When they hear that Donna Seaman is preparing to publish a book about female artists, most people assume that means literary artists, otherwise known as writers. Seaman is, after all, one of the best-known literary critics in Chicago. And as editor of adult books at Booklist, she wields significant influence over the book-buying habits of consumers — including librarians, booksellers and general readers — around the country.
But no. In fact, Seaman’s new book, “Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists” (Bloomsbury, due in February), is about visual artists, not writers.
“It’s a running joke,” she said with a laugh at her office at the Chicago-based American Library Association, which publishes Booklist. (Full disclosure: I wrote reviews for Booklist, with Seaman as my editor, several years ago.) “Everybody thinks it’s a book about writers, and I’ve even caught myself introducing it that way.”
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It turns out that the author, so closely associated with the world of books, has lived something of a double life. Her mother was a visual artist, and Seaman once wanted to follow in her footsteps, preparing herself for a career in the field by attending the Kansas City Art Institute. In later years, after she’d veered in a more literary direction, Seaman continued to be fascinated by art and artists, in particular those of her own gender.
It made sense, therefore, that when she was deciding on the topic for a book about a decade ago, she landed on the idea of a series of profiles of female artists, many of whom had struggled to gain traction in a field dominated by men and, in some cases, had languished in relative obscurity.
In the end, Seaman wrote seven full-length profiles, all of 20th century artists (Gertrude Abercrombie, Joan Brown, Lois Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Lenore Tawney and Christina Ramberg), two of which were published in TriQuarterly, a literary magazine published at Northwestern University. Two of the artists, Abercrombie and Ramberg, were Chicagoans, the latter considered part of the Hairy Who, a group of local artists associated with the Hyde Park Art Center.
“I identified strongly with all of them, in part because they were all clearly caught between the two worlds of domestic life and art — and having tried to be an artist myself, I had faced many of those challenges,” Seaman says. “And while I realize that male artists — I know a lot of them — face a great deal of obstacles in the art world, women, especially looking back to the last century, had an even more difficult time being accepted and recognized as serious artists.”
That struggle, which in some cases entered the artists’ work as a subject, either subtly or overtly, also helped form their character, making them even more determined to pursue their artistic visions despite the art world’s prejudices against them because of their gender. “It added some drive,” Seaman says, “to what was already an obsessive calling.”
“Identity Unknown” unearths a trove of new information about the lives and careers of the artists, including Jones, associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and Tawney, whose pioneering combinations of art and craft anticipated much of the multimedia work in the contemporary art world but at the time were widely viewed as separate (and highly unequal) genres.
The book will include an insert with color reproductions of the artists’ work, along with black-and-white reproductions sprinkled strategically in the text. This is a source of special satisfaction for Seaman, who spent vast amounts of time scurrying about navigating the often multilayered permissions process with the artists’ estates.
“Scurrying isn’t the word,” she said with a laugh.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer.