Bellion, WendyChercheuse invitée, Terra Foundation for American art (1er février-10 avril)

Biographie

Wendy Bellion is associate professor at the University of Delaware, where she teaches American art history and material culture.  During spring 2015, she is the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor, with appointments at INHA and the Université de Paris-Diderot.  Her scholarship explores American art within the cultural geographies of the British Atlantic world and early modern Americas.  She is the author of Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), which was awarded the Charles Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and she is currently completing a new book project, What Statues Remember: Art and Iconoclasm in New York City.  She is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and has held fellowships with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and Winterthur Museum.

 

Bibliographie

  • Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011).
  • “City as Spectacle: William Birch and the Chestnut Street Theatre,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 32:1 (Jan. 2012), 15-34.
  • “Extend the Sphere: Charles Willson Peale’s Panorama of Annapolis,” The Art Bulletin 86:3 (Sept. 2004), 529-549.
  • “Heads of State: Profiles and Politics in Jeffersonian America,” in New Media, 1740-1915, eds. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey P. Pingree (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 31-59.
  • “Illusion and Allusion: Charles Willson Peale’s Staircase Group at the Columbianum Exhibition,” American Art 17:2 (summer 2003), 18-39.
  • Objects in Motion: Visual and Material Culture across Colonial North America (introduction and co-editor), special issue of Winterthur Portfolio, 45:2/3 (summer/autumn 2011).
  • “Patience Wright’s Transatlantic Bodies,” in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early National America, eds. Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
  • “Slow Art: The Pleasures of Trompe l’Oeil,” Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 11:2 (Jan. 2011), www.common-place.org
  • “Teaching across the Borders of North American Art History,” co-author Mónica Domínguez Torres, in The Blackwell Companion to American Art, eds. John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill, and Jason LaFountain (Blackwell Publishing, 2015).
  • “The Return of the Eighteenth Century,” American Art 19:2 (summer 2005), 2-10.
  • “The Sculpture Club,” in Samuel F.B. Morse’s ‘Gallery of the Louvre’ and the Art of Invention (Terra Foundation for American Art, 2014), 88-99.
  • “Vision and Visuality,” in “American Art and the Senses,” American Art 24:3 (fall 2010), 21-25.

 

Projet de recherche

My current book project, What Statues Remember: Art and Iconoclasm in New York City, traces a history of artistic creation, destruction, and reinvention from Georgian Britain through 20th-century New York.  During the 1760-1770s, colonial New Yorkers erected three political monuments:  two statues, commissioned from London, and a series of liberty poles.  In the opening salvos of the American Revolution, crowds attacked and partially destroyed all of these objects.  My project explores the material and affective dimensions of these events, asking how sculptural objects – and rituals of destruction – create sites for political practice and invest civic spaces with ideological significance.  The project also investigates the cultural meanings attached to surviving fragments of the monuments, and it considers how colonial acts of iconoclasm were reimagined in a body of 19th and 20th century prints, paintings, and performances.  Arguing that statues imperfectly remember history and place, the project aims to understand how New York’s history of Revolutionary-era iconoclasm remains embedded with the contemporary landscape of the post-9/11 city.