Search results for ""Author Makeda Best""

Alexander Gardner is best known for his innovative photographic history of the Civil War. What is less known is the extent to which he was involved in the international workers’ rights movement. Tying Gardner’s photographic storytelling to his transatlantic reform activities, this book expands our understanding of Gardner’s career and the work of his studio in Washington, DC, by situating his photographic production within the era’s discourse on social and political reform.Drawing on previously unknown primary sources and original close readings, Makeda Best reveals how Gardner’s activism in Scotland and photography in the United States shared an ideological foundation. She reads his Photographic Sketch Book of the War as a politically motivated project, rooted in Gardner’s Chartist and Owenite beliefs, and illuminates how its treatment of slavery is primarily concerned with the harm that the institution posed to the United States’ reputation as a model democracy. Best shows how, in his portraiture, Gardner celebrated Northern labor communities and elevated white immigrant workers, despite the industrialization that degraded them. She concludes with a discussion of Gardner’s promotion of an American national infrastructure in which photographers and photography played an integral role.Original and compelling, this reconsideration of Gardner’s work expands the contribution of Civil War photography beyond the immediate narrative of the war to comprehend its relation to the vigorous international debates about democracy, industrialization, and the rights of citizens. Scholars working at the intersection of photography, cultural history, and social reform in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic will find Best’s work invaluable to their own research.

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Collects over 150 years of key moments in the visual history of the Southern United States, with over two hundred photographs taken from 1850 to present The South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. Indeed, many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines the American experience—from racism, poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster, immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global economy—appear as key themes in the photography of the South. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the history of photography and also the history of America, and is therefore an apt lens through which to examine American identity. A Long Arc: Photography and the American South accompanies a major exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with more than one hundred photographers represented, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, William Eggleston, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Alec Soth, and An-My Lê. Insightful texts by Imani Perry, Sarah Kennel, Makeda Best, and Rahim Fortune, among others, illuminate this broad survey of photographs of the Southern United States as an essential American story. Copublished by Aperture and High Museum of Art, Atlanta

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Tracing the impacts of militarism on the American landscape, through the lens of art, environmental studies, and politicsDevour the Land considers how contemporary photographers have responded to the US military’s impact on the domestic environment since the 1970s, a dynamic period for environmental activism as well as for photography. This catalogue presents a lively range of voices at the intersection of art, environmentalism, militarism, photography, and politics. Alongside interviews with prominent contemporary artists working in the landscape photography tradition, the images speak to photographers’ varied motivations, personal experiences, and artistic approaches. The result is a surprising picture of the ways violence and warfare surround us. Although most modern combat has taken place abroad, the US domestic landscape bears the footprint of armed conflict—much of the environmental damage we live with today was caused by our own military and the expansive network of industries supporting its work. Designed to evoke a field book and to nod toward ephemera produced by earlier artists and activists, the catalogue features works by dozens of photographers, including Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Dorothy Marder, Alex Webb, Terry Evans, and many more.Distributed for the Harvard Art MuseumsExhibition Schedule:Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (September 17, 2021–January 16, 2022)

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A richly illustrated look at how travel influenced the work of renowned contemporary artist Betye SaarBetye Saar (b. 1926) is an artist whose assemblages tell visual stories and convey powerful political messages. A leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, she works with found objects—many of which she gathers on her extensive travels—to explore themes like symbolic mysticism, feminism, racism, and Eurocentric chauvinism. Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer sheds new light on Saar’s unique creative process, her trips around the world, and the diverse ways in which her artworks engage with global histories of travel and forced migration. It presents how the artist’s work conjures the transporting experience of a voyage to a faraway place.This beautifully illustrated book draws on original, in-depth interviews with Saar and the companions who accompanied the artist in her travels across four continents over several decades. Essays by leading scholars contextualize Saar’s journeys within her broader life and career, as well as how her practice fits into broader traditions—such as scrapbooking—in African American visual culture. In addition to providing this context, this book explores how Saar’s assemblage practice both echoes and provides a critical counterpoint to the collecting practices of Gilded Age American art collectors like Isabella Stewart Gardner.Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished material—including almost thirty travel sketchbooks and two dozen finished assemblages—Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer provides a fresh look at a groundbreaking American artist while offering a timely social history of the impact of travel on the African American experience.Distributed for the Isabella Stewart Gardner MuseumExhibition ScheduleIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, BostonFebruary 16–May 21, 2023

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