Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora's Transcultural Aesthetics
Angel DeCora was the best-known Native American artist of her generation but she is generally omitted from histories of “modern” Native American art. Working at a time when United States Indian policy was dedicated to eradicating Native identity, DeCora fought for the participation of Native Americans in modern American cultural and political life. This essay demonstrates the formal and conceptual modernity of DeCora's work. It explores her sophisticated engagement with contemporary social and aesthetic theory and argues that her paintings, illustrations, and designs draw on these ideas to represent the transcultural condition that defines modern Native American experience.
A Contemporary Matter on Art: Modernism
Modernism and modern art are contemporary concepts which have been discussed for decades, but impacts of modernism on art have been less evaluated. Whereas modernism changed many materials, instruments and approaches about art and formed art in a different way. Today, situation of individual workshops and art galleries emerged after modernism are being discussed. Modernism influenced all components of life since it began to appear among people and also brought new styles on different areas. Classical styles became outmoded after modernism provided economic incomes and revealed new styles in architecture, clothing and even in sense of amusement which dominated on people‟s lives. Authors, artists and researchers were influenced by modernism as well and they began to prefer attractive approaches of modernism. In this context, needless to say, art has been naturally affected by modernism, so it changed its form and content due to inevitable alterations and innovations appeared by means of new mentality of the century. This study includes the assessment of modern art and discusses the influences of modernism in art along with the various descriptions of modernism.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.