Ellen Emmet Rand: Gender, Art, and Business

Ellen Emmet Rand (1875–1941) was one of the most important and prolific portraitists in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century who set about to paint the most famous and powerful people who would afford to pay for her time and talent. Rand negotiated her career, reputation, family, and finances in modern, commercially savvy ways revealing the complex negotiations she had to make to balance these competing pressures.
Engaging with newly available archival documents and featuring scholars with radically different approaches to visual culture, this collection not only seeks to reimagine the meaning of Rand’s portraits and her career, but indeed to rethink women, art, business, and modernism in the 20th century.