Lauren Kroiz

Living Power explores the modernist aesthetics of the women's suffrage movement in the United States in the decades leading to the Nineteenth Amendment's passage in 1920. Artists and activists in this period envisioned, and even materialized, new forms of inclusive, modern political citizenship. But at the same time, many progressive advocates premised the right to vote on whiteness, splitting suffragists along racial lines. Lauren Kroiz analyzes how artworks—including Charlotte Perkins Gilman's design for soap trading cards, Adelaide Johnson's marble portrait busts, Anne Brigman's photographs in the California wilderness, and Meta Warrick Fuller's sculptures of mothers and children—interrogated the unstable divide between subjecthood and objecthood at the heart of demands for political agency. Expanding the scholarship of feminist art, Kroiz traces a history that remains both pivotal and unresolved.

Living Power explores the modernist aesthetics of the women's suffrage movement in the United States in the decades leading to the Nineteenth Amendment's passage in 1920. Artists and activists in this period envisioned, and even materialized, new forms of inclusive, modern political citizenship. But at the same time, many progressive advocates premised the right to vote on whiteness, splitting suffragists along racial lines. Lauren Kroiz analyzes how artworks—including Charlotte Perkins Gilman's design for soap trading cards, Adelaide Johnson's marble portrait busts, Anne Brigman's photographs in the California wilderness, and Meta Warrick Fuller's sculptures of mothers and children—interrogated the unstable divide between subjecthood and objecthood at the heart of demands for political agency. Expanding the scholarship of feminist art, Kroiz traces a history that remains both pivotal and unresolved.

During the 1930s and 1940s, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America’s midwestern heartland; others deemed their painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens focuses on Regionalists and their critics as they worked with and against universities, museums, and the burgeoning field of sociology. Lauren Kroiz shifts the terms of an ongoing debate over subject matter and style, producing the first study of Regionalist art education programs and concepts of artistic labor.