D5 Class 3.2

Jun 10

Mobilizing for War

In our last class we glimpsed the role of patriotic music in mobilizing public sentiment. Today we turn to the visual rhetoric of WWI poster campaigns. To prime the pump for your HW, read this article posted by New York Historical Society about the depiction of women in WWI-era posters, many of them by an artist named Howard Chandler Christy (brief bio—if you're interested).

Then choose one of the following images and write a brief analysis noting:

  • What kind(s) of people does the poster target, and what does it ask of them? (You may find it helpful to work backwards: think about what the poster is asking first, then about what kind of people make good targets for that demand.)
  • What emotion(s) does the poster evoke in its targets? Alternatively, what promises or threats does it make, explicitly or implicitly? In discussing these questions, focus on at ONE or TWO key visual details.

In Class: the Cultural Mission of Museums

WordCloud Site: link.

Their History and their Present Purpose
What are museums for? Where do they come from?
Rethinking Cotter
In our last class we debated Holland Cotter’s suggestion that memorials raised to celebrate the Confederacy should be moved to museums. Interestingly, a group of five museum professionals responded to his article with a firm, “No, thank you”: link.
The Peabody-Essex Museum
Let’s look at the mission statement of the Peabody-Essex Museum to find out how its leadership situates the organization in relation to these different models for what museums do: link.

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