Louise Siddons

author of "Centering Modernism: J. Jay McVicker and Postwar American Art"

December 11, 2018

Louise Siddons received a doctorate degree from Stanford University and is an associate professor of Art History, teaching courses in American and Native American visual and material culture. She has published on topics from the 18th century to the present and is active as an independent curator and critic. Siddons joined the faculty at Oklahoma State in 2009.

From 2009-2014, in addition to her faculty position, she was the founding curator and co-director of the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art. Her most recent monograph is “Centering Modernism: J. Jay McVicker and Postwar American Art.”

Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, the Henry Moore Institute, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Oklahoma Humanities Council and more. Her current projects include a book about photographer Laura Gilpin and midcentury Navajo politics, along with two shorter studies of Native visual sovereignty in the civil rights era.

During the 20th century, artists across the United States participated in the modernist movement. However, as American modernism evolved during the 1950s and 1960s, the art world likewise changed, narrowing its vision to large coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. As these cities claimed the avant-garde for themselves, artists from the “flyover” states all but disappeared from view due to what Siddons terms the coastalization of American art.

Among these forgotten figures is Oklahoma modernist J. Jay McVicker. In “Centering Modernism,” Siddons fills a gap in the history of American art by exploring—and indeed salvaging—McVicker’s career and contributions to international modernism. A painter, printmaker and sculptor, McVicker exhibited internationally.

Marshaling evidence from primary sources—including newly discovered archival sources and interviews with the artist’s friends, family, and colleagues—Siddons traces McVicker’s development from his early regionalist roots through biomorphic abstraction, hard-edge geometric abstraction, and finally to a style that reflects the shifting boundaries of postmodernism.

Featuring nearly one hundred full-color reproductions of McVicker’s works, Centering Modernism is the first comprehensive survey of McVicker’s career and oeuvre, as well as a story of the diversity of American modernism.

URL: https://library-dep.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2019-honorees/louise-siddons

Last Updated: 19 January 2021