Race Experts

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

Nonfiction, Home & Garden, Crafts & Hobbies, Art Technique, Sculpture, Art & Architecture, Art History
Cover of the book Race Experts by Linda Kim, UNP - Nebraska
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Author: Linda Kim ISBN: 9781496208033
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska Publication: August 1, 2018
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press Language: English
Author: Linda Kim
ISBN: 9781496208033
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Publication: August 1, 2018
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English

2019 Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the CAA 

In *Race Experts *Linda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina 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 Meštrović, 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 training but 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. 

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

2019 Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the CAA 

In *Race Experts *Linda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina 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 Meštrović, 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 training but 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. 

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