Alexis Carr is a second-year graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. She will be giving a New Perspectives talk at the Kemper Art Museum titled "Mythologizing the West: A Conversation About American Identity, National Heros, and Their Representations" on January 27, 2022.
Webinar description:
Amid the worldwide racial justice protests of 2020, demands for institutional change and accountability came swiftly and grew loud. One critique that arose from those demands concerned the ways in which American history is (mis)represented in museums. Nineteenth-century American history is complex, contentious, and often contested. The period of American Westward expansion captured the imagination of American genre and landscape painters, including Missouri-based artists George Caleb Bingham and Charles Ferdinand Wimar. These artists mythologized white settler colonialism and contributed to the formation of an American national identity through the landscape. But the “progress” of Westward expansion and the white supremacist ideology which justified it came at a tremendous cost to the Indigenous people as stewards of the land and to their cultures. This talk will investigate how constructions of American identity and national memory are presented within the gallery space. The talk will also explore how nineteenth-century American landscape paintings inform or contribute to the current conversation about representation and diversity within art museums, as well as the current movement to reexamine America’s history and national heroes.
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