John Sloan, Fordism, and Mass Automobility

John Sloan, Fordism, and Mass Automobility

Date: 4 May 2026 (Wednesday)
Time: 4pm-5:15pm
Venue: Room 10.28, 10/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

All are welcome

This presentation will focus on the work of the Ashcan artist John Sloan (1871-1951), describing and analyzing Sloan’s relation to Fordism and the rise of mass automobility over the duration of his career.  To do so, I will begin with Sloan’s familiarity with Fordist tropes, his appeals to them in his writings, and his remarkable pictorial satire “Ford Tank with Fleeing Figures.” This preliminary discussion will then frame an analysis of what has been called the first truly typical New York Sloan—“Dust Storm Fifth Avenue” of 1906, which notably depicts a car—and continue through Sloan’s diarized accounts of riding in automobiles. The presentation will culminate with Sloan’s images from Gloucester, Massachusetts and a discussion of his use of the Maratta scales of colors and pigments, a commercially produced painting system that can be analogized to Fordist production.  The presentation will then conclude with Sloan’s satirical pictures of the effects of automobiles on indigenous life in the Southwest and with a discussion of Sloan’s relationship to indigenous art and culture. Overall, the presentation demonstrates how Fordism and the power dynamics associated with automobiles was a recurring interest of Sloan’s, shaping both his subject matter and his technique over the course of his life.  A key finding of the presentation is to identify a thematic continuity between Sloan’s early, middle, and late artistic production, which are phases of his career that are often treated as disjointed.

Speaker: Oliver O’Donnell is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Basel, and has held research appointments at the Warburg Institute and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.  At Berkeley, he is a core collaborator on the Depictured Worlds Project, sponsored by the NOMIS Foundation.