Shown is a postcard of Buchanan’s most well-known sculpture, the heavily allegorical “The Suffragist Trying to Arouse Her Sisters” (1911). This sculpture was widely reproduced in small scale, and on posters, banners, and cards in the final decade of the American womens’ suffrage movement.  The caption states: “Central figure-Suffragist. To right – Vanity at her feet lies Prostitution. To left is dozing Conventionality. Behind Conventionality is Wage-earner.”

See: “Western Woman Symbolizes the ‘Cause,’ ” Sault  Ste. Marie Evening News, October 20, 1911.

Malvina Hoffman (1885-1966) was both a consummate sculptor and a consummate self-promoter. In 1929, Hoffman was at the height of her fame, with studios in both New York and Paris. She approached Stanley Field, president of Chicago’s Field Museum, with the idea of representing the races of the world in sculpture. Soon, Hoffman had a very lucrative contract to produce 147 sculptures for the Museum, many of which are still on display.

As ethnographic representations, the set of sculptures embodied then-current notions of race, including assumptions of white superiority. The lifesize bronze “Nordic Type,” for example, was modeled after Rodin’s “Age of Bronze,” showing a muscular, nude caucasian man with upraised arms. Other races hold attributes of primitive technology, like baskets or spears, and are shown crouching, or with downcast eyes, making clear visual statements about their inferior culture and status.

Hoffman’s methods of gathering information, and her research, which included gathering widely-reproduced ethnographic images of the day, is written about in some detail. The process of making the sculptures, and the organization of her large-scale studios, however, is not given the same consideration.

I was hoping to find out about Hoffman’s day-to-day life as a sculptor, and how she managed her studios, assistants, and foundries, but was disappointed. This is not to say that the book is not an extremely well-written investigation of an era of American cultural history that many people would rather forget. But in the end, it is less about Malvina Hoffman’s work than the society she lived in.

“Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman,” by Marianne Kinkel, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2011: 260 pages, $40.

http://www.amazon.com/Races-Mankind-Sculptures-Malvina-Hoffman/dp/0252036247

I recently met with two members of my sculpture group, Joyce Audy Zarins and Eleonora Lecei, at Eleonora’s house and studio for a day of outdoor raku.

We glazed our bisqueware and heated it in Eleonora’s smaller electric kiln, which she’d placed outdoors. When the glaze was molten, we fished the pieces out with long metal tongs and deposited them in a steel drum that had been filled with a mixture of shredded newspaper and sawdust. Once the sawdust caught on fire, the chamber was covered and left to smoke like a captive dragon. Eventually, we pulled the finished pieces out again and sprayed them with water until they cooled.

I used a combination of colors including copper metallic glazes on this head. The result is a finish like tarnished silver that still shows the red earthenware underneath.

Pictured: Louisa Lander’s bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts

Sources: Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions

1 “In 1882, Phebe Hanaford wrote of Lander, “She executed ‘To-day’ and ‘Galatea,’ ‘Evangeline’ and ‘Elizabeth, the Exile of Siberia,’ all of them delightful each in its own way, and to these she has added ‘Undine,’ as a sculptured creation of beauty, ‘Ceres Mourning for Proserpine’ and ‘A Sylph.’… Miss Lander has continued to brighten the world of art by her genius. May she long live to mould clay, and chip marble into forms of loveliness!” All of these works are lost.  Source: Kathleen Lawrence files.

See this live and in person at Open Studios tomorrow!

Has anyone done this at home? I’m going to try casting tin solder as soon as I can get a microwave-size refractory rig set up.

Open Studios continues on Sunday the 25th, but I won’t be in town although my studio will be open.

http://www.artspacemaynard.com

Whitney was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, just outside Boston proper, on 2 September, 1821. She was educated privately, and even as a child was interested in art and writing. Whitney could not attend college since women were not admitted to Yale or Harvard. In 1846 she opened a small school for girls in Salem, Massachusetts, and the poetry she wrote at that time was collected in a volume simply titled “Poems” (New York, 1859). After the Civil War she made several visits to Europe where she studied sculpture, and on her return in 1873 she established a studio in Boston.

A well-known supporter of both the abolitionist and womens’ suffrage movements, Whitney herself was to publicly feel the brunt of sexism. In 1875, she won a commission for a statue of Charles Sumner but the work was denied her when it was discovered that the winning model was created by a woman.

Among her extant public monuments are: the statue of Samuel Adams (1876) located in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol; “Leif the Discoverer” in Boston  (another casting was in that same year placed in Juneau Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin); and the seated, monumental portrait of Charles Sumner which casts a thoughtful presence over Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whitney’s choice of portrait subjects (John Keats, Samuel Adams, Toussaint l’Ouverture, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Frances Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Sewall, Alice Freeman Palmer, Robert Gould Shaw, Eben Norton Horsford, Harriet Martineau, Jennie McGraw Fiske, Lucy Stone and others) reveals her political and cultural interests. Whitney’s aim seems to have been to create traditional bronze and marble memorials to radical subjects (like Toussaint l’Ouverture and Lucy Stone), the effect of which must have been quietly revolutionary in her own time. Whitney died in Boston in 1915.

For the sculpture’s location and an interactive map of public art in Boston: http://www.publicartboston.com/map/node

http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/le-mod-le-37521

http://www.examiner.com/arts-in-boston/leif-eriksson-statue-by-anne-whitney-endured-major-changes
Source: Rubenstein, Charlotte Streifer, American Women Sculptors, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1990.

Pictured: “Leif Erikson” (1886), unveiled in Boston, 29 October, 1887. The statue (formerly above a fountain) represents the Norse-Icelandic discoverer of America as a man of physical beauty and vigor, in the costume of an ancient Scandinavian warrior.

Catlett briefly lived and worked in Harlem, New York, while married to Charles White. After studying in Mexico, she in 1947 married Mexican artist Francisco Mora and made Mexico her permanent home, where she lives today. Although Catlett officially retired from teaching sculpture and heading the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1975, she continues to be active in the Cuernavaca art community.

Throughout her career, Catlett has been a political progressive whose art reflects her commitment to improving the lives of African American and indigenous peoples. In Mexico, she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Arts Workshop), a group of printmakers  dedicated to using their art to promote social change. There she and other artists created posters, leaflets, collective booklets, illustrations for textbooks, posters and illustrations advocating for schools and literacy in Mexico.

Pictured: Woman Fixing her Hair, 1993, Mahogany and opals, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1993.217

Listen to Catlett speak about her work and see a timeline of her accomplishments:

http://elizabethcatlett.net/