Unseeing sight: blindness in American art and material culture
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation explores how the loss or absence of sight fundamentally shaped experiences of making and understanding art objects between the 1870s and 1890s in the United States. In doing so, it examines how artworks, together with visual spectacles and scientific technologies, made visible the physiological and epistemological limitations of looking. American artists and audiences turned to works of art to probe vision’s subjective nature—to grapple with what it meant to see and to be blind. Such objects invited viewers to see in entirely new ways, challenging cultural and social definitions of disability and ability. Interdisciplinary in scope and ambition, this dissertation positions histories of disability, medicine, and science squarely within art history to reveal new understandings of the shifting meanings of vision in the nineteenth century. ☐ The dissertation’s four chapters illustrate the diverse ways in which blindness, blind people, and the non-visual structured relationships between artists, viewers, and artworks. Chapter Two demonstrates how tactile relief maps made for blind students broadly influenced the artistry of mapmaking and the visualization of geography. Chapter Three considers how John Haberle’s trompe l’oeil paintings, in particular, A Bachelor’s Drawer, engaged with vision aids and his own visual disability to engender a communal experience of blindness. Chapter Four explores how the representation of blindness in Randolph Rogers’s enduring sculpture Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii reconfigured understandings of disability and established modes of viewership. Chapter Five investigates how anatomical models challenged medical and cultural categories of disability and ability by altering the nature of visuality. Taken together, the objects in these case studies generated a kind of unseeing sight in the nineteenth century: they counteracted prevailing assumptions about vision, exposed its cultural constructions, and broadened its terms to include the non-visual. Exploring how disabled people and experiences of disability informed the creation, signification, and understanding of works of art, this project uncovers a more inclusive and dynamic understanding of American art’s significance and reach in the nineteenth century.
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Keywords
Disability history, History of medicine, Haberle, John, Auzoux, Louis, Material culture, Rogers, Randolph