Louise Siddons – författare

During the twentieth century, artists across the United States participated in the modernist movement. But as American modernism evolved during the 1950s and 1960s, the art world likewise changed, narrowing its vision toward large coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. As these cities increasingly claimed the avant-garde for themselves, artists from the ""flyover"" states all but disappeared from the canon of experimental artists. Among these forgotten figures is Oklahoma modernist J. Jay McVicker (1911-2004). In Centering Modernism, Louise Siddons fills a curious gap in the history of American art by exploring - and indeed salvaging - McVicker's career and contributions to international modernism.A painter, printmaker, and sculptor, McVicker served as chair of the Department of Art at Oklahoma State University. As his career progressed, he experimented with different styles and expanded his professional network, exhibiting his work in major national and international galleries and museums. Marshaling evidence from primary sources - including newly discovered archival sources and interviews with the artist's friends, family, and colleagues - Siddons traces McVicker's development from his early regionalist roots through biomorphic abstraction, hard-edge geometric abstraction, and finally to a style that reflects the shifting boundaries of postmodernism.Despite his achievements, McVicker - along with other midwestern artists - dropped out of view during the postwar period due to what Siddons terms the coastalization of American art, as critics, artists, and curators from the East and West Coasts formed an elite and tightly knit group that garnered exclusive institutional access and support. According to Siddons, the bias against artists outside that circle continues to this day, even among revisionist scholars.Featuring nearly one hundred full-color reproductions of McVicker's works, Centering Modernism showcases the extraordinary range of his artistry. As the first comprehensive survey of McVicker's career and oeuvre, this volume is also the story of American modernism in all its diversity.

What are the limits of political solidarity, and how can visual culture contribute to social change?A fundamental dilemma exists in documentary photography: can white artists successfully portray Indigenous lives and communities in a manner that neither appropriates nor romanticizes them? With an attentive and sensitive eye, Louise Siddons examines lesbian photographer Laura Gilpin’s classic 1968 book The Enduring Navaho to illuminate the intersectional politics of photography, Navajo sovereignty, and queerness over the course of the twentieth century.   Gilpin was a New York–trained fine arts photographer who started working with Navajo people when her partner accepted a job as a nurse in Arizona. She spent more than three decades documenting Navajo life and creating her book in collaboration with Navajo friends and colleagues. Framing her lesbian identity and her long relationship with the Navajo people around questions of allyship, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon addresses the long and problematic history of White photographers capturing images of Native life. Simultaneously, Siddons uses Gilpin’s work to explore the limitations of White advocacy in a political moment that emphasized the need for Indigenous visibility and voices.   Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon introduces contemporary DinÉ (Navajo) artists as interlocutors, critics, and activists whose work embodies and extends the cultural sovereignty politics of earlier generations and makes visible the queerness often left implicit in Gilpin’s photographs. Siddons puts their work in conversation with Gilpin’s, taking up her mandate to viewers and readers of The Enduring Navajo to address Navajo aesthetics, traditions, politics, and people on their own terms.     Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.