Led by: Prof. Jennifer Van Horn (University of Delaware)
Course Number: Forthcoming
Semesters: New Course
Image: A landscape watercolor painted by Ulysses S. Grant as a cadet at West Point, ca. 1842. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC07641)
American Art and Material Culture of the 18th and 19th Centuries
American Art and Material Culture of the 18th and 19th Centuries
Course Description
This course investigates the creation, display, and reception of art and material culture in the United States from roughly 1650 to 1900, grappling with the question of what is “American” about American art. Artists, architects, and designers in the United States mobilized diverse European, African, Asian, and Native American traditions in their work and different groups of Americans used art and artifacts to express who they were and what they wanted America to be. How did such art help to define conceptions of personhood, nationhood, democracy, and citizenship, and also promote colonization, Manifest Destiny, racial and gender disenfranchisement, and attempted cultural genocide? How did paintings, sculptures, buildings, and artifacts of various media represent and shape notions of “America” and American identities?
Lecture Preview
Coming soon
About the Scholar
Jennifer Van Horn, Associate Professor of History, University of Delaware
Jennifer Van Horn is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the departments of art history and history at the University of Delaware. She is a specialist in the art of the United States and has published about objects of many sorts, including dressing tables, dentures, portraits, city views, gravestones, and embroidered samplers. Several of these appear in her first book, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. Her second book, Portraits of Resistance, Activating Art During Slavery, locates enslaved Africans and African Americans on both sides of the painted canvas, as producers and viewers of portraits, and as destroyers and preservers of depictions. Before returning to teach at her alma mater, the University of Delaware, Van Horn worked as an assistant curator at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and taught at George Mason University as well as for the Smithsonian MA Program in the History of Decorative Arts.
The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.