Dissertations

Abbot, Janet Gail, "The Barnett Aden Gallery: A home for diversity in a segregated city." Pennsylvania State University, 2008

"The Barnett Aden performed the traditional gallery function of featuring talented emerging artists, but it provided a critical service for African American artists, who had few opportunities to show their work in parity with white artists or even to see evidence of their existence within established art institutions. By placing their work alongside that of honored black predecessors, such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, Edward Bannister, and Meta Warrick Fuller, the gallery validated their artistic identity and situated them within an art historical tradition. "

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Avery, Anne Louise, “The Veiled Landscape: Space and Place in the Art and Life of Edward Mitchell Bannister.” [Unpublished PhD Thesis including a Catalogue Raisonné], 2007.

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​Block, Elizabeth. “Respecting hair: The culture and representation of American women's hairstyles, 1865–90.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2011.

Using an approach that merges art historical and material culture, this dissertation recognizes the centrality of hairstyles in figure painting, both portraiture and genre as well as in the photography of the mid- to late nineteenth century in the northeastern United States. Block considers the specific ways in which artists depicted hair and how that treatment helped achieve their goals. According to Block, Christiana’s salons in Boston are examples of places that played significant roles in the cause of abolitionism by functioning as centers of information.

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Costa, Traci Lee, "Edward Mitchell Bannister and the Aesthetics of Idealism."  Master Thesis, Roger Williams University, 2017. docs.rwu.edu/aah_theses/1

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Gonzalez, Aston , "Visualizing Equality: African American Abolitionist Champions of Race, Rights, and Visual Culture, 1830-1880." PhD diss., University of Michigan. 2014.

“Visualizing Equality: African American Abolitionist Champions of Race, Rights, and Visual Culture, 1830-1880” charts the changing roles of African American visual artists who shaped representations of African Americans during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. These artists, and the individuals who circulated their images, intended to change not only what people saw when they saw race, they also instructed them about how they should see it. Includes discussion of Bannister as a photographer, barber, and artist. Refers to his barber shop in Malden, Massachusetts and contains a photo he took of John Van Surly DeGrasse.

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Holland, Juanita Marie."Co-workers in the kingdom of culture: Edward Mitchell Bannister and the Boston community of African-American artists, 1848–1901.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998.

This dissertation considers the careers of painters Edward Mitchell Bannister, William H. Simpson, and Nelson Primus, and sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis, probably the largest community of African American artists in a northern city in the mid-century. Bannister, whose life and career encompassed pivotal events in nineteenth-century America’s political and cultural history, functions as the primary focus for this study of African American artistic identity.

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Hollis, Sara, "Afro-American Artists--A Handbook." PhD diss. Atlanta University, 1985.

This dissertation, which is structured as a handbook, provides the basic information needed to prepare and teach a unit on Afro-American artists to an undergraduate class in art history or interdisciplinary humanities. Bannister is mentioned throughout.