Consuming Passions: Women Art Collectors and Cultural Politics in the United States, 1945-1995

This dissertation examines the role of women art collectors in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, emphasizing the contributions of these women to our national culture and the position(s) they hold within their gendered, racial, ethnic, economic, geographical, and art communities. It interrogates, in particular, the cultural practices of two American women art collectors, Samella Sanders Lewis of Los Angeles and Louise Rosenfield Noun of Des Moines, each of whom selected a focus for their art collections in the years following World War II. Their cultural practices are revealed as ones that end the cultural apartheid which epitomized most of this century. Through their personal, professional, scholarly, artistic, and political pursuits, we are afforded a view of how mature women, inspired by and active in social change movements, maneuver within a changing society.