Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Mary's Institute (Dayton, Ohio) »

This article examines the Religious Art of Today exhibition, originally held in 1944 at Boston’s Institute of Modern Art and then reformulated for the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. The exhibition was eclectic in that it included a wide range of artists and a diversity of faiths, and engaged the debate held among museum professionals about the relationship between religion and modern art. The article focuses closely on Catholic, Jewish, and Navajo art included in the exhibition. The IMA’s commitment to the figurative tradition afforded artists the opportunity to explore their identities—as Jews, as Catholics, as Navajos—using recognizable religious subjects. That the works in the exhibition were selected as representative of modern art resulted in a convergence of discourses related to modern art with those of religious/cultural identity.

Abstract Though quite busy, E. M. Martin, secretary of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, affably gave me much time, and proved to be a good talker. He is a sturdily built, sharp-featured man with shrewd eyes; his color is that of sunburned white Southerners; his thin, graying hair is straight. He is energetic and forceful, and from all quarters I heard that he was a resourceful business man. One of his immediate concerns was an eight millimeter technicolor motion picture called “The Parade of Negro Progress” that the Atlanta Life Company had been exhibiting throughout the South. The picture took two years and a lot of money to make, he told me. The machinery belonged to the company and a photographer was employed for the filming and showing. Martin candidly admitted that the primary object of the film was to make money, but in a clean honest way, he said, “to build friendships, and to show others what we’re doing. Many Negro schoolboys in their history classes learned only one thing pertaining to the Negro and that is that Lincoln freed the slaves.” The picture stresses the “highlights of Negro life,” with such items as the Negro hospital in St. Louis, a commencement at Atlanta University, the new plant at the Tennessee A & I State College at Nashville, the celebration at Daytona Cookman Institute when Mrs. Roosevelt went down there on Mrs. Bethune’s anniversary; Negro farmers in southwest Georgia with large mechanized farms, warehouses, fine mule and horse teams, well-fed cattle, and tractors at work in the fields; hair-dressing establishments; the bank in Atlanta; girls at the intricate statistical machines in the Atlanta Life offices; gas stations owned and manned by Negroes; Paul Laurence Dunbar’s home in Dayton, Ohio; green troops marching in the camps; Negro pilots taking off at Tuskegee; Dean William Pickens selling bonds. And so the list went. “It would be an all-day proposition if we showed all the stuff,” Martin said. So it was edited to meet local interest, with the school and church stuff varying according to the section. When shown in Texas, for instance, a few Texas churches and schools would be spliced in.