Tirza True Latimer
California College of the Arts, Oakland (Oakland, CA 94618-1426)
FT-60525-13
Summer Stipends
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$6,000 (approved)
$6,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
6/1/2013 – 7/31/2013
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Eccentricity in the History of American Art during the Modernist Period
The book project, Eccentric Modernisms, takes a case study approach to the investigation of modernist misfits who challenged sex/gender codes and racial prohibitions, as well as aesthetic regimes, to cultivate discrepant strains of modernism in America during the 1930s and 1940s. Each of the book's three chapters focuses on a document I regard as a manifesto of "eccentric modernism": a bilingual (French/English) artists' book titled "Dix Portraits" (1930), an opera program from Gertrude Stein's "Four Saints in Three Acts" (1934), and an art journal, "View" (1945). I have completed two of these three studies and seek NEH support to complete the third chapter, which focuses on the 1945 "American Issue" of the journal "View." Several of the protagonists featured in "Dix Portraits" and "Four Saints" reappear in this third chapter as contributors to "View." The journal takes issue with the prevailing ethos of nationalism as well as the formalism that dominates mid-century American Art.
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