Race Experts Sculpture, Anthropology, and the American Public in Malvina Hoffman's Races of Mankind / Linda Kim.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kim, Linda, author.

Series:

Critical studies in the history of anthropology.

Critical studies in the history of anthropology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hoffman, Malvina, 1885-1966. Races of mankind.

Hoffman, Malvina.

Hoffman, Malvina, 1885-1966--Criticism and interpretation.

Figure sculpture, American--20th century.

Figure sculpture, American.

Ethnology in art.

Art and anthropology--United States--History--20th century.

Art and anthropology.

Ethnology--Social aspects--United States x History--20th century.

Ethnology.

Art and society--United States--History--20th century.

Art and society.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2018

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2018]

Summary:

2019 Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the CAA Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum In Race Experts Linda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptorMalvina Hoffman in T?he Races of Mankind series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protégé of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Meštrovi?, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. She was nonetheless commissioned by the Field Museum to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman's Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and everyday ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the artist brought scientific understandings of race and the everyday racial attitudes of museum visitors together in powerful and productive friction. The exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate not only the expertise of racial science and her own artistic trainingbut also the popular ideas about race that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the Races of Mankind exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of racial expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them. Race Experts is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.

Contents:

Racial know-how : expertise versus common sense

Mediations : art in the natural history museum

Racial portraiture : between typologies and commonsense

Racial homelands : popular geography and local races

Micro-expertise : passing for indian, passing for white.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781496208033

149620803X

9781496208057

1496208056

OCLC:

1041559732