American Transnationalism: Perspectives from the Sheldon Museum of Art – serie

Inspired by the Sheldon Museum of Art's holdings in geometric abstraction, this book introduces adventurous new thinking about a visual approach that has captivated both artists and viewers for more than a century. Four richly illustrated essays explore the European genesis of geometric abstraction, its translation into an American context, and its current direction, charting the style's aesthetic, intellectual, and social implications. Sharon L. Kennedy's essay draws on the Sheldon's collection to trace the style's beginnings and its various transformations by twentieth-century American artists. Peter Halley invokes contemporary theory in rethinking how postmodern artists engage with geometry while challenging its most basic presumptions. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe delves into the work of four contemporary artists who are taking geometry in new directions, and Jorge Daniel Veneciano reveals the persistent manner in which theorists and defenders of geometric abstraction have obscured aspects of its history and contributed to the esoteric aura of modern art. Featured throughout are full-color reproductions of art from both the Sheldon and private collections, including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by diverse artists such as Ilya Bolotowsky, Carmen Herrera, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Odili Donald Odita, Frank Stella, and Charmion von Wiegand.

In this volume, the Sheldon Museum of Art presents more than one hundred examples from its distinguished photography collection, which contains nearly twenty-five hundred objects. Encompassing the full range of photographic history, Encounters showcases recognized masterpieces, recent acquisitions, and rarely seen treasures by a diverse range of artists, including Berenice Abbott, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Käsebier, André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, Yinka Shonibare, Paul Strand, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Carrie Mae Weems. Encounters explores photography through the lens of transnationalism, highlighting the artistic, cultural, geographic, scientific, and technological conflicts and concurrences that have shaped the modern photographic image. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the catalog addresses issues such as tourism, souvenir production, and the search for authenticity in the face of increasing industrialization; the transmission of American, European, and Mexican forms of modernism; gender identity and sexuality; the real and perceived tensions between nature and the built environment; and the convergences of art and science, craft and technology. Images are set within their context by the catalog's principal author, Brandon K. Ruud, and are accompanied by lively, thought-provoking essays by a team of scholars that includes Zeynep Çelik, Keith F. Davis, Gregory Nosan, Robert G. O'Meally, Britt Salveson, and the museum's director, Jorge Daniel Veneciano.