Patricia Hills, an art historian who teaches at Boston University, has in recent years scored several large scholarly coups, recently with her catalogue for the Eastman Johnson exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. That catalogue, co-authored with Terry Carbone of the Graduate Center, offered a fresh and provocative view at issues of race, class, gender, and ideology in Johnson’s so-called “genre” paintings. Indeed, it is typical of Hills to inject intellectual life and political relevancy into art historical topics often thought to be banal or populist, such as nineteenth-century American genre painting.

With her newly edited anthology, Modern Art in the U.S.A., Hills amasses a wide range of reproduced primary source documents. Historically, they cover the entirety of the twentieth century in the United States, from Robert Henri’s c.1910 Whitmanesque reckoning with the question of a “national” American art to more contemporary writings by and interviews with critics, historians, curators, and artists in the late 1990’s.

While this is an anthology, it is still obviously possible to evaluate the editor’s inclusions, omissions, and contextualization. On these counts, Hills succeeds marvelously. Her brief introductory essays at the start of each section (which are divided both chronologically and conceptually) and before individual documents are informative for both students of American art and more general readers. She discusses the political and ideological context of each document as well as its art-historical significance. For example, with respect to the aforementioned Henri writing, she discusses the text as both a reaction to the criticisms of the early exhibitions of The Eight by Progressive Era writers and in the larger context of that era’s mass immigration and economic and political expansionism.

Perhaps what is most unique and appealing about this small paperback volume, however, is the author’s use of rare and/or unlikely facsimile archival documents. For instance, she goes beyond normal anthology-type materials in her inclusion of poetry and historic photographs from events as diverse as the Armory Show (1913) and Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964). Hills also includes facsimiles of surprising primary sources such as Duchamp’s brief statement “The Richard Mutt Case” from the journal Blind Man (1917) and J. Edgar Hoover’s confidential FBI file on artist/activist Ben Shahn (1951). More recent facsimile reproductions include Maciunas’s “Fluxus Manifesto” (1963), a multi-page magazine exposition of James Luna’s performance Artifact Piece (1986), and several Guerilla Girls posters (1988-9).

In terms of her choices of inclusion, Hills covers not only a wide range chronologically, but also racially, methodologically, and ideologically. We are treated to excerpts from an array of sources such as art historian’s Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino’s writings on Chicano art to Suzanne Lacy’s personal letter to Hills describing that artist’s own feminist performances to a recent interview with artist/curator Fred Wilson.
Hills’s anthology is definitely worth a close look. Its diverse archival material makes it a valuable addition to a personal library and its small size and paperback format render it affordable.