Mapping immigrant New York: race and place in Ashcan visual culture
Date
2020
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation explores the racial significance of Ashcan School imagery in the context of period debates about immigration. This group of artists—which includes Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, George Luks, and George Bellows—has always been deeply linked with the perennial subject of their pictures: New York City. Art historians usually describe this relationship in terms of the close affinities between the art and the realities of urban experience. Gender and class-focused investigations of social problems in Ashcan art have been the principal concern of scholars to date. Yet issues of race and debates about immigration are just as crucial for understanding this body of work. Ashcan artists represented immigrants in a range of media and were deeply preoccupied with mobility and immobility, inclusion and exclusion––issues that were part and parcel of the immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century. ☐ Organized along racial and spatial lines, each chapter examines a range of urban sites (parks, restaurants, and markets) in connection with specific immigrant populations (Italian, Chinese, and Jewish), locating the production and contestation of racial meaning in and through particular urban spaces. Chapter one considers Glackens’s representations of Italians in Washington Square Park in relationship to themes of mobility and assimilation. The second chapter analyzes Sloan’s Chinese restaurant scene through the lens of food and taste to explore the growing presence of immigrants and changing food culture within New York. Chapter three situates Luks’s Hester Street within the context of the era’s anti-Semitism to address the artist’s engagement with racial typing, stereotyping, and discourses of Jewish difference that proliferated during the long nineteenth century. ☐ Drawing on the approaches of critical race theory and cultural geography, this study complicates familiar narratives about Ashcan School realism and provides a more richly textured picture of the artists’ relationship to their city. More broadly, it resituates Ashcan art within an emerging visual culture of immigration and in relation to contemporary discourses of race, national identity, and Americanness often attributed to artistic production of the interwar decades.
Description
Keywords
Ashcan visual culture, Immigrant populations, Urban spaces, Cultural geography, Critical race theory