Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750-1850 - Couverture souple

Majeski, Anna

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1606180401 ISBN 13 : 9781606180402

Editeur : American Philosophical Society Press, 2024

Synopsis

Sketching Splendor examines the work of three American naturalists, William Bartram, Titian Ramsay Peale, and John James Audubon whose work exemplifies innovation and injustice in equal measure. The exhibition draws on the American Philosophical Society's rich holdings as well as select loans, with many objects exhibited together for the first time.

The careers of Bartram, Peale, and Audubon spanned the exciting period from 1750 to 1850, helping to shape the nation's emerging intellectual identity, cataloging species unknown to Euro-Americans, engaging with the nascent concepts of ecology and evolution, as well as developing new techniques to visually and verbally represent the complexity of the natural world. Yet natural history was not an innocent intellectual pursuit, and these three naturalists also supported expansionist agendas dispossessing Native Nations and relied on enslaved labor. Moreover, while the names of Bartram, Peale, and Audubon are commemorated in the historical record, there were many unacknowledged or underacknowledged Native Americans, people of African descent, and women, whose knowledge, labor, and skills made their work possible. These are the two realities that this exhibition engages, teasing out the many ways in which Bartram, Peale, and Audubon relied on and promoted the forces of colonization and plantation slavery, even as it acknowledges points of ambivalence. Their work speaks to the conflicted nature of our nation's early history and the place of natural historians in that complex landscape.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Anna Majeski received a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2022, where she completed a doctoral dissertation on a remarkable series of astrological fresco cycles completed in Padua between 1300 and 1440. Her research focuses on the intersections of art and science, image and knowledge in the early modern world, and has been supported by pre- and postdoctoral fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. She joined the American Philosophical Society, Library & Museum, as Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Natural History Exhibition Research Fellow in October 2022, where she curated the exhibition Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750-1850. She is currently researching her monograph, Powerful Images: Art and Astrology in Renaissance Italy.

Michelle Craig McDonald is the Librarian/Director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 and the oldest learned society in North America. The APS has more than 14 million pages of manuscripts and 300,000 printed volumes, with particular strengths in early American history, the history of science, and Native American and Indigenous cultures. Dr. McDonald earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan where she focused on business relationships and consumer behavior between North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. She also holds a master's in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, Annapolis, a master's in Museum Studies from George Washington University, and a bachelor's in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School. She is the co-author of Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge Press, 2011), and her current monograph, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in spring 2025.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: American Philosophical Society Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1606180401
• ISBN 13: 9781606180402
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 112
• Éditeur: Society American Philosophical
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible