1st Edition
Exhibiting Animals in Europe and America
This edited volume, written by historians of art and visual culture who are working with the field of animal studies, seeks to understand how our ways of positioning (and ex-positioning) animals have separated us from the other-than-human animals that are an integral part of our interconnected world.
Bringing together the visual and material culture of display with recent theoretical study on human-animal relations, the book draws attention to ways in which we might rethink this history and map pathways for the future. Defining the idea of exhibition and display broadly, chapters consider a diverse range of media, including paintings, anatomical sculpture, books, prints, and clothing; exhibition venues that take place in both the public and private realms; and key ideas such as looking at/looking back, seeing/being seen, and interspecies recognition. The authors cover topics that span the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries and focus geographically on Europe and America, with significant content related to Canada, Indigenous America, and Latin America.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, museum studies, animal studies, and environmental humanities.
Introduction
M. Elizabeth Boone and Lianne McTavish
Part 1. In Books, Prints, and Photographs
1. Anxious Shores: Early Modern Illustrations of Marine Animals from the Magellan Strait and the Chilean Coast
Catherine Burdick
2. Capturing Animal Life in Brehms Thierleben
Stephanie Triplett
3. Turning the World Inside Out: Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Broadsheets
M. Elizabeth Boone
4. Talking Like the Birds: Animal Speech and Embodied Imitation in Early Colonial Mexico
Allison Caplan
5. Posing Pony: Considering Horses, Children, and Display in Rural Lakota Photographs
Claire Thomson
Part 2. In Palaces, Churches, and Ceremonial Spaces
6. Visceral Castor: Animal Presence in Indigenous Beaver-Pelt Coats and French Tricorn Hats
Catherine Girard
7. A World Beyond the Mines: Birds in the Flower Paintings of San Martín de Tours in Potosí, Bolivia
Maya Stanfield-Mazzi
8. The War Stories of Sspitaikoan
Annabel Crop Eared Wolf, Marjie Crop Eared Wolf, and Heather Caverhill
9. Coexisting Species and Imperial Networks: Displaying African and Asian Animals in the New Kingdom of Granada
Patricia Zalamea
10 Winged Beasts for Charles III
Tara Zanardi
Part 3. In Studios, Theatres, and Museums
11. The Corpse at the Door: Edwin Landseer and Albert the Lion
Katie Hornstein
12. Bloodhounds, Race, and Spectacle: From Nineteenth-Century Melodrama to Breed Specific Legislation
Jessica Dallow
13. Riding into the Afterlife: A Close Reading of Honoré Fragonard’s Écorché of a Horse and his Rider (1766–1771)
Valérie Bienvenue
14. Fragile Fragments: Reflections on Victorian Beetle Art in a Time of Climate Crisis
Keri Cronin
Part 4. In Parks, Fairs, and Zoos
15. “Predecessors of the Living:” Displaying Extinct Animals at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham”
K. Anger
16. Twice-stilled Animals: Control and Vulnerability in Images of Taxidermy in the United States
Elizabeth Hutchinson
17. “From ocean’s depths and inland streams:” Fish on Display at the 1893 Columbian Exposition
Naomi Slipp
18. How a Polar Bear Lived in Canada’s First National Park
Lianne McTavish
Biography
M. Elizabeth Boone is professor in the history of art, design, and visual culture at the University of Alberta.
Lianne McTavish is professor in the history of art, design, and visual culture at the University of Alberta.
“This geographically diverse volume makes a ground-breaking contribution to the rise of animal studies in the early modern and modern histories of art and visual culture. Without a doubt, it will also add to a growing body of work enriching histories of visual and material culture within the environmental humanities.”
Emily Gephart, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and Maura Coughlin, Northeastern University
“This innovative and important collection takes a collaborative approach to the study of visual culture and animal life in the Americas and Europe. In a challenge to conventional approaches, the authors place human and other-than-human perspectives and experiences on an equal footing, moving back and forth between uses and depictions of animals on the part of human societies and the lives of the many different creatures they encountered.”
Sarah R. Cohen, University at Albany, SUNY
