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WORK TITLE: Work Sights
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/people/vschulma
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1981.
EDUCATION:Brown University, A.B., 2003; University of California, Irvine, M.A., 2007, Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, assistant professor. Has also taught at Illinois State University.
WRITINGS
Has published articles in journals, including Invisible Culture, American Periodicals, and Early Popular Visual Culture.
SIDELIGHTS
Vanessa Meikle Schulman teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture of the United States and the history of technology and photography at George Mason University. She has written articles for various academic journals, including Invisible Culture, American Periodicals, and Early Popular Visual Culture. Her first book, an outgrowth of her doctoral dissertation, is Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America, which takes a close look at images of labor, industry, and technology in the three decades spanning 1857 through 1887—a time when the United States saw the expansion of rail lines and the telegraph system, the rise of corporations, and the beginnings of “mechanized production.” She includes ample artwork from the time period, ranging from newspaper illustrations to paintings.
Ross Barrett, critiquing the book in Journal of Southern History, commented that in “tracing the development of broad pictorial types and closely analyzing individual pictures,” the author establishes that “nineteenth-century industrial images were marked by deep aesthetic and ideological tensions.” Indeed, in “struggling to make sense of industrial modernization, illustrators and painters made pictures that employed traditional and innovative representational modes and gave voice to a host of conflicting sentiments, including enthusiasm, anxiety, confidence, and fear.” Barrett pronounced Work Sights “sweeping in scope and brimming with insights.” In Choice, S. Webster called it a “beautifully written, finely illustrated chronicle.” Writing at Sharp News, Carrie Johnston commented that in sounding notes on “belonging and citizenship,” Work Sights “proves timely, providing useful historical context.” The illustrated periodicals of the day gave Americans a new vision of their world. “Schulman sets out to study the tensions that emerged as a result: a celebration of an orderly, standardized world that technological innovation promised, alongside a fear of the disastrous potential of new technologies.” Johnston described the study as a “compelling historical account.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, July, 2016, S. Webster, review of Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America, p. 1604.
Journal of Southern History, May, 2017, Ross Barrett, review of Work Sights, p. 443.
ONLINE
George Mason University Website, https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu (November 7, 2017), author faculty profile.
Sharp News, http://www.sharpweb.org (February 24, 2017), Carrie Johnston, review of Work Sights.
Vanessa Meikle Schulman
Vanessa Meikle Schulman
Assistant Professor
Vanessa Meikle Schulman is a specialist in the art and visual culture of the United States. She received her PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine, in 2010, and has published her research in the academic journals Invisible Culture, American Periodicals, and Early Popular Visual Culture. Her book, Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, was the winner of the 2016 International Committee for the History of Technology book prize for junior scholars and was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2016. Before coming to Mason, she taught at Illinois State University. She will be offering classes on colonial through twentieth-century American art and architecture, history of photography, and other thematic art history courses.
Selected Publications
Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).
Forthcoming: “‘The Books We All Read’: The Golden Age of Children’s Book Illustration and American Soldiers in the Great War,” The Lion and the Unicorn, 2017.
“Alph-Art, B Movies, Cast Corpses: Death by Sculpture and Hergé’s Middle Ground,” in The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are not so Clear, ed. Joe Sutliffe Sanders (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 62-76.
“Walter Robinson: Badness Embraced,” in Walter Robinson, ed. Barry Blinderman (Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University, 2015), 46-51.
“Managing Subjects, Manufacturing Citizens: Picturing Sites of Social Control in Nineteenth-Century America.” Early Popular Visual Culture 12.2 (May 2014): 104-126.
“Definite Indeterminacy: Blindness in the Civil War Imagery of Ambrose Bierce and Winslow Homer,” Invisible Culture 19 (Fall 2013): ivc.lib.rochester.edu
“Making the Magazine: Visuality, Managerial Capitalism, and the Mass Production of Periodicals, 1865-1890,” American Periodicals 22.1 (Spring 2012): 1-28.
“Deeply Shallow: Ruminations on Surface,” Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal 4 (2008): 9-18.
Education
Ph.D. 2010, Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
M.A. 2007, Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
A.B. 2003, History of Art and Architecture and American Civilization, Brown University
Contact Information
vschulma@gmu.edu 703.993.1250
Robinson Hall B 377D
Office Hours
Fall 2017 / M W 12-1:15 pm
Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in
Nineteenth-Century America
Ross Barrett
Journal of Southern History.
83.2 (May 2017): p443.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America. By Vanessa Meikle Schulman.
Science/Technology/Culture. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 287. Paper,
$29.95, ISBN 978-1-62534-195-2; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-62534-194-5.)
Over the past three decades scholars have explored the visual culture of nineteenth-century American industry with
increasing avidity. Recent studies have addressed images of factory labor, specific genres of industrial art, the visual
culture of Pittsburgh, and the technological sublime, among other topics. Vanessa Meikle Schulman's Work Sights:
The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America makes a welcome contribution to this body of
scholarship. Seeking to understand how "artists working in divergent visual media helped to shape American ideas
about technology" and industry, Work Sights examines illustrations and paintings that contended with several forms of
"technical and industrial change" that unfolded in the United States between 1857 and 1887, including the expansion
of telegraphic and railroad networks, industrialization in the South, the globalization of the American sugar industry,
and the rise of modern industrial management (pp. 2, 4). By tracing the development of broad pictorial types and
closely analyzing individual pictures, Work Sights shows that nineteenth-century industrial images were marked by
deep aesthetic and ideological tensions. Struggling to make sense of industrial modernization, illustrators and painters
made pictures that employed traditional and innovative representational modes and gave voice to a host of conflicting
sentiments, including enthusiasm, anxiety, confidence, and fear.
Work Sights offers a dazzlingly comprehensive survey of late-nineteenth-century American industrial imagery.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this sweeping account has certain blind spots. Schulman does relatively little to engage
scholarship on visual culture and to explain how the "vast and diverse visual realm" that emerged around American
industry fit within the larger landscape of nineteenth-century visuality (p. 4). In so doing, the book misses a chance to
make the case that the images and ways of seeing that it studies constituted a novel historical formation of visual
culture, a new and distinct field of perception, visibility, and visual representation that sprang from the specific
material priorities and sensory dynamics of industrialization.
If the book stops short of articulating a new model of visual culture, however, it does offer a sensitive account of the
common and divergent aesthetic imperatives that shaped print and painterly interpretations of industry. Arguing that
the pictorial press's industrial organizational structure and ties to the business elite spurred illustrators to compose
largely sympathetic accounts of industry, Work Sights shows (in chapters 1, 3, 5, and 6) that graphic artists developed
a series of innovative image types--including maps, allegorical tableaux, and cut-away views--to represent new modes
of industrial communication, transportation, work, management, and vocational training that arose in the late
nineteenth century.
The book also offers suggestive interpretations of important industrial paintings. Proceeding from the idea that painters
had "greater room for experimentation, play, and doubt" than did illustrators, the second chapter argues that John
Ferguson Weir's The Gun Foundry (1864-1866) and Forging the Shaft (1866-1868) dramatized the unnerving power
and bewildering material transmutations of modern metalworking and, in so doing, gave visual form to a new aesthetic
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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construct: the "alchemical sublime" (pp. 7, 59). Although the connection between Weir's paintings and the cultural
discourse of alchemy remains somewhat nebulous, the chapter sheds new light on the subtly allusive ways that these
works "explore the frightening and magical side of American industry" (p. 57). Focusing on Thomas Moran's Lower
Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey (1880), the fourth chapter convincingly demonstrates that the artist's
understudied urban canvases used the language of the picturesque to engage the communication and distribution
systems "at the heart of American industrialization" (p. 123).
Taken together, these analyses advance an account of industrial imagery that extends scholarship on the visual culture
of industry, technology, and labor in several exciting directions. Sweeping in scope and brimming with insights. Work
Sights will no doubt be useful to .scholars in history, art history, American studies, and other fields.
Ross Barrett
Boston University
Barrett, Ross
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Barrett, Ross. "Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America." Journal of Southern
History, vol. 83, no. 2, 2017, p. 443+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495476245&it=r&asid=0f88b088fc7d9641c7226b4efc61557c.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495476245
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Schulman, Vanessa Meikle. Work sights: the
visual culture of industry in nineteenth-century
America
S. Webster
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.11 (July 2016): p1604.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Schulman, Vanessa Meikle. Work sights: the visual culture of industry in nineteenth-century America. Massachusetts,
2015. 287p index afp ISBN 9781625341945 cloth, $95.00; ISBN 9781625341952 pbk, $29.95
53-4671
N72
2015-30475 CIP
This is a beautifully written, finely illustrated chronicle of the visual representation of US technology during the
second half of the 19 th century (1850s-80s). According to Schulman (Illinois State Univ.), these were important
decades because, as she writes in her introduction, they "saw the rapid expansion of rail and telegraph networks," the
rise of corporations, and the evolution of "mechanized production." Such developments were brought into public
consciousness through articles and wood engravings reproduced and published in two new publications: Frank Leslies
Illustrated Newspaper (first published in 1855) and Harper's Weekly (started in 1857). Wood engraving was favored
for illustration because it reproduced with great accuracy the shadowed interiors of factories and complex machinery
such as the Corliss engine, which was exhibited to great acclaim and awe at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia. As Schulman demonstrates, these illustrations and paintings such as John Ferguson Weir's Forging the
Shaft (1874-77, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) offered the public "a wide-ranging engagement with the
question of technological systems in the nineteenth-century United States." Summing Up: *** Highly recommended.
Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students.--S. Webster, Lehman College and the Graduate Center CUNY
Webster, S.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Webster, S. "Schulman, Vanessa Meikle. Work sights: the visual culture of industry in nineteenth-century America."
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2016, p. 1604+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457393251&it=r&asid=ae19cd4257ddbac429f6a58726f81ba0.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457393251
Vanessa Meikle Schulman. Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America
Published by SB on February 24, 2017
Vanessa Meikle Schulman. Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. xi, 278p., ill. ISBN 9781625341952. US $29.95 (paperback).
With strong opinions of belonging and citizenship motivating current debates on immigration reform and global economics, Vanessa Schulman’s Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America proves timely, providing useful historical context through which we can understand the ways that these concepts were shaped and circulated in nineteenth-century America. The “Work Sights” of the title suggests the “sights” of labor to which Americans were exposed, as well as the ways that Americans perceived that work. By examining the portrayals of technology and labor in both fine art and periodical illustrations produced between 1857 and 1887, Schulman demonstrates that these visual representations fostered divergent, yet interrelated notions of American nationalism and its correlation with labor and technology.
Schulman points to two related phenomena in the 1850s that accelerated changes in Americans’ lived experiences during the time period 1857-1887. The advent of illustrated periodicals such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1855 and Harper’s Weekly in 1857, along with the first attempts to lay a suboceanic transatlantic telegraph cable, “combined to create a world more saturated with inexpensive and readily available information and images” (4). While acknowledging that Americans reacted to this networked world with ambivalence, Schulman sets out to study the tensions that emerged as a result: a celebration of an orderly, standardized world that technological innovation promised, alongside a fear of the disastrous potential of new technologies. Schulman analyzes a range of images produced during these three decades that embody and create those tensions while also discussing the interpretive decisions made by artists and illustrators in depicting the sights and sites of work in the mid-nineteenth century.
Close reading both factual and imaginative visual representations of technology – often within a single image – Schulman provides a compelling historical account of the time period under consideration through a formalist art historical approach. Looking at John Ferguson Weir’s oil paintings, The Gun Foundry and Forging the Shaft, for instance, Schulman coins the term “alchemical sublime” to describe the ways that depictions of industrial interiors create a unique brand of the American technological sublime to evoke feelings of uncertainty, fear, and awe. On the other hand, popular press illustrators under pressure to produce celebratory, pro-business images portrayed what Schulman terms “technological systems” in ways that reinforced the virtues of hard work and industry, whether it be a map of Georgia’s post-Civil War rail lines or a woodcut engraving of prison inmates in an orderly line.
Concluding with a consideration of the shift from wood engraving to the halftone process in the 1890s, Schulman demonstrates that the technology of visual representation informed Americans’ interpretations of technology itself. While nineteenth-century illustrators never imagined themselves to be rendering statements of fact through their wood engravings of work sights, halftone technology represented a demand for truthfulness in representation. For instance, the wood engravings that Schulman characterizes as “the managerial eye” did not aim to present a literal view of industrial production, but rather represent the orderly expertise required of a manager. And while halftone photographic representations were inferior in quality, their indexical quality was more appealing to late nineteenth-century audiences.
Despite little attention to these nineteenth-century images among art historians today, Work Sights reveals the “visual vocabulary that stressed the centrality of labor as a core American value and a prerequisite for proper citizenship” (194). This visual rhetoric, as Schulman’s study indicates, has powerfully influenced enduring notions of technology and its centrality to American national identity.
Carrie Johnston
Wake Forest University