Director's Foreword

~Elizabeth Catlett was born in our nation’s capital in 1915, the granddaughter of slaves. She graduated from Howard University, having studied design, drawing, printmaking, and art history. After a two-year stint teaching high school in North Carolina, she enrolled at the University of Iowa, where she was influenced by, among others, the regionalist...

Winslow Homer’s art has long been beloved by American audiences. So many of his images explore aspects of our national identity that are especially meaningful to us, from military heroism and innocent childhood to hard work and a reverence for nature. As Walt Whitman did with language in the same period, Homer used his artistic tools and materials to craft a strong, original style. He developed unorthodox methods of representation to conjure tangible, visceral experiences. Looking at the world …

The Art Institute of Chicago takes seriously its mission to collect, research, preserve, and display representative examples of the world’s artistic legacy for the benefit of the public. This is a grave responsibility, and nothing we do is more important. Critical to this enterprise are the efforts of our conservators, who collaborate with our curators to assess the condition and...

As one of this country’s greatest encyclopedic museums, the Art Institute of Chicago has a long-standing commitment to study, display, and communicate knowledge about the heritage of the world’s peoples. Thus, we play a crucial cultural and civic role in our region, our country, and our wide international community. There is no substitute for displaying original works of art, and it is through the presence of such invaluable objects that the museum is able to present some five thousand years …

To all but a few individuals, the works of art featured in this book and the exhibition Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South will be almost entirely unknown. Yet, as with masterpieces from more familiar ancient traditions, the objects strike us with a sense of surprise, wonderment, and puzzled interest. They appear to have a family affinity with the arts of Mesoamerica and other regions of the Americas where early societies arose and flourished, but …

We at the Harvard University Art Museums are committed to advancing the knowledge and appreciation of art through exhibitions and their attendant publications. Often these derive from seminars taught by our colleagues elsewhere in the university. Byzantine Women and Their World began life as one such seminar and, with the help of Andrew W. Mellon...