Dedication and Acknowledgments

Braddock, Alan C.

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Dedication and Acknowledgments

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

Acknowledgments

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23297

Dedication and Acknowledgments

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Dr. Douglas Lewis, retired Curator of the Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where I worked as a summer intern in 1984 and as a curatorial assistant from 1984 to 1986. Doug provided a model of professionalism, erudition, and decency that I will never equal or forget. His generous encouragement over the years, most recently in connection with my research on Ludovico Carracci and Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome, made it possible for a naive kid from Iowa without a cosmopolitan classical education to imagine being an art historian. I am truly grateful to him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every publication embodies a complex set of interrelationships—a scholarly ecology—to which the author owes a considerable debt. I thank the following people and institutions for their assistance and support in making this book possible.

Patricia Fidler at Yale University Press has been patiently instrumental in seeing this project germinate, evolve, and materialize over several years. Her colleague Kate Zanzucchi played an important role as well. Laura Jones Dooley’s heroic copyediting refined the text considerably.

At my home institution, William & Mary, I greatly appreciate the efforts of Kate Conley, Dean of Arts & Sciences, in facilitating a scheduled research leave that allowed me to spend ten months at the Getty Research Institute in 2019–20. I also thank my colleagues in the Department of Art & Art History for making the necessary adjustments during my absence.

My scholarship in residence at the Getty, as part of a cohort exploring the theme of “Art and Ecology,” was very productive despite substantial disruptions caused by wildfire and the covid-19 pandemic. Special thanks go to Alexa Sekyra, Head of the Scholars Program, for her graceful management of that difficult situation and for encouraging me to take a research trip to Vienna and Rome in January 2020, shortly before the pandemic emerged and the world entered lockdown. In Vienna, Gudrun Svoboda generously took time for an extended conversation with me in front of Ludovico Carracci’s Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima while the painting was on view at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. In Rome, Dr. Tristan Weddigan introduced me to the Bibliotheca Herziana. At the Getty, I also benefited from conversations with Gail Feigenbaum, Head of Publications, as well as Ulrich Birkmaier and Devi Ormond in the J. Paul Getty Museum Paintings Conservation Department. My fellow Getty scholars were valuable interlocutors.

For more than a decade, Karl Kusserow at Princeton University has been a good friend and intellectual partner in thinking about ecocritical art history. I am grateful to him for many fruitful conversations over the years and for including an earlier version of my essay on Diego de Valadés in his edited collection, Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective (2021).

In Rhode Island, several people provided crucial assistance in my research on Edward Mitchell Bannister, including Nicholas Bruno, Charles Coelho, Bill Emerson, Jennifer Galpern at the Rhode Island Historical Society, Nancy Grinnell at the Providence Art Club, Bertram Lippincott III and Ingrid Peters at the Newport Historical Society, Maureen O’Brien at the RISD Museum, and William Vareika.

Brian Hall at Harvard Forest graciously provided a graphic he designed to illustrate historical changes in Massachusetts tree growth. He also consulted his colleagues David Foster, Glenn Motzkin, and Neil Pederson regarding my query about tree species identification.

I thank Ross Barrett and Joe Rezak for inviting me to present my research on Bannister in a virtual lecture sponsored by the American Studies Program at Boston University in 2022.

Amelia Goerlitz allowed me to share my ideas about Bannister when I led a Terra Seminar for fellows at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2022.

Thanks to the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., for providing access to the Edward Mitchell Bannister Scrapbook there.

Cheers and appreciation go to Joshua Shannon for inviting me to speak in a virtual symposium on “‘Nature’ in American Art since 1970,” which he organized with the Terra Foundation for American Art and the John F. Kennedy Institute of American Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin, in 2020. Along with Jason Weems and Laura Bieger, Joshua also graciously included an essay contribution by me in their Terra volume, Humans, which provides the basis for another chapter here.

I would also like to acknowledge Subhankar Banerjee and Scott Slovic for inviting me to publish earlier versions of relevant material in their respective Routledge edited collections.

My early thinking about Ludovico Carracci and the Seicento urban ecology of Rome benefited from participating in the College Art Association (CAA) session, “From Cloaca Maxima to America: Italy’s ‘History of Shit,’” organized by Sasha Goldman and Danielle Abdon in 2020, with Pamela Long as respondent. At that session, I especially appreciated the feedback and suggestions of Renzo Baldasso.

I thank Caroline Gillaspie and her colleagues at the City University of New York Graduate Center for inviting me to give a keynote address on Humboldt at their symposium “Un-Fair Trades: Artistic Intersections with Social and Environmental Injustices in the Atlantic World” in 2019.

P. J. Brownlee and Peter Krieger generously involved me in a colloquium on “Mountain Aesthetics and Ecology: The Conceptual Heritage of Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas,” held at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 2019 and cosponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

I appreciate Betsy Jacks and Kate Menconeri for asking me to speak at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in 2019 about the role of directionality in the artist’s work.

Betsy Kornhauser graciously brought me to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018 to speak at a symposium held in conjunction with a remarkable exhibition of Thomas Cole’s work she organized with Tim Barringer. I also very much enjoyed discussing Cole’s The Oxbow with Betsy in a podcast produced by the museum in 2021.

Thanks go to Marie Sanquer for inviting me to give a talk in 2017 sponsored by the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where I first articulated my idea of an “Ecocritical Dictionary.”

I am indebted to John Davis and Veerle Thielemans for asking me to serve as a senior scholar in the 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art summer residency program at Giverny, France, where I had many productive conversations and an opportunity to share my early ideas for this book in a seminar with an international cohort of Americanists.

John Tyson and Ellen Tani organized a 2017 College Art Association conference session on “The Meteorological Impulse in Art: Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Atmospheric Turn,” in which I initially presented my ideas about Olafur Eliasson, fog, and ecomimesis.

Ken Myers gave me a valuable opportunity to share my research on Frederic Church and wilderness at a symposium held in conjunction with an exhibition he curated at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2017.

A number of other individuals have provided valuable assistance with research, images, and thinking for this book at various points, including Stefano Bifolco, Morgan Brittain, Sue Coe, Rachael DeLue, Monica Dominguez-Torres, Stephen Eisenman, Laura Frahm, Lindsay Garcia, Elli Garlin, Carolin Görgen, Brian R. Hall, Yijun Huang, Sam Iden, Grace Kim, Anita Krajnc, Fabiano Kueva, Jenny Labalme, Jason LaFountain, Jo-Anne MacArthur, Anna Marley, Timothy Morton, Jesús Muñoz Morcillo, Madeline Mulder, James Nisbet, John Ott, and Chris Slaby.

Finally, I thank Karen Sherry and our cats Matilda and Henry for the good memories.

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