Renée Ater

In Keith Morrison, I look at an artist whose use of detail, color, humor, ethnicity, and the sacred and the secular captures the essence of a fantastic imagination. Considering 50 plus images that Morrison painted between 1962 and 2004, I write about the diverse ways the artist intertwines fluidity and control with narrative.

Citation: Ater, Renée. Keith Morrison. Vol. 5. David C. Driskell Series of African American Art. San Francisco: Pomegranate Books, 2005.

Remaking Race and History focuses on the life and public sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), one of the early twentieth century’s few African American women artists. To understand Fuller’s strategy for negotiating race, history, and visual representation, I examine the artist’s contributions to three early twentieth-century expositions: the Warwick Tableaux, a set of dioramas for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition (1907); Emancipation, a freestanding group for the National Emancipation Exposition (1913); and Ethiopia, the figure of a single female for the America’s Making Exposition (1921). I argue that Fuller’s efforts to represent black identity in art provide a window on the Progressive Era and its heated debates about race, national identity, and culture.

Citation: Ater, Renée. Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011; paperback 2021.

In this essay, I reevaluate Meta Warrick Fuller's Ethiopia, a statue she created for the America's Making Exposition, a 1921 fair that focused on the contributions of immigrants to American society. I argue that Ethiopia served two seemingly contradictory purposes. It filled a need for African Americans to formulate an authentic racial identity by looking to the grand achievements of Egyptian history while also supporting the romantic ideal of Christian Ethiopia as a symbol of black liberation. At the same time, Ethiopia's message was assimilationist in the way it was exhibited at a "melting pot" event, representing the emancipation of a people attempting to prove their value to a society that had long excluded them from full involvement as United States citizens.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Making History: Meta Warrick Fuller's Ethiopia." American Art 17, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 12-31.

Article available ONLY on the subscription services: JSTOR or The University of Chicago Press Journals.

In late spring 1936, Aaron Douglas painted four murals at the Texas Centennial Exposition. In this essay, I argue that Douglas’s murals were part of a heroic endeavor by black historians and fair organizers to counter the effacement of a black presence from the main exposition. Since at least the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, African Americans had participated in world fairs and regional expositions to assert their Americanness, to highlight their historic achievements, and to display their contributions to the development and growth of the United States. The Texas Centennial Exposition provided African Americans the opportunity to re-articulate their racial and national identities and to reshape historical memory in the public spaces of the Hall of Negro Life.

This essay was a chapter in the exhibition catalog, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist. The exhibition opened at the Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence (September 8 - December 2, 2007). It traveled to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee (January 18 - April 13, 2008); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (May 9 - August 3, 2008); and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City (August 30 - November 30, 2008).

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Creating a ‘Usable Past’ and a ‘Future Perfect Society’: Aaron Douglas’s Murals for the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition.” In Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, ed. Susan Earle, 95–113. New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art, 2007.

In this short chapter, I consider the history of African and African American engagement with three-dimensional form. Starting in the early twentieth century, artists became preoccupied with questions of how to represent the body and whose body to depict. One of the pressing questions for African American sculptors was how to represent the black body in a sensitive and non-stereotypical manner, to embody "blackness" in their materials.

This chapter appeared in the exhibition catalog, Beyond the Blues: Reflections of African America in the Fine Arts Collection of the Amistad Research Center, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Amistad Research Center (April 10 - July 11, 2010).

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Embodying Blackness in Three Dimensions.” In Beyond the Blues: Reflections on African America from the Amistad Research Center Fine Arts Collection, ed. Margaret Vendryes, 29–31. New Orleans, LA: Tulane University and New Orleans Museum of Art, 2010.

This commentary discusses the ways in which slavery is represented in public monuments. It highlights three monuments: Michael Walsh, Middle Passage Monument, 1999, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands; Dorothy Spradley, The African American Monument, 2002, Savannah, Georgia; and North Carolina Freedom Monument Project, 2008, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments.” American Art 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 20–23.

Article available ONLY on the subscription services: JSTOR or The University of Chicago Press Journals.

This chapter examines two memorials/monuments in North Carolina: the Unsung Founders Memorial situated on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project planned for downtown Raleigh. I assess the visual forms of the memorials and consider how the diverse constituencies, the university community at Chapel Hill, and the monument planning committee and citizens of North Carolina, have sought to remember slavery in the public spaces of the campus and city.

This paper was originally presented at the session “Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space,” at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Boston, January 2011.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “The Challenge of Memorializing Slavery in North Carolina: The Unsung Founders Memorial and the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project.” In Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, ed. Ana Lucia Araujo, 141–156. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.

In “The Search for a Usable Past,” I trace the growth of mural painting in the United States in order to place Hale Woodruff’s Talladega College murals in a broader historical context. I consider three themes integral to African American artists’ approaches to mural painting: the call for the documentation of black history, the search for a “usable past” as articulated by the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), and the rebirth of history painting in public space in the 1930s.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “The Search for a Usable Past: American Mural Painting, 1880-1940.” In Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College, ed. Stephanie Heydt, 105–21. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2012.

The African American Civil War Memorial is a monument that seeks to rectify a perceived omission of history—African American participation in the American Civil War. It places African American men front and center in the story of American freedom, recognizes their contributions to the nation, and shows their presence, their commitment, and their strength. The memorial materializes the real names and units of the United States Colored Troops, suggesting the bravery, loyalty, and devotion of these men despite the trauma of slavery, the racism of the period, and the denigration of black manhood during the nineteenth century.

Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ “Shaw Memorial” was the winner of the 2014 W.E. Fischelis Award from the Victorian Society of America.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Commemorating Black Soldiers: The African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C.” In Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ “Shaw Memorial,” eds. Sarah Greenough and Nancy Anderson, 112-126. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2013.

This chapter is a revised version of “Making History: Meta Warrick Fuller’s Ethiopia.” American Art 17, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 12–31.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Meta Warrick Fuller’s Ethiopia and the America’s Making Exposition of 1921.” In Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Amy Kirschke, 53-84. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

In the past fifty years, countless artists have captured Martin Luther King Jr.’s image as a preacher, orator, visionary, and dynamic leader of the civil rights movement.  They have wrestled with how to best represent a man of such significance to American society. In this essay, I consider the controversy surrounding the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, as a case study for engaging with ideas about memorial making, history, race, and public space.

This paper was originally presented at the "Art, Race, Space" symposium held at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in January 2013.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Communities in Conflict: Memorializing Martin Luther King Jr. in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.” Indiana Magazine of History 110 (March 2014): 32–39. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/imh/issue/view/1434

In English and French, this essay considers Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller's combined interest in the modernism of August Rodin with the personal and emotional expressivity of Symbolism and the natural forms of Art Nouveau.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Meta Warrick Fuller: African American Art Nouveau.” coupDefouet 23 (2014): 36–41.

Co-authored commentary with Alan Braddock that highlights the significance of ecology as a key concern not only in American art today but also a defining idea in the history of modernity writ large--an idea whose comprehension demands our acceptance of environmental change as an irrevocable fact of life.

Citation: Braddock, Alan and Renée Ater. “Commentaries: Art in the Anthropocene.” American Art 28, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 2–8.

Article available ONLY on the subscription services: JSTOR or The University of Chicago Press Journals.

History and civil rights are intertwined at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site at Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama. Moton Field was a training flight facility for African American pilot candidates in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, operating from 1941–45. This essay examines the way in which race, personal narratives, historical objects, and sensorial experience (sight, sound, touch, and smell) are used at the historic site to suggest the significance of the Tuskegee Airmen.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Commemoration, Race, and World War II: History and Civil Rights at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site.” American Studies Journal no. 59 (2015).

http://www.asjournal.org/59-2015/commemoration-race-and-world-war-ii-history-and-civil-rights-at-the-tuskegee-airmen-national-historic-site/

Visual Representations of Slavery is an annotated bibliography commissioned by Oxford Bibliographies, an online resource.

From the first encounters of Africans and Europeans to the transatlantic slave trade to the abolition of slavery to emancipation and freedom, visual representations of slavery and enslaved persons proliferated in material culture, painting, print culture, sculpture, and photography. Contemporary artists continue to explore the visual representation of slavery in multimedia and new media.

Citation: Ater. Renee. "Visual Representations of Slavery." Oxford Bibliographies, June 2016.

Article available ONLY on the subscription service: Oxford Bibliographies.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is intentionally conceived as a sacred space for recognition of the dead, many of whom remain unnamed. Visitors are informed on numerous signs that “this memorial is a sacred space” and to act accordingly. The temple-like structure of the memorial is deeply affective in that it provides an evocative space that encourages visitors to locate themselves within the past in order to find personal, familial, and national healing in the present.

This commentary is one of four short essays in the Bully Pulpit section of the online journal: Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Edited by Dell Upton, the essays consider “Confederate Monuments, Public Memory, and Public History.”

Citation: Ater, Renée “Bully Pulpit: Confederate Monuments, Public Memory, and Public History: National Memorial for Peace and Justice,” ed. Dell Upton. Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 4, no. 1 (Spring 2018). https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/confederate-monuments-public-memory-and-public-history/ater-bully-pulpit/

On November 14, 1888, city and state officials and the citizens of Boston, Massachusetts, attended the dedication of the Boston Massacre/Crispus Attucks Monument on Boston Common. Thousands of men and women, elite and working class, white and black, gathered along Charles and Beacon Streets to hear the remarks of the governor of Massachusetts and the mayor of Boston. Conceived to recognize the first bloodshed of the American Revolution, the German-born Adolph Robert Kraus (1850-1901) designed the monument, which combined an obelisk, an allegorical female figure of “Free America” with an eagle at her feet, a bas-relief of the Boston Massacre, and inscriptions on the obelisk and base. This essay is concerned with the competing interests that led to the commission of the Boston Massacre/Crispus Attucks Monument and how these interests shaped its form and meaning.

This paper was originally presented at the "Sculpture, 1850-1880" symposium held at Fondation Singer-Polignac, Paris in May 2014.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Performing an Act of Justice Too Long Delayed: History, Commemoration, and the Boston Massacre/Crispus Attucks Mnoument.” In La Sculpture Triomphante: 1850-1880, ed. Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, 64-75. Paris: Fine Arts Paris, 2018.

This chapter considers two recent monuments to the memory of slavery in Alexandria, Virginia: Erik Blome’s Edmonson Sisters Memorial (2010) and Mario Chiodo’s Path of Thorns and Roses (2013), part of the Contraband and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial. The bronze monuments reveal the difficulties contemporary artists face in visualizing the historical enslaved body in three-dimensional form and in rendering it with sensitivity in public space. Giving shape to and producing two different histories of the slave past for contemporary audiences in Alexandria, both rely on nineteenth-century figural tropes of blackness: the properly clothed and Christian body of the formerly enslaved and the anguished and suffering body of the slave. Neither monument can truly convey the “terrible spectacle” of slavery, the violence and subjugation, only suggest it.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “The Memory of Slavery in the Urban Landscape of Alexandria, Virginia.” In Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World, eds. Lawrence Aje and Nicolas Gachon, 215-232. London: Routledge, 2019.

This essay provides an overview of the visual and textual components of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It was written for smarthistory.org, an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to making art history content free and accessible on the web.

Citation: Ater, Renée. "The National Memorial for Peace and Justice." Smarthistory, March 18, 2019, accessed August 19, 2019, https://smarthistory.org/national-memorial-for-peace-and-justice/ and Dr. Hilary N. Green, Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Renée Ater, "The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Equal Justice Initiative)," in Smarthistory, March 2, 2022, accessed November 6, 2022.

This commentary is one of four short essays in the Bully Pulpit section of the online journal: Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Edited by Laura M. Holzman, the essays consider the following question: “Isn’t It Time for Art History to Go Public?” I discuss my shift from academic art historian to public scholar, and the role of digital humanities in my current project.

Citation: Ater, Renée “Bully Pulpit: Isn’t It Time for Art History to Go Public?: Slavery, Monuments, and the Black Digital Humanities,” ed. Laura M. Holzman. Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5, no. 2 (Fall 2019). https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/public-scholarship/slavery-monuments/

In May It Please the Court, artist Xavier Cortada portrays ten significant decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States that originated from people, places, and events in Florida. These cases cover the rights of criminal defendants, the rights of free speech and free exercise of religion, and the powers of states. In Painting Constitutional Law, scholars of constitutional law analyse the paintings and cases, describing the law surrounding the cases and discussing how Cortada captures these foundational decisions, their people, and their events on canvas. This book explores new connections between contemporary art and constitutional law.

Contributors: Renée Ater, Mary Sue Backus, Kathleen A. Brady, Jenny E. Carroll, Erwin Chemerinsky, Xavier Cortada, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Leslie Kendrick, Corinna Barrett Lain, Paul Marcus, Linda C. McClain, M.C. Mirow, James E. Pfander, Laura S. Underkuffler, and Howard M. Wasserman.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Xavier Cortada: Socially Engaged Activist Artist.” In Painting Constitutional Law: Xavier Cortada’s Images of Constitutional Rights, eds. M.C. Mirow and Howard M. Wasserman, 27-44. Legal History Library, volume 46. London: Brill, 2021.

In this essay on Martin Puryear’s Slavery Memorial at Brown University, I explore how the tactile and sensate are key to understanding the memorial, as is its location on the Front Green, also known as the Quiet Green, and the memory work that it both does and does not accomplish. Puryear has called the Slavery Memorial “something in the nature of an industrial artifact,” referencing the technology of the ball and chain used to shackle enslaved persons as representative of the industrial reality of slavery. The materials of this industrial artifact—ductile cast iron in a rich brown-rust patina, an impact and fatigue resistant industrial material—bring into the present the palpable presence of the brutality of slavery and Brown’s connection to this slave past. The memory work of the Slavery Memorial is dynamic and multivalent, asking the diverse members of Brown’s community to contemplate over and over again their physical connection to the past in the context of the everyday.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Tactility, Memory Work, and the Slavery Memorial.” In Slavery and Justice Report, eds. Anthony Bogues, Cass Cliatt, and Allison Levy, 23-32. 2nd edition. Providence, RI: Brown University. https://slaveryandjustice.brown.edu/report/2021-report

This essay considers the numerous images of women in the work of the sculptor, William Edmondson. I engage these stone women to talk about their visual impact — I am interested in the ways that Edmondson captured Black womanhood in his corner of Nashville: the church ladies, teachers, nurses, and neighbors who lived besides Edmondson in the Vanderbilt-Belmont area.

“The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework draws on new scholarship and methodologies to contextualize Edmondson’s carvings, both within the histories of Nashville during the Interwar years and the history of modern art in the United States. Cheekwood Estate & Gardens is the greatest single repository of sculptures by Edmondson and related works, including a substantial collection of photographs of the artist and his work gifted by Louise Dahl-Wolfe. The Sculpture of William Edmondson is the first large-scale museum examination of the artist’s career in over twenty years.”

This essay was a chapter in the exhibition catalog, The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework. The exhibition ran at the Cheekwood Estate & Gardens and Fisk University Galleries, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee from August 12-October 31, 2021.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Edmondson’s Stone Women.” In The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework, ed. Marin Sullivan, 36-47. Exh. cat. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2021.

This essay explores a monument dedicated to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad in Wilmington, Delaware: Mario Chiodo’s Unwavering Courage in the Pursuit of Freedom (2012). The multi figure statue of Harriet Tubman, the white station master Thomas Garrett, and two freedom seekers celebrates the cooperation between black and white abolitionist in Delaware. Unwavering Courage in the Pursuit of Freedom is part of a cultural heritage landscape that highlights through architecture, markers, interpretative signs, and the land itself, the heroic efforts of blacks (free, self-liberated and enslaved persons) and whites on the Underground Railroad. The statue’s commission and installation reveals the ways in which the City of Wilmington and the State of Delaware have used monumental form tied to heritage tourism to lay claim to the ideals of interracial cooperation along the historic Underground Railroad and to inspire visitors to think about freedom and social justice within the context of their lives in the present.

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Monument and Heritage Tourism: Memorializing Harriet Tubman and Thomas Garrett on the Underground Railroad in Delaware.” In Ending Slavery: The Antislavery Struggle in Perspective, eds. Lawrence Aje and Claudine Raynaud, 265-286. Montpellier, France: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2022.

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“This is the first volume to document and contextualize Sonya Clark’s large-scale, community-centric and collaborative artworks. These projects demonstrate Clark’s career-long commitment to addressing the urgent issue of racial inequality in American society and her philosophy of creatively engaging the viewer in reflection on the nation’s history of slavery and our roles in dismantling systemic racism today.”

Citation: Ater, Renée. “The Monumental Work of Sonya Clark.” In Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other, edited by Elissa Auther, Laura Mott, and Monica Obniski, 21-31. Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2023.

“Monuments and Myths is the first publication to trace the intersecting work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) and Daniel Chester French (1850–1931), the leading American sculptors of the Gilded Age. Featuring provocative essays, stunning photographs, and an in-depth illustrated chronology, the catalog brings a contemporary perspective to sculptures that have defined and defied notions of American identity. This critical look at the artists’ public and private works considers evolving ideas about race, representation, Indigeneity, civic space, memory, and American history.”

Citation: Ater, Renée. “Female Allegory, Race, and the Civil War Memorial.” In Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, edited by Andrew Eschelbacher, Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2023.

In The Shape of Power: Race and American Sculpture, edited by Karen Lemmey, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura. (Smithsonian Institution, forthcoming).

“ Smithsonian American Art Museum’s upcoming exhibition considers the relationship between sculpture and societal constructions of race in the United States. The exhibition will present more than 80 sculptures made in a wide range of media between the mid-nineteenth century and the present. The Shape of Power asks, why is sculpture such a vital medium to communicate ideas of race? How does the medium give physical form to racist ideas, shaping how generations have learned to visualize and think about race? And how do sculptors use this medium to challenge the enduring social and cultural constructions of race and racialized power while offering new visions of community, identity, and selfhood? At its core The Shape of Power is a portal into nuanced and complex ideas about the enduring power of sculpture as a potent tool in the making and unmaking of race in the United States.”

—https://www.pafa.org/events/shape-power-stories-race-american-sculpture-030624

In Controversial Monuments: Personifying the Continents between the 18th and 21st Centuries, edited by Louise Arizzoli, Maryanne Cline Horowitz, and Marion Romberg.

“The iconography of the Four Continents reached an apex of popularity during the Baroque era, in institutional and academic settings but also within folk piety. This volume is the first to examine the long reverberations of this iconography and its Eurocentric hegemonic message to the present day, using an approach that crosses media and time periods.”

To be published in 2024, Brill Press.

“What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South by Dell Upton.” Winterthur Portfolio 50, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 295-296.  PDF

“Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery by Ana Lucia Arajuo.” Historical Dialogues, Justice, and Memory Network, April 6, 2017.  PDF 
http://historicaldialogues.org/2017/04/06/book-review-shadows-of-the-slave-past-memory-heritage-and-slavery/

“Slavery, Geography and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica by Charmaine Nelson.” RACAR, Universities Art Association of Canada, April 24, 2017.  PDF
http://www.racar-racar.com/r_ater_nelson_2017.html

“Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art of Horace Pippin by Celeste-Marie Bernier.” caa.reviews, January 30, 2018.  PDF
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2825#.WtIZQsgh2XQ

“Race Experts: Sculpture, Anthropology, and the American Public in Malvin Hoffman’s Races of Mankind by Linda Kim.” Panorama: Journal of the Association of American Historians 6, no. 2 (Fall2020). https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/race-experts/