Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
In
Race Experts
Linda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in the
Races of Mankind
series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protégé of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Mestrovic, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. Nonetheless, the Field Museum commissioned her to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist.
Hoffman's
exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and lay ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate into her artistic model of race not only racial science but also popular ideas that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the
exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them.
is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.
Linda Kim
is an associate professor of American and modern art history at Drexel University.