APRIL MASTEN

My father's irrepressible drive to produce art and reach out to others has prompted him to ask his children to do the same. I have been privileged to be a part of a family in which both parents have combined avocation with vocation – to have two examples of how to live one's life. It should come as no surprise, then, that I try to combine art and scholarship in my own life, or that the subjects of my scholarship are people in the past who did the same. Writing music is still a passion, but it shares time with teaching and writing history. I am currently finishing a book on women artists in 19th century America, and researching the connection between Irish and African American dance and music. Below I offer samples of some old and new work.

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The Work of Art:
American Women Artists and Market Democracy

>>>This is the book I'm writing. It aims to connect the histories of art, labor, and political culture by taking seriously the hundreds of nineteenth-century American women who claimed that art was their work. Between 1850 and 1880, women from all over the United States moved to New York City to study art and pursue careers as painters, designers, illustrators, engravers, colorists, and art teachers. I focus on these successful though now largely forgotten women artists who passed through the New York School of Design to show how egalitarian ideals and economic imperatives, not middle-class privilege, enabled American women to become artists and influenced their understanding of art and work.
>>>The letters, paintings, and school records of women artists reveal how their aspirations and experiences were linked to the emerging political and economic system in America. After 1820, many middle-class girls were educated for occupations by families and contemporaries who felt compelled by liberal republican ideals and the volatile capitalist economy to support women's employment. They also embraced the prevailing aesthetic ideology, the “Unity of Art,” which held no distinction between the fine and applied arts. This concept mirrored the egalitarian and free labor politics of the period and underlay the support of art education for workers and women by social reformers as diverse as Horace Greeley, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Peter Cooper.
>>>After graduating, women artists took advantage of new art markets and industries in which a variety of new genres flourished. Those who earned their living by art called themselves “workers” to distinguish themselves from “lady amateurs.” These conditions and ideas were so inclusive that women found in art/labor markets what other female employment did not offer: socially meaningful work and an escape from traditional systems of support and authority. Women artists temporarily seized in the economic realm what had been denied them politically – their independence.
>>>Unfortunately, the democratic potential of art work was severely limited after 1876 when competitive and acquisitive values gained ascendancy over more egalitarian and republican ethics. During the next decade the increased proletarianization of labor and professionalization of art curtailed women's ability to use art work as a means to improve their economic, cultural, or political status.


"How the Blacks became Irish:
Cultural Exchange and National Identity"

This is a new project that examines the reciprocal exchange of music and dance among Irish, African and Native Americans in 18th and 19th century North America. Voluntarily and under duress on slavers, plantations and farms, in forts, villages and cities, free and un-free people swapped dance steps, musical instruments, melodies and rhythms. I focus on the form and content of "traditional" American and Irish music and dance - on step and tap, ballads and blues, drums, fiddles and bones - as well as the causes and context of cultural trade, to show how the results of this exchange, which spread along the Atlantic littoral from New York City to Dublin during a period of nation building, was incorporated into each group's national and cultural identity.

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LILY MARTIN SPENCER AND THE POLITICS OF ART

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Stony Brook Web Page