Books by Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw

Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century

by Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw

From the American Revolution through the Civil War and on into the Gilded Age, American artists created dynamic images of black sitters. Many of these portraits illuminate the search for a self-possessed identity as well as cultural stereotypes and practices. Portraits of a People looks critically at images made of and by African Americans. They range from a 1773 engraving of the African-born poet Phillis Wheatley purportedly drawn by her friend, the slave Scipio Moorhead, to an 1897 portrait of the artist's mother painted by the expatriate Henry O. Tanner while visiting from Paris.
Portraits of a People features color reproductions of more than 100 important portraits in various media, drawn from museum and historical collections across the United States. The biographies of individual sitters, artists, or histories of the works are discussed in short texts. Essays consider various issues of how the self was fashioned pictorially and the development of unique identities through the formal portraiture of freeborn and previously enslaved African American artists and sitters.

Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect

by Henry Adams, Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Patricia Junker, Audrey Lewis, Karen Baumgartner, Chris Crosman, Mary Landa, Christine Podmaniczky, Joyce Hill Stoner, Shuji Takahashi

An insightful and essential new survey of Wyeth’s entire career, situating the milestones of his art within the trajectory of 20th-century American life

This major retrospective catalogue explores the impact of time and place on the work of beloved American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). While previous publications have mainly analyzed Wyeth’s work thematically, this publication places him fully in the context of the long 20th century, tracing his creative development from World War I through the new millennium.

Published to coincide with the centenary of Wyeth’s birth, the book looks at four major chronological periods in the artist’s career: Wyeth as a product of the interwar years, when he started to form his own “war memories” through military props and documentary photography he discovered in his father’s art studio; the change from his “theatrical” pictures of the 1940s to his own visceral responses to the landscape around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his family’s home in Maine; his sudden turn, in 1968, into the realm of erotic art, including a completely new assessment of Wyeth’s “Helga pictures”—a series of secret, nude depictions of his neighbor Helga Testorf—within his career as a whole; and his late, self-reflective works, which includes the discussion of his previously unknown painting entitled Goodbye, now believed to be Wyeth’s last work.

Published in association with the Seattle Art Museum and the Brandywine River Museum of Art

Exhibition Schedule:
Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, PA
(06/24/17–09/17/17)
Seattle Art Museum
(10/19/17–01/15/18)

Represent 200 Years of African American Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art

by Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw

This publication highlights nearly 150 objects in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that were created by American artists of African descent. Introduced with an essay by the distinguished scholar Richard J. Powell, the volume includes paintings, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, costume and textiles, and photography by some 100 artists, from classically trained painters such as Henry Ossawa Tanner to self-taught artists such as Bill Traylor. Informative, thematic essays by the consulting curator, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, are followed by individual object entries as well as texts spotlighting areas of collecting strength, many of them written by members of the museum’s curatorial staff.

The first major publication to focus on the museum’s diverse collection of works by African American artists, this volume also offers a fresh scholarly perspective on African American art from the early 19th century to the present.

Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents

by Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Christopher Riopelle, Daniel Immerwahr, Stephanie L. Herdrich, Sylvia Yount

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career.

Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This groundbreaking publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas—in particular, The Gulf Stream (1899), an iconic painting long considered the most consequential of his career—revealing a lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. The book also includes Homer’s depictions of rural life and the sea, in which he grapples with the violence of nature, as well as his Civil War and Reconstruction paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, which explore the unresolved effects of the war on the landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. Recognizing the artist’s keen ability to distill complex issues in his work, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer’s work resonates with the challenges of the present day.