AMERICAN STUDIES will be hosting its first
Works-in-Progress Brown-bag Lunch Conversations on September 30th
from 12:30 – 2:00pm (Scott Hall 105). American Studies affiliate faculty member,
Professor Jennifer Marshall will be giving a talk about her paper “Nashville,
New York, Paris, and Nashville: William Edmonson, Mobilize and Unmoved.” See below for more details. Email amstdy@umn.edu to receive a draft of the book chapter on which the talk is based on to read before the talk
Event: American Studies Works-in-Progress Brown-Bag Lunch Conversations Save the Date/Time:Wednesday, September 30th 2015, 12:30-2 (Nicholson 135). American Studies affiliate faculty member, Professor Jennifer
Marshall, will pre-circulate a draft of an essay (title and abstract
below) and then give a 20 minute talk during our first American Studies Works-in-Progress Brown-Bag Lunch Conversation this fall. Bring
your lunch and contribute to shaping new scholarship, while also
building intellectual community in the Department of American Studies!
“Nashville,
New York, Paris, and Nashville: William Edmondson, Mobilized and
Unmoved” by Jennifer Marshall (Art History and American Studies,
UMN-TC)
Abstract
Centering
on William Edmondson, a self-taught sculptor from Nashville, Tennessee
who achieved national prominence in the late 1930s (ca. 1874-1951), this
talk will pursue three main objectives. (1) It will begin by reflecting
on how the current international contexts of thing theory and
object-oriented ontology have brought new critical attention to
artist-makers like Edmondson, whose hand-working of limestone so nicely
dramatizes the “distributed agency” of artistry, in which creative will
might seem equally a factor of materials, as of muscles and mind. (2)
Next, it will explore how it had been an international context of ideas
that first produced the conditions of Edmondson’s art-world visibility
in the mid-1930s, ideas that included: the direct-carving movement,
anti-modern modernism, folk-art fever, primitivism, and the humanist
tradition of the against-all-odds artist, plucked from rustic obscurity.
(3) Finally, it will contrast the many international currents that have
repeatedly allowed for the circulation of works by Edmondson (as well
as images of him and stories about him), with what remained and did not
move: Edmondson himself (who stayed at home) and a dwindling number of
his stone monuments still in situ, eroding on their Tennessee hills.
