A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome

Description

This project is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned the Declaration of Sentiments for the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, she unleashed a powerful force in American society. In A Sisterhood of Sculptors, Melissa Dabakis outlines the conditions under which a group of American women artists adopted this egalitarian view of society and negotiated the gendered terrain of artistic production at home and abroad. Between 1850 and 1876, a community of talented women sought creative refuge in Rome and developed successful professional careers as sculptors. Some of these women have become well known in art-historical circles: Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. The reputations of others have remained, until now, buried in the historical record: Emma Stebbins, Margaret Foley, Sarah Fisher Ames, and Louisa Lander. At midcentury, they were among the first women artists to attain professional stature in the American art world while achieving international fame in Rome, London, and other cosmopolitan European cities. In their invention of modern womanhood, they served as models for a younger generation of women who adopted artistic careers in unprecedented numbers in the years following the Civil War. At its core, A Sisterhood of Sculptors is concerned with the gendered nature of creativity and expatriation. Taking guidance from feminist theory, cultural geography, and expatriate and postcolonial studies, Dabakis provides a detailed investigation of the historical phenomenon of women’s artistic lives in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. As an interdisciplinary examination of femininity and creativity, it provides models for viewing and interpreting nineteenth-century sculpture and for analyzing the gendered status of the artistic profession.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome

  • 2014-06-30
  • 304 pages
  • Ebook
  • Penn State Press
• 

  A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome

  • 2015-02-15
  • - pages
  • Paperback
  • Penn State University Press

Similar books

• 

  Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran

  By Nima Naghibi

  Considering three major works—Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra, and Edmonia Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra—she explores the intersection of race, sex, and class to reveal the meanings each work holds in ...

• 

  Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900

  By Laurence Madeline, Pauline Willis

  'Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900' showcases the remarkable artistic production of women during this period of great cultural change, revealing the breadth and strength of their creative achievements.

• 

  Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery

  By Caitlin Meehye Beach

  On the sculpture's relationship to the politics of Italian unification and the Risorgimento, see Caitlin Meehye Beach, ... For thorough discussions of American sculptors in nineteenth-century Rome, see Dabakis, A Sisterhood of ...

• 

  Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject

  By Kirsten Buick

  Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes.

• 

  Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection

  By Lynne Blackman

  These essays examine how the variables of historical gender norms, educational barriers, race, regionalism, sisterhood, suffrage, and modernism mitigated and motivated these women who were seeking expression on canvas or in clay.

• 

  Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor

  By Edward S. Cooper

  This is an engaging biography of a spirited female artist, and an effective portrait of Washington, D.C. in the Civil War era.

• 

  The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis: A Narrative Biography

  By Harry Henderson, Albert Henderson

  Of special interest to African-American and American-Indian studies, as well as art, women's, and American history, the narrative opens an abundance of previously unrecognized sources, reinterprets important relationships, names missing ...

• 

  Republics and empires: Italian and American art in transnational perspective, 1840–1970

  By Melissa Dabakis, Paul H. D. Kaplan

  15 For thorough discussions of American sculptors in nineteenth-century Rome, see M. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, ...

• 

  Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-century American Women's Writing

  By Annamaria Formichella Elsden

  Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art. Knoxville:University of Tennessee Press,2002. ———.“Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James: The Literary Relationship.” Massachusetts Studies in English ...

• 

  Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era

  By Paul Henry Daniel Kaplan

  Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 119–20, 122–23; Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles, 116, 123–24; Doyle, Cause of All Nations. Douglass, “Prospect in the Future.” Fuller, Memoirs, 2:229. On Fuller's earlier expressions of interest ...