This program is only offered through Zoom.
Image shown: Amy Jones, c. 1930s (2010.249.1)
While many 19th-century American women drew, sketched, and even painted, few were able to become professional artists, and fewer still have their work in museum collections today. Why was visual art considered a ladylike pursuit, and yet an unsuitable career for women at the same time? How did some women surmount the historical obstacles to becoming artists? And why have even their success stories been largely forgotten? This talk will explore the lives and work of women who became landscape painters, portraitists, and commercial artists, from the mid-1800s through the Great Depression, especially those who found inspiration in the wilds of the Adirondacks
About The Speaker:
Laura R. Prieto is the Alumni Chair in Public Humanities and a Professor of History at Simmons University in Boston. She researches and writes about women, gender, and race in American culture. Her first book, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America, studies how women painters, sculptors, and illustrators created a professional identity for themselves in the face of exclusion. Her current research traces women’s transnational work and activism, within and across the overseas empire that the United States established in the Caribbean and Pacific.
This program is co-sponsored by Adirondack Diversity Initiative