Beauty out of the Ashes

Aaron Douglas. Cover Illustration for Fire!!  Devoted to Younger Negro Artists, ed. Wallace Thurman. New York, 1926..

March 1, 2023.

Professors Ronald D. Patkus, Eve Dunbar, and Caroline Culp discuss their current exhibition in the Thompson Memorial Library, Beauty out of the Ashes: Printed Works of the Harlem Renaissance, 1923-1936, on view through June 15, 2023.

A key focus of the exhibition is the literary production of the Harlem Renaissance. Works of thirteen different authors are presented. Together they provide a window into some of the key aspects of authorship during the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, it’s also important to note that the exhibition considers not only texts, but also art, since the first editions of these works often included artwork on the dust jackets or within the book itself. By studying not just texts but also physical books, we gain a sense of the visual nature of published works, and thus a wider understanding for how works of the Harlem Renaissance were presented to their reading audience.

 

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Anne Gaud Tinker

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith. Landscape, c. 1928. 10-3/8 x 13-3/4". The Johnson Collection, Spartenburg, S.C.

December 14, 2022. 

Anne Gaud Tinker (VC '67) discusses the book she co-authored with Dwight McInvaill and Caroline Palmer, Alice: Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Charleston Renaissance Artist, published in 2021 in Charleston by the Middleton Place Foundation and Evening Post Books.

A lifelong Charleston resident with limited professional training, Alice Smith forged her style from a wide range of sources—her French teacher at the local Carolina Art Association, mentors who introduced her to Tonalism and Japanese woodblock prints, and extensive fieldwork. In a career of sixty years, she defied gender expectations and gained national acclaim.

Descended from prominent rice planters, Alice’s work reflects a reverence for nature and nostalgia for an idealized past. She helped spark Charleston’s historic preservation movement, depicted the waning days of rice planting, and captured the mystical spirit of the Lowcountry’s coast, marshes, and woodlands in luminous watercolors.

Alice was one of the principal guiding lights of an invigorating cultural change that flourished between the twentieth century’s two world wars called the Charleston Renaissance. In recent years, this artistic and cultural movement has been reexamined for its elitist perspective and romanticized view of Charleston and the city’s fraught history. Alice’s story raises important questions about historical memory and the forces that shaped Charleston into the city it is today.

Middleton Place Museum Shop Books

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Katherine Hite

April 13, 2022.

Katherine Hite, Professor of Political Science on the Fredrick Ferris Thompson Chair and Director of Research and Development at Vassar College, talks about her recent research on Texas history, published in her articles "Texas, Monuments, and the Politics of Self-Reckoning in Texas," (Memory Studies Special Issue 14:6, 2021) and "A Monumental Battle for the Story of Texas," (Revista: The Harvard Journal of Latin Amerian Studies, 20:23, 2021), as well as about her books on monuments and the politics of memory in Latin America and Spain: The Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (Routledge, 2013) and Memory in Chile from Pinochet to Bachelet (First Forum, 2013). 

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Dora Apel

Vienna: Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Rachel Whiteread, 2000

October 13, 2021.

The acclaimed art historian and cultural critic, Dora Apel, W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University, talks about her recent monograph, Calling Memory Into Place (Rutgers UP, 2020). Her many books include Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob;  Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing; and Beautiful, Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline.

"In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.  
 

"These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations."  

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Mary-Kay Lombino

March 6, 2019.

Mary-Kay Lombino, Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, talks about her exhibition Freehand: Drawings by Inez Nathaniel-Walker, on view February 1 - April 14 at the Center.

Inez Nathaniel-Walker (1907–1990) made her first works of art while she was serving a sentence at a maximum-security prison for killing a man by whom she had been abused. While in prison she began to draw, creating remarkable portraits of her fellow inmates whom she called “bad girls.” Her richly patterned works combine meticulous detail and playful simplicity, forming expressive depictions of her subjects’ personalities and physical attributes. Freehand is Walker’s first one-person museum exhibition. The exhibition is supported by the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Exhibition Fund and organized with the cooperation of the American Folk Art Museum, New York.

Mary-Kay Lombino

October 21, 2015.

Mary Kay Lombino, Emily Hargroves Fisher 1957 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, discusses the exhibition on view at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center September 25 - December 13, 2015 entitled “Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument."

“Gordon Parks was one of America’s most significant social photographers, filmmakers, and writers of the twentieth century, and the first African-American photographer to work for Life magazine. In 1948, he began a professional relationship with Life that would last twenty-two years when he proposed a series of pictures about the gang wars that were then plaguing Harlem. Parks gained the trust of one group of gang members and their leader Red Jackson, producing photographs of them that are artful, emotive, poignant, and sometimes shocking. From this larger body of work, twenty-one pictures were selected for a photo essay in Life. The exhibition comprises forty-five prints alongside contact sheets, issues of the original publication, and related ephemera that both contextualize the images chosen for the story and suggest the ways in which the editorial process shapes the narrative arc."

37:40 minutes.

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Maria Höhn

April 2, 2014.

Maria Höhn, Professor of History and International Studies on the Marion Musser Lloyd Chair  at Vassar College, talks about her most recent book, co-authored with Martin Klimke, entitled: A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, published by Palgrave in 2010.

"Depicting the African American GI as the unheralded keystone of the civil rights movement in America during the post-WWII era, this book exhilaratingly exposes the two-facedness of America denazifying Germany while practicing Jim Crow segregation in its own military. With a thorough analysis of the African American press’s role in disclosing this hypocrisy, it reveals the many ways in which subsequent civil rights leaders owe their success to the groundwork laid by African American GIs. Together, they forged the space to launch a civil rights revolution in America." -- Calvin Robinson, President, NAACP

58:23 minutes.

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View the new film based on the book.
View the project website.

Eve Dunbar

October 9, 2013.

Vassar Associate Professor of English Eve Dunbar discusses African American writers abroad and her book Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World, published this year by Temple University Press.

Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes were all pressured by critics and publishers to enlighten mainstream (white) audiences about race and African American culture. Focusing on fiction and non-fiction they produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Eve Dunbar's important book, Black Regions of the Imagination, examines how these African American writers—who lived and traveled outside the United States—both document and re-imagine their "homegrown" racial experiences within a worldly framework. 

53.30 min.

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