Race Experts

Sculpture, Anthropology, and the American Public in Malvina Hoffman's Races of Mankind

Linda Kim

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496208033
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

2019 Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the CAA
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 sculptorMalvina Hoffman in T?he 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 Meštrovi?, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. She was nonetheless commissioned by the Field Museum 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 Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and everyday ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the artist brought scientific understandings of race and the everyday racial attitudes of museum visitors together in powerful and productive friction. The exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate not only the expertise of racial science and her own artistic trainingbut also the popular ideas about race that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the Races of Mankind exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of racial expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them. Race Experts is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Racial Know-How
• 2. Mediations
• 3. Racial Portraiture
• 4. Racial Homelands
• 5. Micro-Expertise
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Linda Kim
• Series List