Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture considers the visual languages, politics, and poetics of personal appearance. Dandyism has been most closely associated with influential caucasian Western men-about-town, epitomized by the 19th century style-setting of Oscar Wilde and by Tom Wolfe's white suits. The essays collected here, however, examine the spectacle and workings of dandyism to reveal that these were not the only dandies. On the contrary, art historians, literary and cultural historians, and anthropologists identify unrecognized dandies flourishing among early 19th century Native Americans, in Soviet Latvia, in Africa, throughout the African-American diaspora, among women, and in the art world.

Moving beyond historical and fictional accounts of dandies, this volume juxtaposes theoretical models with evocative images and descriptions of clothing in order to link sartorial self-construction with artistic, social, and political self-invention. Taking into consideration the vast changes in thinking about identity in the academy, Dandies provides a compelling study of dandyism's destabilizing aesthetic enterprise.

Contributors: Jennifer Blessing, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Rhonda Garelick, Joe Lucchesi, Kim Miller, Robert E. Moore, Richard J. Powell, Carter Ratcliffe, and Mark Allen Svede.

Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture considers the visual languages, politics, and poetics of personal appearance. Dandyism has been most closely associated with influential caucasian Western men-about-town, epitomized by the 19th century style-setting of Oscar Wilde and by Tom Wolfe's white suits. The essays collected here, however, examine the spectacle and workings of dandyism to reveal that these were not the only dandies. On the contrary, art historians, literary and cultural historians, and anthropologists identify unrecognized dandies flourishing among early 19th century Native Americans, in Soviet Latvia, in Africa, throughout the African-American diaspora, among women, and in the art world.

Moving beyond historical and fictional accounts of dandies, this volume juxtaposes theoretical models with evocative images and descriptions of clothing in order to link sartorial self-construction with artistic, social, and political self-invention. Taking into consideration the vast changes in thinking about identity in the academy, Dandies provides a compelling study of dandyism's destabilizing aesthetic enterprise.

Contributors: Jennifer Blessing, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Rhonda Garelick, Joe Lucchesi, Kim Miller, Robert E. Moore, Richard J. Powell, Carter Ratcliffe, and Mark Allen Svede.

One of the premier sculptors of her generation in the Northwest, Hilda Morris (1911-1993) lived her artistic life in the center of the region's circle of avant-garde painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians. This is the first book to document her half-century-long career and presents Morris's highly individual abstract sculptures against the backdrop of artistic developments during the second half of the twentieth century. A part of the abstract expressionist movement, Morris's vigorous, gestural sculptures inspired by mythological and universal symbols were instrumental in introducing a rigorous, expansive thinking about abstraction to the Pacific Northwest community. As an account of her life and the first complete survey of her entire oeuvre - sculpture, painting, and drawing - this volume will be essential to an understanding of the period. Bruce Guenther, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum, has organized and contributed to numerous international exhibitions of contemporary art. Dr. Susan Fillen-Yeh has published widely on American art and is the editor and author of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (2001). Sculptor David Curt Morris is based in New York, exhibits nationally, and has executed numerous public commissions. He is the son of Hilda and Carl Morris and serves as director and trustee for the Carl and Hilda Morris Foundation.