During American Art Week 2025!
Crafting the Dream
IAC’s 29th Annual American Art Conference
May 7 – 10, 2025
Heritage Auctions
445 Park Ave.
New York, NY
“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.” —Vincent Van Gogh
“A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.” —André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
All art, it can be argued, begins with a dream, whether of subject, stylistic approach, medium, or message (or of all of these). That dream can channel the unconscious or spring from the artist’s conscious probing of the self. It can be mimetic or interpretive, whether of nature, the built environment, or the individual. It can be of iconoclasm or iconolatry. From that dream, the artist must turn to the concrete, to the hard task of realization, of crafting that dream.
There is no art without craft. Nor is there is craft without art. By viewing American Art through the twin lenses of “dream” and “craft” and by acknowledging an incontrovertible connection between the two, we can derive a deeper, more nuanced understanding of American art in its many dimensions. This is the goal of “Crafting the Dream,” IAC’s 29th annual American Art Conference.
Artistic dreams manifest themselves in near-infinite variety. Thus, we have Hicks’ early 19th-century dream of spiritual and temporal harmony in his more than 100 versions of the “Peaceable Kingdom.” A century later, we have Hopper’s melancholic dream of urban isolation and, perhaps, disharmony, in “Nighthawks.” Different dreams, to be sure, by artists distant from one another in space, time, and culture, but a dream, however distinct, resided at the heart of each work.
Whether among artists distant from one another in every respect who painted the same subject—consider here Thomas Cole’s and Steven Hannock’s respective depictions of the Oxbow, the latter in homage, in large measure, to the former—or among contemporaries rendering similar subjects—consider here Georgia O’Keeffe’s, Joseph Stella’s, and Max Weber’s highly personal approaches to the urban landscape—the dreams are as particular as the dreamers. Their contemporaries, Precisionists Sheeler, Demuth, and Strand, dreamt still differently in their transformation and formalization of the world around them.
No one more overtly recognized the role of the dream in artistic production more acutely than the Surrealists: Breton, in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, described an eventual resolution of the contradictory states of dreaming and reality that would yield an absolute or surreality. American Surrealists—Joseph Cornell, Lee Miller, and Kay Sage, to name but three—like their counterparts elsewhere, consciously sought to engage the unconscious in their production, each in different, carefully crafted media. Like the Surrealists, Transcendental artists like Emil Bisttram, Raymond Johnson, and Agnes Pelton dreamt of “[carrying] painting…to imaginative realms” (Transcendental Painting Group Statement, possibly 1938, Archives of American Art), of embodying in their work a higher spiritual reality.
Dreaming differently, American artists crafted differently, and we will examine their explorations in different media. We will range widely in this respect, embracing all materials and methods employed in artistic expression.
No dream is crafted in an art-historical vacuum or without knowledge of method and technique, and we must consider how the transmission of knowledge, whether in informal or formal contexts, has affected American artistic expression. We will thus look at important teachers such as William Merritt Chase, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Robert Henri and important academies, such as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Arts Students’ League.
Last, there is the dream at the heart of selling and collecting of art. Dealers such as Julien Levy and Alfred Stieglitz, for example, surely had their particular dreams, dreams that shaped individual and institutional collections and influenced the canon. The dreams of artists, dealers, and collectors coexist in dynamic interplay, each affecting the other to a perhaps unknowable extent.
Like the 28 American Art Conferences that have proceeded it, Crafting the Dream will broaden the field of inquiry in American art and celebrate its richness, in all its complicated glory.
We gratefully acknowledge Leadership Funding from O’Brien Art Foundation and Anchor Sponsorship from Heritage Auctions for Crafting the Dream.
We are grateful as well for funding from Collisart, LLC; D. Wigmore Fine Art; James Dicke II; Kenneth R. Woodcock; the Steven Alan Bennett Foundation; and anonymous donors (as of November 27, 2024).
We are deeply grateful for the media sponsorship provided by The Magazine ANTIQUES, and American Fine Art Magazine.
