Books
(Selected)
Ink and Paper
I have always had one foot in the publishing industry. From typesetting copy, checking galleys, taking photoshoots, laying out page designs, developing negatives, preparing printing plates, running presses, and binding books—putting ink on paper has always come easily to me. When I shifted my professional efforts to academics and museums, I thought I would be leaving the world of publishing. On the contrary, I was entering a profession where careers rest heavily on the ability to develop and publish worthwhile ideas. As a curator, I never lack for ideas to explore, research, and write; the collections demand attention and the publications follow.
In academia, publishing is a matter of course; likewise, museums publish—a lot. Given my background in the graphic arts, my scholarly ambitions, and the importance of publishing in the museum profession, is not surprising that the museums I have directed were far and away the most productive publishers of record on their respective campuses.
The following selection of books (arranged by date) illustrate my range of skills as scholar, writer, curator, and editor.
Reflections & Undercurrents: Ernest Roth and Printmaking in Venice, 1900–1940
Two for the Road: Ernest Roth and André Smith in Europe, 1912–1930
Editor: Phillip Earenfight
Author: Eric Denker
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This pair of handsomely illustrated volumes considers the central role of Ernest Roth in American etching during the first decades of the twentieth century.
The first volume (2012) examines Roth’s work in Venice and the influence of James McNeill Whistler on Roth and the wide circle of artists working there.
The second volume (2022) concentrates on Roth and André Smith and their work in other European towns and cities before and after World War I.
In Light of the Past: Experiencing Photography 1839–2021
Editor and Faculty Advisor: Phillip Earenfight
Student Contributors: Tenzin Crowley, Hill Goborne, Ana-Elena Karlova, Emma Larson-Whittaker, Zuqing Qi, Jackson Rhodes
2021
ISBN: 978-1-7366748-1-9
In Light of the Past aims to provoke ideas and thoughts on the photographic image at this important moment in history, when digital imagery is playing such a dominant role in our experience of the photograph. In arriving at the structure for this exhibition, the student curatorial group considered ways in which viewers experience photographs, based in part on the physical nature of the photographs and the conditions and physical contexts in which they were most likely experienced. The group arrived at the following divisions: case photographs, mounted albumen prints, photographs as art, photo albums and scrapbooks, printed books and magazines, snapshots, instant photographs and illuminated and projected imagery. These divisions were then grouped into three major viewing environments: personal/domestic, professional/institutional (libraries, schools), public/leisure (theaters, cinema). Working within these broad divisions, the student curators responsible for the exhibition identified narrowly defined topics for focused research. Their essays appear in the following pages of the catalogue, which is divided into six chapters that cover most of the principal divisions mentioned above. The essays are by no means an exhaustive consideration of the issues raised by the divisions in question; rather, they illustrate the richness and potential for future research in these areas of study.
Shan Goshorn: Resisting the Mission
Editor: Phillip Earenfight
Essays by: Phillip Earenfight, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Shan Goshorn, Suzan Shown Harjo, Barbara Landis, Gina Rappaport, Heather Shannon, W. Richard West Jr.
2019
ISBN 978-0-9861263-5-2
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Resisting the Mission present thirty-nine woven baskets by Shan Goshorn. The works address a range of key issues associated with Native identity, particularly the damage wrought by generations of forced acculturation at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylania, the nation’s largest and most influential off-reservation boarding school.
For her work, Goshorn creates numerous paper splints that feature text and, in many cases, imagery she weaves into vessels based on traditional Cherokee patterns and shapes. The texts feature the names of former students and, in several instances, speeches delivered by the school’s founding superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt. The imagery is drawn from archival photographs of the students at Carlisle and applied to the paper from which the splints are cut, all of which Goshorn weaves into the final baskets. In this way, the artist interweaves colors, names, places, events, places, and ideologies into a visual history that is traditional upon first appearance but also profoundly moving and political.
The title of this catalogue and exhibition is based on Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, a monumental set of seven pairs of baskets, each pair featuring images of students upon their arrival at the Carlisle Indian School and of the same students months or years later. The original purpose of these before-and-after photographs was to show the supposed efficacy of Pratt’s assimilationist mission at the school. In Goshorn’s before-and-after baskets, such tools of propaganda become memorials to the students, whose images and names, along with Pratt’s words, are interwoven into the bodies of the paper vessels.
College Art Association, Alfred A. Barr Jr. Award for Outstanding Museum Catalogue, Honorable Mention (2019)
Pennsylvania Federation of Museums and Historical Organizations, Award of Merit (2019)
From the Southern Plains to the Matanzas Bay
Editor: Phillip Earenfight
Curators: Emily Arthur, Marwin Begaye, John Hitchcock
2018
Moved by the many ledger drawings made by several of the Native artists at Fort Marion from 1875 to 1878, contemporary artists Emily Arthur, Marwin Begaye, and John Hitchcock developed Re-Riding History, a curatorial project that invited seventy-two artists, Native and non-Native, to respond to the experience of imprisonment by creating an individual work on paper similar to the historic ledger drawings made at the fort. The exhibition is a contemporary response to a historical experience held intact within American Indian communities through oral history and art.
Engaging these historical events, the artists reclaim the telling of this story to offer an indigenous perspective of a shared history. Their visions demonstrate a plurality of ideas about memory, history, and time. Re-Riding History artists, curators, and educators create a new visual history of St. Augustine and in doing so they claim the personhood of their ancestors.
Lalla Essaydi
Editor: Phillip Earenfight
Author: Valerie Behiery
2018
ISBN: 978-0-9861263-3-8
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Lalla Essaydi (b. 1956, Marrakesh) grew up in Morocco, raised her family in Saudi Arabia, and relocated to France and finally the United States. Her work opens perspectives into cross-cultural identity politics, creating views that draw together culturally embedded materials and practices—including the odal- isque form, Arabic calligraphy, henna, textiles, and bullets—to critique the narratives that have been associated with Muslim women throughout time and across cultures. By plac- ing Orientalist fantasies of Arab women and Western stereotypes in dialogue with lived realities, Essaydi presents identity as the cul- mination of these legacies, yet something that also expands beyond culture, iconography, and stereotypes.
Picasso and the Circus: Fin-de-Siècle Paris and the Suite de Saltimbanques
Editor: Phillip Earenfight
Essays by Phillip Earenfight, Christine Giviskos, Fernando Martín Martín
ISBN: 978-0-982-61562-1
2011
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Picasso and the Circus presents a pivotal moment in Picasso's early career, between his Blue and Rose Periods, when he was increasingly drawn to the subject of the circus. The book analyzes the circus and related spectacles in fin-de-siècle Paris, and how they were interpreted by print arts of the era, including Jules Cheret, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Henri Gray, Edgar Chahine, and Richard Ranft. It considers Picasso's Suite de Saltimbanques (1904-6), an early and important series of etchings and drypoints related primarily to acrobats (saltimbanques).
The popularity of the circus in late 19th- and early 20th-century Paris resonates in the works of many artists at this time. From sensational—and sensationalized—feats of strength and prowess to moving depictions of poverty and the life of the outcast, these prints not only expand our understanding of the period, they also represent some of Picasso's finest work.
Masterworks: Renaissance, Baroque, and Early Modern Prints and Drawings from the Darlene K. Morris Collection
Phillip Earenfight
ISBN 978-0-9826156-3-3
2011
[Click image to view entire catalogue]
Prints and drawings are often the most intimate and revealing works by an artist. Frequently small in size, they provide a view into an artist’s creative spirit on a scale that is individual, direct, and intense. The small size and immediacy of prints and drawings, particularly those made in the pre-modern era, invite the viewer to hold the work in their hands, like a book, and experience the image on a personal level.
When experiencing a print or drawing, one is struck by the nature of the image, its media—be it ink, chalk, graphite, charcoal, watercolor wash—and how it interacts with the paper. The image can be faint, made of whispery lines that appear to blow gently across the surface of the paper, as in the case of drypoints and etchings. Or it may be firm, dark, and embossed deeply into the paper fibers, as with woodcuts and wood engravings. Or it may be direct and gestural, as in the case of drawings, which bear the touch of the artist’s hand—revealing the immediate application of pigment to the paper.
The texture, color, and thickness of the paper also shape our experience of prints and drawings. Unlike finished paintings, prints and drawings immediately express their “paper-ness”; the viewer is always aware of their physical reality as paper and pigment, not as a mirror nor an illusion of reality. The paper itself is as much a part of the image as the pigments it carries on its surface. But the paper is not merely a vehicle, providing the ground on which the image is applied, stamped, embossed; it forms part of the image. It is both the distant background sky and the foreground stream.
In the final analysis, the image and the paper are but the physical aspects of prints and drawings. Together they combine to express ideas that transcend physical limitations. They carry beliefs and values from the artist to the viewer.
Because of the powerful effect of prints and drawings, they have been popular among collectors who admire the intimate nature of finely crafted images that express grand ideas on a small scale. The acquisition of prints and drawings has long been a passion among collectors who value the subtle, intimate qualities of works on paper.
This catalogue surveys a selection of works on paper from the Darlene K. Morris Collection.
Joyce Kozloff: Co+Ordinates
Editor: Phillip Earenfight
Essays by Nancy Princenthal and Phillip Earenfight
ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2
2009
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Joyce Kozloff: Co-Ordinates considers the New York–based artist’s paintings and works on paper—which employ the formal structure and conventions of cartography to examine issues of power, gender, and global politics—from the late 1990s to the present. This is the first book to consider Kozloff’s work since the late 1990s within the broader context of her career and the history of map-related art. Charting her influential contribution to the Pattern and Decoration movement, which was an integral part of the downtown New York art scene of the 1970s—the volume also explores Kozloff’s later, large-scale public artworks. Fifty full-color photo spreads are dedicated to key projects—Targets, Boys’ Art, American History and Voyages—and accompanied by an essay by critic Nancy Princenthal and an interview with the artist.
A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion
Editor: Phillip Earenfight
Essays by Janet Catherine Berlo, Phillip Earenfight, Brad Lookingbill, George Miles,
ISBN: 978-0-295-98727-9
2008
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A Kiowa’s Odyssey recreates a sketchbook of drawings by Etahdleuh Doanmoe that chronicle the experiences of seventy-two Southern Plains Indians captured by the U.S. Army in Oklahoma Territory in 1875. To stem their ability to lead raids against white settlers, the army exiled these Arapaho, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa Indians more than 1,000 miles, by wagon, train, and steamboat, to Fort Marion, Florida. The prisoners, dazed by travel and unfamiliar surroundings, quickly found themselves subject to a process of Westernization and assimilation. Under the direction of Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, the Indians were made to adopt Western appearance, behavior, language, and beliefs. Pratt was a prominent advocate of Indian assimilation, and many of the practices that he introduced at Fort Marion were subsequently institutionalized at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which he founded in 1879.
College Art Association, Alfred A. Barr Jr. Award for Outstanding Museum Catalogue, Winner (2009).
Pennsylvania Federation of Museums and Historical Organizations, Award of Merit (2008)
Within the Landscape: Essays on Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture
Editors: Phillip Earenfight and Nancy Siegel
Essays by: Kevin J. Avery, Matthew Baigell, Phillip Earenfight, David Schuyler, Nancy Siegel, Allan Wallach
2005
ISBN: 978-0-9768488-0-6
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Within the Landscape is a collection of essays by leading scholars that reevaluates and discusses the nineteenth-century American landscape from the perspective of visual and literary culture. Through a variety of thematic and ideological approaches, this book investigates the development and production of American landscape scenery while addressing common perceptions concerning the Hudson River School and its artists with fresh interpretations and interdisciplinary views.
Specific topics covered in this book are the popularization of the Hudson Valley through a literary and visual tradition; the dissemination of American landscape imagery in the early to mid-nineteenth century through a variety of media such as drawings, paintings, engravings, and decorative arts; the concept of the staged view and the use of the panorama; the presence of the deity in the landscape as a cultural construct; and the influence of a newly created resort and tourist industry with regard to literary and cultural climates. This volume considers the work of prominent nineteenth-century artists, engravers, authors, and philosophers including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic E. Church, Sanford R. Gifford, William H. Bartlett, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.