Priceless Children includes vintage photographs of working class and middle-class children at the turn of the century. Lewis Hine's pioneering documentation of immigration and child labor are compared and contrasted with the Pictorialist work by six of his contemporaries: F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Clarence White. Hine's working-class children, portrayed for reform-minded audiences as victims of harshly inhumane conditions, often display a freedom, exuberance, sociability, and autonomy that their more privileged and closely guarded peers might well have envied. Conversely, the bourgeois interior, in the iconography of fine-art photography, did not always or unambiguously register as a safe haven in a heartless world. This book suggests that establishing the value of the "priceless child," part of whose history can be seen in photographs, is an always-unfinished project.

Priceless Children: American Photographs 1890-1925 : Child Labor and the Pictorialist Ideal

Arts & Photography

Fanning, Patricia J.

Beck, Tom

Curtis, Verna Posever

Dimock, George

Photography & Video

Weatherspoon Art Museum

Changing Perceptions: The Evolution of Twentieth Century American Art

Beesch, Ruth K.

Contemporary art, with its inherent contradictions, ambiguities, and market alliances, is an idiosyncratic--even problematic--lens through which to examine situations borne of economic necessity. Nevertheless, some artists do challenge their own system, choosing to proactively address economic dispossession and the larger social and political factors that contribute to adverse economic conditions. Seeking to counteract stereotypical expectations and portrayals of lower-income existence, Borne of Necessity brings together recent and newly commissioned work by Julie Ault and Martin Beck, Peggy Diggs, Anthony Hernandez, Tom Hunter, Marjetica Potrc, Michael Rakowitz, Camilo José Vergana, Ken Lum, Samuel Mockbee and The Rural Studio, and the artists' collective Temporary Services with Dave Whitman. Accompanying reproductions of the artists' projects are essays by curator Ron Platt, who frames the exhibition within current contemporary practice, and Carol Becker, who discusses the ways in which artists engage new strategies in politically oriented works. Also included is a CD of “Dave's Stories,” a sound piece produced by Temporary Services.

Borne Of Necessity

Platt, Ron

Lum, Ken

Becker, Carol

Doll, Nancy

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Published by the Weatherspoon Art Museum Dread and Delight features the work of contemporary artists using canonical fairy tales to examine the complexities of postmodern life. In the history of art, the widespread use of fairy tales is new—a phenomenon of the late twentieth century that continues to gain traction. Surveying some forty years of artistic production, this is the first book to consider why artists have turned to fairy tales and how they are reinvigorating the genre. In recalling specific stories—including “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and others—some artists have embraced fairy tales’ promises of transformation and championing of the disenfranchised. Others, however, have plumbed their darker elements—poverty, abuse, addiction, and exploitations of power. Many artists engage in what Renaissance scholar Armando Maggi describes as “dirty” storytelling, a disjointed and spontaneous mode of narration that revels in the marvelous and denies easy explanations. Rather than merely recasting classical fairy tales in contemporary contexts, these artists dismantle and reassemble the stories in wholly transformative ways. In 1982, conceptual artist John Baldessari noted, “What appears to be trivial in a fairy tale, etc. could be the lingering remnant of the memory of the soul.” Focusing on specific cultural contexts for fairy tale subjects, Dread and Delight explores the ways in which artists have countered this notion of fairy tales as inconsequential and instead revealed their relevance for our lives today.

Dread and Delight: Fairy Tales in an Anxious World

History & Criticism

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Books by Weatherspoon Art Museum