By Sara Evans A wallboard at this summer’s blockbuster John Singer Sargent exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum posed an intriguing question: “Do you have to be French to be a Parisienne?” For the countless young American women artists who flocked to the City of Light in the early 1900’s
As a boy, I would lie awake at night clutching a transistor radio in my hand, futzing with the metal clip antenna, wiggling my earphones so I could catch the thrill of the games played by our local baseball football, basketball, and hockey teams. On the wings of those voices from WJR in Detroit I flew, and as I heard those games unfold, my love for my hometown grew. In the simple act of rooting for my team, I was participating in a tradition that stretches all the way back to ancient Greece.
My mother organized support for people forcibly removed from towns where they had lived for generations, and sent to the wilderness of the veld. This was occurring regularly as White areas were “cleansed” of Blacks. And she offered daily, practical help to a constant stream of Black South Africans caught up in the bureaucratic nightmare of dispossession.
When millions were displaced by the Dust Bowl and job loss during the Great Depression, the federal government made housing a priority. The Roosevelt Administration enlisted leading thinkers, collectively known as “housers.” These architects, designers and social scientists challenged barriers to housing for all.
Maria Sibylla Merian could not resist the lure of Suriname. In 1699, together with her daughter, Dorothea, she began a great adventure—at the age of 52. It was, by all accounts, a perilous voyage. After staying in the burgeoning capital of Paramaribo, along with two Black slaves and two indigenous guides, they ventured into the rainforest and were dazzled by the incredible richness and intense colors of the flora and fauna.
When Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Daniel Chester French, and their fellow commissioners chose Henry Bacon’s Greek temple design for the Lincoln Memorial in 1913, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, led by an associate a Frank Lloyd Wright, threw a fit.
Who gets to say what parts of the American narrative are acceptable and what parts are to be excised or erased? This is the heart of a heated conversation about the role of public art today.
The spotlight has been on New Deal muralists known for their radical views of history.
The conflict over control within the first colonies—who could vote, who dictated one’s beliefs, who held authority over whom—was hard-fought, a prelude to the relentless skirmishes we endure today.
For a passionate and prolific response to racism in America we turn to two extraordinary artists from the 1960s: Nina Simone and James Baldwin. Simone sang about Mississippi lynchings and Baldwin wrote about the profound abuse that Blacks suffered in the South. The two friends supported each other in the fight for Civil Rights.