Thomas Hart Benton at the Milwaukee Art Museum

I've been living in Milwaukee for about ten months now. I moved here to spend time with Charlie while he trained for speedskating (he retired at the end of the season), and we'll be moving to DC in the fall, but it's been an interesting experiment spending the year in the Midwest when I've lived my entire life so far on the East Coast. One of the great pleasures has been visiting the local museums and cultural institutions, especially the Milwaukee Art Museum. We became members for the year, and it's been a pleasure to visit the collection, a unique and eclectic representation of art movements around the world. Two of the highlights for me are the American collection (naturally, as I'm trained as an Americanist), which employs one of the most accessible approaches to the decorative arts that I've ever seen, and the folk art collection, which is varied and deep.

I'm kicking myself that I didn't bring my camera when we stopped by yesterday. I had been thinking about finding material to talk about here on the blog (especially as I know I've been remiss about posting all week), and it turns out that the piece that most captured my imagination yesterday, a sculpted clay maquette made circa 1939 by Thomas Hart Benton for his painting Cotton Weighing, is almost completely unrepresented by images online. I was able to find two, a tiny one on MAM's website, and a Flickr image posted by user hanneorla. May this be a lesson to me to staple my camera to my person for the future.

I never knew that Thomas Hart Benton used miniature clay sculptures as studies for his paintings, and now that I know, I'd like to learn more about it. It's certainly a novel way to work. If you're at all familiar with his paintings, you can probably picture the exaggerated, monumental figures, swirling motion, and dramatically tilted perspective that mark many of his paintings; all of these elements were visible in the little clay maquette. In the images above, you can probably even make out that the glass case enclosing the maquette even features a sharply tilted floor, making the perspective even more exaggerated. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed my little step into a tiny 3D version of a Benton painting. What can I say? I'm a sculpture person - I like it when paintings pop out of their frames.

Full disclosure and point of order on blogging: Yesterday marked the six week mark before my wedding, and about the eight-week mark for my cross-country move back to DC. I'm starting to realize that starting a blog at a time like this might have been a weird idea, but I'm going to do my best to keep plugging away, even if I didn't do such a good job of that this week! In the upcoming week, expect some musings on art events as they happen, and the introduction of at least one new blog feature!

Odds and Ends

So, I'm realizing that being mind-bendingly busy is not always conducive to getting lots of blogging done.

I've been participating in a wonderful summer institute known by the difficult-to-pronounce moniker PEMCI, which stands for the Public Engagement Material Culture Institute, run by the Center for Material Culture at the University of Delaware, which I attend. Despite being about public engagement, PEMCI surprisingly does not have an up-to-date web presence, but here is an article about a past PEMCI student that explains the program. The schedule for the past few weeks has been wonderful, but exhausting enough that I've been going to bed at about 9:30 every night with no time for blogging. It doesn't help that the Soviet-inspired apartment I'm renting has no internet access.

Anyway, this all means that I'm thinking that I should save the real launch of this blog as a daily entity until next week, and for now, anything I post is a victory. Don't worry! I've been using transit time to jot down lots of ideas for future posts and features. I just have little energy for shaping them at this point.

I can't put up a post with no pictures, though, so I figured I'd share the (rather silly) image on the right. One of our tasks for PEMCI was to design a lesson plan for a K-12 audience, and mine was a combination of a field trip to a local monument and an art project, designing one's own monument. This is my monument to art historians - notice the precise uniform of chic black skirt and scarf. I didn't take pictures of the rest of the base, but I added some important tools of the trade: wine and cheese, a laptop, and tea.

Today, we took a trip to the Delaware Art Museum to learn about how museums do public outreach. Most of what we learned is shop talk that is outside the realm of this blog, but I really enjoyed wandering around the sculpture garden at lunchtime, especially my encounter with the Crying Giant by Tom Otterness, sculpted in 2002 (pictured at left). I first encountered Otterness' whimsical figures in the 14th Street subway station in New York City two summers ago, and I've kept his name stored in my head ever since then. The scale of this piece is pretty monumental - I think I would have about reached his knees (note to self - it's always good to take a scale picture with a human figure when photographing sculpture!). Overall, I was impressed with the Delaware Art Museum's collection in general and with the selections in the sculpture garden: though on a relatively modest scale, the sculptures present offered a lot of fun opportunities to puzzle through issues of movement in sculpture, bodily relationships, and sound. I highly recommend it if you are in Wilmington.

As a parting note, here I am two years ago with one of the Otterness sculptures in the 14th Street subway - you can see that they're on a much different scale!


Public art makes me happy.

A new venture

This is me.


I'm a Ph.D. student in art history, and I'm working on my dissertation. I study soldier monuments, and the way they seemingly came out of nowhere in the wake of the Civil War. We see them all the time now, in all of our hometowns, so much so that for many of us they have all but lost their meaning, but we need to keep in mind that before the Civil War, nobody anywhere in the world was spending so much time making bronze statues of the common man. This is a pretty radical change, and it's at the heart of my dissertation.

Over the next months and years, I'm going to use this blog to help me to think more deeply about my project and about sculpture in general, because I've been having a little trouble getting my head around it lately. I'm hoping to write every day. Post lengths will vary. Sometimes they'll be about soldier monuments, sometimes about war, sometimes about things that interest me in the nineteenth century, and sometimes about public art in general. I hope at least some of them are worth reading.


This is Charlie. He is my fieldwork buddy, sometimes-photographer, GPS operator, and soon-to-be husband. He comes into stories a lot.

So, that's where I will leave it for now. I know, kind of an inauspicious first post, but all projects must start somewhere (sort of how I feel about my dissertation!).