Stott, Annette

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STOTT, Annette

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Concordia College, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1977; University of Wisconsin—Madison, M.A., 1980; Boston University, Ph.D., 1986.

ADDRESSES: Office—School of Art and Art History, University of Denver, Shwayder Art Building, 2121 East Asbury Ave., Denver, CO 80208. E-mail—astott@du.edu.

CAREER: University of Maine—Orono, assistant professor, 1986–87; Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC, assistant professor, 1987–91; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Mellon faculty fellow in the humanities, 1989–90; University of Denver, Denver, CO, assistant professor, 1991–94, associate professor of art history and women's studies, 1994–, director of School of Art and Art History, 1999–.

MEMBER: College Art Association, American Culture Association, American Studies Association, Association for Gravestone Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fulbright fellow, 1983–84; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1997–98.

WRITINGS:

Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture, Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 1998.

Contributor to scholarly periodicals, including American Art, Prospects, and Art Journal; contributor of essays to exhibition catalogues, including Gari Melchers: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1990.

Holland Mania has also been translated into Dutch.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Gender Politics of American Watercolor Painting; Denver's Early Cemeteries: Sculpture Gardens of the West.

SIDELIGHTS: Art historian Annette Stott is the author of Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture. According to Stott, the "Holland Mania," phase of American cultural history, which lasted roughly from 1880 through 1920, occurred when Americans began to rebel against the long-held idea that America's British heritage was responsible for its success. Instead, people began writing about and appreciating the influence that the Dutch—with their long history of living out such American ideals as democracy, religious freedom, free and universal education, and constitutional government—had had upon the United States. This "Holland Mania" affected many of the visual aspects of American culture, from high art to kitsch to architecture and even advertising. The rich collected the paintings of the old Dutch master artists, while the middle class decorated their homes with Delft tiles and the stereotypical images of the Netherlands—cute Dutch children in old-fashioned costumes, cheerful workers in wooden shoes, windmills, and dikes. Homebuyers built Dutch colonial houses, painted them with Dutch Boy-brand paints, and cleaned them with Old Dutch Cleanser, while smokers puffed away on Dutch Masters cigars. Benjamin Moser, writing in the New York Review of Books, stated that in the "admirable and exhaustively researched" book Stott explains how some cultural arbiters "set the o;stage for a longstanding Dutch vogue in American culture." In addition, Holland Mania is an "earnest, engaging study," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, while in Library Journal Russell T. Clement declared the book a "ground-breaking" and "a veritable tour-de-force in identifying Dutch American influences."