Lauren Kroiz

Living Power: Women's Suffrage and Modern American Art

Lauren Kroiz
2026

Living Power explores the modernist aesthetics of the women's suffrage movement in the United States in the decades leading to the Nineteenth Amendment's passage in 1920. Artists and activists in this period envisioned, and even materialized, new forms of inclusive, modern political citizenship. But at the same time, many progressive advocates premised the right to vote on whiteness, splitting suffragists along racial lines. Lauren Kroiz analyzes how artworks—including Charlotte Perkins Gilman's design for soap trading cards, Adelaide Johnson's marble portrait busts, Anne Brigman's...

Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era

Lauren Kroiz
2018
During the 1930s and 1940s, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America’s midwestern heartland; others deemed their painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens focuses on Regionalists and their critics as they worked with and against universities, museums, and the burgeoning field of sociology. Lauren Kroiz shifts the terms of an ongoing...

Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle

Lauren Kroiz
2012
In turn-of-the-century New York, the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Stieglitz and his allies embraced a racialized aesthetic discourse in their expressions of identity in the modern era. This book examines the often-neglected role played by immigrant artists and critics in the Stieglitz circle, including Japanese-German author Sadakichi Hartmann, Mexican-born caricaturist Marius de Zayas and English Sri-Lankan curator Ananda Coomaraswamy, as well as better-known U.S.-born painters, including Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe. Creative Composites argues for a new...