Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West – serie

Less than thirty years after Lewis and Clark completed their epic journey, Prince Maximilian of Wied - a German naturalist - and his entourage set off on their own daring expedition across North America. Accompanying the prince on this 1832-34 voyage was Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, whose drawings and watercolors - designed to illustrate Maximilian's journals - now rank among the great treasures of nineteenth-century American art. This lavishly illustrated book juxtaposes Bodmer's landscape images with modern-day photographs of the same views, allowing readers to see what has changed, and what seems unchanged, since the time Maximilian and Bodmer made their storied trip up the Missouri River.To discover how the areas Bodmer depicted have changed over time, photographer Robert M. Lindholm and anthropologist W. Raymond Wood made several trips over a period of years, from 1985 to 2002, to locate and record the same sites - all the way from Boston Harbor, where Maximilian and Bodmer began their journey, to Fort McKenzie, in modern-day western Montana. Pairing sixty-seven Bodmer works side by side with Lindholm's photographs of the same sites, this volume uses the comparison of old and new images to reveal alterations through time - and the encroachment of a built environment - across diverse landscapes. Karl Bodmer's America Revisited is at once a tribute to the artistic achievements of a premier landscape artist and a photographer who followed in his footsteps, and a valuable record of America's ever-changing environment.

Charles Deas (1818-67), an enigmatic figure on the edge of mainstream artistic circles in mid-nineteenth-century New York, went west to explore new opportunities and subjects in 1840. From his adopted hometown of St. Louis, Deas sent his iconic paintings of fur trappers and Indians back east for exhibition and sale, briefly winning the recognition that had earlier eluded him.This handsome volume - featuring more than 150 illustrations, 70 in color - is the first book exclusively devoted to Deas. In two major essays, Carol Clark presents Deas's haunting biography and complex art - works that embodied Americans' uncertainty about the future of their rapidly expanding nation, especially in the contested spaces of the West. Ranging from Indian genre scenes to more violent and bizarre themes drawn from literature and his own imagination, Deas's images reverberate with the racial tensions and cut-throat economic competition of the period. Three additional essayists examine the historical, political, and social context of Deas's art and discuss in detail two of his major paintings, Walking the Chalk and Long Jakes, ""the Rocky Mountain Man.""The volume also includes Clark's catalogue of Deas's paintings, watercolors, and drawings - the most extensive recovery and documentation to date of the work of this important but little-known artist. Charles Deas and 1840s America will constitute the definitive reference on the painter for years to come.

In the decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century, Charles M. Russell depicted the American West in a fresh, personal, and deeply moving way. To this day, Russell is celebrated for his paintings and sculptures of cowboys at work and play, his sensitive portrayals of American Indians, and his superlative representations of landscape and wildlife. This handsome book - a companion volume to the acclaimed Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné, edited by B. Byron Price - showcases many of the artist's best-known works and chronicles the sources and evolution of his style.Here are iconic images that have defined the West in the popular imagination for more than a century. The volume boasts reproductions, most in full color, of more than 150 of Russell's finest works in oil, bronze, and mixed media. Select examples of his drawings, watercolors, and illustrated letters as well as archival photographs place Russell's paintings and sculpture in historic and artistic context.This sumptuous volume is an essential addition to the library of every aficionado of American western art. In its pages readers will discover the work of a man whose ideal vision of the American experience continues to stir the spirit nearly a century after his death.

Grafton Tyler Brown - whose heritage was likely one-eighth African American - finessed his way through San Francisco society by passing for white. Working in an environment hostile to African American achievement, Brown became a successful commercial artist and businessman in the rough-and-tumble gold rush era and the years after the Civil War. Best known for his bird's-eye cityscapes, he also produced and published maps, charts, and business documents, and he illustrated books, sheet music, advertisements, and labels for cans and other packaging.This biography by a distinguished California historian gives an underappreciated artist and his work recognition long overdue. Focusing on Grafton Tyler Brown's lithography and his life in nineteenth-century San Francisco, Robert J. Chandler offers a study equally fascinating as a business and cultural history and as an introduction to Brown the artist.Chandler's contextualization of Brown's career goes beyond the issue of race. Showing how Brown survived and flourished as a businessman, Chandler offers unique insight into the growth of printing and publishing in California and the West. He examines the rise of lithography, its commercial and cultural importance, and the competition among lithographic companies. He also analyzes Brown's work and style, comparing it to the products of rival firms.Brown was not respected as a fine artist until after his death. Collectors of western art and Americana now recognize the importance of Californiana and of Brown's work, some of which depicts Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and they will find Chandler's checklist, descriptions, and reproductions of Brown's ephemera - including billheads and maps - as uniquely valuable as Chandler's contribution to the cultural and commercial history of California. In an afterword, historian Shirley Ann Wilson Moore discusses the circumstances and significance of passing in nineteenth-century America.

Attracted to the rich ceremonial life and unique architecture of the New Mexico pueblos, many early-twentieth-century artists depicted Pueblo peoples, places, and culture in paintings. These artists' encounters with Pueblo Indians fostered their awareness of Native political struggles and led them to join with Pueblo communities to champion Indian rights. In this book, art historian Sascha T. Scott examines the ways in which non-Pueblo and Pueblo artists advocated for American Indian cultures by confronting some of the cultural, legal, and political issues of the day.Scott closely examines the work of five diverse artists, exploring how their art was shaped by and helped to shape Indian politics. She places the art within the context of the interwar period, 1915-30, a time when federal Indian policy shifted away from forced assimilation and toward preservation of Native cultures. Through careful analysis of paintings by Ernest L. Blumenschein, John Sloan, Marsden Hartley, and Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal), Scott shows how their depictions of thriving Pueblo life and rituals promoted cultural preservation and challenged the pervasive romanticizing theme of the ""vanishing Indian."" Georgia O'Keeffe's images of Pueblo dances, which connect abstraction with lived experience, testify to the legacy of these political and aesthetic transformations.Scott makes use of anthropology, history, and indigenous studies in her art historical narrative. She is one of the first scholars to address varied responses to issues of cultural preservation by aesthetically and culturally diverse artists, including Pueblo painters. Beautifully designed, this book features nearly sixty artworks reproduced in full color.

Naturalist John James Audubon found the Great Plains and their wildlife so riveting when he visited the region in 1834 that he broke off a letter to his wife because he was too excited to write. In the almost two hundred years since then, the Wyoming landscape, deemed the ""Italy of America"" by landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, has retained its glory if not its place in the imagination of the American public. This book reminds us of the remarkable bounty contained in the wild beauty and rich history of the Wyoming grasslands - even as these riches are under threat from both human and natural forces.This landscape is now captured in all its spectacular diversity in the photography of Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton, two of the modern American West's most accomplished and well-known landscape photographers. Essays by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston provide a contextual framework for the images. Goodyear introduces us to the imagery of the American West and explains the place of Berman's and Sutton's work within that tradition, and Preston focuses on the natural history of the grasslands, illuminating the area's ecological diversity and changes through the seasons and over the years.In 2012 Berman and Sutton launched their massive Wyoming Grasslands Photographic Project, a partnership between The Nature Conservancy, Wyoming Chapter, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Working in the tradition of late-nineteenth-century explorers and photographers of the American West, Berman and Sutton shot more than 50,000 digital photographs of Wyoming prairie, from the Red Desert of southwestern Wyoming to the Thunder Basin National Grassland of the state's northeastern corner. The best of their extraordinarily sensitive, revealing, and powerful images appear in these pages, documenting the sweep and the seasons of the Wyoming landscape.In eloquent words and pictures, including a foreword by environmental historian Dan Flores, Wyoming Grasslands offers dramatic proof of how the land that inspired the likes of Audubon and Bierstadt, while having altered over time, still holds and demands our attention.

Artist-explorer John Mix Stanley (1814-1872), one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the American West in his time, was in a sense a victim of his own success. So highly regarded was his work that more than two hundred of his paintings were held at the Smithsonian Institution - where in 1865 a fire destroyed all but seven of them. This volume, featuring a comprehensive collection of Stanley's extant art, reproduced in full color, offers an opportunity - and ample reason - to rediscover the remarkable accomplishments of this outsize figure of nineteenth-century American culture.Originally from New York State, Stanley journeyed west in 1842 to paint Indian life. During the U.S.-Mexican War, he joined a frontier military expedition and traveled from Santa Fe to California, producing sketches and paintings of the campaign along the way - work that helped secure his fame in the following decades. He was also appointed chief artist for Isaac Stevens's survey of the 48th parallel for a proposed transcontinental railroad. The essays in this volume, by noted scholars of American art, document and reflect on Stanley's life and work from every angle. The authors consider the artist's experience on government expeditions; his solo tours among the Oregon settlers and western and Plains Indians; and his career in Washington and search for government patronage, as well as his individual works.With contributions by Emily C. Burns, Scott Manning Stevens, Lisa Strong, Melissa Speidel, Jacquelyn Sparks, and Emily C. Wilson, the essays in this volume convey the full scope of John Mix Stanley's artistic accomplishment and document the unfolding of that uniquely American vision throughout the artist's colorful life. Together they restore Stanley to his rightful place in the panorama of nineteenth-century American life and art.

One of America's most popular and influential American artists, Frederic Remington (1861-1909) is renowned for his depictions of the Old West. Through paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he immortalized a dynamic world of cowboys and American Indians, hunters and horses, landscapes and wildlife. Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is a comprehensive presentation of the artist's body of flat work, both in print and on this book's companion website.Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 figures and 100 color plates, this book offers insightful essays by notable art historians who explore Remington's experiences in Taos, New Mexico, and other parts of the West. The chapters include analyses of Remington's artistic development from an illustrator to a fine art painter, his search for and understanding of ""men with the bark on,"" his relationship with the famed illustrator Howard Pyle, and the shared imagery of Remington and ""Buffalo Bill"" Cody. A chapter considering Remington's enduring bond with the horse and its representation in his paintings follows an examination of Remington's ties to Theodore Roosevelt that reveals how the two men helped move the American conscience toward wildlife preservation. An assessment of the authentication process for evaluating Remington's works opens the collection: Remington is perhaps the most frequently faked American artist.The book features a unique keycode granting access to a companion website that brings together more than 3,000 reproductions of the artist's flat works, including the complete original 1996 edition of the Catalogue Raisonné and nearly 300 previously unknown or relocated pieces. Each entry includes the title, date, medium, size, inscriptions, provenance, and exhibition and publication history of the work, as well as select commentary. The online catalogue is fully searchable and will be continuously updated as new information becomes available.Based on decades of scholarship and research, the revised Remington Catalogue Raisonné is an essential resource for scholars, collectors, museum curators, historians of the American West, and anyone seeking definitive information on the art of Frederic Remington.Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is published in cooperation with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming.

The American nineteenth century saw a largely rural nation confined to the Eastern Seaboard conquer a continent and spawn increasingly dense commercial metropolises. This time of unprecedented territorial and economic growth has long been thought to find its most sweeping visual equivalent in the period's landscape paintings. But, as Matthew N. Johnston shows, the age's defining features were just as clearly captured in, and motivated by, visual material mass-produced through innovations in printing technology. Illustrated railroad and steamboat guidebooks, tourist literature, reports of geological surveys, ethnographic studies: all of these new print vehicles brought new meanings to the interplay of time, space, and place as American continental expansion peaked.Instrumental to that project of national and industrial growth, these commercial and scientific publications introduced readers, travelers, and citizens to a changing North American landscape made more accessible by new travel routes blazed between 1825 and 1875. More fundamentally, as Johnston shows in his nuanced analysis, by simulating new temporal frameworks through their presentation of landscape, these print materials established new models of consumption and new kinds of knowledge critical to expansion.Johnston relates these sources to traditional art historical subjects - the landscapes of the Hudson River school, luminist paintings by John Kensett and William Trost Richards, Native portraits painted by George Catlin, and photographs by Timothy O'Sullivan - to show how key discourses associated with expansion shifted away from picturesque strategies pairing imagery and narrative toward entirely new forms that gave temporal structure to viewers' experience of an emerging modernity.Revealing the crucial role of print and visual culture in shaping the nineteenth-century United States, Narrating the Landscape offers fresh insight into the landscapes Americans beheld and imagined in this formative era.

Artists and filmmakers in the early twentieth century reshaped our vision of the American West. In particular, the Taos Society of Artists and the California-based artist Maynard Dixon departed from the legendary depiction of the ""Wild West"" and fostered new images, or brands, for western art. This volume, illustrated with more than 150 images, examines select paintings and films to demonstrate how these artists both enhanced and contradicted earlier representations of the West.Prior to this period, American art tended to portray the West as a wild frontier with untamed lands and peoples. Renowned artists such as Henry Farny and Frederic Remington set their work in the past, invoking an environment immersed in conflict and violence. This trademark perspective began to change, however, when artists enamored with the Southwest stamped a new imprint on their paintings.The contributors to this volume illuminate the complex ways in which early-twentieth-century artists, as well as filmmakers, evoked a southwestern environment not just suspended in time but also permanent rather than transient. Yet, as the authors also reveal, these artists were not entirely immune to the siren call of the vanishing West, and their portrayal of peaceful yet ""exotic"" Native Americans was an expansion rather than a dismissal of earlier tropes. Both brands cast a romantic spell on the West, and both have been seared into public consciousness.Branding the American West is published in association with the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, and the Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas.

Throughout his long and prolific career, Ray Stanford Strong (1905-2006) strove to capture the essence of the western American landscape. An accomplished painter who achieved national fame during the New Deal era, Strong is best known for his depiction of landscapes in California and Oregon, rendered in his signature plein air style. This beautiful volume, featuring more than 100 color and black-and-white illustrations, is the first comprehensive exploration of Strong's life and artistry.Through family papers, archives, photographs, and a two-year series of interviews conducted with the artist personally, Mark Humpal traces Strong's journey from his childhood on an Oregon berry farm to his artistically formative years in New York and San Francisco. After moving back to the West Coast, Strong produced important works for the WPA, executed major diorama projects for two world expositions, helped organize the Santa Barbara Art Institute, and served as teacher and mentor for a new generation of plein air artists. But, as Humpal emphasizes, Strong distinguished himself by resisting the drumbeat of the avant-garde. During an era when many artists were experimenting with abstract expressionism, Strong never relinquished his personal vision and adherence to a more traditional style. With his outgoing personality, he forged friendships and associations with such prominent artists as Frank Vincent DuMond, Maynard Dixon, Ansel Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Steinbeck.Ultimately, Strong had little concern for his place in the sweep of art history. The proficiency he achieved through years of formal and informal study allowed him to craft a personal style difficult to categorize but unique and engaging. By expanding our understanding and appreciation of Strong's artistic contributions, this book offers a fitting tribute to one of America's finest landscape artists.

When Buffalo Bill's Wild West show traveled to Paris in 1889, the New York Times reported that the exhibition would be ""managed to suit French ideas."" But where had those ""French ideas"" of the American West come from? And how had they, in turn, shaped the notions of ""cowboys and Indians"" that captivated the French imagination during the Gilded Age? In Transnational Frontiers, Emily C. Burns maps the complex fin-de-siècle cultural exchanges that revealed, defined, and altered images of the American West.This lavishly illustrated visual history shows how American artists, writers, and tourists traveling to France exported the dominant frontier narrative that presupposed manifest destiny - and how Native American performers with Buffalo Bill's Wild West and other traveling groups challenged that view. Many French artists and illustrators plied this imagery as well. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, sculptures of American cowboys conjured a dynamic and adventurous West, while portraits of American Indians on vases evoked an indigenous people frozen in primitivity. At the same time, representations of Lakota performers, as well as the performers themselves, deftly negotiated the politics of American Indian assimilation and sought alternative spaces abroad.For French artists and enthusiasts, the West served as a fulcrum for the construction of an American cultural identity, offering a chance to debate ideas of primitivism and masculinity that bolstered their own colonialist discourses. By examining this process, Burns reveals the interconnections between American western art and Franco-American artistic exchange between 1865 and 1915.

As one of America's most prominent nineteenth-century painters, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) is justly renowned for his majestic paintings of the western landscape. Yet Bierstadt was also a painter of history, and his figural works, replete with images of Plains Indians and the American bison, are an important part of his legacy as well. This splendid full-color volume highlights his achievements in chronicling a rapidly changing American West.Born in Germany, Bierstadt rose to prominence as an American artist in the late 1850s and enjoyed nearly two decades of critical success. His paintings propelled him to the forefront of the American art scene, but they also met with reproach from his peers and critics in the press who viewed his painting style as outmoded. Bierstadt's star has both risen and fallen as modern art historians have reconsidered his complex oeuvre.This volume takes a major step in reappraising Bierstadt's contributions by reexamining the artist through a new lens. It shows how Bierstadt conveyed moral messages through his paintings, often to preserve the dignity of Native peoples and call attention to the tragic slaughter of the American bison. More broadly, the book reconsiders the artist's engagement with contemporary political and social debates surrounding wildlife conservation in America, the creation and perpetuation of national parks, and the prospects for the West's indigenous peoples. Bierstadt's final history paintings, including his dual masterworks titled The Last of the Buffalo - a special focus of this volume - stand out as elegiac odes to an earlier era, giving voice to concerns about the intertwined fates of Native peoples and endangered wildlife, especially bison.Along with its rich sampling of Bierstadt's diverse artwork, Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West features informative essays by noted curators, scholars of art history, and historians of the American West.

In centuries long past, a vast swath of grassland swept down the center of North America, from Canada's Prairie Provinces to central Texas. This once-plentiful prairie has now all but disappeared. Humans have grazed, mowed, and plowed the plains, dammed the rivers, and imposed their will on the land and its creatures. Fortunately, some remnants have survived, including the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in northeastern Oklahoma. In this visually stunning volume, wildlife photographer Harvey Payne and historian James P. Ronda offer an intimate look at and into one of America's Last Great Places.Spanning nearly 40,000 acres in Oklahoma's Osage County, the Preserve is a living witness to a world that once existed. But the Osage prairie is not a museum or theme park - and it is not frozen in time. Under the stewardship of The Nature Conservancy, which has overseen its restoration, the Preserve lives on as a fully functioning ecosystem. And for twenty-five years, Payne and Ronda have explored these lands, together and in solitude. Rendered here in brilliant color and paired with Ronda's informative yet deeply personal commentary, Payne's photographs open our eyes to the ever-changing world of the Tallgrass Preserve. In chapters focused on grass, sky, birds, bison, and fire, Ronda and Payne reveal that the ""Big Empty"" is, in fact, teeming with life.Through interwoven images and words, Visions of the Tallgrass shows that our nation's grasslands are sacred ground, a priceless piece of our American past - and future.

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.

From its sweeping coastlines to its soaring inland mountains, verdant valleys, and volcanoes standing in splendid isolation, the Pacific Northwest has long inspired artists to capture the unique spirit of its varied landscape. Yet the early years of twentieth-century Pacific Northwest painting remain shrouded in mystery. In this groundbreaking work, John Impert introduces readers to the rich and varied array of artists and works of art that defined the region's artistic transition from a nature-bound impressionism to the arrival of modernism.Focusing on nine artists - Paul Morgan Gustin, C. C. McKim, Clyde Keller, J. Edgar Forkner, Clara Jane Stephens, Dorothy Dolph Jensen, Eustace Paul Ziegler, Mark Tobey, and C. S. Price - art historian John Impert organizes his work around the landscapes, people, and city scenes they painted. He identifies the influence of impressionism, in particular the singular way in which each artist's biography, style, and iconography contribute to a distinctive northwestern sensibility.Painters of the Northwest shows us for the first time how a spectacular natural environment, one that conformed aesthetically to nineteenth-century ideals of romanticism and transcendental reverence, combined with an emphasis on subject over style to create a body of work far more concerned with the natural environment than with the socioeconomic issues that occupied city-bound artists of the day. Establishing a chronology, history, and art historical canon for this little-studied place and time, this book is a long-overdue foundational history of early twentieth-century painting in the Pacific Northwest.

For nearly half a century, celebrated historian Ron Tyler has researched, interpreted, and exhibited western American art. This splendid volume, gleaned from Tyler's extensive career of connoisseurship, brings together eight of the author's most notable essays, reworked especially for this volume. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 images, Western Art, Western History tells the stories of key artists, both famous and obscure, whose provocative pictures document the people and places of the nineteenth-century American West.The artists depicted in these pages represent a variety of personalities and artistic styles. According to Tyler, each of them responded in unique ways to the compelling and exotic drama that unfolded in the West during the nineteenth century - an age of exploration, surveying, pleasure travel, and scientific discovery. In eloquent and engaging prose, Tyler unveils a fascinating cast of characters, including the little-known German-Russian artist Louis Choris, who served as a draftsman on the second Russian circumnavigation of the globe; the exacting and precise Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who accompanied Prince Maximilian of Wied on his sojourn up the Missouri River; and the young American Alfred Jacob Miller, whose seemingly frivolous and romantic depictions of western mountain men and American Indians remained largely unknown until the mid-twentieth century. Other artists showcased in this volume are John James Audubon, George Caleb Bingham, Alfred E. Mathews, and, finally, Frederic Remington, who famously sought to capture the last glimmers of the ""old frontier.""A common thread throughout Western Art, Western History is the important role that technology - especially the development of lithography - played in the dissemination of images. As the author emphasizes, many works by western artists are valuable not only as illustrations but as scientific documents, imbued with cultural meaning. By placing works of western art within these broader contexts, Tyler enhances our understanding of their history and significance.

What is American Indian photography? At the turn of the twentieth century, Edward Curtis began creating romantic images of American Indians, and his works - along with pictures by other non-Native photographers - came to define the field. Yet beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, American Indians themselves started using cameras to record their daily activities and to memorialize tribal members. Through a Native Lens offers a refreshing, new perspective by highlighting the active contributions of North American Indians, both as patrons who commissioned portraits and as photographers who created collections.In this richly illustrated volume, Nicole Dawn Strathman explores how indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada appropriated the art of photography and integrated it into their lifeways. The photographs she analyzes date to the first one hundred years of the medium, between 1840 and 1940. To account for Native activity both in front of and behind the camera, the author divides her survey into two parts. Part I focuses on Native participants, including such public figures as Sarah Winnemucca and Red Cloud, who fashioned themselves in deliberate ways for their portraits. Part II examines Native professional, semiprofessional, and amateur photographers.Drawing from tribal and state archives, libraries, museums, and individual collections, Through a Native Lens features photographs - including some never before published - that range from formal portraits to casual snapshots. The images represent multiple tribal communities across Native North America, including the Inland Tlingit, Northern Paiute, and Kiowa. Moving beyond studies of Native Americans as photographic subjects, this groundbreaking book demonstrates how indigenous peoples took control of their own images and distinguished themselves as pioneers of photography.

Representations of first contact - the first meetings of European explorers and Native Americans - have always had a central place in our nation's historical and visual record. They have also had a key role in shaping and interpreting that record. In Framing First Contact author Kate Elliott looks at paintings by artists from George Catlin to Charles M. Russell and explores what first contact images tell us about the process of constructing national myths - and how those myths acquired different meanings at different points in our nation's history.First contact images, with their focus on beginnings rather than conclusive action or determined outcomes, might depict historical events in a variety of ways. Elliott argues that nineteenth century artists, responding to the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the subject, used the visualized space between cultures meeting for the first time to address critical contemporary questions and anxieties. Taking works from the 1840s through the 1910s as case studies - paintings by Robert W. Weir, Thomas Moran, and Albert Bierstadt, along with Catlin and Russell - Elliott shows how many first contact representations, especially those commissioned and conceived as official history, speak blatantly of conquest, racial superiority, and imperialism. And yet, others communicate more nuanced messages that might surprise contemporary viewers.Elliott suggests it was the very openness of the subject of first contact that allowed artists, consciously or not, to speak of contemporary issues beyond imperialism and conquest. Uncovering those issues, Framing First Contact forces us to think about why we tell the stories we do, and why those stories matter.

As time passes, personal memories of the Great Depression die with those who lived through the desperate 1930s. In the absence of firsthand knowledge, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the photographs produced for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) now provide most of the images that come to mind when we think of the 1930s. That novel and those photographs, as this book shows, share a history. Fully exploring this complex connection for the first time, Picturing Migrants offers new insight into Steinbeck’s novel and the FSA’s photography—and into the circumstances that have made them enduring icons of the Depression.Looking at the work of Dorothea Lange, Horace Bristol, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee, it is easy to imagine that these images came straight out of the pages of The Grapes of Wrath. This should be no surprise, James R. Swensen tells us, because Steinbeck explicitly turned to photographs of the period to create his visceral narrative of hope and loss among Okie migrants in search of a better life in California. When the novel became an instant best seller upon its release in April 1939, some dismissed its imagery as pure fantasy. Lee knew better and traveled to Oklahoma for proof. The documentary pictures he produced are nothing short of a photographic illustration of the hard lives and desperate reality that Steinbeck so vividly portrayed. In Picturing Migrants, Swensen sets these lesser-known images alongside the more familiar work of Lange and others, giving us a clearer understanding of the FSA’s work to publicize the plight of the migrant in the wake of the novel and John Ford’s award-winning film adaptation.A new perspective on an era whose hardships and lessons resonate to this day, Picturing Migrants lets us see as never before how a novel and a series of documentary photographs have kept the Great Depression unforgettably real for generation after generation.

Over a century ago, a group of painters dreamed of establishing an artists’ colony in the village of Taos, New Mexico, and succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. Founded in 1915 and disbanded in 1927, the Taos Society of Artists promoted painting that embraced the landscape of the Southwest and the local Pueblo and Hispanic people. This gorgeous two-volume set is the culmination of decades of scholarship by leading authorities in the field. Lavishly illustrated with more than 600 full-color illustrations, it is a fitting tribute to the groundbreaking artists of the society and their remarkable legacy.Volume 1 depicts the origins of the society and its objectives, cultural context, and expanding importance in American art history. The essays that follow focus on the contributions of the society’s founding members: Joseph H. Sharp, E. Irving Couse, Bert G. Phillips, Ernest L. Blumenschein, Oscar E. Berninghaus, and W. Herbert Dunton. Volume 2 explores the achievements of six other prominent artists who joined the society, as well as its associate and honorary members. The volume concludes with a detailed chronology of relevant events from 1850 to 1966.

With some 400 members, the California Camera Club was the largest photography network in the United States in the early twentieth century. In The California Camera Club, Carolin Gö rgen recaptures the lost history of this community - and reveals its critical but little-known role in defining the popular image of California, and the American West generally, for posterity. At a time when hand-held cameras were multiplying and San Francisco was becoming the main venue for aspiring western photographers, the unknown but committed practitioners of the California Camera Club collectively pictured California as the dominant symbol of the American West. Detached from the cultural hubs of the East Coast, club members were instead closely tied to an influential circle of western artists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and environmentalists, all of whom were determined to promote California through the increasingly accessible medium of photography. Members deployed new technology and worked outdoors, producing an unprecedented number of images - in prints, exhibitions, magazines, and lantern slides - that would forever inform our understanding of California photography as an outdoor practice rooted in the western environment. Gö rgen begins her account with the first photo-exhibitions of the 1880s and the formation of a vibrant exchange network of photo excursionists. She then explores how the Club survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire to become a crucial source of support for a new, now well-known, generation of photographers by the time of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. Though instrumental in promoting individual photographers' careers - as in the case of Ansel Adams - the club's more significant contribution emerged in its collaborative nature and outdoor efforts. In telling its story, Görgen offers a new view of the history of photography and the collective composition of an enduring picture of the American West.