Description
Summary: Joslyn Art Museum, established in 1931, is distinguished nationally for its permanent collection of over 12,000 works, representing artists and cultures from antiquity to the present. Since free general admission was reinstated five years ago, the museum has become an increasingly vital gathering place, achieving annual attendance of over 193,000 in 2017. American art figures among its best-recognized strengths, with holdings that include several significant sub-collections of works on paper which it seeks to make available to the public through publications, exhibitions, and digital platforms.
In keeping with these aims, Joslyn now seeks funding to publish the catalogue, Revisiting America: The Prints of Currier & Ives , which will accompany a collection-based exhibition set to open at the museum in October of 2020. Three additional venues are planned. Joslyn holds one of the largest and best-preserved Currier & Ives collections in the U.S. comprising 550 hand-colored and monochrome lithographs. The collection includes an expansive range of subjects that together demonstrate how in picturing “modern” nineteenth-century life, the printing firm addressed dominant political and cultural tensions — from the intimate perspective of home and hearth to the national political stage. The museum received the entire collection in 2016 as the gift of ConAgra Foods, when the firm relocated its headquarters to Chicago.
The fully-illustrated publication, Revisiting America: The Prints of Currier & Ives , will explore a cross section of the firm’s production grouped by themes including: the railroad, transportation and commerce; city views and disasters; home and family; the South; the Frontier; history and memory; sporting life; and humor. The text, including essays by three scholars of American art and culture, will explore the firm’s motivation and initiative in employing an inexpensive and popular medium to offer a more complex and conflicted vision of American life than is often assumed, promoting the possibilities of an urban, industrial society while celebrating the rural ideal. It will explore how the makers and marketers at Currier & Ives focused on broad appeal, skilled labor, machine reproduction, and commercial success; and they continually recalibrated their production to consumers who sought re-assurance that social and moral bearings could survive necessary adaptation to sweeping cultural change.
Each of the authors, who have not previously published on Currier & Ives, will offer new interpretations of this familiar material, highlighting the ongoing relevance of the firm and its work to our present, media-saturated era. Michael Clapper (Franklin and Marshall University) will consider the intersection of popular art and contemporary life as seen through the lens of Currier & Ives’ prints; Baird Jarman (Carleton College) will address the firm’s political prints of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, when it shifted from
being a purveyor of competing narratives to a succession of more partisan positions; and Spencer Wigmore (Amon Carter Museum of American Art) will address the role and identity of the artists who worked within or for the firm. The catalogue project will be overseen by Toby Jurovics, Joslyn’s Chief Curator and Holland Curator of American Western Art, who will also provide a foreword tracing the history of the collection and its roots in Nebraska.
The book with be published by Lucia-Marquand in an edition of 2,000, and will be distributed nationally as well as through the exhibition venues. It should be noted that Joslyn is also producing an on-line catalogue of the complete collection that will be accessible from the museum’s home page and easily searchable, with downloadable, reproduction-quality images available at no cost in an open-source format.
Grant funds would underwrite all costs related to the production of the print catalogue.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $85,000 to the Joslyn Art Museum for a collection-based exhibition catalogue of Currier and Ives prints.
