Ellery Foutch | Middlebury College (original) (raw)

Papers by Ellery Foutch

Sculpture Journal, Jun 27, 2023

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2022

Sculpture Journal, Jun 2023

Introduction to special issue on the theme "Sculpture, Animacy, Petrification," co-edited with Je... more Introduction to special issue on the theme "Sculpture, Animacy, Petrification," co-edited with Jessica Keating and Melissa Haynes, featuring contributions that analyze materiality, vitality, life/death with objects & ideas from around the globe and across vast time scales: prehistoric Chilean mummies, Ovid's writings and fantasies of sculptural animacy from classical antiquity, 7th-century Japanese shrines adorned with beetle wings, late-medieval Carnival masks, Ruskin on geology and the architecture/sculpture of Verona... PLUS some wonderful musings on art and life from contemporary artists Cassils and Dario Robleto.

Modernism/modernity, 2016

Art should not be confined entirely to the studio of the artist… its realization upon canvas, or ... more Art should not be confined entirely to the studio of the artist… its realization upon canvas, or upon paper, or in the living picture, tends to improve the mind, assimilates the real with the ideal, conforms taste to the noblest standard, overflows the heart with pure and holy thoughts, and adorns the exterior form with graces surpassing those of the Muses." 1-James H. Head, Home Pastimes; or, Tableaux Vivants (1860) While James Head emphasized the moral and aesthetic benefits of performing tableaux vivants in family parlors in the 1860s, I have found that the practice is pedagogically valuable in classrooms in our own historical moment as well. The act of researching and performing tableaux vivants compels students to look closely, to research works of art, to think critically, to interpret and create, and to engage in metacognitive and embodied experiences, indeed "improv[ing] the mind" and bringing work beyond the confines of the artist's studio-or the slide lecture. This essay will explore a recent experiment in implementing tableaux vivants as an assignment to instigate meaningful learning, pointing to the resulting assignments and the students' written self-reflections as evidence for the successes and possibilities of the project. 2

The Zoë Mozert Appreciation Society cordially invites you to submit a proposal for our upcoming C... more The Zoë Mozert Appreciation Society cordially invites you to submit a proposal for our upcoming CAA session “Producing and Consuming the Image of the Female Artist.” We welcome submissions from practicing artists and from art historians who study any geographic region or historical period (including the present day). Please do share this invitation widely. For more details, please consult: https://zmas.org/2019/06/24/cfp-caa-2020/

CFP: Producing and Consuming the Image of the Female Artist
CAA 2020 (Chicago, 12-15 Feb. 2020)
Co-Chairs: Alison J Carr and Ellery E Foutch

American illustrator Zoë Mozert (1907-1993) was the ultimate 1940s “Calendar Girl,” famously serving as her own model for the pin-ups that she so prolifically painted. Newsreels and magazine coverage fostered a fantasy of an artist-model who willingly and flirtatiously revealed herself to viewers. Her assertive engagement with commerce and publicity—and canny use of her own body helped to launch and sustain her creative career.

Although Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz incisively analyzed and articulated the tropes, ‘myths,’ and ‘legends’ of male artist-creators throughout history, the image of the female artist has not been as extensively investigated. This panel invites explorations of the role of women artists in society and art history, across chronological and geographical boundaries. How have female and nonbinary artists embraced, rejected, or adapted stereotypes of artistic identity and success for their own ends? When the dominant genre of artistic achievement has been the representation of the female nude, how have these artists inserted or adapted the representation of their own bodies? What does it mean to deploy one’s own body in image-making? What does the exploitation through idealization of the artist’s body mean? How might we understand bodies as sites of and vehicles for exploration, experimentation, and even protest?

Please submit proposals (2-page cv, abstract, images) to co-chairs Alison J Carr (ajc@alisonjcarr.net) and Ellery E Foutch (efoutch@middlebury.edu) by 23 July. For more information, see https://caa.confex.com/caa/2020/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html.

About The Zoë Mozert Appreciation Society (ZMAS)
Inspired by the work of Zoë Mozert, a mid-century pin-up artist and model, ZMAS explores questions of artistic practice, image consumption, bodily display, and relationships between artist and model, muse and producer. Balancing a playful spirit of inquiry with rigorous research and critical engagement, ZMAS searches for evidence of the lived experiences of pin-up models and artists through archival hunting and imaginative acts of interpretation and speculation.

ZMAS.org will function as an archive and platform as we generate transdisciplinary research into Mozert, reconstructing a context for her that considers her contemporaries as well as who Mozert has influenced today. We welcome collaborators, contributors, and co-conspirators in this exploration and adventure.

American Art, 2017

invited contribution to 30th anniversary issue of _American Art_, considering the significance of... more invited contribution to 30th anniversary issue of _American Art_, considering the significance of Michael Clapper's 2002 article "'I Was Once a Barefoot Boy!' Cultural Tensions in a Popular Chromo."

Flora/Fauna: The Naturalist Impulse in American Art, 2017

Modernism/modernity, Nov 2016

In 1896, bodybuilder Eugen Sandow submitted a patent for a portable projection device to British ... more In 1896, bodybuilder Eugen Sandow submitted a patent for a portable projection device to British officials; this “novel and effective portable method of advertising” radically engages with and reconceptualizes pressing contemporary issues of mobility, technology, consumption, and urban spectacle. The patent revolutionizes our understanding of the history or narrative of “screen practice” by proposing a mobile screen borne on the body of a pedestrian, meant to circulate through the city at night. Although it doesn’t seem to have entered production, it raises important issues for our understanding of the turn-of-the-century’s imagined urban dweller and the possibilities that 19th-century people foresaw for street life and visual consumption. This hybrid man-machine himself becomes a spectacle, luring potential consumers to the changing images and to his own strange contraption, transforming himself into a technologically-enhanced sandwich man, a cyborg of capital.

Common-place, 2016

In an election year in which claims to transparency seem deeply opaque, Foutch recalls the moment... more In an election year in which claims to transparency seem deeply opaque, Foutch recalls the moment when the way to save democracy was clear as glass.

This essay explores the rhetorics of visibility and transparency that made themselves manifest in material form in the mid-19th century: a glass ballot box, designed, patented, and manufactured in New York in 1856-1857 and later illustrated in dozens of political cartoons and allegorical representations of the democratic process. Just as the hanging chad, the butterfly ballot, and the Diebold voting machine came to exemplify fears and anxieties about voting, democracy, and representation at the turn of the twenty-first century, Jollie’s glass ballot box is a compelling embodiment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century election concerns, of both anxieties and aspirations for American democracy.

http://common-place.org/article/glass-ballot-box-political-transparency/

Panorama, 2016

This collection of essays features research first presented at a session sponsored by the Associa... more This collection of essays features research first presented at a session sponsored by the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) entitled “Art and Invention in the U.S.” at the College Art Association annual conference in Washington, DC in February 2016.

Call for Papers: Art and Invention in the U.S. Session sponsored by the Association of Historians... more Call for Papers: Art and Invention in the U.S.
Session sponsored by the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA)
College Art Association Annual Conference, February 3-6, 2016
Washington, DC

This session will explore the explosion of inventiveness from art historical perspectives and will consider works of art through the lens of the history of technology. How did new media alter expectations for art and industry? What relationships developed between artists and inventors, and what was at stake in the dialogues between art and invention? How did inventions and patent processes change the look of modernity, and how was American identity shaped by the production of art and inventions?
Please send proposals to organizers Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance by May 8, 2015. For more information, please see http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf or contact the organizers: efoutch [at] middlebury.edu; helenevalance [at] gmail.com. Accepted presenters must be members of both AHAA and CAA to participate in the 2016 conference. Proposals from all time periods are welcome.

A few years after the exhibition of his Gallery of the Louvre, painter Samuel F. B. Morse adapted... more A few years after the exhibition of his Gallery of the Louvre, painter Samuel F. B. Morse adapted one of his canvas stretchers to create the prototype of a telegraph receiver, literally transforming a tool of his art practice into a medium of technological experimentation and invention. Over the course of the industrializing 19th century, the U.S. government revised and formalized procedures for granting patents and copyright, thereby changing public perceptions about creativity, invention, and intellectual property while creating entirely new careers for artists: patent examiners, model-makers, technical illustrators. The very act of perception was altered by technology as well, via new visual spectacles, environments, and experiences.

A few years after the exhibition of his Gallery of the Louvre, painter Samuel F. B. Morse adapted... more A few years after the exhibition of his Gallery of the Louvre, painter Samuel F. B. Morse adapted one of his canvas stretchers to create the prototype of a telegraph receiver, literally transforming a tool of his art practice into a medium of technological experimentation and invention. Over the course of the industrializing 19th century, the U.S. government revised and formalized procedures for granting patents and copyright, thereby changing public perceptions about creativity, invention, and intellectual property while creating entirely new careers for artists: patent examiners, model-makers, technical illustrators. Patents proliferated, and inventions were eagerly heralded in the popular press and public demonstrations. The very act of perception was altered by technology as well, via new visual spectacles, environments, and experiences. This session seeks to explore the complex relationships of art and invention in the United States.

Technological developments have profoundly changed all aspects of artistic production, consumption, and display; industrially-produced pigments and supports altered the process and materiality of painting itself, while photography and chromolithography yielded entirely new media, fostering competition and leading to anxieties about the status of art. Furthermore, new technologies such as the telegraph and the steamship—whose inventors, Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton, were also painters—allowed for increased transmission of ideas and images around the globe. Innovations such as artificial lighting affected the display of art, and new exhibition formats such as world’s fairs and patent museums juxtaposed painting and sculpture with the latest technological developments, from steam engines to X-ray machines. Many of these enterprises were financed by industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Charles Lang Freer, or Henry Marquand, who marketed innovations to global consumers while turning to artists and art institutions via philanthropy for status. Art in turn was used to glorify technological change, as when railroad magnate J.J. Phelps commissioned George Inness’s painting Lackawanna Valley in 1855.

Please send proposals to organizers Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance by May 8, 2015. For more information, see http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016-call-for-participation.pdf or contact the organizers: efoutch@middlebury.edu; helenevalance@gmail.com.

Sculpture Journal, Jun 27, 2023

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2022

Sculpture Journal, Jun 2023

Modernism/modernity, 2016

CFP: Producing and Consuming the Image of the Female Artist
CAA 2020 (Chicago, 12-15 Feb. 2020)
Co-Chairs: Alison J Carr and Ellery E Foutch

American Art, 2017

Flora/Fauna: The Naturalist Impulse in American Art, 2017

Modernism/modernity, Nov 2016

Common-place, 2016

http://common-place.org/article/glass-ballot-box-political-transparency/

Panorama, 2016

A few years after the exhibition of his Gallery of the Louvre, painter Samuel F. B. Morse adapted... more A few years after the exhibition of his Gallery of the Louvre, painter Samuel F. B. Morse adapted one of his canvas stretchers to create the prototype of a telegraph receiver, literally transforming a tool of his art practice into a medium of technological experimentation and invention. Over the course of the industrializing 19th century, the U.S. government revised and formalized procedures for granting patents and copyright, thereby changing public perceptions about creativity, invention, and intellectual property while creating entirely new careers for artists: patent examiners, model-makers, technical illustrators. Patents proliferated, and inventions were eagerly heralded in the popular press and public demonstrations. The very act of perception was altered by technology as well, via new visual spectacles, environments, and experiences. This session seeks to explore the complex relationships of art and invention in the United States.

Several American artists have been drawn to butterflies, both for their intricate wing patterns a... more Several American artists have been drawn to butterflies, both for their intricate wing patterns and their symbolic associations. This talk explores artists’ pursuit of butterflies and their experimentations with representation from the early 19th century to today. Examples include Titian Peale’s sketches, oil paintings, and elaborate specimen boxes that encased and displayed butterflies between panes of glass in dazzling patterns; Sherman Foote Denton, whose family’s mail order company manufactured display mounts that they promised would “make each specimen a picture;” Old Lyme Artist Willard Metcalf, who purchased dozens of Denton patented mounts in which to display his own collection; and contemporary artist Damien Hirst, who has collaged butterfly wings into compositions resembling stained glass windows.

Anxieties about hacked voting technology are nothing new. Produced by Piers Gelly

Modelos na Arte: 200 anos da Academia de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro, July 2016 In September 1... more Modelos na Arte: 200 anos da Academia de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro, July 2016

In September 1863, U.S. painter Martin Johnson Heade boarded a steamer bound for Brazil, informing the public that he intended " to paint those winged jewels, the humming-birds, in all their variety of life as found beneath the tropics. " For the next several months, Heade socialized with many wealthy U.S. expatriates in Rio de Janeiro and Petropolis, pursuing patrons for a proposed album of chromolithographs to be titled Gems of Brazil. Heade also sought the support and patronage of notable Brazilians, utilizing his connections to the U.S. Consulate to arrange meetings with Dom Pedro II, and he ultimately convinced the emperor to support the project, dedicating the work to him. Although Heade refused to sell any of his hummingbird paintings in Brazil, he actively participated in both official and unofficial exhibition programs, submitting work to the Exposições Gerais and mounting a show in a shop operated by American businessman Henry Milford on rua dos Ourives, near Rio's most fashionable shopping district. With his titles and palette, Heade transformed fast-moving, ephemeral hummingbirds into gemstones, a metaphor that virtually crystallized the creatures into hard, glittering, precious entities rather than the soft, organic, and often-decaying bodies they inhabited. This transformation also echoed popular American perceptions of Brazil and its riches, especially its mines with their wealth of gemstones that were imported to both North America and Europe, removed from their indigenous, natural sources and refined into elaborate gilded settings, foreign to their original contexts. Actual hummingbird heads and bodies were similarly employed in jewelry of the period, their heads mounted in gold settings in a taxidermy substitution for rubies and emeralds—a popularized literalization of Heade's Gems of Brazil for fashionable ladies of the period, furthering Brazil's reputation as an exotic land of riches and brilliant flora and fauna. Heade's " Gems of Brazil " is a remarkable project of artistic and scientific competition and exchange with metaphors that indicate wider cultural concerns about wealth, violence, preservation, and decay. This project explores the letters and diaries of Heade and his social network in Brazil and beyond, as well as his canny manipulation of the press coverage of his trip to Rio de Janeiro and subsequent work in London, to unpack the rich associations of Brazilian hummingbirds and international prestige in the 1860s.

“Chasing Butterflies: Hawthorne, Titian Peale, and the Pursuit of Perfection” Ellery Foutch Nat... more “Chasing Butterflies: Hawthorne, Titian Peale, and the Pursuit of Perfection”
Ellery Foutch

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844) considers the lone figure of the watchmaker-artist Owen Warland, who retreats from society in his pursuit of perfection, inspired by- and attempting to create anew- an elusive, transcendent butterfly. Due to its dramatic and highly visible metamorphosis, the butterfly was a potent nineteenth-century symbol of change, transformation, and the evanescence of beauty. In their highly visible transformations from earth-bound, homely caterpillars to brightly colored and patterned flying creatures, butterflies acquired spiritual resonance that evoked the human passage from earthly body to heavenly soul or spirit; in their ‘rebirth’ from the cocoon, butterflies were seen to parallel Christ’s resurrection. While some authors occasionally referred to the cocoon or chrysalis as a ‘sarcophagus’ or ‘tomb’, the adult butterfly was consistently referred to as the “perfect state” of the insect. Like Hawthorne or Warland, Titian Peale (1799-1885) was similarly transfixed by butterflies and moths, studying the insects throughout the course of his lifetime and creating delicate sketches, lithographs, oil paintings, and over a hundred butterfly boxes bound in leather and marbled paper, their specimens preserved between layers of glass. Peale’s scientific and artistic preservation of these butterflies was an attempt to forestall their decay, immortalizing their perfection and transforming them from natural creatures that interacted with their environment into static objects, incapable of either decay or future life, a theme Hawthorne evoked in both “The Artist” and “The Birthmark.” The structured composition of Peale’s butterfly boxes imposed order, control, and symmetry on these fluttering, evolving creatures, while his use of watch glass explicitly trapped them in a tool of preservation intimately linked with the consideration of the passage of time. This paper considers the tensions between metamorphosis and stasis, life and death, and the limitations of human representation in Peale and Hawthorne.

The 2014 Wellesley-Deerfield Symposium will explore visual representations of scientific inquiry ... more The 2014 Wellesley-Deerfield Symposium will explore visual representations of scientific inquiry produced, collected, distributed or otherwise circulating in New England from the start of the 18th century to the first decades of the 20th century. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines will address a variety of topics from the use of anatomical and biological models in scientific pedagogy to the impact of mechanical inventions for enhancing vision on artistic and scientific practice.

Dr Ellery Foutch will discuss the fascinating life of the first bodybuilder: Victorian Strongman ... more Dr Ellery Foutch will discuss the fascinating life of the first bodybuilder: Victorian Strongman Eugen Sandow and how his arm became the must-have accessory for men of the era. Then, modern day Sandow "The Mighty Moustache" (Sir Leopold Aleksander) will present us with "The Path to Victory" his lecture on gaining the Necessary Attributes of the True Gentleman.

his pursuit of the Duke of Argyll and their shared interest in the aesthetics of hummingbirds. To... more his pursuit of the Duke of Argyll and their shared interest in the aesthetics of hummingbirds. To Argyll, hummingbirds served as evidence of what would be categorized today as "intelligent design," their multicolored plumage seemingly non-functional and an indication of a Creator's love of beauty. As Argyll noted, species variation was often not related to functional or "essential organs" such as their beaks or tongues, but rather amounted to "…little more than a mere difference of colour. The radiance of the ruby or topaz in one species, is replaced perhaps by the radiance of the emerald or the sapphire in another."

The Sheldon Relic Chair, 2018

In 1884, amateur historian Henry Luther Sheldon built a "relic chair," an eclectic Windsor chair ... more In 1884, amateur historian Henry Luther Sheldon built a "relic chair," an eclectic Windsor chair whose spindles were carved from fragments of sites of historical significance, both local (the Middlebury, VT Congregational Church) and national (Old Ironsides). In 2018, students in Middlebury College American Studies 1017: Material Culture in Focus researched this chair, building a website to share our findings with the broader public. We also built our own version of a 2018 relic chair, selecting the objects we felt conveyed our own historical moment and experiences.

Art History Pedagogy & Practice, 2017

This article explores a recent experiment in implementing tableaux vivants as a college-level art... more This article explores a recent experiment in implementing tableaux vivants as a college-level art history assignment, in which students researched works of art and also assumed the pose, posture, and attributes of the work; students were also invited to reconceptualize and think transformatively about these historical works. Drawing upon the principles of Universal Design for Learning, the assignment offers an impetus for close looking, research, critical thinking, interpretation and creativity, and an engagement in metacognitive and embodied experiences, as will be demonstrated by the resulting assignments and students’ written self-reflections. While the assignment was originally designed for a course focused on American culture prior to 1830, this approach could apply to a broad chronological and geographical range to encompass nearly any figurative art.