Episode No. 276 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features historian and author Jane Kamensky and curator Anne Ellegood.
Kamensky is the author of “A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley.” The book is a new biography that places one of early America’s best and most important artists within the context of the political and revolutionary events of his time — and details how Copley and his family were actors in them. Amazon offers it for $20 in hardcover and at $16 for Kindle.
Kamensky is a professor of history at Harvard University and the director of the Schlesinger Library. She is a historian of early America and the Atlantic world.
On the second segment, Hammer Museum curator Anne Ellegood discusses her new exhibition “Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World.” Ellegood’s retrospective is the first major Durham show in the United States in over 20 years.
Durham came to prominence as an artist in New York City in the 1980s. His work has consistently addressed questions of identity, colonialism and the inseparability of identity from politics in the United States. The exhibition is on view at the Hammer through May 7, when it will travel to the Walker, the Whitney and to the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The show’s thorough catalogue was published by DelMonico Prestel. Amazon offers it for $60.
Air date: February 16, 2017.
John Singleton Copley, Dorothy Murray, c. 1759-61.
John Singleton Copley, Charles Pelham, c. 1753-54.
John Singleton Copley, The Return of Neptune, c. 1754.
![John Singleton Copley, Maj. [Gen.] Thomas Gage, ca. 1768.](https://modernartnotespodcast.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/copley-major-thomas-gage.jpg?w=1100)
John Singleton Copley, Maj. [Gen.] Thomas Gage, ca. 1768.
John Singleton Copley, Thomas Hancock, 1764-66.
John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765.
Left: Henry Pelham, The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or The Bloody Massacre, 1770. Right: Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston on March 5th, 1770 by a party of the 28th Regiment, 1770.
John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere, 1768.
Jimmie Durham, Tlunh Datsi, 1984.
Jimmie Durham, Pocahontas’ Underwear, 1985.
Jimmie Durham, A Stone Rejected by the Builder (1), 2006.
Jimmie Durham, Still Life With Spirit and Xitle, 2007.
The Modern Art Notes Podcast 
I thought it interesting that there was no mention of the African American tradition of assemblage in the deep south as a reference point for Durham and his work. These curators really feed the beast when it comes to an artists ego – the notion of so very little existing context for the artist’s work (and the curator’s pet project) therefore the work is that much more original. I love Durham, an interesting artist without question. But, figures like Thorton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Dinah Young, James Thomas, etc. seems so fundamental in that assemblage tradition tradition though – surely Durham was aware of that work… come on, if he wasn’t, he was an idiot. The influence of these artist’s work is continually neglected.
LikeLike