Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia
February 4 to May 14, 2023
Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut
June 3–September 10, 2023
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
As the Princeton University Art Museum constructs a new building (set to open in 2024), more than 100 works of American art from its collection are traveling the country. The exhibition “Object Lessons in American Art” will premiere at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia from February 4 to May 14, 2023.
John Singleton Copley (American, 1738 – 1815), “Elkanah Watson,” 1782. Oil on canvas, 149 × 121 centimeters. Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of the estate of Josephine Thomson Swann (y1964-1
Spanning the 18th century to the present, “Object Lessons” features works of Euro-American, African American and Native American art and illustrates how fresh investigations and contemporary perspectives can inform and enrich its meaning. With these objects, the exhibition asks fundamental questions about artistic significance and how meaning changes across time, place and context. Following its appearance in Georgia, the exhibition will travel to the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut, and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky.
Organized by Karl Kusserow, the Princeton University Art Museum’s John Wilmerding Curator of American Art, the exhibition focuses in particular on race, gender and the environment. It arranges its works of art in 30 separate groups, each intended to provoke new considerations and raise timely questions about American history and culture. These juxtapositions serve as “object lessons” — gatherings of tangible artifacts that communicate an embodied idea or an abstract concept — to anchor debates about the country’s complex social, racial and political history, thereby expanding our ideas about the history of American art.
The exhibition emphasizes how a broad array of artists contended with the most pressing issues of their and our time. It includes works by the enslaved potter David Drake, whose craft was a bold statement of resistance, and the artist Frederic Remington, who represented the “Wild West” in ways that stereotyped both white settlers and Native Americans, alongside recent works by contemporary artists such as Rande Cook, Renee Cox and Titus Kaphar. One section will feature three iconic portraits of George Washington, including one by Rembrandt Peale that lionizes the first American president as a godlike celebrity together with a photograph by Luke C. Dillon of the ruins of the slave quarters at Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, to remind us of the complexities of the man and his legacy.
Other works in the exhibition emphasize the central role of women in the history of American culture. Among them are a painting of the poet Annis Boudinot Stockton, one of the first American women to have her work published, and a finely rendered portrait of a “colonial dame” by the early American artist Sarah Perkins. Later works, including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Grace Hartigan and several prints by the anonymous feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, stress how much remains to be done for women to be fully integrated into our understanding of American art and history.
The continuously evolving relationship between American artists and the natural world functions as another of the exhibition’s pillars. While Indigenous American understandings of humanity’s place in nature often emphasize reciprocal relationships, Euro-Americans have typically stressed human domination and the subjugation of the landscape to the human will. Among the works the exhibition investigates in this light are Fitz Henry Lane’s “Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor,” a seascape depicting the human and natural worlds as irrevocably intermingled, and the collective Postcommodity’s “Repellent Fence” (2015), for which the group and its collaborators anchored 26 balloons decorated with Indigenous iconography across a 2-mile expanse at the U.S. – Mexico Border to comment on the arbitrary nature of modern geopolitical divisions.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue distributed by Princeton University Press and edited and with a lead essay by Karl Kusserow, with additional essays by Kirsten Pai Buick (University of New Mexico), Ellery Foutch (Middlebury College), Horace Ballard (Harvard Art Museums), Jeffrey Richmond-Moll (Georgia Art Museum), and Rebecca Zorach (Northwestern University).
A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more
Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University's venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more.
