Faculty & Staff Directory

Betsy Fahlman

Betsy Fahlman: Professor of Art History. Graduate degrees: Mount Holyoke College (BA, 1971), University of Delaware (MA, 1977; Ph.D. 1981). She has taught at ASU since 1988. Affiliated Faculty: Women’s Studies and Center for Nonprofit Leadership and Management. A specialist in American Art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she also has a strong interest in the art history of Arizona, and has lectured widely throughout the state for the Arizona Humanities Council.

Fahlman has had two books appear in 2009. New Deal Art in Arizona, published by the University of Arizona Press, explores the rich history of art in Arizona during the Depression era. Arizona’s art history is emblematic of the story of the modern West, and few periods in that history were more significant than the era of the New Deal. From Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams to painters and muralists including Native American Gerald Nailor, the artists working in Arizona under New Deal programs were a notable group whose art served a distinctly public purpose. Their photography, paintings, and sculptures remain significant exemplars of federal art patronage and offer telling lessons positioned at the intersection of community history and culture. Art is a powerful instrument of historical record and cultural construction, and many of the issues captured by the Farm Security Administration photographers remain significant issues today: migratory labor, the economic volatility of the mining industry, tourism, and water usage. Art tells important stories, too, including the work of Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake in Arizona’s internment camps, murals by Native American artist Gerald Nailor for the Navajo Nation Council Chamber in Window Rock, and African American themes at Fort Huachuca.

Wonders of Work and Labor: The Steidle Collection of American Industrial Art, co-authored with Eric Schuers, has been published by the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum and Art Gallery at Penn State, and is being distributed by Penn State University Press. The paintings and prints of the Steidle Collection capture the power and beauty of industry. The images, potent reminders of earlier vigorous industrial development in America, are a visual record connecting fine arts, industry, and education before World War II. Established and expanded by Edward Steidle during his tenure at The Pennsylvania State University, the collection, with its unique focus on the mineral industries, is one of the most comprehensive assemblages of American industrial art. The collection remains today a remarkable artifact at the intersection of art, industry, and education. As a time capsule of the period between the stock market crash of 1929 and World War II, the collection sheds light on Pennsylvania’s most important industries. The unique beauties of steel and coal that inspired the artists in this collection remind us of the power these industries held in the culture and economy of Pennsylvania. At the time he assembled his industrial art collection, Dean Steidle could hardly have imagined the collapse of the nation's formidable steel industry and the disappearance of the blast furnaces that inspired such powerful paintings and prints.

Her book, James Graham & Sons: A Century and a Half in the Art Business, appeared in 2007, and chronicles the history of one of five Manhattan galleries remaining from the nineteenth-century. She served as Guest Curator for “Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster,” an exhibition of Precisionist painter Charles Demuth for the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. She authored the accompanying publication. It opened in August 2007, and in 2008 traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

She has published widely in the field, and major works include Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Modern Life (New York: James Graham and Sons, 2004), The Cowboy’s Dream: The Mythic Life and Art of Lon Megargee (Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Wickenburg, 2002), John Ferguson Weir: The Labor of Art (University of Delaware Press, 1997), The Spirit of the South: The Sculpture of Alexander Galt (College of William and Mary, 1992), Pennsylvania Modern: Charles Demuth of Lancaster (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983), and Guy Pène du Bois: Artist About Town (Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1980). Recent essays include “The Art Spirit in the Classroom: Educating the Modern Woman Artist,” in Marian Wardle, ed., American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910-1945 (Rutgers University Press, in conjunction with the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 2005); “The Engines of Art: The Railroad as Cultural Icon,” in Railroad Heritage (2005); and “Constructing an Image of the Depression: Aesthetic Visions and New Deal Photography in Arizona,” in Katherine G. Morrissey and Kirsten Jensen, eds., In Picturing Arizona: The Photographic Record of the 1930s (University of Arizona Press, 2005).

Strong research interests include women and gender, the history of professional art training, the New Deal, and the relationship between art and industry. Her lecture courses include “Women in the Visual Arts” and “History of Photography,” and seminars on Public Art and the history of American Printmaking. She also arranges for art history internships to area arts organizations and institutions.