Wendy Jean Katz – författare

Although the framework of regionalist studies may seem to be crumbling under the weight of increasing globalization, this collection of seventeen essays makes clear that cultivating regionalism lies at the center of the humanist endeavor. With interdisciplinary contributions from poets and fiction writers, literary historians, musicologists, and historians of architecture, agriculture, and women, this volume implements some of the most innovative and intriguing approaches to the history and value of regionalism as a category for investigation in the humanities. In the volume's inaugural essay, Annie Proulx discusses landscapes in American fiction, comments on how she constructs characters, and interprets current literary trends. Edward Watts offers a theory of region that argues for comparisons of the United States to other former colonies of Great Britain, including New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Whether considering a writer's connection to region or the idea of place in exploring what is meant by regionalism, these essays uncover an enduring and evolving concept. Although the approaches and disciplines vary, all are framed within the fundamental premise of the humanities: the search to understand what it means to be human.

The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 celebrated Omaha’s key economic role as a center of industry west of the Mississippi River and its arrival as a progressive metropolis after the Panic of 1893. The exposition also promoted the rise of the United States as an imperial power, at the time on the brink of the Spanish-American War, and the nation’s place in bringing “civilization” to Indigenous populations both overseas and at the conclusion of the recent Plains Indian Wars. The Omaha World’s Fair, however, is one of the least studied American expositions. Wendy Jean Katz brings together leading scholars to better understand the event’s place in the larger history of both Victorian-era America and the American West.The interdisciplinary essays in this volume cover an array of topics, from competing commercial visions of the cities of the Great West; to the role of women in the promotion of City Beautiful ideals of public art and urban planning; and the constructions of Indigenous and national identities through exhibition, display, and popular culture. Leading scholars T. J. Boisseau, Bonnie M. Miller, Sarah J. Moore, Nancy Parezo, Akim Reinhardt, and Robert Rydell, among others, discuss this often-misunderstood world’s fair and its place in the Victorian-era ascension of the United States as a world power.

As newspapers and periodicals proliferated in the United States in the nineteenth century, editors seeking to carve out a large and loyal audience hired artists to pair vivid imagery with sensational fiction ripped from the headlines. In Crime and Class in Print, Wendy Jean Katz examines the emergence of a modern visual culture in pre-Civil War New York City around these illustrated stories of crime, swashbuckling, and ordinary and extraordinary characters both rich and poor. Katz documents the life and career of Tompkins H. Matteson (1813–1884), whose drawings were printed alongside these tales, to understand the mass production, reception, and circulation of serialized illustrations. By closely analyzing the images within both their historical and fictional contexts, she interrogates how these cheap, ephemeral periodicals dramatized urban crime but also framed it within class-based concerns. The serial nature of Matteson’s illustrations, which made the coupled stories accessible to a larger swath of readers, represented an investment in industrial progress necessary to reach "mass" audiences. As Katz explores, while the images of city life conveyed nuance regarding ethnicity, temperance, police powers, privacy, sex, labor, aesthetics, reading practices, and masculinity, their paired narrative texts frequently mutated within and across different periodicals and languages to suit their audiences. In the English-language press, Matteson’s illustrations highlighted class struggle yet entwined them within the jingoist politics that advocated against immigration and upheld the white working class in opposition to ethnic diversity. As meaning shifted from one story, newspaper, or language to the next, what was a visual demonstration of progressive values championing proletariat interests became a platform to enforce a petit bourgeois and nativist perspective.

One of Hyperallergic's Top Ten Art Books for 2021 Approximately 300 daily and weekly newspapers flourished in New York before the Civil War. A majority of these newspapers, even those that proclaimed independence of party, were motivated by political conviction and often local conflicts. Their editors and writers jockeyed for government office and influence. Political infighting and their related maneuvers dominated the popular press, and these political and economic agendas led in turn to exploitation of art and art exhibitions. Humbug traces the relationships, class animosities, gender biases, and racial projections that drove the terms of art criticism, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War.The inexpensive "penny" papers that appeared in the 1830s relied on advertising to survive. Sensational stories, satire, and breaking news were the key to selling papers on the streets. Coverage of local politicians, markets, crime, and personalities, including artists and art exhibitions, became the penny papers' lifeblood. These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period's expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose new models for American art and society and tear down existing ones.Arguing that the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized, Humbug covers the changing politics and rhetoric of this criticism. Author Wendy Katz demonstrates how the penny press's drive for a more egalitarian society affected the taste and values that shaped art, and how the politics of their art criticism changed under pressure from nativists, abolitionists, and expansionists. Chapters explore James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and its attack on aristocratic monopolies on art; the penny press's attack on the American Art-Union, an influential corporation whose Board purchased artworks from living artists, exhibited them in a free gallery, and then distributed them in an annual five-dollar lottery; exposés of the fraudulent trade in Old Masters works; and the efforts of socialists, freethinkers, and bohemians to reject the authority of the past.

One of Hyperallergic's Top Ten Art Books for 2021 Approximately 300 daily and weekly newspapers flourished in New York before the Civil War. A majority of these newspapers, even those that proclaimed independence of party, were motivated by political conviction and often local conflicts. Their editors and writers jockeyed for government office and influence. Political infighting and their related maneuvers dominated the popular press, and these political and economic agendas led in turn to exploitation of art and art exhibitions. Humbug traces the relationships, class animosities, gender biases, and racial projections that drove the terms of art criticism, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War.The inexpensive "penny" papers that appeared in the 1830s relied on advertising to survive. Sensational stories, satire, and breaking news were the key to selling papers on the streets. Coverage of local politicians, markets, crime, and personalities, including artists and art exhibitions, became the penny papers' lifeblood. These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period's expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose new models for American art and society and tear down existing ones.Arguing that the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized, Humbug covers the changing politics and rhetoric of this criticism. Author Wendy Katz demonstrates how the penny press's drive for a more egalitarian society affected the taste and values that shaped art, and how the politics of their art criticism changed under pressure from nativists, abolitionists, and expansionists. Chapters explore James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and its attack on aristocratic monopolies on art; the penny press's attack on the American Art-Union, an influential corporation whose Board purchased artworks from living artists, exhibited them in a free gallery, and then distributed them in an annual five-dollar lottery; exposés of the fraudulent trade in Old Masters works; and the efforts of socialists, freethinkers, and bohemians to reject the authority of the past.

This book argues that nativism, the hostility especially to Catholic immigrants that led to the organization of political parties like the Know-Nothings, affected the meaning of nineteenthcentury American art in ways that have gone unrecognized. In an era of industrialization, nativism's erection of barriers to immigration appealed to artisans, a category that included most male artists at some stage in their careers. But as importantly, its patriotic message about the nature of the American republic also overlapped with widely shared convictions about the necessity of democratic reform. Movements directed toward improving the human condition, including anti-slavery and temperance, often consigned Catholicism, along with monarchies and slavery, to a repressive past, not the republican American future. To demonstrate the impact of this political effort by humanitarian reformers and nativists to define a Protestant character for the country, this book tracks the work and practice of artist William Walcutt. Though he is little known today, in his own time his efforts as a painter, illustrator and sculptor were acclaimed as masterly, and his art is worth reconsidering in its own right. But this book examines him as a case study of an artist whose economic and personal ties to artisanal print culture and cultural nationalists ensured that he was surrounded by and contributed to anti-Catholic publications and organizations. Walcutt was not anti immigrant himself, nor a member of a nativist party, but his kin, friends, and patrons publicly expressed warnings about Catholic and foreign political influence. And that has implications for better-known nineteenth-century historical and narrative art. Precisely because Walcutt's profile and milieu were so typical for artists in this period, this book is able to demonstrate how central this supposedly fringe movement was to viewers and makers of American art.