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. She negotiated her career, reputation, family, and finances in modern and commercially savvy ways-revealing the complex negotiations needed to balance these competing pressures. Engaging with newly available archival documents and featuring scholars with radically different approaches to visual culture, this edited collection not only seeks to interrogate the meaning of Rand's portraits and her career, but indeed to rethink gender, art, race, business, and modernism in the twentieth century.

Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute. She is the author of Visual Culture (2020) and Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man (2017), co-author of Furious Feminisms: Alternate Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road (2020), and editor of Ellen Emmet Rand: Gender, Art, and Business (2020) and Thomas Kinkade, The Artist in the Mall (2011).