Investigating the career of the French-born American artist Jules Tavernier (1844–1889), this issue of the Bulletin recounts the artist’s travels through the American West and examines his portrayals of some of the Indigenous communities he encountered. The story focuses on Tavernier’s masterwork, Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse at Clear Lake, California (1878), which depicts a ceremonial dance—known as mfom Xe, or “people dance”—performed by the Pomo community of Elem at Clear Lake, in Northern California. Robert Joseph Geary, an Elem Pomo cultural leader, eloquently describes his first reactions upon seeing Tavernier’s depiction of his ancestors and the significance of the mfom Xe ceremony. Elizabeth Kornhauser and Shannon Vittoria provide additional historical context for the painting and show how it recognizes the rich vitality of Elem Pomo culture while also exposing the threat posed to the community by White settlers. This Bulletin juxtaposes paintings, prints, watercolors, and photographs by Tavernier and other artists with examples of historic and contemporary Pomo basketry and regalia to celebrate the resiliency of the Pomo peoples and highlight their continued cultural presence.

This book examines the reception in Latin America of prints designed by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing how colonial artists used such designs to create all manner of artworks and, in the process, forged new frameworks for artistic creativity. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist’s designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects. Rubens in Repeat is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analyzing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator.

French artist Jules Tavernier (1844-1889) was one of the American West's foremost talents, with a natural ability that many believed was second to none. After arriving in the United States, he and fellow Frenchman Paul Frenzeny were commissioned by Harper's Weekly to travel by rail from New York to San Francisco, producing illustrations of the rapidly changing American frontier along the way. The images were dramatic - American Indian customs, the emerging cattle trade, the decimation of native wildlife - and had rarely been seen by a popular audience. These scenes established Tavernier's reputation as a bold and daring painter and influenced the work of subsequent artists. Tavernier's reputation continued to grow in California, where he flourished in the budding social scene. He became a member of San Francisco's newly established Bohemian Club, hosting elaborate parties and taking part in celebratory outdoor revels, and his studio in Monterey became a hub of the peninsula's developing art colony. The strange grandeur of the Monterey coastline appealed to Tavernier's imagination, and it was during this period that he produced some of the most audacious work of his career, featuring a host of mysterious themes and images. Always on a quest for new and "untouched" subject matter (and weighed down by significant debts), Tavernier moved on to Hawaii, where he was fascinated by the island's dramatic scenery. "There is material here for a lifetime," he wrote to a friend, and, indeed, it was in this preindustrial paradise, with its lush greenery and churning beds of lava, that the artist's turbulent and creative life seemed to find its perfect visual embodiment. Jules Tavernier: Artist and Adventurer, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same title, is the first publication to focus on Jules Tavernier and his full range of work. With more than 120 artworks and photographs, it explores the life and work of this extraordinary artist.

Focuses on the 19th-century transformation in San Francisco--from Gold Rush to earthquake--to show how the city's diverse residents created a modern American city through everyday "cultural frontiers," such as restaurants, hotels, and annual fairs and expositions, among others.

Art book by Logan Maxwell Hagege

"The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. Igler examines the broader impact of western industrialism - as exemplified by Miller & Lux - on landscapes and waterscapes, bringing to the forefront the important issues of land reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. He provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller & Lux, from the dispossession of Californio rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force."--Jacket.