American Pastoral Painting

The Unchosen Ones

In 2016, award-winning Minnesota-based photographer R. J. Kern made portraits of youth contestants at Minnesota county fairs. Each participant—some as young as four years old—had spent a year raising an animal, which they had then entered into a 4-H livestock competition. None of the youths who sat for him had succeeded in winning an award, despite the obvious care they had given to their animals. The Unchosen Ones depicts the bloom of youth and the mettle of the kids who grow up on farms, reminding us how resilient children can be when confronted with life's inevitable disappointments. The formal qualities of the lighting and setting endow these young people with a gravitas beyond their years, revealing self-directed dedication in some, and in others, perhaps, the pressures of traditions imposed upon them. Kern's beautiful portraits capture a particular America, a rural world, and a time in life when the layered emotions of youth are laid bare. Four years later, in 2020, Kern returned to photograph his young subjects. The most recent photographs show how the children have grown into adolescence or young adulthood: some of them have continued to pursue animal husbandry, while others have developed other interests. It is likely that some of these kids will not choose to continue running their family farms—an unpredictable and demanding way to make a living. These diptychs are punctuated by lush landscapes of the farms that are their homes. As Kern made the second group of photographs, he asked his young subjects what they had carried forward from their previous experience. What were their thoughts, their dreams, and their goals for the future? How would they fit into the future of agricultural America?

Renegade Regionalists

Arcadian Waters and Wanton Seas

The nineteenth century was the great age of landscape painting in Europe and America. In an era of rapid industrialization and transformation of landscape, pictures of natural scenes were what people wanted most to display in their homes. The most popular and marketable pictures, often degenerating into kitsch, showed a wilderness with a pond or a lake in which obtrusive signs of industry and civilization had been edited out. Inspired by Romantic ideas of the uniqueness of the nation, pictorial and literary art was supposed to portray the «soul» of the nation and the spirit of place, a view commonly adopted by cultural and art historians on both sides of the Atlantic. Arcadian Waters and Wanton Seas argues that nationalistic or exceptionalist interpretations disregard deep-rooted iconological traditions in transatlantic culture. Depictions and ideas of nature go back to the classical ideas of Arcadia and Eden in which fountains, ponds, lakes, rivers, and finally the sea itself are central elements. Following their European colleagues, American artists typically portrayed the American Arcadia through the classical conventions. Arcadian Waters and Wanton Seas adopts the interdisciplinary and comparative methodological perspectives that characterize American studies. The book draws on art history, cultural history, literature, and the study of the production and use of visual images, and will serve well as a textbook for courses on American studies or cultural history of the Western world.