemera within an increasingly international art world.

Why did collectors seek out posters and collect ephemera during the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? How have such materials been integrated into institutional collections today? What inspired collectors to build significant holdings of works from cultures other than their own? And what are the issues facing curators and collectors of digital ephemera today? These are among the questions tackled in this volume—the first to examine the practices of collecting prints, posters, and ephemera during the modern and contemporary periods. A wide range of case studies feature collections of printed materials from the United States, Latin America, France, Germany, Great Britain, China, Japan, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. Fourteen essays and one roundtable discussion, all specially commissioned from art historians, curators, and collectors for this volume, explore key issues such as the roles of class, politics, and gender, and address historical contexts, social roles, value, and national and transnational aspects of collecting practices. The global scope highlights cross-cultural connections and contributes to a new understanding of the place of prints, posters and ephemera within an increasingly international art world.