Browsing by Author "Hooper, Rachel"
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Item Embargo American Art Histories: Framing Race in Exhibitions, 1842-1876(2018-04-06) Hooper, Rachel; Costello, LeoIn the mid to late nineteenth century, exhibitions in the United States presented histories of art by laying out sequences of objects. Paintings, sculptures, and prints were aligned or juxtaposed with so-called artifacts and specimens as well as plaster casts of classical sculpture in order to convey a sense of progress or development across epochs and cultures. Each chapter of this dissertation focuses on a sculpture or painting on display in Washington, D.C., New York, Ann Arbor, New Haven, Boston, and Philadelphia and outlines the terms by which the artwork was interpreted in situ. Drawing on installation photographs and previously unpublished lectures, this project reveals the formative role that ideas about race played in art exhibitions open to the public at the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, the Metropolitan Fair, academic art museums, and the 1876 Centennial Exposition during the political upheaval and radical social change surrounding slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Who should be a part of art history? How would their stories be told? i These questions were central to the organization of nineteenth-century art exhibitions and the answers formulated at that time have powerful ramifications even to this day. The notion that race could be defined by location, time, and physicality suggested that what was then known as the “fine arts” had something to contribute to a scientific study of race. Curators, artists, and scholars in the United States responded by arranging collections to make them speak to ideas of racial progress and categorization. Objects from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe were gathered as points of comparison for modern American art and culture in displays that resulted in a contested racial politics of objects. This dissertation is the first to acknowledge public exhibitions as constitutive of early art historical discourse in the United States and racial categorization as fundamental to the institutionalization of the discipline.Item Complicated Desires: Yto Barrada(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Yto Barrada in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem The Dizzident: Lia Perjovschi(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Lia Perjovschi in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Imprints of Conflict: Yael Bartana(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Yael Bartana for "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Induction and Intuition, on the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Metholology(Rice University, 2009-01-01) Hooper, Rachel; Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston; Blaffer GallerySince 1994, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)--a research organization based in Culver City, California--has studied the U.S. landscape, using multidisciplinary research, information processing and interpretive tools to stimulate thought and discussion around contemporary land-use issues. During a residency at the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, the CLUI established a field station on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou, revealing aspects of the relationship between oil and the landscape in Houston that are often overlooked--even by the city's residents. The CLUI's findings are presented in this volume and a concurrent exhibition at the Blaffer Gallery, titled Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry. The book documents the CLUI's methodology in a series of interviews and includes a photographic essay on land use in Houston featuring a panoramic, foldout section and a comprehensive chronology of the CLUI's projects and publications over the past 14 years.Item Josephine Meckseper Interviewed by Rachel Hooper(Rice University, 2011-03-16) Hooper, Rachel; Meckseper, Josephine; Sharjah Art FoundationInterview with Josephine Meckseper included in the catalogue for Sharjah Biennial 10 "Plot for a Biennial"Item jsut that way(Rice University, 2012-09-26) Hooper, Rachel; University of Texas Press and Blaffer Art MuseumAndy Coolquitt makes objects and environments that exist in symbiosis with human relationships. During the 1990s, his life and work revolved around an expansive studio/artist commune/performance space/living sculpture/party place on the east side of Austin, Texas, where he continues to live, work, and host events. Intrigued by social contracts, Coolquitt creates artwork that facilitates conversation and interaction, augmenting the energy and frictions generated by individuals forming a community. He chooses materials that show the wear and tear of practical use, and, over the years, he has refined an artistic practice based on the collection, study, and reuse of things scavenged from the streets around him. Since his 2008 solo exhibition iight in New York City, Coolquitt's work has gained a wide national and international audience. Andy Coolquitt is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist's work. Published in conjunction with a solo museum exhibition at Blaffer Art Museum, this volume displays the full range of Coolquitt's work over the past twenty-five years, including images of site-specific installations that no longer exist. Accompanying the color plates are an introduction and chronology of the artist's work by exhibition curator Rachel Hooper, an essay tracing Coolquitt's connections to other contemporary artists and designers by Frieze magazine senior editor Dan Fox, an in-depth exploration of Coolquitt's concepts and process by art writer Jan Tumlir, an interview with Coolquitt by director and chief curator of White Columns Matthew Higgs, and Coolquitt's biography and bibliography.Item Lessons in Buffoonery and Bravado: Erik Van Lieshout(Rice University, 2007) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Erik Van Lieshout for "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem A Lexicon of Suburban Neologisms(Rice University, 2008-02-16) Hooper, Rachel; Yen, Jayme; Walker Art CenterThe suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. Portrayed alternately as a middle-class domestic utopia and a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity--with manicured suburban lawns and the inchoate darkness that lurks just beneath the surface--these stereotypes belie a more realistic understanding of contemporary suburbia and its dynamic transformations. Organized by the Walker Art Center in association with the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, "Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes" is the first major museum exhibition to examine both the art and architecture of the contemporary American suburb. Featuring paintings, photographs, prints, architectural models, sculptures and video from more than 30 artists and architects, including Christopher Ballantyne, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Gregory Crewdson, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Dan Graham and Larry Sultan, "Worlds Away" demonstrates the catalytic role of the American suburb in the creation of new art and prospective architecture. Conceived as a revisionist and even contrarian take on the conventional wisdom surrounding suburban life, the catalogue features new essays and seminal writings by John Archer, Robert Beuka, Robert Breugmann, David Brooks, Beatriz Colomina, Malcolm Gladwell and others, as well as a lexicon of suburban neologisms.Item Now Let the Storm Break Loose(Rice University, 2009-10-31) Hooper, Rachel; JRP|RingierIn her photography, videos and installations, Josephine Meckseper (born 1964) sets images of political activism-photographs of demonstrations, newspaper cuttings-against twinkling consumer goods and advertising motifs. This publication concentrates on a new series of works, such as the installation "Ten High" (2007) in which silver mannequins bear anti-war slogans.Item Respect and Pride Restored: Zwelethu Mthethwa(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Zwelethu Mthetwa in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Satire and A Cynical Smile: Josephine Meckseper(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Josephine Meckseper in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem A Singular Cloud: Race, Natural Science, and the Origins of Art History in the United States, 1845-1875(Rice University, 2014) Hooper, RachelThe abolition of slavery in the United States incited a social rupture that spread even to the halls of Harvard University. In defense of liberal ethics of equality and freedom, the study of art, previously the domain of private tutors to the elite, was made an official course of study available to the public through lectures and publications. Despite rhetoric on democratization, the first art historian at Harvard, and in the US, Charles Eliot Norton, adopted the methods and findings of scientific racism. Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz’s claim that races constituted separate species was used by Norton to reify the subject position of his white students as authoritative agents of “civilization” and custodians of the only “human” culture— namely the arts of Western Europe. This microhistory of an aesthetics that simultaneously claimed scientific objectivity and reinforced racist epistemology has yet to be acknowledged in the historiography of art history, although the resulting formalist pedagogy has a lasting legacy at Harvard. In addition to taking a critical stance on art historical methodologies, my research uncovers the formative influence of Agassiz’s expedition to Brazil on pedagogy in the US. Agassiz went to Rio de Janeiro during the US Civil War and his observation of “miscegenation” there was crucial to his theory of polygenesis. Agassiz’s attempted negation of Brazilian hybridity produced a formalist way of looking that was then applied to biology, art, and society in the US. The broader implication of my project is that, contrary to a center-periphery model of modernization, this modern aesthetic was not simply formulated in Cambridge and exported to Brazil, but rather the aesthetic crystallized around a social changes on an international scale— namely abolitionism.Item Stories Told in the Shape of a Sphere(Rice University, 2010-08-28) Hooper, Rachel; Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston; Blaffer Art MuseumAmy Patton's latest film Oil slips between a theater production of Upton Sinclair's novel of the same name and the making of the film itself. Bitter, Black Thoughts is the first book on Patton's films and features her notes for Oil along with essays by curator Rachel Hooper and novelist Ingo Niermann.Item Subtle Shifts: Artur Zmijewski(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Artur Zmijewski in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Sunlight and Fresh Air: Picturing Life in the Central-Hall Houses of Beirut, 1890-1920(Rice University, 2012) Hooper, RachelIn the last thirty years of Ottoman rule in Beirut, Lebanon, a form of domestic architecture developed that became the ultimate status symbol for the burgeoning bourgeoisie of the city. This new type of dwelling came to be known as the central-hall house. Based on a historiography of this housing type, I will use recently published photographs from this same time period of 1890 to 1920 to reconsider three major design elements of the central-hall house: the triple arched window, plan of the central hall, and red tile roof in light of how these architectural features can be seen to be a part of the the inhabitants' lives. Based on photographic evidence, I will show that upper-class women were a touch point for changes and conversations taking place in the last thirty years of Ottoman rule in Beirut. New urban homes, educational opportunities, access to infrastructure, and conspicuous consumerism were a part of the lived reality of these women's day-to-day existence. By taking these socio-cultural factors into account, iconic features of the central-hall house offer a view of space, place, and gender in the early stages of modernization in city of Beirut, the area of Lebanon, and the greater Syrian geographic area.