Donna Seaman. (2017). Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Donna Seaman. 2017. Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Donna Seaman, Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Donna Seaman. Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

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Identity Unknown

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1. • value: 1900s
2. • value: women's history
3. • value: 20th Century
4. • value: marginalized artists
5. • value: female painters and sculpters
6. • value: obscure artists

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Seaman, Donna
   • bioText: Donna Seaman is Editor, Adult Books, Booklist, a member of the advisory council for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. She has reviewed for the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among others. She has written biocritical essays for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and American Writers. Her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books. She lives in Chicago.
   • name: Donna Seaman

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Bloomsbury USA

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title

Identity Unknown

fullDescription

An award-winning writer rescues seven first-rate twentieth-century women artists from oblivion—their lives fascinating, their artwork a revelation.
Who hasn't wondered where-aside from Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo-all the women artists are? In many art books, they've been marginalized with cold efficiency, summarily dismissed in the captions of group photographs with the phrase "identity unknown" while each male is named.

Donna Seaman brings to dazzling life seven of these forgotten artists, among the best of their day: Gertrude Abercrombie, with her dark, surreal paintings and friendships with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; Bay Area self-portraitist Joan Brown; Ree Morton, with her witty, oddly beautiful constructions; Loïs Mailou Jones of the Harlem Renaissance; Lenore Tawney, who combined weaving and sculpture when art and craft were considered mutually exclusive; Christina Ramberg, whose unsettling works drew on pop culture and advertising; and Louise Nevelson, an art-world superstar in her heyday but omitted from recent surveys of her era.

These women fought to be treated the same as male artists, to be judged by their work, not their gender or appearance. In brilliant, compassionate prose, Seaman reveals what drove them, how they worked, and how they were perceived by others in a world where women were subjects-not makers-of art. Featuring stunning examples of the artists' work, Identity Unknown speaks to all women about their neglected place in history and the challenges they face to be taken as seriously as men no matter what their chosen field-and to all men interested in women's lives.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: O, the Oprah Magazine
   • content: Re-creates the careers of seven groundbreaking female virtuosos, rescuing from history's margins bold, invigorating work that defied male-centric norms.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Washington Post
   • content: Female creators rise in all their splendor and defiance in Donna Seaman's wonderful new book . . . Seaman [is] an enchanting biographer.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Tribune
   • content: Seaman is out to right a grievous wrong but she does so not with shrill arguments but rather with stylish, sensitive and deeply researched prose. "Identity Unknown" is a revelatory, engaging and provocative work.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Seattle Times
   • content: Identity Unknown goes far beyond the more narrow question of criticism in discussing seven women artists whose relative neglect places them in unfair obscurity. No more obscurity for this arty septet! Seaman's lively portraits make the reader eager to rediscover them, a process helped along by the book's photos of them and their art.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Buffalo News
   • content: [A] diligently researched and compassionately written look into several undsersung female artists . . . It is only through books like Seaman's, which contains fascinating biographical details as well as keen analyses of individual artworks, that this great historical (and ongoing) slight of accomplished women artists has any hope of being corrected.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: With impressive research, Booklist editor Seaman curates a fine retrospective on the history of women in the male-dominated world of 20th-century art . . . A decidedly important and long-overdue showcase.
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Los Angeles Review
   • content: Seaman's refreshingly intimate descriptions of these women are as candid as they are beautiful . . . She writes as if she knew them personally, and refuses to gloss over their imperfections, even while she lauds their artistic geniuses . . . Identity Unknown's call for remembrance of female artistic brilliance is thorough, poignant, and elucidating.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Pacific Standard Magazine
   • content: Rendered in wise and beautiful prose . . . Donna Seaman has written a dangerous book about dangerous women who were dangerous because they dared to be themselves . . . Identity Unknown is a credo to creativity, to lives lived large without apology . . . Seaman creates an artistic afterlife for seven women artists whom we can no longer forget.
9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 1, 2016
     

     This book presents seven 20th-century American women artists who achieved critical success while active, but who are not much known today. Arguably, Louise Nevelson is really not forgotten, but the other six painters and sculptors likely will be unfamiliar to most readers: Gertrude Abercrombie, Lois Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Joan Brown, Christina Ramberg, and Lenore Tawney. Seaman (editor, adult books, Booklist; Writers on the Air) provides a loosely constructed biographical sketch of each artist, incorporating snippets of interviews, journal entries, art journalism, and other primary sources. Her writing is more idiosyncratic than academic in tone, at times using incomplete sentences, poetic passages, and strings of examples and descriptors. Seaman describes many important artworks in text, but the book includes frustratingly few reproductions, severely limiting the ability of readers to appreciate or form an impression of the artists' work. Those who want to view the art will need to find other sources. VERDICT This primarily nonvisual approach to art history, focusing on relatively unknown women artists, will fill a hole in the received record. Most useful for research and specialty art collections.--Kathryn Wekselman, Cincinnati

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 7, 2016
      Booklist editor Seaman (Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books) highlights the lives and work of seven “underappreciated” women artists from the 20th century, but sloppy writing and a lack of focus undermine this slice of art history. For one, Seaman’s selection is highly personal—she explains that she chose “to write about artists whose work has deeply affected ”—but the biographical sketches are framed around a broad notion of obscurity. This feels less than apropos when discussing Louise Nevelson, an artist with a New York City plaza named after her. The biographical sketches of the other artists—Gertrude Abercrombie, Joan Brown, Loïs Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Christina Ramberg, and Lenore Tawney—are undermined by overwrought writing and disjointed stories. Seaman also has a habit of including random facts without further explanation of their significance. For example, Seaman attributes Jones’s scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to her athletic ability without any explanation as to why an art school would be interested in a student’s athleticism. Elsewhere she writes that Brown learned from the experience of teaching at a private school, but fails to explain how. Occasionally photographs will show one of the artists with their work in the background, but there aren’t many images of the actual work. Instead, readers must often rely on written descriptions, which makes Seaman’s book even harder to penetrate. B&w photos.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 15, 2016
      Vital portraits of forgotten women artists that aim to celebrate their lives and work and to establish their permanent standing within the canon of contemporary art.With impressive research, Booklist editor Seaman (Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books, 2005, etc.) curates a fine retrospective on the history of women in the male-dominated world of 20th-century art. Inspired by the carelessness with which scholars would identify group photographs of artists--famous men named, women overlooked--the author chronicles her subjects' lives in lengthy essays that fall gently between biography and scholarly criticism. Louise Nevelson, Gertrude Abercrombie, Lois Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Joan Brown, Christina Ramberg, and Lenore Tawney each led rich lives of passionate pursuit, all while managing the uneven expectations hoisted upon midcentury wives and mothers. This fine selection of artists lends the book both cultural and technical diversity. Jones, an accomplished black painter often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, studied under Rodin in Paris and embraced her African heritage while facing racial prejudice at home. Tawney worked exclusively in fiber, weaving tapestries in New York City while friends Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg worked nearby. Abercrombie, queen of the Chicago jazz scene and painter of mesmerizing works, appears in photographs alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. Ramberg's sensual graphics can be found not only in analyses of the Chicago Imagists, but also in the pages of Playboy in the 1970s. Seaman exuberantly portrays each highly accomplished woman as the inspirational force she was, and she does a service by bringing them back into contemporary discourse. Unfortunately, the author too often lets her excitement carry her away, running lists of adjectives and too many descriptions on top of one another. This results in clumsily executed passages--e.g., Brown's "slapped, sloshed, slashed, layered, kinetic canvases" and Abercrombie's "bewitching, enigmatic, elegant, awkward, eerie, funny, clever, sad, anguished, teasing and playful" paintings.Seaman's frequent thesaurus-leaning renders her portraits overpainted, but despite its awkward turns, this is a decidedly important and long-overdue showcase (two 16-page color inserts).

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

26

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An award-winning writer rescues seven first-rate twentieth-century women artists from oblivion—their lives fascinating, their artwork a revelation.
Who hasn't wondered where-aside from Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo-all the women artists are? In many art books, they've been marginalized with cold efficiency, summarily dismissed in the captions of group photographs with the phrase "identity unknown" while each male is named.

Donna Seaman brings to dazzling life seven of these forgotten artists, among the best of their day: Gertrude Abercrombie, with her dark, surreal paintings and friendships with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; Bay Area self-portraitist Joan Brown; Ree Morton, with her witty, oddly beautiful constructions; Loïs Mailou Jones of the Harlem Renaissance; Lenore Tawney, who combined weaving and sculpture when art and craft were considered mutually exclusive; Christina Ramberg, whose unsettling works drew on pop culture and advertising;...

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