Understanding and Experiencing Mass Images

Michael Leja (Ph.D., Harvard) studies the visual arts in various media (painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, illustrations) in the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in the United States. His work is interdisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts in relation to contemporary cultural, social, political, and intellectual developments. He is especially interested in examining the interactions between works of art and particular audiences. His book Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (2004) traces the interactions between the visual arts and the skeptical forms of seeing engendered in modern life in northeastern American cities between 1869 and 1917. It won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2005.

He is currently at work on a book exploring changes in pictorial forms and in social relations associated with the industrialization of picture production and the development of a mass market for images in the mid-nineteenth century.

Jennifer A. Greenhill is Associate Professor of Art History with a 0% appointment in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She specializes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art and visual culture, with an emphasis on intermedial and intercultural objects, race and the politics of visuality, and intersections between elite and popular forms of expression. Greenhill recently published Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), which investigates the strategies artists devised to simultaneously conform to and humorously undermine “serious” culture during the late nineteenth century, when calls for a new cultural sophistication ran headlong into a growing public appetite for humor.

Greenhill’s next book-length study investigates mass-market illustration in the early twentieth century, extending her ongoing interest in how “art” can register in diverse sites, such as the pages of a magazine, where it shapes both public experience and individual subjectivities.

Jennifer L. Roberts is Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard College Professor, and Chair of the Program in American Studies. She teaches American art from the colonial period to the present, with particular focus on issues of landscape, material culture, print culture, and the history of science. She received her A.B. from Stanford and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale. Her book Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History was published in 2004 by Yale University Press. It examines the ways in which Smithson’s celebrated earthworks and traveling projects of the 1960s and 70s confront the social and material histories of the sites they occupy. She has also published numerous essays and reviews on 18th, 19th and 20th century American art and material culture, and is a co-author of the Prentice Hall textbook American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2007). She recently curated a curricular exhibition on Jasper Johns and the materiality of print, published as Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print (Harvard Art Museums, 2012).

Her new book, Transporting Visions: the Movement of Images in Early America, was published by the University of California Press in January of 2014. The project traces the dispatch of images through the Anglo-American landscape between 1760 and 1860. Treating pictures that register, in various ways, the material complications of their own transmission, the book explores the relationship between communication/transportation media and period understandings of visual representation.

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