Preface

Why Encounters?

The theme of encounter is at the heart of our bookencounter not only among traditions, but between fine arts and commercial mass media, as well as among alternative versions of American identity. But this book examines well-known works as well. Set in a new context, the "canon" of American fine arts-those familiar landmarks of our cultural education- acquires new meaning and complexity. We see that those who created these well-known and well-loved works did so often in moments of cross-cultural awakening. For example, the arts were catalyzed by their encounter with Japanese aesthetics followingJapan's opening to international trade in the 1850s. Or again, Abstract Expressionists, emulating the works of Native artists they collected and studied, pushed their art beyond the representation of magic and ritual to its enactment in paint. Through such examples, we discover just how international our ''.American" traditions of fine art and design really are. Our theme of encounter not only expands what we look at but how we look at it.

From the time of European colonization, North America has been crisscrossed by population currents: west from Europe and Africa, north from Mexico, east from the Pacific Asian world, northwest from the Caribbean. West and Central Africans, forcibly uprooted from their homeland, encountered Spanish colonizers and Indians in Florida, French Creole culture in New Orleans, or English settlers in the Northeast. American Indians from the Northeast, forced progressively westward, encountered other Indian societies from the South and the Plains. Hispanic settlers in the Southwest encountered Pueblo and Navajo. The products of these various encounters are all American artworks. As we shall show, heterogeneous mixture is not a new American story at all.

Indeed such encounters predate the contact between Europe and the "New World." Even before the first contact with Europe, Native societies were engaged in networks of cultural exchange through trade, migration, and warfare. The facts contradict the conventional image of Indians as a timeless people living in a static world impervious to change.

The European colonization of North America vastly accelerated the rate of cultural encounter that characterized the centuries before contact. The historical period from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries is distinguished by a global system of commodity exchange, in which raw materials, goods, and human beings circulated among the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. While these economic engines of exchange proved highly destructive of traditional societies, they also introduced a range of new materials, new motifs, and creative interactions between and among people.

Encounters between the colonizers and New World cultures, however, were frequently lopsided. Europeans held disproportionate power over the peoples already here. Impelled by a powerful sense of mission, Europeans settling in America reproduced many aspects of the societies from which they came. Their arts and material culture (those humanly made objects of everyday life that shape and transmit culture) are all around us, holding a place of honor in our national memory, in our museums, and in our built environment. Their history has crucially shaped the nation's identity, although it has undergone radical revision in recent decades. It remains a central thread in any account of the meeting of societies and peoples in the New World.

Modernization brought another form of encounter, introducing massive changes in people's everyday lives, and drawing them with greater intensity toward historical anchors in the past. Virtually every ethnic group we examine in this book revived earlier traditions-"reinventing tradition"-in some manner. Around the time of the 1876 Centennial celebration Americans of northern European ancestry looked back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a time they associated with rural simplicity and civic virtue. In the early twentieth century, Pueblo potters in the Southwest revived earlier techniques of black earthenware and incorporated the geometric patterns of ancient Mimbres and Anasazi pottery. In the decades between World War I and World War II European-American critics, designers, and artists looked back to the nineteenth century for historical precedents for a "machine" aesthetic in the twentieth. In many cases, the traditions from which later generations borrowed were themselves hybrid and retrospective. This process of recovery and reinvention was directed at preserving cultural memory and continuity during periods of accelerating historical change.

The older art historical concept of influence might seem at first glance a perfectly good way of explaining these transitions between cultures and generations. Influence, however, primarily concerns the elements of style, and it assumes a linear history across time, a one-way flow from artist to artist. Encounter expands the notion of influence beyond individual artists and makers to take in broader visual traditions. Unlike influence, it flows in multiple directions, between, across, and among cultures, as when nineteenth-century European-American artists documenting Plains Indian cultures became the source for twentieth-century efforts among American Indians to reproduce lost traditions of dress and ritual. Above all, encounter reminds us of the enormous malleability, resilience, and capacity for productive change that characterize human expression. Encounter is dynamic in nature; both parties get something different out of the exchange.

Encounters between different traditions may be friendly (trade and alliance), filled with suspicion, dread, or physical aggression ( colonialism, conquest, and war), or full of comic, or sometimes tragic, cultural misunderstandings. The sixteenth-century Spanish writer Antonio de Ciudad Real recounts an act of naming by which the Spanish took symbolic possession of new lands. Asking the Indian inhabitants what they called their country, the Indians replied "uic athan," meaning '"what do you say or what do you speak, that we do not understand you?' And then, the Spaniard ordered it set down that [the new country] be called Yucatdn." 1 As this story reveals, cultural encounter frequently involves misunderstandings that nonetheless serve the needs of the interpreting party. In the process, a new reality emerges, a Yucatan of the imagination that affects both parties.

While exchanges between and among different ethnic groups continued to vitalize the arts, the emergence of mass culture introduced another axis of encounter. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, mass media-the chromolithograph, the illustrated newspaper, comics, animation, film, and photography-introduced technologically mediated forms of visual culture which challenged concepts of artistry and originality. Many artists reacted to mass media by appropriating and borrowing from them, but the encounter also produced a form of 'boundary policing" in which the two realms were strictly separated. As our text suggests, the conversation between the fine arts and mass media produced both fruitful exchange and defining opposition.

Our Relationship to the Past

Framing the entire book is our own relationship to history. Scholars, as well as artists and designers, reinterpret the past in light of their concerns. We study the art of the past because it is a reservoir of visual quotation from which each generation of artists, designers, architects, filmmakers, and advertisers draw. Our study promotes an understanding of how objects affect us, what messages they carry- explicit and otherwise-and what stories they can tell us about ourselves as a people. Our text opens its own conversation with the next generation of students and scholars in the field of American art. We recognize that you-our readers-differ from the readers of a similar text twenty, thirty, or sixty years ago, when the field of American art history had its origins in the cultural nationalism of the post-war years. Furthermore, we believe that our text is more "true" to the past than this older version. Since there is certainly room for debate on that question, we must as authors acknowledge how much our present moment has shaped our text.

As scholars susceptible to events occurring around the world, we are profoundly uneasy with narrow concepts of nationalism, especially those rooted in rigid definitions of ethnic identity and cultural difference sustained by prolonged histories of suffering and inequality. The present text embodies a cosmopolitan vision of American culture, defined not around differences from others but around the conversation between traditions, the energizing exchanges, borrowings, and appropriations from other cultures that have contributed so much to our art. Turning away from arguments grounded in difference-and exclusivity-American Encounters looks toward points of contact and overlap.

What Shapes this Version of the Past?

l. A 'post'-national perspective that moves beyond the notion of defining a national identity through the arts: Earlier histories of American art established their account of the visual arts around the concept of national identity. But as scholar Michael Leja has written, "How viable is the national art of the United States as a field of study when that art is thoroughly permeated by significant ties to the arts of other nations, in Europe, the Americas, and throughout the world?" How do we define the boundaries of ''.American" arts? While our account is still centered on the United States and its historical antecedents (excluding Canada and Mexico), we are no longer concerned with the need to defme a national identity through the arts.

A related idea shaping earlier histories is that a "national art" expresses a unitary identity shared-to one degree or another-by everyone. The role of the arts, in this model, is consensual: part of a broad network of common beliefs, shared political and social objectives, in which regional, ethnic, and class differences were subsumed within a common culture. Indeed much American art itself-since the advent of the nation-state in 1776-purported to speak on behalf of a unitary public. In recent decades, such claims to a common culture of more or less like-minded citizens have been reassessed: we no longer approach any particular artistic expression as one voice representing the many, but in terms of one among multiple speakers, revealing its specific conditions, time, and place.

2. A view beyond exceptionalism to a multiplicity of traditions and their dialogues with one another: Part and parcel of nationcentered accounts of the arts is the idea of American exceptionalism: the guiding assumption that America is different from the rest of the world. In this view, the United States has developed according to historic.ally unique laws that distinguish its history from that of any other nationstate. Belief in American exceptionalism has had a dramatic effect on how we have understood the arts as expressions of American national identity. Exceptionalism isolates national life from the historical influences and processes of cultural formation that have shaped other creative traditions. In moving beyond exceptionalist histories, we also go beyond singularity to the multiplicity of local, regional, international, and cross-cultural influences. We consider how the arts articulate identities across space and national borders, and the ways in which ethnic and local loyalties cut across allegiances to an often abstract and distant concept of nation. Furthermore, we consider the enormous debt that the arts owe to European mother cultures and "ancestral homelands" such as Africa and Mexico, as well as to an increasingly international marketplace of motifs, ideas, materials, working methods, and sites of exhibition. The result is not one American tradition but multiple traditions, each in dialogue with a range of other expressive forms.

3. Feminist and gender studies scholarship offers a means to an inclusive history: Beginning in the 1970s a generation of scholarship by and about women expanded our sense of the past and of the critical role played by women artists at every level of cultural production. Inserting these women into the prevailing history of male artists, this generation also revalued traditional "women's arts" of the needle, from quilts to samplers. Long relegated to a low status as "domestic" products, these works contain a rich history shaped by the same processes of exchange and adaptation that characterize other forms of art. The new, more inclusive history of the arts that emerged from this scholarship offered an important critique of many of the inherited assumptions underlying art history as a discipline. Since that first generation of feminist historians, scholars in "gender studies" have broadened our understanding of the many ways in which gender identity has shaped the arts, from the manner in which artistic training has excluded women, to the objectification of women as th~ subjects of artists, to the ways in which artistic genius has always carried a masculine gender. Such scholarship also understands male artistic experience as equally shaped by historically specific and changing gender ideals and roles. All of these are informed by the emergence of gender as an integral dimension of any historically balanced account.

4. "Post-colonial studies" provide a framework: From the mid-twentieth century onward, movements for national independence have given a voice to cultures previously marginalized by a historical account of the past centered on Europe and its evolving societies-including America. In this post-colonial framework, the rise to dominance on the part of European colonizers is no longer taken for granted, but is opened up to historical scrutiny. How was such dominance established? How do material and visual forms create hierarchies of value? And through what avenues are such values promoted and circulated throughout a culture?

5. A visual studies approach informs the selection of objects: American Encounters recognizes the role of visual forms that have been, until the past decade or two, considered outside the boundaries of Art History as a discipline, such as maps, festivals, cartoons, quilts and needlework, animation, and "outsider" art. These vernacular visual forms, too long considered non-artistic, play a role in the process by which individuals acquire a sen,.se of selfhood and participation in a broader public. More than broadening the boundaries that define our objects of study, visual studies also shift our sights from the aesthetic object as a self-contained product of a singular creative effort, to the object as it exists at the juncture of multiple histories. This, in the largest sense, is how we understand our defining theme of encounter. The object becomes a site of encounter between creator and culture, individual and community; between past and present; between functional requirements and the need for beauty and symbolic meaning. It symbolizes the preservation of communal memory, the survival and persistence of cultural traditions, the conferral of status and identity by which individuals come to feel themselves part of larger groups and nations. This attention to cultural process over static artifact is a defining feature of contemporary scholarship.

Our Methods

Any understanding of the past based on surviving artifacts is necessarily limited: it is shaped by those objects that have been preserved into the present. Such objects give us an unequalled insight into how earlier generations saw and experienced their world. They do so with a tactile immediacy, often with a strangeness that provokes our curiosity and leads us to ask questions. Individuals create and transmit culture. This process occurs through languages of style, form, and symbolism that frame the individual expression.

Our ultimate purpose is to form a compassionate understanding of history and human cultures, in their creative, expressive, ritualistic, and memorializing functions, but our method of access is through the aesthetic and material world. We draw different stories out of objects and works of art depending on what questions we ask as we look and study. One of the greatest challenges, and rewards, of Art History is to explore how material and aesthetic forms and media are linked to content-not just to narratives, subject matter, and internal structures of meaning, but to the cultural and historical experience that shaped them. As you use this book, please keep this in mind. Asking questions actively transforms how we see the "reality" around us. Seeing and knowing are intimately related in the discipline of Art History. Neither one should take priority; description blooms into knowledge when avid observation and historical curiosity go hand in hand.

How to Use This Book

Ours is an integrative approach in which diverse topics interrelate; our goal is to broaden understanding of cultural and historical connections among various objects, media, and subject matter in order to increase our understanding of culture as a whole. This book repeatedly demonstrates the multitudinous nature of the past-not one, but many. Accordingly any picture of the past depends on one's point of entry. If some stories appear to be neglected (the story, for instance, of the individual career from start to finish), others come more strongly to the surface. We hope that the overall patterns that emerge will offer opportunities for students to approach American arts in new, productive ways.

We also hope that this book will be an active presence in the classroom, a text to argue with and to assist in framing issues. It furnishes a set of core works, as well as a survey and analysis of media and themes central to American visual culture, around which students can construct their own narratives. Our selection of works tries to balance issues of aesthetic quality with choices that embody our general themes. This book is a roadmap; you are the navigator. As in geography, so in history: there are many ways to arrive at one's destination.

CHRONOLOGICAL RANGE AND THEMES

Our text is arranged chronologically around themes, rather than around individual careers. You will find in reading this book that artists and objects reappear in different chapters. Objects, like the people who owned them, often have several lives, and the historian can tell more than one story about them. The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, for instance, appears in chapters 2, 3, and 15. Built and rebuilt over three centuries since its original construction in the early 1600s, the Palace of the Governors embodies the complex history of New Mexico as colony and later as state. For the historian, it furnishes evidence of Hispanic town planning and architecture in the seventeenth century, as well as of the reinvention of Hispanic forms in the early twentieth century. It also served as a stage for the annual Santa Fe Fiesta.

This book begins in the cent}lries before the arrival of Europeans. Some will choose to skip over this part of the story. But it is a part of the story, since American identities have always been shaped in relation not only to European heritage but also to the North American continent itself, with its long history of habitation. The braided stories of European and Native artistic expression tell us a great deal about the distinctive values, attitudes toward nature, and concepts of history and identity, at work within different societies occupying the same environment.

Our book concludes with two chapters offering extensive coverage of art since 1960, and we have taken special care to ensure that this section bears an organic relationship to the preceding chapters. This strategy represents a departure from many other survey texts on American art. Traditionally, the scope of the American art field has been delimited by a twentieth-century cutoff date separating ''.American Art" as such from contemporary art (for many years this date was set at 1945; now it tends to fall around 1960). Works of art created on opposite sides of this imaginary watershed have come to occupy the segregated territories of two entirely different pedagogical fields. A painting by Joseph Stella done in New York in 1920 lies within the purview of ''.Americanists" and tends to be taught near the tail end of American art surveys, while a painting by Frank Stella done in New York in 1960 falls to "modernists" and tends to be taught in courses on global modernism or contemporary art. To be sure, this artificial division has emerged in response to legitimate pressures (practical as well as political and theoretical). But we believe that its reification is becoming increasingly problematiceven potentially crippling-for the study of American art.

This textbook demonstrates that international and cross-cultural currents have defined American art from the outset. Hybridity, adaptation, and appropriation have always been linked to the arts in America. While today they have become increasingly self-conscious strategies, they have also been embedded in the historical realities of societies in transition. Americanists have much to contribute to discussions about global contemporary art, and contemporary art specialists can bring new perspectives to the study of the global context of earlier American culture. But this is only possible once we break down the artificial division between American and contemporary. The final two chapters of this text accordingly suggest connections between late twentieth-century and earlier American art. Our aim in proposing such links is not to collapse historical distinctions, but rather to draw attention to the persistent problem of modernity in America.

By attending carefully to contemporary art we also hope to encourage an awareness of the complexities of arthistorical methods among our student readers. Over the past fifty years, many artists have developed extremely nuanced and self-conscious interrogations of history itself. Thus, their work offers us a special opportunity to bring the end of this textbook in line with the beginning. Contemporary artists have played a crucial part in developing the critical understandings of encounter, hybridity, and media that have made this textbook possible in the first place

Running beneath our chronological narrative are broad historical processes that tie together very different times and places: the role of architecture and the visual arts in expressing power and cultural self-assertion throughout the often tense and uneven encounters between different ethnic and social groups; the creative resilience manifested by marginal groups as they respond to challenging conditions; the growing force of international trade and a market-based economy in stimulating exchange, recombination, and new expressive forms; and the fluid and adaptive nature of identity itself, on the ever-shifting ground of historical encounter and cultural mobility. As you use this book, it is important to keep in sight both change over time, and continuity. The history of American arts encapsulates the dynamism of modernity itself.

THE BOX PROGRAM

Several times in the course of a chapter readers will find a separate narrative inserted into the text. These boxes add information and context that enrich the main narrative. There are five different categories of boxes:

FAST FORWARD links historical material to topics closer to the reader in time, or explores the historical trajectory of a particular cultural or artistic form, its life through time. (e.g. "Disney's Fantasia: Middlebrow Modernism" p. 403)

FRAMING THE DISCOURSE steps out of the historical narrative to explore the terms with which we understand or study a subject. (e.g. "Diaspora and Creolization " p. 98)

METHODS AND TECHNIQUES focuses on the means of art: its formal components, its materials, and its technical procedures. ( e.g. "Reading Architectural Plans" p. 82)

CULTURAL CONTEXTS goes beyond the themes of the chapter to consider broader intellectual, historical, social, or cultural factors that have shaped visual culture. (e.g. "The China Trade" p. 159)

MYTHS AND LEGENDS looks at a subject through the lens of stories that are both reflected in and shaped by visual artifacts. (e.g. "The Puritan Ideal" p. 64)

The materials included in the boxes offer opportunities for research, class discussion, and the consideration of other dimensions of our subject than those covered in the main narrative.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We extend our most profound thanks to our editors, Helen Ronan and Margaret Manos, at Prentice-Hall. Margaret's meticulous line-editing and her gift for economy of language improved our diverse prose styles immensely Helen, our project editor, calmly guided us to think about the shape of the book as a whole. At Laurence King Publishing, in London, the editorial production team headed by Richard Mason demonstrated infinite patience, courtesy, and tact during months of editing, layout, and illustration procurement. We are grateful to Eve Sinaiko, formerly of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., who first conceived . of this project with Angela Miller, more than a decade ago, and to Julia Moore, senior editor at Abrams, for coaxing us through the early stages of the project. We would also like to thank the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, and Max Marmor in particular, for their grant for travel and research in the early stages of the textbook.

Thanks are due as well to the many readers who gave crucial critical feedback on the manuscript and helped shape it: Anna Verner Andrzejewski, University of WisconsinMadison; Karen Bearor, Florida State University; Rebecca Bedell, Wellesley College; M. Elizabeth Boone, Humboldt State University; Donna Cassidy, University of Southern Maine; Melissa Dabakis, Kenyon College; Anne Dawson, Eastern Connecticut State University; Ursula Ehrhardt, Salisbury University; Roberta Smith Pavis, Stetson University; Donald Harington, University of Arkansas; Carmenita Higginbotham, University of Virginia; Victor Katz, Holyoke Community College; Barbara Platten Lash, Northern Virginia Community College; Michael Leja, University of Delaware and University of Pennsylvania; Diana Linden, Pitzer College; Maurie Mcinnis, University of Virginia; Alexander Nemerov, Yale University; Matthew Rohn, St. Olaf College; Kathleen Spies, Birmingham-Southern College; Elizabeth West Hutchinson, Barnard College / Columbia University; Mark White, Oklahoma State University; and Cecile Whiting, University of California Irvine.

One reader in particular- Mary Coffey of Dartmouth College- engaged our deepest themes with vigor, pushing us to clarify our commitments and to refine and nuance our use of the encounter model. Her sustained involvement with our text deserves special thanks.

We are very grateful as well for the editorial advice and suggestions of Paul Staiti at a very busy time; and to Margaretta Lovell and David Lubin for their invaluable contributions and generous participation in this project.

Angela Miller would like to thank the following individuals who have given material help, encouragement, and crucial support as this book was completed: Matthew Bailey, Elizabeth Childs, Andrew Hemingway, Theresa Huntsman, John Klein, Diana Linden, Paula Lupkin, David Miller, Dwight Miller, Julia Moore, Eric Mumford, Mike Murphy, Susan Rather, Eve Sinaiko, Paul Staiti, Maren Stange, Alan Wallach, Sherry Wellman, and Betha Whitlow. The biggest thanks go to her co-authors, in particular to Janet Berlo. Janet's keen eye for cliche and insistence on the highest standards of scholarship and writing throughout endless revisions, and despite her own pressing commitments, has made this a better book. Her friendship, and her sense of satire, have lightened the burden and heightened the pleasures of collaboration.

Janet Berlo would like to thank Aldana Jonaitis and Ruth Phillips for reading selected sections on Native American art, and her former graduate students Norman Varano, Lucy Curzon, and Elizabeth Kalbfleisch for their research assistance when this book was in its formative stages.

Jennifer L. Roberts would like to thank Carrie LambertBeatty and Robin Kelsey for their critical feedback at the manuscript stage, Jacob Proctor and Megan Luke for their invaluable research assistance, and the entire authorial team for giving her the opportunity to participate in the project.

Bryan Wolf would like to thank the Stanford Humanities Center and the Stanford School of Arts and Sciences for a sabbatical fellowship to complete work on the textbook; Susan Jane Williams, formerly of the Yale Visual Resources Collection, for her expertise and support in image acquisition; and former graduate students Robert Savoie and Susee Witt, for their skilled research assistance. He would like to thank Marissa, Micah, and Gabriel.

Angela L. Miller, Janet C. Berlo, Jennifer L. Roberts, Bryan]. Wolf JUNE 2007