Hello! Welcome. This page was created for students in Professor Wue's Portraiture East-West Fall 2021 class. This class explores posthumous portraits; cross cultural dressing; portraits across culture; portraits and disabilities; portraits of artists; portraits across gender; and the materiality of the portrait. This page is only a preliminary starting point for resources/inspiration (mainly books & journal articles). Slides from the in-person presentation are available here.
You can make an appointment with me (virtual or in-person). If you need immediate help, we have a 24/7 virtual chat service. This is best used for more basic research questions.
Grove Art Online
Oxford Bibliographies Online:
These are just a few art & art history journals and magazines. For a longer list, visit the "Art Journals & Magazines" page on this research guide. You can also browse & discover art journals using BrowZine.
More databases are listed on the Art Research Databases page.
icon means this resource is paid for by the libraries and requires UCI authentication. 
The Afterlife of Images : translating the pathological body between China and the West
Portrayal and the Search for Identity by
We are surrounded with portraits: from the cipher-like portrait of a president on a bank note to security pass photos; from images of politicians in the media to Facebook; from galleries exhibiting Titian or Leonardo to contemporary art deploying the self-image, as with Jeff Koons or Cindy Sherman. In antiquity portraiture was of major importance in the exercise of power. Today it remains not only a part of everyday life, but also a crucial way for artists to define themselves in relation to their environment and their contemporaries.
Portraiture and Critical Reflections on Being by
his book analyzes the philosophical origins of dualism in portraiture in Western culture during the Classical period, through to contemporary modes of portraiture. Dualism - the separation of mind from body - plays a central part in portraiture, given that it supplies the fundamental framework for portraiture's determining problem and justification: the visual construction of the subjectivity of the sitter, which is invariably accounted for as ineffable entity or spirit, that the artist magically captures. Every artist that has engaged with portraiture has had to deal with these issues and, therefore, with the question of being and identity.
Hide/Seek : difference and desire in American portraiture by
A new interpretation of modern American portraiture based on the history of sexual difference. This companion volume to an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, traces the defining presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, and portraits from leading American artists. Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism
Eugenics, 'Aristogenics', Photography by
This is the first study to explore the connections between late-19th-century university/college composite class portraits and the field of eugenics - which first took hold in the United States at Harvard University. Eugenics, "Aristogenics," Photography takes a closer look at how composite portraiture documented an idealized reality of the New England social-caste experience and explains how, when positioned in relation to the individual stories and portraits of members of the class, the portraits reveal points of non-conformity and rebellion with their own rhetoric
Women Who Ruled : queens, goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque art / by
This is a well-illustrated catalogue to an exhibition of paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture of female archetypes, including historical and mythological female rulers. While the accompanying essays are largely based on secondary literature, the book still serves as a good introduction to the issues around representations of powerful women.
Portraits of a People : picturing African Americans in the nineteenth century by
Considers the role of portrait painting in shaping racial identity and fashioning selfhood during the 19th century in the United States. The earliest portrait is Scipio Moorhead’s engraving of Phillis Wheatley (1773), the latest portrait is Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1897). Numerous color and black-and-white illustrations. Published in association with the University of Washington Press.
Portraiture and Photography in Africa
Some essays originally presented at the conference "Portrait Photography in African Worlds" (February 3-4, 2006), University of California, Santa Cruz
Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World by
Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888.
Exposing Slavery : photography, human bondage, and the birth of modern visual politics in America by
Within a few years of the invention of the first commercially successful photography process in 1839, American slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves. Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass also came to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype saloons of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. And, as the Civil War raged, Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell. In these ways and others, photography powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested. This book explores how photography altered, and was in turn shaped by, conflicts over bondage. Drawing upon an original source base that includes hundreds of unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists as well as written archival materials, it puts visual culture at the center of understanding the experience of late slavery. It assesses how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, slaves to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to imagine and pictorially enact an interracial society during the Civil War. With diverse goals, these peoples transformed photography from a scientific curiosity into a political tool. While this project sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, it also reveals a key moment in the much broader historical relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of power and resistance
The Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography by
This book is a theoretical examination of the relationship between the face, identity, photography, and temporality, focusing on the temporal episteme of selfie practice. Claire Raymond investigates how the selfie's involvement with time and self emerges from capitalist ideologies of identity and temporality. The book leverages theories from Katharina Pistor, Jacques Lacan, Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson, and Hans Belting, to explore the ways in which the selfie imposes a dominant ideology on subjectivity by manipulating the affect of time. The selfie is understood in contrast to the self-portrait. Artists discussed include James Tylor, Shelley Niro, Ellen Carey, Graham MacIndoe, and LaToya Ruby Frazier.
Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie by
This collection explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture, "selfies," with a specific interest in online self-imaging strategies in a Western context. The book examines the selfie as a social and technological phenomenon, but also engages with digital self-portraiture as representation: as work that is committed to rigorous object-based analysis. The scholars in this volume consider the topic of online self-portraiture - both its social function as a technology-driven form of visual communication, as well as its thematic, intellectual, historical, and aesthetic intersections with the history of art and visual culture.
