Boxing, a combat sport with ancient origins, was wildly popular in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Curated by Allie Rudnick–an Assistant Curator in the Met’s Drawings and Prints Department and a PhD candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center–On the Ropes features vintage boxing cards dating from the 1880s to the 1950s, exploring the ways in which images of boxing foreground issues of nationality, race, ethnicity, celebrity, and notions of masculinity in the United States during the period.Â
Works in other media included in the exhibition, such as John Hoppner’s painting Richard Humphreys, the Boxer, attest to the ubiquity of boxing imagery in the visual culture of eighteenth-century England. The later emergence of the sport as a source of both entertainment and inquiry across the globe is reflected in diverse works by Richmond Barthé, George Bellows, Lola Cueto, Eadweard Muybridge, and August Sander.
Allie is an Assistant Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where manages the Study Room for Drawings and Prints and oversees the ephemera collection. She joined the department in 2012 and previously held positions at the print shop Harlan & Weaver and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Active in the field of contemporary printmaking, she is a frequent contributor to Art in Print and serves as treasurer for the Association of Print Scholars.
The show is on view through October 21.
[pictured: Thomas Rowlandson, “Six Stages of Marring a Face,” hand-colored etching, May 29, 1792]