Rebecca Zurier Associate Professor PhD Yale University

Rebecca Zurier studies what American art and culture can tell us about each other, defining art broadly to include comic strips, mass media, vernacular architecture, and other aspects of the visual and built environment. Her research has focused to date on the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, a time when industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and changes in race relations and social mores–as well as experimentation in politics and the arts–redefined the United States as modern. Current interests include urban culture in New York and Detroit, national identity and the perception of American art abroad, and concepts of realism and representation in art and writing.

Books:

Picturing the City: Urban Vision and Representation in the Art of the Ashcan School. University of California Press, 2006.

Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and their New York (with Robert Snyder and Virginia Mecklenburg). W. W. Norton and National Museum of American Art, 1995.

Art for The Masses: A Radical Magazine and its Graphics. Temple University Press, 1988.

The American Firehouse: An Architectural and Social History. Abbeville Press, 1982.

Articles:

"Visionary in Boston: The Charlesgate as Housing in a Nationalist Utopia" (part of a series on the development of the American apartment house),  Architectura, vol. 22, 1993, 120-34.

"Classy Comics" Art Journal, vol 50, Fall 1991, 98-103.

Articles in Books:

"City, Stage, and Screen: John Sloans Urban Theater" in Patricia McDonnell et al, On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth Century American Art, 2002, Yale Univ. Press in association with the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Univ. Minnesota, pp. 175-87.

"The American Vision of Robert Hughes," in Jochen Wierich and Barbara Groseclose (eds) American Art without Borders: Decentering the Study of American Art under contract with Pennsylvania State University Press.