19th-century New York City was a
visual experience, a spectacle for residents and visitors alike. New York’s
entrepreneurs turned to woodcuts, aquatints, lithographs, and photographs to
make sense of the booming metropolis and promote their own wares to a national—indeed,
an international—market. They experimented with new mass-production techniques
to provide an ever-increasing number of compelling visual and material forms in
factories staffed largely with immigrants and women.
This symposium is
being held upon the occasion of the Bard Graduate Center Focus Gallery exhibit,
Visualizing 19th-Century New York, which explores the role of New York
and other cities as models for new ways in which an exploding urban scene might
be understood in visual terms. Distinguished
scholars incorporating the perspectives of Art History, History, and American
Studies will offer a comparative look at makers of 19th-century cultural
commodities intended for the new and rising middle class audience and will
recover the representations of the working people of New York in the wider
range of available images of the city’s residents and its diverse neighborhoods
that entered the panorama of urban life in the 19th century.
Peter N. Miller
Bard Graduate Center
Welcome
David Jaffee
Bard Graduate Center
Introduction
Michael Clapper
Franklin & Marshall College
Art Entrepreneurs: Currier and Ives, Louis Prang, and John Rogers
Jonathan Prude
Emory University
The “look” of Lesser Sorts in 19th Century New York
Panel Discussion
Chair: David Jaffee, Bard Graduate Center