Speaker: James Denison

This paper looks at Regionalism in the early-to-mid-twentieth-century United States through an expansive lens, understanding it as a broader phenomenon characterized by a metropolitan fascination with the supposedly unique character of particular portions of the United States that were considered representative of the nation as a whole. This phenomenon extended beyond the Midwest to other regions, including New England and the Southwest, that became objects of fascination for cosmopolitan cultural interpreters. Though there is sometimes a perception that Midwestern Regionalists and contemporaneous American modernists were opposing camps, both pursued artistic projects to which celebrating ostensibly unchanging American regions was central. The principal contention of this paper is that, in all of its iterations, Regionalism was fundamentally rooted in racialized conceptions of place. Like the perception that race was a factual and immutable categorization system, Regionalism was founded on a false notion of unchanging realities and traditional identities. The fundamental appeal of Regionalism was otherness, and much of this otherness was constructed around the racial identities of the populations (or imagined populations) of these distant provinces. In some instances (New England, the Midwest) the appeal was an alleged racial and ethnic purity that had supposedly been lost in diverse urban environments, while in others (i.e. the Southwest) interest was rooted in the simultaneous supposed exoticism and nationally representative character of Native Americans.

Drawing on examples from the second Stieglitz Circle, Denison uses Georgia O’Keeffe’s representations of objects and places from Southwestern Indigenous communities, John Marin’s pictures from his attempted assimilation into a “Yankee” community on the Maine coast, and Marsden Hartley’s white-supremacism-inspired paintings from his late-career return to Maine to demonstrate the breadth of racialized Regionalist practices in the interwar era. Finally, he returns to Midwestern examples to reconsider how Middle America was, though not a frequent tourist destination in the interwar era like some other regions were, nonetheless a place whose racialization helped it play a key role in metropolitan Americans’ notions of national identity.

Biography:
James Denison studies connections between racism and U.S. art and visual culture. A native of the Washington, DC area and a graduate of Bowdoin College, he completed his PhD in art history at the University of Michigan in 2023. At Michigan he wrote a dissertation on the connections between the Stieglitz Circle artists and racism in the interwar U.S.  He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Kalamazoo College and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. He has previously been awarded fellowships from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rackham Graduate School, the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, and the University of Michigan History of Art Department.