Making American Art: Narrative Art for a New Democracy

Barbara Dayer Gallati is curator emerita of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. She is the author of Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children (2004) and a coauthor of Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (2007).Linda S. Ferber is vice president and senior art historian of the Museum at the New-York Historical Society. She was formerly Andrew W. Mellon Curator and chair of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized and coauthored Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (2007). She is the author of Pastoral Interlude: William T. Richards in Chester County (2001) and Masters of Color and Light: Homer, Sargent, and the American Watercolor Movement (1998), with Barbara Dayer Gallati.Ella M. Foshay is an independent art historian. When curator of paintings and sculpture at the New-York Historical Society, she produced the catalog Mr. Luman Reed's Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art (1990) for an exhibition that re-created Reed's private art gallery as it would have looked in his house in 1835. She is author of, with Barbara Novak, Intimate Friends: Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and William Cullen Bryant (2000).Kimberly Orcutt is curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society, where she organized the exhibition John Rogers: American Stories. She served as assistant curator of American art at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum and curated the exhibition Painterly Controversy: William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at the Bruce Museum. She is chair emerita of the Association of Historians of American Art.