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Temporary Monuments

Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise

Temporary Monuments

Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise

How art played a central role in the design of America’s racial enterprise—and how contemporary artists resist it.
 
Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America’s racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces—the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders—to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design.
 
Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Zorach shows how contemporary artists—including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gaspar, Kerry James Marshall, Alan Michelson, Dylan Miner, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams—have mined the relationship between environment and social justice, creating works that investigate and interrupt White supremacist, carceral, and environmentally toxic worlds. The book also draws on poetry, creative nonfiction, hip-hop videos, and Disney films to illuminate crucial topics in art history, from the racial politics of abstraction to the origins of museums and the formation of canons.
 

296 pages | 16 color plates, 74 halftones | 7 x 10 | © 2024

Art: American Art, Art Criticism, Art--General Studies

Reviews

“Zorach discusses why monuments matter in a historical context, exploring how statues and sculptures have become political flashpoints against the backdrop of key moments such as the founding of early US museums. The author also aims to show how contemporary artists—including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Kerry James Marshall and Cauleen Smith—focus on social justice and disrupt White supremacism.”

Art Newspaper “Book Bag” column

“Captivating . . . . Zorach reconsiders the evolution of the American museum, construction of nature, the garden, erasure and indigeneity, abstraction and land art to ‘open up new questions about these public sculptural traditions by situating them in the context of politics and histories of land, race, art and ecologies. . . . Zorach’s complex but gripping narrative debunks myths of American modernism’s apoliticism and firmly implicates it in the nation’s racial enterprise. . . . By making her own whiteness a key factor, Zorach adds an important dimension to this study. In an age of political and cultural foreboding, such candour and self-awareness are vital, exemplifying the broader ambitions of the book to ‘alter how we teach and present histories of human creative activity’.”

Art Monthly

“Taking the reader from the founding of the original colonies—including the Eurocentric art ideas the colonizers brought with them and the deep ties that our first art institutions had to slavery—up through the protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd, Zorach lays out the stakes in exceedingly accessible language. . . . Zorach writes that Temporary Monuments came together in the wake of Donald Trump’s first presidential victory. Now that he’s poised to retake office, Zorach’s observations have taken on an even more prescient, keenly relevant tone. Indeed, the intro alone should be required reading for anyone who cares to weigh in on the subject of monuments.”

Chicago Reader

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Temporary Monuments
1 Museum: “Abundantly Illuminated”
2 The Wild: Freedom, Slavery, and Desire
3 Islands: Looking for Indian Things
4 Garden: Violence and the Landscapes of Leisure
5 Home: Color, Abstraction, Estrangement, and the Grid
6 Walls and Borders: Place Holding

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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