Professional Affiliation

Professor of American Art Department of Art History and Archaeology University of Maryland

Expert Bio

As an undergraduate at Hiram College (1971-75), I first became involved in the study of the relations between art and religion. Double-majoring in art history and religious studies, I wondered early on why so little scholarly attention had been directed toward the interdisciplinary intersections that defined my own field of interest. My intellectual engagement of this subject remained constant through a master's degree at Yale University Divinity School (1975-78) and a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago (1983-88), where the interdisciplinary Committee on the History of Culture, rather than any single department, granted my Ph.D. By the time I reached Chicago, my interests had a geographical and chronological focus: the United States from the colonial period through the early twentieth century. Chicago's program in the History of Culture suited me well, allowing me to pursue studies in American art history, American cultural history, and the history of American religions. While interdisciplinarity characterizes my intellectual commitments, by profession I am an art historian. This means that not only do I hold my faculty appointment at the University of Maryland's in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, but also, for any given inquiry -- in classroom, museum, or archive -- my investigations begin with works of art or artifacts as well as ideas about them.

 

Expertise

American Art History and Visual Culture, especially: Relations between Art and Religion in the United States

Project Summary

In selecting materials for research, I am principally concerned with images and objects that illuminate the roles played by both art and religion in the construction of American culture. Two specific sets of issues frequently associated with my broader interdisciplinary area of specialization are especially significant to my work:





 

• iconoclastic episodes in American culture -- not just in the more extreme and literal sense but also in the form of less dramatic suspicions and contentions about images and their roles and meanings.
  
   
• the arrangement of visual culture, cultural categorization, and the configuration of visual cultural hierarchy.

 

In terms of method, I am committed to a contextual approach and to interpretive strategies that prioritize historical evidence and historical audiences.



I conceive of my current project as an exercise in reframing consideration of the public display of religion. My research examines carefully the issues of government funding, property, and supervision -- but does not stop there. While not minimizing the substantial importance of constitutionally bounded church-state relations in American religious expression, the accent here is equally on the non-governmental operation of religious images and objects in the public arena.







My purpose is twofold:

 

 

 

 

 

• I want to define the public display of religion, as a category of visual experience, in a manner conducive to more inclusive academic inquiry. To date, a scant literature addresses particular forms (John Beardsley's work on yard art), particular functions (Edward T. Linenthal on public memory and sacred space), or particular aspects of public funding and legal history (Leonard W. Levy on the establishment clause and Wayne R. Swanson on Lynch v. Donnelly). In addition, while there is a large body of scholarly writing on public art and on the 1990s "culture wars," acknowledgment of religion's significant presence in both of those areas has been negligible. My research represents an initial attempt to reorganize and reconfigure the subject of the public display of religion. I hope to account, in the process, for all three terms ("public," "display," "religion") and some of their relations and to treat in a more comprehensive fashion the collection of materials usefully delineated within this visual field of information.
  
  
  
  
  
   
• Perhaps of more immediate consequence, I wish to suggest that this conceptual arrangement of the public display of religion has significant implications in relation to the dynamics of contemporary individual and group identity. Though it has functioned differently in the past, in the early twenty-first century United States, the public display of religion plays a key role in manifesting the nation's plural character. Religion's public display, I will argue, thus makes visible pluralism's fundamental relation to American culture.

 

 

 

 

Major Publications

• The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited with David Morgan (University of California Press, 2001)
  
   
• Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton University Press, 1999)
  
   
• Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Indiana University Press, 1993)