Jennifer L. Roberts
Jennifer L. Roberts is the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.
Roberts, Jennifer L.
Roberts, Jennifer L.
United States of America
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Description: Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00282
Robert Smithson (1938–1973), an artist of paramount importance in postwar America, created radical new perspectives for landscape architecture, photography, art criticism, and site-specific installation. His Spiral Jetty—a 1,500-foot-long coil of rock built in 1970 at the edge of the Great Salt Lake—is widely appreciated as one of the most significant art projects of the twentieth century. Less well known is the connection between the Jetty and the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, location of the completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. The link between these two monuments is but one facet of an entire complex of historical reference and reflection that structures Smithson's work. close analysis of the artist's working model of history and featuring comprehensive case studies of three of his most influential works: The Monuments of Passaic, Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan, and the Spiral Jetty. Incorporating abundant new material from Smithson's personal papers and library, Jennifer Roberts offers surprising new interpretations about the artist and his responses to the social, ideological, and material contradictions of his time.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2004 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300094978
EISBN 9780300266856
Illustrations 82
Print Status out of print
Description: Scale
Several years ago, while researching the monumental images of The Birds of America by John James Audubon (1785–1851), I encountered an unexpected...
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Related print edition pages: pp.10-24
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00194.001
Chapter subject tags:Size perceptionPolitics in art
Description: Scale
BOOKScale
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00194
Scale is perhaps the most spectacularly overlooked aspect of artistic production. As photographic and digital reproductions have essentially dematerialized art, critical and historical research dealing with scale—both within the American critical tradition and abroad—has become scattered and insufficiently theorized. However, by posing a specific challenge, such research forces a heightened recognition of both the properties of materials and the deep technical knowledge of makers. A reconsideration of scalar relationships in American art and visual culture therefore reveals original insights.

With a wealth of new research from Glenn Adamson, Wendy Bellion, Wouter Davidts, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Christopher P. Heuer, Joshua G. Stein, and Jason Weems, Scale explores viewers’ physical relationship to Barnett Newman’s abstract canvases, the arduous engineering behind the creation of Mount Rushmore, and the charged significance of liberty poles in the landscape of eighteenth-century New York, among other topics that range from studies of specific works of art to significant conceptual and theoretical concerns.
Author
Print publication date November 2016 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171597
EISBN 9780300256833
Illustrations 74
Print Status in print