The arts: general topics Books

Book SynopsisTrade Review"Examining the titles of Matta-Clark’s works, as well as private notebooks, aphoristic notecards, letters and loquacious statements he made to various interviewers, Richard—herself a poet—maps with obsessive precision the ways in which the artist’s language use frames and enlarges his artworks, many of which exist now only in the form of documentation. . . . Richard’s nimble exegesis of her subject and his language sets the stage for conjuring a vision of Matta-Clark working in the landscape." * Chicago Review of Books *"Richard conscientiously treats Matta-Clark's written word as another facet of his artistic production, which serves to contextualize and deepen an understanding of his short-lived career. Presenting these musings, complete with words crossed-out, spelling errors, arrows, and marginal notations from books, provides a conduit to Matta-Clark's archive and displays his playful use of language. This book is remarkable in its ability to systematically weave Matta-Clark's thought process with his artwork in a way that remains directly connected to the archives while still reading narratively. It would be an excellent resource for anyone interested in Matta-Clark and his milieu in the 1970s Soho art scene." * ARLIS/NA Reviews *"Richard's compelling and crystalline prose make it quite the page-turner. Reading it under lockdown during a pandemic has been a particularly thought-provoking experience. Physical Poetics exemplifies the kind of rigorous work that is difficult to achieve, so thorough is its analysis of the archival and the material evidence. It reads at once like a biography, an essay and an inventory; it is a Matta-Clark concordance, but much more thrilling than that sounds." * Burlington Magazine *"Richard authors an extensively researched and dense text that examines the archives of the artist, focussing predominantly on his prosaic texts and irreverent semantic aphorisms recorded on notecards. For any fan or interest in the artist, the book serves as part-analysis of the archive, with a nuanced insight into New York’s emerging contemporary art scene of the late 1960’s and early 70’s. However, the volume also works as semi-biographical, charting Matta-Clark’s tumultuous parentage and maturation, in a parallel to his works, interests, and backdrop of famous connections past, present, and future." * Visual Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction. CONFUSION GUIDED BY A CLEAR SENSE OF PURPOSE; or, a comet, which would have its tail in front PART ONE. TOTAL (SEMIOTIC) SYSTEM: READING GORDON MATTA-CLARK “Total (Semiotic) System” Walking and Reading WORKING AT SEVERAL DIMENTIONS “A step taken in the fog” “Kool Killer, or the Insurrection of Signs” PART TWO. ANARCHITECTURE AS POETIC DEVICE: GORDON MATTA-CLARK AND THE SOHO CONVERSATION Anarchitecture as Poetic Device “The Poetics of Psycho-Locus” AVAILABLE “Metaphoric Void”Arche and the Alpha Privative "Ambiguity Is All” Art World Prince BEST LATED WISHES Of Trees, Burial, Cooking, and Cannibalism “Another name more or less the same” Venn Diagram To THE MEETING and THE MOB (AGAIN) MAKING NOT SOLVING PROBLEMS The Irrational Village and the Non-u-ment Un-monumentalizing Conversation Monument, Non-u-ment, and Site/Non-site Smithson Coda: The IslandsQuadrille, Walls paper, et al.Fake Estates LAYERED REALITY, Thin Edge, and Space Between “Been Gone”: Notes on the Index Cut/Draw/WriteImmune versus Cancer Cells PART THREE. A SILENT FORCE: THE LEGACIES OF MATTA AND DUCHAMP DEMENTIONS “A Silent Force” Matta and Pajarito: “Psychological Morphology” and Réalité parallèle Noguchi “Jestures”Étant . . . Anartist and AnarchitectureInframince and Thin Edge Bullet Holes Phenomena of Infra- Readymade and Ready-to-be-unmade The Alchemical Pun PART FOUR. SPACISM: GORDON MATTA-CLARK AND THE POLITICAL “We chose to build a world of our own” “My understanding of art . . .” and THE JOY OF GETTING AWAY WITH IT SPACISM “I woundered who it is for . . .” Chile and the Bienal de São PauloWindow Blow-OutArc de Triomphe for WorkersA Resource Center and Environmental Youth Program for Loisaida THE VOYEURIST'S SPACE Violent Space, SECURITY MEASURES, and THE SIGN POST ANARCHIE The Money Photographs Cornell ’69 “Gordon Matta-Clark and Individualism” “A fine-tuned language and logic of the body” Conclusion. “WITHIN ABSURDITY THERE IS A FANTASTIC FREEDOM” Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisDigitization is the animating force of everyday life. Rather than defining it as a technology or a medium, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life argues that digitization is a socio-historical process that is contributing to the erosion of democracy and an increase in political inequality, specifically along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Taking a historical approach, Janet Kraynak finds that the seeds of these developments are paradoxically related to the ideology of digital utopianism that emerged in the late 1960s with the rise of a social model of computing, a set of beliefs furthered by the neo-liberal tech ideology in the 1990s, and the popularization of networked computing. The result of this ongoing cultural worldview, which dovetails with the principles of progressive artistic strategies of the past, is a critical blindness in art historical discourse that ultimately compromises art's historically important role in furthering radical democratic aims.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction. Digitization and Anti-Democracy: The Perils of Digital Utopianism 1. Network Effects: Networked Centralities and Political Marginalization 2. Collaboration and the Hive Mind: Social Networks and the Gendering of the Economy 3. Therapeutic Participation and the Museological User: The Museum in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism 4. Modularity and the Alterities of Search: Racialization, Difference, and Computational Systems 5. Audible Pasts and Imaginary Futures: On Silence and the Technological Imaginary 6. In Lieu of a Conclusion Notes List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“Based on exhaustive research and interviews, this thoughtful and comprehensive biography makes a good case for recognizing Jacob Lawrence as among the finest American artists of the 20th century. . . . [Hills’] empathetic analyses will make this the definitive biography of Lawrence for a very long time.” * Artnews *“The book is the most thorough analysis available of Lawrence’s work and a valuable contribution to American art history as well as African-American studies.” * The Artblog *“Hills knows a great deal about her subjects - Lawrence and the Harlem in which he lived and worked for much of his life - and this will be an essential book for those who study these subjects.” * Art New England *“Hills offers a beautifully illustrated, critical assessment . . . By paying close attention to Lawrence’s sophisticated imagery and situating his work within its rich cultural and political contexts, Hills provides a much-needed analytical discussion of his oeuvre and a thoughtful account of race in 20th-century American art and life. . . . Highly recommended.” * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction PART ONE The Artist’s Place in Harlem 1 Harlem’s Artistic Community in the 1930s 2 Patrons and the Making of a Professional Artist PART TWO Themes and Issues 3 African American Storytelling: Toussaint L’Ouverture and Harriet Tubman 4 The Great Migration in Memory, Pictures, and Text 5 Confrontations with the Jim Crow South in the 1940s 6 Home in Harlem: Tenements and Streets 7 The Double Consciousness of Masks and Masking 8 The Paintings of the Protest Years, 1955–70 Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix: Jacob Armstead Lawrence and His Family Notes Selected Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisLong viewed as a tabula rasa, the deserts of the American West have played a distinct role in the projection of American cultural identities. Historically represented through fantasies of individualism, frontier ruggedness, and land acquisition, the desert is also the site of extreme social and environmental violence. The Invention of the American Desert brings together a wide-ranging group of interdisciplinary essays that explore, through diverse perspectives, dialectical problems posed by an environment that has served as a testing ground for modernist experimentation in art and architecture, military-industrial incursions, and ecological disasters throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In light of the urgent climate crisis and the planet's increasing desertification, this volume reflects on the nature and legacy of the desert as a crucible for competing visions of land, environment, and art.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Lyle Massey and James Nisbet PART ONE: CONTAMINATION 1. Desolate Dreams Joseph Masco 2. Air, Wind, Breath, Life: Desertification and Will Wilson’s AIR (Auto-Immune Response) Jessica L. Horton PART TWO: FABRICATION 3. Notes from Bioteknika Albert Narath 4. Troglodyte Modernists Lyle Massey 5. Explosive Modernism: Hiram Hudson Benedict's Bouldereign and Zabriskie Point at Fifty Edward Dimendberg PART THREE: INVISIBILITY 6. Point Omega / Omega Point: Desert in Three Parts Stefanie Sobelle 7. The Desert in Fine Grain Emily Eliza Scott PART FOUR: DYSTOPIA 8. The Desert as Black Mythology Bridget R. Cooks 9. On the Recalcitrance of the Desert Island, by way of Andrea Zittel's A–Z West James Nisbet CODA 10. Four Theses for the Coming Deserts Hans Baumann and Karen Pinkus List of Contributors List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisIt is often assumed that surrealism did not survive beyond the Second World War and that it struggled to take root in America. This book challenges both assumptions, arguing that some of the most innovative responses to surrealism in the postwar years took place not in Europe or the gallery but in the United States, where artistic and activist communities repurposed the movement for their own ends. Far from moribund, surrealism became a form of political protest implicated in broader social and cultural developments, such as the Black Arts movement, the counterculture, the New Left, and the gay liberation movement. From Ted Joans to Marie Wilson, artists mobilized surrealism's defining interests in desire and madness, the everyday and the marginalized, to craft new identities that disrupted gender, sexual, and racial norms. Remade in America ultimately shows that what began as a challenge to church, family, and state in interwar Paris was invoked and rehabilitated to diagnose and breacTrade Review"​​Remade in America reveals what the protesters at the 1968 MoMA exhibition knew well—that Surrealism’s potency lay in its ability to evolve, in its very refusal to be history, giving shape to a far more multidimensional picture of the diversity of American art." * Journal of the Association of Historians for Art *"Pawlik’s central and novel insight is that the reception and subsequent remaking of Surrealism along queer and non-white lines, among other marginalized identities, is predicated upon the perception of its minoritarianism. Also key is the view that Surrealism was alive and well after 1940, indeed that it flourished in several locations around the globe, and that these iterations (not mere afterlives) of the movement deserve careful, situated, and context-sensitive consideration on their own creative merits." * CAA Reviews *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Re-Viewing Surrealism: Charles Henri Ford's Poem Posters (1964–65) 2. Encountering Surrealism: Nadja (1928) and Autobiographical Beat Writing 3. Blackening Surrealism: Ted Joans's Ethnographic Surrealist Historiography 4. Turning on Surrealism: Queer Psychedelia 5. Hystericizing Surrealism: The Marvelous in Popular Culture Postscript Notes Selected Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisWhat happens when a drone enters a gallery or appears on screen? What thresholds are crossed as this weapon of war occupies everyday visual culture? These questions have appeared with increasing regularity since the advent of the War on Terror, when drones began migrating into civilian platforms of film, photography, installation, sculpture, performance art, and theater. In this groundbreaking study, Thomas Stubblefield attempts not only to define the emerging genre of drone art but to outline its primary features, identify its historical lineages, and assess its political aspirations. Richly detailed and politically salient, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of the intersections between drones, art, technology, and power.Trade Review"In Drone Art, [Stubblefield] ruminates on the profound implications of a technology that can, by cross-referencing historical patterns, provide ‘limitless temporal parameters.'" * London Review of Books *"Stubblefield manages to masterfully intertwine art criticism and critical theory with some remarkably lucid explanations of the actual operations of drone warfare." * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Perverse Symmetry of Drone Art 1. Signature Strikes and World-Making 2. How to Photograph a Drone: The Nesting Logic of Vertical Empire 3. From the Ground Below: Spotting Industries, Smartphones, and the Post-Panopticism of Drones 4. The Animal Remainder: Excavating Nonhuman Life from Contemporary Drones 5. Showing Sensing: Drone Space and Postmedia in Film and Theater Conclusion: Supersymmetry, Capital, and War Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisWhat happens when a drone enters a gallery or appears on screen? What thresholds are crossed as this weapon of war occupies everyday visual culture? These questions have appeared with increasing regularity since the advent of the War on Terror, when drones began migrating into civilian platforms of film, photography, installation, sculpture, performance art, and theater. In this groundbreaking study, Thomas Stubblefield attempts not only to define the emerging genre of drone art but to outline its primary features, identify its historical lineages, and assess its political aspirations. Richly detailed and politically salient, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of the intersections between drones, art, technology, and power.Trade Review"In Drone Art, [Stubblefield] ruminates on the profound implications of a technology that can, by cross-referencing historical patterns, provide ‘limitless temporal parameters.'" * London Review of Books *"Stubblefield manages to masterfully intertwine art criticism and critical theory with some remarkably lucid explanations of the actual operations of drone warfare." * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Perverse Symmetry of Drone Art 1. Signature Strikes and World-Making 2. How to Photograph a Drone: The Nesting Logic of Vertical Empire 3. From the Ground Below: Spotting Industries, Smartphones, and the Post-Panopticism of Drones 4. The Animal Remainder: Excavating Nonhuman Life from Contemporary Drones 5. Showing Sensing: Drone Space and Postmedia in Film and Theater Conclusion: Supersymmetry, Capital, and War Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsContents Forewords Jay Xu and Fang Qin Acknowledgments Fan J. Zhang Maps Introduction Fan J. Zhang Part I Exploring Zhou’s Southern Borderland ONE Unearthing a Lost State: The Discovery of Zeng Jay Xu TWO Discovering Chu: The Legacy of the Southern Lands Fan J. Zhang THREE Art and Religion on the Ancient Jiang-Han Plain John S. Major Part II Material Culture of the Middle Yangzi River Region FOUR Jades of the Chu and Zeng States Colin Mackenzie FIVE Ritual and Musical Traditions in the States of the Jiang-Han Plain Haicheng Wang SIX Obsession with the Supernatural and Luxuries: Chu-Style Lacquerware, Textiles, and Funerary Objects Guolong Lai and I-fen Huang Part III Catalogue Jades, Agate, and Glass Bronze Ritual Vessels Musical Instruments and Weapons Lacquerwar Special Mortuary Objects Textiles, Gold, and Miscellanea Inscriptions Reigns of Zhou Kings and Zeng and Chu Lords Chronology Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Beautiful Agitation is a much-needed contribution to the field of art history, but it is also a serious historical account of a volatile era from which the region is still suffering aftershocks. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in looking beyond the standard definitions of modern art and the traditions of art historical writing." * caa.reviews *"Beautiful Agitation operates as an essential act of recuperation, providing precious evidence that modernist narratives need not follow presumptions of originality, exclusive ownership, or authenticity. Certainly, it will prove invaluable to all art historians and art lovers who wish to go below the surface." * H-Net *"Throughout the book, the close attention to Arabic terms and concepts, the reappraisal of complex international webs of cultural actors, the close reading of the artworks, as well as the thorough historical inquiries of often fluid political situations, situate this study in an inclusive approach and a much-needed rethinking of modernist narratives in the Middle East, and more generally in the field of global art history." * Journal of Art History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on the Text Introduction 1. Arab Romantics: Kahlil Gibran and the Awakening Storm 2. Colonial Syria: Finding Life within Culture 3. Popular Politics: Adham Ismail and the Aesthetics of Revival 4. National Excavation: Fateh al-Moudarres and the Unholy Image Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisFrom abolitionist medallions to statues of bondspeople bearing broken chains, sculpture gave visual and material form to narratives about the end of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Sculpture at the Ends of Slaverysheds light on the complexand at times contradictoryplace of such works as they moved through a world contoured both by the devastating economy of enslavement and by international abolitionist campaigns. By examining matters of making, circulation, display, and reception, Caitlin Meehye Beach argues that sculpture stood as a highly visible but deeply unstable site from which to interrogate the politics of slavery. With focus on works by Josiah Wedgwood, Hiram Powers, Edmonia Lewis, John Bell, and Francesco Pezzicar, Beach uncovers both the radical possibilities and the conflicting limitations of art in the pursuit of justice in racial capitalism's wake.Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction. “Within a Few Steps of the Spot”: Art in an Age of Racial Capitalism 1. Grasping Images: Antislavery and the Sculptural 2. “The Mute Language of the Marble”: Slavery and Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave 3. Sentiment, Manufactured: John Bell and the Abolitionist Image under Empire 4. Relief Work: Edmonia Lewis and the Poetics of Plaster 5. Between Liberty and Emancipation: Francesco Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery Coda. “Sculptured Dream of Liberty” Notes List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisSlant Steps explores the vital role of the semi-peripheryartistic communities working between the provinces and the metropole. Premised on the collective fascination with the found object Slant Step, the book details a history of encounters among artists, filmmakers, critics, and others operating in and out of the Bay Area during the long 1960s. They revised the terms of the counterculture, the appeal of consumer goods, and the surfaces and materials of industrial design and contemporary sculpture. Whether extending to international exchanges or shrinking to local coteries, these circles helped develop process, funk, and conceptual art as they forged new directions for the art world and its members. Yet when these groups degraded their own works alongside those of their rivals, they made their political and aesthetic commitments difficult to decipher, reorganizing the ties between the visual arts and the New Left. Merging sociologies of art with the tradition of social art history, JacTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Waste Makers 2. Parading the Fetish 3. Funk 4. Lax Behavior 5. Shoddy Meaning 6. Gatekeeping Rituals Conclusion: Semi-Peripheral Development Acknowledgments Notes Illustration Credits Index

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Book SynopsisIn Consuming Stories, Rebecca Peabody uses the work of contemporary American artist Kara Walker to investigate a range of popular storytelling traditions with roots in the nineteenth century and ramifications in the present. Focusing on a few key pieces that range from a wall-size installation to a reworked photocopy in an artist's book and from a theater curtain to a monumental sculpture, Peabody explores a significant yet neglected aspect of Walker's production: her commitment to examining narrative depictions of race, gender, power, and desire. Consuming Stories considers Walker's sustained visual engagement with literary genres such as the romance novel, the neo-slave narrative, and the fairy tale and with internationally known stories including Roots, Beloved, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Walker's interruption of these familiar works , along with her generative use of the familiar in unexpected and destabilizing ways, reveals the extent to which genre-based narrative conventions depend Trade Review“Peabody asserts that narrative is a necessary interpretative scheme with which to approach Walker’s art, and the author gives deep histories to some of the most interesting moments in Walker’s narrative engagement. . . . [A] remarkable book which spans Walker’s nearly twenty-year long career to date…” * Oxford Art Journal *"This excellent book contributes greatly to the plethora of existing scholarship on Kara Walker." * Panorama *“Rebecca Peabody’s lyrically written, provocative, and smart new take on Kara Walker suggests that there is, in fact, much more to say about this artist. . . . Peabody has set the bar high. Not only does she rigorously review the copious literature on Walker, but she has taken considerable trouble to familiarize herself with Walker’s own words and ideas in order to present as thorough a critique of this enigmatic artist. Brava.” * Woman’s Art Journal *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Kara Walker, Storyteller 1. The End of Uncle Tom 2. The Pop of Racial Violence 3. American Romance in Black and White 4. The International Appeal of Race 5. Storytelling in Film and Video Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Illustration Credits Index

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Book SynopsisIn this vivid portrait of the art world of 1950s Turkey, Sarah-Neel Smith offers a new framework for analyzing global modernisms of the twentieth century: economic development. After World War II, a cohort of influential Turkish modernists built a new art scene in Istanbul and Ankara. The entrepreneurial female gallerist Adalet Cimcoz, the art critic (and future prime minister) Bülent Ecevit, and artists like Aliye Berger, Füreya Koral, and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboglu were not only focused on aesthetics. On the canvas, in criticism, and in the gallery, these cultural pioneers also grappled with economic questionsattempting to transform their country from a developing nation into a major player in the global markets of the postwar period. Smith's book publishes landmark works of Turkish modernism for the first time, along with an innovative array of sourcesfrom gossip columns to economic theoryto reveal the art world as a key site for the articulation of Turkish nationhood at midcentury.Trade Review"Metrics of Modernity will prompt new, productive methodological approaches in the field. Notably, art historians might retool the same categories to form a shared ground of comparison that cuts across established regional and cultural boundaries in current art historical scholarship." * H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews *Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction. Art and Development: A New Framework for Postwar Art 1. The Semiperipheral Art Gallery: Gallery Maya, Istanbul 2. Democratic Abstractions: Bülent Ecevit on Art and Politics 3. “The First Coup in the Turkish Art World”: The Developing Turkey Competition of 1954 4. The Artist as Agent of Development: Füreya Koral between Turkey and the United States Conclusion. Building Istanbul Modern: Art and Development in a Twenty-First-Century Museum Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisIn the 1960s, multinational corporations faced new image problemsand turned to the art world for some unexpected solutions. The 1960s saw artists and multinational corporations exploring new ways to use art for commercial gain. Whereas many art historical accounts of this period privilege radical artistic practices that seem to oppose the dominant values of capitalism, Alex J. Taylor instead reveals an art world deeply immersed in the imperatives of big business. From Andy Warhol's work for packaged goods manufacturers to Richard Serra's involvement with the steel industry, Taylor demonstrates how major artists of the period provided brands with forms of persuasion that bolstered corporate power, prestige, and profit. Drawing on extensive original research conducted in artist, gallery, and corporate archives, Taylor recovers a flourishing field of promotional initiatives that saw artists, advertising creatives, and executives working around the same tables. As museums continue tTrade Review"Forms of Persuasion is a well-researched, revealing account of how avant-garde art and design filled the ‘fishbowl foyers’ of Midtown Manhattan, the imaginations of board members and the pockets of a lucky few artists. . . . This sophisticated new kind of sales pitch, Mr. Taylor argues, helped secure the global dominance of the American corporation." * Wall Street Journal *"Sheds light on the mechanisms by which contemporary visual art elevated corporate image. . . . Taylor’s methodology is a worthy model for art historians interested in post–WW II corporate art partnerships that provided cultural capital, enhanced overall images, and international appeal. They were precursors to today’s ubiquitous corporate branding intertwined with a thoroughly commodified art world." * CHOICE *Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Culture Sell PART 1: REPACKAGING POP 1. Trademarking Campbell’s Soup 2. Container Corporation’s Art Direction 3. The Bold New Taste of Philip Morris PART 2: ABSTRACTION AT WORK 4. Chase Manhattan’s Executive Vision 5. A Passport for Peter Stuyvesant PART 3: MARKETING MATERIALS 6. Modernizing Italsider 7. The Rusting Face of U.S. Steel 8. Collapse at Kaiser Steel Conclusion: Conceptualizing Corporate Sponsorship List of Abbreviations Notes List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisA free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Many recent works of contemporary art, performance, and film turn a spotlight on sleep, wresting it from the hidden, private spaces to which it is commonly relegated. At the Edges of Sleep considers sleep in film and moving image art as both a subject matter to explore onscreen and a state to induce in the audience. Far from negating action or meaning, sleep extends into new territories as it designates ways of existing in the world, in relation to people, places, and the past. Defined positively, sleep also expands our understanding of reception beyond the binary of concentration and distraction. These possibilities converge in the work of Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has explored the subject of sleep systematically throughout his career. In examining Apichatpong's work, Jean Ma brings together an array of interlocutorsfrom Freud to Proust, George Méliès to Tsai Ming-

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“Recommended.” * CHOICE *“Remaking Race and History is an important sourcebook on this otherwise under-recognized artist. . . . Provides an indication of the insights that such future investigations can yield.” * caa.reviews *“Impressive and important. . . . The socio-historical details and contexts of Fuller’s life and art given throughout the book are well-researched and coherently presented. . . . Ater makes a noteworthy contribution to African American art history.” * Association of Historians of American Art *"An exemplar of a more integrated art history. [Ater] is especially gifted with comparative stylistic and iconographic analysis of period sculpture." * Art Bulletin *“Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller goes a long way in correcting the glaring omission of one of the key African American woman artists of the twentieth century.” * Tikkun *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. “Foremost Sculptor of the Negro Race” 2. Segregation and Inclusion 3. Memory and Commemoration 4. Race and Americanization Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisThe 1950s and early 1960s in Brazil gave birth to a period of incredible optimism and economic development. In The Affinity of Neoconcretism, Mariola V. Alvarez argues that the Neoconcretistsa group of artists and poets working together in Rio de Janeiro from 1959 to 1961formed an important part of this national transformation. She maps the interactions of the Neoconcretists and discusses how the artists and poets collaborated to challenge existing divides between high and low art and between fields such as fine art and dance. This book reveals how art and intellectual work in Brazil occurred within a local political and social context and also emerged from the transnational movement of artists, artworks, published materials, and ideas.Table of ContentsContents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Introduction 1. The Anti-Dictionary: The Verbal Non-Object and Neoconcrete Poetry, Books, and Installation Art 2. Experiência Neoconcreta: Jornal do Brasil and Its Cultural Supplement, Graphic Design, and the Modern Public 3. A Synergistic Phenomenon: The Neoconcrete Ballets and Abstraction 4. New Monumentality and Collaboration: Neoconcretism and Architecture Conclusion NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS INDEX

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The contributors frame Self Help Graphics as an arts organization with the potential to inspire a vision of a more just and inclusive art world, providing new perspectives on the organization and its significant contributions to the Chicano art movement and making Los Angeles a major center for global art." * Design and Culture *Table of ContentsContents Introduction Intangible Registers: Self Help Graphics and the Creation of Sustainable Art Ecologies Karen Mary Davalos and Tatiana Reinoza PART ONE: THE ETHOS OF SELF HELP GRAPHICS & ART 1. Dibujando el Camino: Ibañez y Bueno and the Chicano-Mexican Public Art Tradition JV Decemvirale 2. The Barrio Mobile Art Studio: The History of an Art Education Program for Chicanas/os and Mexican Immigrants in Los Angeles Adriana Katzew 3. Generative Networks and Local Circuits: Self Help Graphics and the Visual Politics of Solidarity Mary Thomas PART TWO: THE ATELIER 4. The Future Is Feminist: How the Maestras Atelier Transformed Self Help Graphics Claudia Zapata 5. Unfinished: The Death Worlds of Homombre LA Robb Hernández 6. Self Help Graphics & Art’s Contributions to Chicana/o/x Art Histories Karen Mary Davalos PART THREE: FROM EAST LOS ANGELES TO THE WORLD 7. Central America at Self Help Graphics: Camaraderie and Artmaking in the City of Angels Kency Cornejo 8. Self Help Graphics and Global Circuits of Art in the 1990s Olga U. Herrera 9. Creating Infrastructures of Value: Self Help Graphics and the Art Market—a Conversation with Arlene Dávila Arlene Dávila, Karen Mary Davalos, and Tatiana Reinoza Atelier History Self Help Graphics & Art Timeline Further Reading List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThe definitive historyof a cherished East Los Angeles institution over five decades of art making and community building. Self Help Graphics at Fifty celebrates the ongoing legacy of an institution that has had profound aesthetic, economic, and political impact on the formation of Chicanx and Latinx art in the United States. Officially launched in 1973 during the Chicano Movement, Self Help Graphics & Art continues to serve on the cultural front. The institution's commitment to art, dignity for all, and empowerment of Chicanx and Latinx artists appears in every aspect of programming, including the Día de los Muertos festival; the Barrio Mobile Art Studio, which brings art education to underserved schools; and the printmaking program, which offers an accessible medium infused with activist aims. Looking at the multiple genealogies of art that intersect in East Los Angeles, Self Help Graphics at Fifty bears witness to the organization's influential role in US and global art historiTrade Review"The contributors frame Self Help Graphics as an arts organization with the potential to inspire a vision of a more just and inclusive art world, providing new perspectives on the organization and its significant contributions to the Chicano art movement and making Los Angeles a major center for global art." * Design and Culture *Table of ContentsContents Introduction Intangible Registers: Self Help Graphics and the Creation of Sustainable Art Ecologies Karen Mary Davalos and Tatiana Reinoza PART ONE: THE ETHOS OF SELF HELP GRAPHICS & ART 1. Dibujando el Camino: Ibañez y Bueno and the Chicano-Mexican Public Art Tradition JV Decemvirale 2. The Barrio Mobile Art Studio: The History of an Art Education Program for Chicanas/os and Mexican Immigrants in Los Angeles Adriana Katzew 3. Generative Networks and Local Circuits: Self Help Graphics and the Visual Politics of Solidarity Mary Thomas PART TWO: THE ATELIER 4. The Future Is Feminist: How the Maestras Atelier Transformed Self Help Graphics Claudia Zapata 5. Unfinished: The Death Worlds of Homombre LA Robb Hernández 6. Self Help Graphics & Art’s Contributions to Chicana/o/x Art Histories Karen Mary Davalos PART THREE: FROM EAST LOS ANGELES TO THE WORLD 7. Central America at Self Help Graphics: Camaraderie and Artmaking in the City of Angels Kency Cornejo 8. Self Help Graphics and Global Circuits of Art in the 1990s Olga U. Herrera 9. Creating Infrastructures of Value: Self Help Graphics and the Art Market—a Conversation with Arlene Dávila Arlene Dávila, Karen Mary Davalos, and Tatiana Reinoza Atelier History Self Help Graphics & Art Timeline Further Reading List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: ME 1. Jean Cocteau: I Am Not One 2. David Hockney: The Missing Body Is in the Pool PART II: NOT ME 3. Aubrey Beardsley: The Male Body Is Absurd 4. Francis Bacon: The Flesh Marks Limits of Knowing PART III: ME . . . BITS 5. Robert Gober: Beeswax Time Machines Will Melt Conclusion Postscript (or the Hanging-On with a Safety Pin): Andrew Ahn—A K-Town Bathhouse Boy Is Me/Not Me Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisThis is the first book to approach the visuality of ancient Greek drama through the lens of theater phenomenology. Gathering evidence from tragedy, comedy, satyr play, and vase painting, Naomi Weiss argues that, from its very beginnings, Greek theater in the fifth century BCE was understood as a complex interplay of actuality and virtuality. Classical drama frequently exposes and interrogates potential viewing experiences within the theatronliterally, the place for seeing. Weiss shows how, in so doing, it demands distinctive modes of engagement from its audiences. Examining plays and pottery with attention to the instability and ambiguity inherent in visual perception, Seeing Theater provides an entirely new model for understanding this ancient art form.Table of ContentsContents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations Introduction Phenomenology, Aristotle, and Classical Greek Drama Theōrein and Seeing Theater The “Play of Actuality” beyond Fifth-Century Theater Engaged Spectatorship Genre and Scope 1. Opening Spaces Tragic and Comic Space Seeing the Setting Staged Spectatorship Seeing Theater, Seeing Assembly Atopic Beginnings The Phenomenology of Space in the Classical Greek Theater 2. Seeing What? Is This That? Aeschylus’s Theoroi Visual Indeterminacy in Aeschylus’s Suppliants Winging with Words in Aristophanes’s Birds 3. Pain Between Bodies Dustheatos Blinded Bodies I: Euripides’s Cyclops and Hecuba Blinded Bodies II: Sophocles’s Oedipus the King Sympathetic Bodies: [Aeschylus’s] Prometheus Bound Pleasure in Pain 4. Pots and Plays Actor, Mask, Costume The Basel Chorus Krater The London Pandora Krater The Naples Birds Krater Epilogue Works Cited General Index Index Locorum

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Book SynopsisAnxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 197880, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the '85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists' engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chi

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Book SynopsisThis book looks at the aristocratic adoption of Roman ideals in eighteenth-century English culture and thought. Philip Ayres shows how, in the century following the Revolution of 1688, the ruling class promoted - by way of its patronage - a classical frame of mind embracing all the arts, on the foundations of 'liberty' and 'civic virtue'. The historical fact of a Roman Britain lent an added authenticity to a new 'Roman' present constructed by Lord Burlington and his circle. Ayres's study shows that the propensity to adopt the self-image of virtuous Romans was the attempt of a newly empowered oligarchy to dignify and vindicate itself by association with an idealized image of Republican Rome. This sense of affinity with the ideals of the free Roman Republic gave British classicism an authenticity impossible under the various versions of absolutism on the continent. Its discourse precluded any more thoroughgoing revolution by suggesting that Britain's liberty had been won by an 'oligarchyTrade ReviewReview of the hardback: 'Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England is an elegant book of just the right size that pays proportionate attention to the various aspects with the right amount of references and quotations. The aesthetic pleasure of a well produced book adds to the intellectual joy.' MnemosyneReview of the hardback: 'Extremely well researched and convincingly argued, this ambitious book is a very welcome addition to scholarship. The argument is clearly thought through.' LatomusTable of ContentsPreface; List of abbreviations; List of plates; 1. Oligarchy of virtue - liberty and the Roman analogy; Civic virtue and the Roman analogy; Literary personae: Pope, Swift, Johnson, Thomson, Fielding, Burke; 2. Virtue made visible - sensibility, sculpture, political gardens and temples; 3. Britannia Romana - Romano-British archaeology: pioneers; The Roman Knights and the recruitment of the aristocracy; Architect as archaeologist: Burlington; 4. Britannia Romana revived - architecture, collections, the numinous in landscape and house; 5. Beyond the mainstream: classical nostalgia and freethinking; Conclusion; Appendix: books on archaeology owned by Burlington: an annotated shelf-list; Bibliography; Notes; Index.

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Book SynopsisThe issue of returning art and cultural property removed from explored or conquered lands by Americans and Europeans is an unresolved problem. This book is about the return, or not, of works of art taken during the Age of Imperialism and now held in museums and private collections.Trade Review"....Overall, the quality of writing and editing is exemplary throughout the book." --James A.R. Nafziger, Williamette University College of Law, American Journal of International LawTable of ContentsForeword John O. Haley; Introduction John Henry Merryman; 1. View from the universal museum James Cuno; 2. From global pillage to pillars of collaboration Talat Halman; 3. Museums as centres of cultural understanding Willard L. Boyd; 4. The Parthenon and the Elgin Marbles William St. Clair; 5. Whither the Elgin Marbles? John Henry Merryman; 6. The beautiful one has come - to return: the return of the bust of Nefertiti from Berlin to Cairo Kurt Siehr; 7. The beautiful one has come - to stay Stephen Urice; 8. NAGPRA from the middle distance: reflections on a tangled web of institutional process and intercultural justice Michael F. Brown; 9. Finders and keepers and deep American history: some lessons in dispute resolution David Hurst Thomas.

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Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion).

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Book SynopsisThe fabulous life and times of one of our wittiest, most endearing and enduring caricaturists—in his own words and inimitable art. Sorel has given us some of the best pictorial satire of our time ... [his] pen can slash as well as any sword” (The Washington Post).Alongside more than 172 of his drawings, cartoons, and caricatures—and in prose as spirited and wickedly pointed as his artwork—Edward Sorel gives us an unforgettable self-portrait: his poor Depression-era childhood in the Bronx (surrounded by loving Romanian immigrant grandparents and a clan of mostly left-leaning aunts and uncles); his first stabs at drawing when pneumonia kept him out of school at age eight; his time as a student at New York’s famed High School of Music and Art; the scrappy early days of Push Pin Studios, founded with fellow Cooper Union alums Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, which became the hottest design group of the 1960s; his two marriages and

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Book SynopsisFrom one of our most widely admired art critics comes a bold and timely manifesto reaffirming the independence of all the arts—musical, literary, and visual—and their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us.As people look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl argues that the arts have their own laws and logic, which transcend the controversies of any one moment. “Art’s relevance,” he writes, “has everything to do with what many regard as its irrelevance.” Authority and Freedom will find readers from college classrooms to foundation board meetings—wherever the arts are confronting social, political, and economic ferment and heated debates about political correctness and cancel culture. Perl embraces the work of creative spirits as varied as Mozart, Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Henry James, Picasso, and Aretha Franklin.

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Book SynopsisA visual celebration of natural Black hair that highlights the powerful connection between mothers and their children during their wash day rituals. “A beautiful love letter to natural hair and the rituals Black women have created.”—Roxane GayIn this stunning book, documentary photographer Tomesha Faxio explores the power of “wash day,” a day that Black women dedicate to washing, detangling, conditioning, and styling their natural hair. The significance of wash day goes far beyond hair care—it’s an opportunity for Black women to pour love into their curly, coily locks and, when they have children, pass on this sacred ritual to the next generation. Wash Day celebrates the unique bonds between Black mothers and their children through intimate photographs of their hair-care routines and insightful stories that detail their natural hair journeys. Faxio brings you into the homes of twen

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Book SynopsisWritten by one of the foremost and widely-respected writers in the field, this volume sheds new light on the forms and premises of the communicative experience. In doing so, it challenges the theoretical positions of marxist and political economy of media analysts who focus largely on the structure of economic and social power within the media.Table of ContentsIntroduction. 1. Intentionality. 2. Sociability. 3. Sincerity. 4. Eventfulness. 5. Authenticity. 6. Identity. 7. Dailiness.

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Book SynopsisPhilosophers have considered questions raised by the nature of art, of beauty, and critical appreciation since ancient times, and the discipline of aesthetics has a long tradition that stretches from Plato to the present.Trade Review"An anthology that paired the strongest evidence in favor of the tradition with the strongest evidence against it would have obvious appeal for many teachers of aesthetics, especially those of us who remain genuinely ambivalent about the tradition. That anthology does not yet exist, at least to my knowledge. In the meantime, the next best thing may be to pair this provocative collection with one of its more traditional competitors." James Shelley, American Society for Aesthetics "Carolyn Korsmeyer has produced a very useful anthology which will undoubtedly become a well used textbook for students of aesthetics and a valuable source of otherwise less readily available texts...the volume is radical in enriching the discipline and Korsmeyer has made the presence of women scholars and feminist theory in philosophy felt in fundamental ways." Melanie Selfe, Women's Philosophy Review, Special Issue no. 25, 2000Table of ContentsList of Plates. Acknowledgments. Introduction. Part One: What is Art?. Preface. John Dewey. The Live Creature. Richard L. Anderson, from Calliope's Sisters. The Artworld. Arthur C. Danto. Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts. Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock. Zen and the Art of Tea. D. T. Suzuki. Dressing Down Dressing Up. The Philosophic Fear of Fashion. Karen Hanson. Part Two: Experience and Appreciation: How Do We Encounter Art?. Preface. A Contested Term: What is "Aesthetic"?. The Aesthetic Attitude. Jerome Stolnitz. Locating the Aesthetic. Marcia Eaton. From Truth and Method. Hans Georg Gadamer. How is Art Presented to the Public?. Artistic Dropouts. Kevin Melchionne. Museums: From Object to Experience. Hilde Hein. The MoMA's Hot Mamas. Carol Duncan. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Arthur Danto. Part Three: Aesthetic Evaluation: Who Decides?. Preface. Of the Standard of Taste. David Hume. From Distinction. Pierre Bourdieu. Disinterestedness and Political Art. Peggy Zeglin Brand. High and Low Thinking About High and Low Art. Ted Cohen. Part Four: Can We Learn from Art?. Preface. From The Republic. Plato. The Sovereignty of Good. Iris Murdoch. From Love's Knowledge. Martha Nussbaum. Carnage and Glory, Legends and Lies. Michael Norman. Paintings and Their Places. Susan L. Feagin. Part Five: Tragedy, Sublimity, Horror: Why Do We Enjoy Painful Experiences in Art?. Preface. Tragedy: Sophocles, Choral Ode from Oedipus at Colonus. From the Poetics. Aristotle. From The Birth of Tragedy. Friedrich Nietzsche. Sublimity. Descent into the Maelstrom. Edgar Allen Poe. From A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edmund Burke. From The Critique of Judgement. Immanuel Kant. Horror. From The Philosophy of Horror. Noel Carroll. Realist Horror. Cynthia Freeland. Part Six: Where is the Artist in the Work of Art?. Preface. Genius and Creativity. From Critique of Judgement. Kant. Gender and Genius. Christine Battersby. Interpreting the Artist in Society. What is an Author? Michael Foucault. Truth and other Cultures. Michael Baxandall. Musical Thinking and Thinking About Music. Bruno Nettl. Index.

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Book SynopsisBringing together essays by museum professionals and academics from both sides of the Atlantic, Art and its Publics tackles current issues confronting the museum community and seeks to further the debate between theory and practice around the most pressing of contemporary concerns.Trade Review"This book deserves a place on the museum-studies reading list and on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in the cultural place of museums today. Its lucid, observant essays take an informed look at a now ubiquitous institution, offering new points of view about the nature of the museum experience. Art and its Publics provides a welcome corrective to the presumption that art museums are monolithic institutions that narrowly control the perceptions and discussions of their visitors." Diana Strazdes, University of California, Davis "Art and its Publics launches a much-needed exploration of art's audiences beginning with McClellan's ‘A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,’ an essay which is well worth the book's price alone." Jeffrey Abt, Wayne State University "A stimulating and provocative review of the range of diverse exhibition strategies used by art museum curators as they endeavor to engage multiple audiences in different aspects of art." Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, University of LeicesterTable of ContentsList of Illustrations. List of Contributors. Series Editor's Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. A Brief History of the Art Museum Public: Andrew McClellan (Tufts University). 3. Having One’s Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era: Nick Prior (University of Edinburgh). 4. Museums: Theory, Practice and Illusion: Danielle Rice (Philadelphia Museum of Art). 5. Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim: Alan Wallach (College of William and Mary). 6. The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Museum Display: Stephen Bann (Bristol University). 7. Museum Sight: Anne Higonnet (Wellesley College). 8. Sacred to Profane and Back Again: Ivan Gaskell (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University). 9. From Theory to Practice: Exhibiting African Art in the Twenty-first Century: Christa Clarke (Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY). 10. Reframing Public Art: Audience Use, Interpretation, and Appreciation: Harriet F. Senie (CUNY). Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisLiterature and Film is a cornucopia of vibrant essays that chart the history and confluence of literature and film. It explores in detail a wide and international spectrum of novels and adaptations, bringing together the very latest scholarship in the field.Trade Review“Stam and Raengo's Literature and Film offers a wonderful collection of approaches to the multifaceted and sometimes contradictory relationship between the written word and the filmic image, bringing into the discussion a refreshing series of examples drawn from international and minority cinemas.” Richard Pea, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsList of Illustrations. Notes on Contributors. Preface. Acknowledgments. Introductory Essay: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation: Robert Stam. 1. Improvements and Reparations at Mansfield Park: Tim Watson (Princeton University). 2. Keeping the Carcass in Motion: Adaptation and Transmutations of the National in The Last of the Mohicans: Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (California State University, Channel Islands). 3. The Discreet Charm of the Leisure Class: Terence Davies's The House of Mirth: Richard Porton (Cineaste magazine). 4. In Search of Adaptation: Proust and Film: Melissa Anderson (CUNY Graduate Center). 5. The Grapes of Wrath: Thematic Emphasis through Visual Style: Vivian C. Sobchack (UCLA). 6. Cape Fear and Trembling: Familial Dread: Kirsten Thompson (Wayne State University). 7. The Carnival of Repression: German Left Wing Politics and The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum: Alexandra Seibel (New York University). 8. Serial Time: Bluebeard in Stepford: Bliss Cua Lim (University of California, Irvine). 9. Boyz ‘N the Hood Chronotope: Spike Lee, Richard Price, and the Changing Authorship of Clockers: Paula J. Massood (Brooklyn College, CUNY). 10. Defusing The English Patient: Patrick Deer (New York University). 11. Carnivals and Goldfish: History and Crisis in The Butcher Boy: Jessica Scarlata (New York University). 12. Mild Revisionism, Failed Revolts: Esquivel's and Arau's Like Water for Chocolate, A Retrospective View: Dianna C. Niebylski (University of Kentucky). 13. Beloved: The Adaptation of an American Slave Narrative: Mia Mask (New York University). 14. Oral Traditions, Literature and Cinema in Africa: Mbye Cham (Howard University). 15. Memory and History in the Politics of Adaptation: Revisiting the Partition of India in Tamas: Ranjani Mazundar (Jamia Millia Islamia). 16. The Written Scene: Writers as Figures of Cinematic Redemption: Paul Arthur (Montclair State University). Index

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Book SynopsisBetween the cultural ephemera, folklore, song, and history embedded in Moses’s paintings and the potent advertising shorthand for Americana that her images rapidly became, this book reveals the widespread longing for the memories, comforts, and small victories of a mythic, intimate American past tapped by the phenomenon of Grandma Moses.Trade ReviewTo most Americans [Grandma Moses’s] art was real art, the genuine, accessible thing, as opposed to the Abstract Expressionist painting being promoted in certain quarters as the internationalist face of American culture in the 1950’s. It’s a little startling to revisit the art wars waged in the popular press of that era, as one can do in Designs on the Heart… Public battles over ‘highbrow’ versus ‘lowbrow’ had a heated, personal urgency rarely inspired by art today. -- Holland Cotter * New York Times *Asking Karal Ann Marling to write a catalogue for a museum exhibition…is a little like asking Jamie Oliver to fix a snack. That you will get anything less than a feast is unimaginable… Marling [is] a stunningly astute observer of American visual culture… Like the best works of cultural criticism, Designs on the Heart will leave the reader saying ‘Of course! How could I not have thought of this before, it’s so self-evidently true? And yet, I would never have asked these questions or connected these dots myself.’ And, like the best works of historical scholarship, it will leave readers asking new questions about our own cultural icons. -- Lauren F. Winner * Books & Culture *Delightful. Marling’s book is neither a straight biography nor a coffeetable picture book. Rather, it is an affectionate analysis of the ‘Grandma’ phenomenon, albeit laced with plenty of photos, biographical stories and images of Moses’ art. -- Mary Abbe * Minneapolis Star-Tribune *In Designs on the Heart: The Homemade Art of Grandma Moses, Karal Ann Marling sets out to explain Grandma Moses’ continuing status as an American icon and her art’s eternal popularity. The book contains photos of Moses and her environs, as well as plenty of color plates of her work. -- Jay Strafford * Richmond Times-Dispatch *How Grandma Moses was discovered in the village of Hoosick Falls, New York, and how she went on to become a worldwide cultural phenomenon are questions answered in an extraordinary and compelling story revealed in Karal Ann Marling’s new book, Designs on the Heart: The Homemade Art of Grandma Moses. -- Peter McLaughlin * Berkshire Living *Karal Ann Marling has long provided astute and sympathetic commentary on diverse facets of American popular culture. Designs on the Heart continues in this vein: a great read full of interesting insights about an American artist that we all really ‘know’ but really don’t know much about. Grandma Moses remains an icon of American art today, and Karal Ann Marling’s new book helps explain why. -- Erika Doss, Professor of Art History, University of Colorado, and author of Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American CommunitiesIt is no mean feat to recast a national icon in a new light, but Karal Ann Marling manages to do so. Marling’s text is a provocative delight—lively, insightful, and mercifully free of jargon. It is an important contribution to the appreciation of a singular artistic personality; equally significant, it provides new illumination to a telling episode in American taste. Students of both art history and American Studies—as well as the legions of Grandma Moses admirers—should find it a valuable addition to the literature. This is the way art history ought to be written. Another Marling triumph. -- Charles C. Eldredge, Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art and Culture, University of Kansas, and author of Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern

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Book SynopsisIn 1805, Jean Jacques Audubon fled violence in Haiti and France to take refuge in America. Ten years later, John James Audubon was a U.S. citizen reinventing himself as a naturalist and artist. The drawings he made in this decade, of specimens collected in France and in America, are published here for the first time in large format and full color.Trade ReviewAudubon: Early Drawings is a record of nature and of Audubon’s own artistic apprenticeship—we can watch Audubon becoming Audubon. The earliest drawings—done in watercolor and, later, pastel—are simple profiles of birds silhouetted against the blank page with little in the way of natural context. They are delicate, hesitant, almost childlike renderings. Later drawings—made after Audubon had invented his celebrated technique of pinning dead birds into naturalistic poses—are more lifelike and animated, more confidently rendered. These look toward the fully realized images of The Birds of America, with their intense drama and implied narratives. Even at an early stage this self-taught artist possessed a powerful sense of color and a keen sensitivity to the way light can model a form. Yet we see him reaching the limits of his technique in his almost-but-not-quite depiction of the male wood grouse’s variegated plumage. Mastery would come later. Each rendering in Audubon: Early Drawings gets both a full-page reproduction and a facing-page commentary. About a bird known as the Willet, shown with a worm squirming in its beak, we read: ‘The May date of this drawing tells us that Audubon crossed paths with the Willet during the spring migration between its wintering grounds on the Gulf Coast of Mexico and the Caribbean and its breeding areas in wetlands of the interior West.’ We are right there with Audubon, his traveling bird and the unlucky worm. -- Eric Gibson * Wall Street Journal *Before [Birds of America] made him famous, [Audubon] had spent decades trying to find a way to make his birds appear to fly off the page. This collection of 116 early drawings, published together for the first time, shows that while his early birds didn’t quite take off, they did have a delicacy and charm that somehow went missing from his later masterworks. -- Stephanie Pain * New Scientist *One of the great pleasures of Audubon: Early Drawings, with its lavish reproductions and scientific notes, is that it allows us to see the naturalist turning into the artist, laboring not merely to give his birds scientific accuracy but an almost uncanny life force. -- Jonathan Rosen * New York Times Book Review *This is the first book to collect and reproduce the pastel, ink, and watercolor studies from early in [Audubon’s] career—it’s not hard to glean the first principle that makes his illustrations so effective: spareness. Although Audubon usually sketches in some contextual clues—a tree stump, some sand, three or four leaves—his pages are remarkably blank. What he is really studying is the bird, so Audubon surrounds the specimen—the osprey, the bullfinch, or the linnet—in white, letting his notes take care of the habitat, migration patterns, and the rest. Audubon preemptively limits the context, isolating and foregrounding the more salient details so we know at a glance what’s important and what isn’t. -- Dushko Petrovich * Boston Globe *In 1805, Jean-Jacques (later to become John James) Audubon, the son of a chambermaid who worked on his father’s plantation in Saint-Domingue, was a refugee in America from revolutionary violence in Haiti and France, and still many years away from the celebrity he was later to achieve as a wildlife illustrator. Yet, as Audubon: Early Drawings clearly demonstrates, he used the next ten years to lay the foundations for the mastery he was to acquire in bird illustration. As these drawings, which include European as well as American species, eloquently show, he had above all mastered the art of imbuing the dead specimens from which he worked with a vitality that makes them look for all the world like birds seen in the wild. -- Peter Davies * Literary Review *These drawings are interesting not just because of their seemingly naive charm, but also because of their great technical distance from the work produced in Birds of America. In this collection, the birds appear in more or less stilted poses, usually in profile. They appear almost always on an otherwise empty page. Audubon offers terse notes to describe their habits, a practice he dropped in Birds. -- Cornelia Dean * New York Times *These 116 early Audubons from the collections of Harvard University provide a perspective on the development of the artist’s mature style. In accordance with established ornithological presentation of the time, most of the birds are stiffly posed in profile with little or no background. Some drawings, however, show their subjects in action or include details of diet or habitat—approaches Audubon took to portray specimens as ‘drawn from Nature’ in his monumental The Birds of America. The watercolors and pastels of the European species were executed in France in 1805 and 1806, and those of the North American birds date from 1805 to 1821. The captions discuss when and where Audubon collected the specimens. Morris, Rhodes, and Edwards contribute essays on the history of the drawings, the artist’s life, and his science. * Science *Drawings [Audubon] made during the period leading up to the publication of his famous The Birds of America are held by the Houghton Library and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and are published together here for the first time in large format and full color. Audubon biographer Richard Rhodes provides background to their creation. Also included are transcriptions of Audubon’s annotations to the drawings and ornithological commentary on Audubon’s depictions of birds found in Europe and the Eastern United States in the early nineteenth century, some now rare or extinct. * Antiques and Fine Art *Prior to the publication of Birds of America, John James Audubon spent decades honing his talents. Audubon: Early Drawings sheds insight into Audubon’s trajectory as an artist and naturalist, offering 116 bird and mammal images from the fledgling stages of his career… A wide-eyed belted kingfisher is charming with a disheveled crown of slate blue plumes. Meanwhile, the composition of a Carolina parakeet perched among pecan branches is appealing not only for its organic symmetry but for its value as one of the few visual records of the now-extinct species—a reminder of Audubon’s timeless relevance. -- Julie Leibach * Audubon *Impressive in its oblong shape and handsomely slip-cased in cloth, Audubon: Early Drawings represents the first large-format full-color publication of the Harris Collection [in the Houghton Library at Harvard University], comprising 116 depictions of species Audubon collected in the United States and Europe, dating primarily between 1805 and 1832. Because they are the product of his own hand, and not the intermediary hands of engravers and colorists, these drawings convey a wonderful immediacy. Graphite, ink, and pastels were his preferred mediums—pastels proving early on more satisfying and more easily manipulated than watercolors. And by noting the dates of each work we witness the gradual refinement of his technique: before 1810 the meticulous attention to details of feathers, feet, and claws seems almost naive against the relative flatness of his colors. By 1810, however, we see the emerging hand of the master in such finely delineated and colored works as the Frog Eater (Redshouldered Hawk) of 1810 and the pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers of 1812. * The Magazine Antiques *John James Audubon’s distinctive role in American ornithology, natural history, and art has long been acknowledged by the numerous volumes that have been published on his life, career, and accomplishments. This handsome volume further contributes to an understanding of the diverse genius and artistic creativity of Audubon by presenting, in meticulously printed colored plates, 116 of his earliest bird drawings (American and European) from the collections of the Houghton Library and Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Beginning in 1805 with one of his earliest drawings, these plates allow readers to examine Audubon’s evolving style and skills as an ornithological artist. Each plate is accompanied by the name given the species by Audubon; the location where the bird was observed, or collected; and the date. Particularly interesting are the ornithological notes on the natural history and unique characteristics of the species included with each plate. These plates are known as the Harris Collection, and a brief but informative essay provides an introduction to this Harvard collection. -- P. D. Thomas * Choice *

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Book SynopsisSydney J. Freedberg presents an interpretive analysis and a full Catalogue Raisonné of Andrea del Sarto's achievement. The interpretive work includes an account of Andrea's career as a painter, illustrations of all his authentic paintings and many of his drawings, a brief biography, and a selective bibliography. The painter's style and its place in the history of Italian painting are discussed in detail. The author questions current concepts of a sudden triumph of Mannerism in Florence after 1520 and presents a more balanced interpretation of this era. The Catalogue Raisonné includes a complete critical catalogue of Andrea's paintings and drawings, an inventory of lost works, and a full account of paintings and drawings attributed to the artist. Documentary information on Andrea's life and the details of dating and attribution which are the basis for the interpretive text are also included. The illustrations in this volume supplement those in the interpretive work and will be of particular interest to scholars and art historians.

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Book SynopsisOffers commentary and an illustrated history of the representations of people of African descent ranging from the ancient images of Pharaohs created by unknown hands to the works of the great European masters such as Bosch, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Hogarth to stunning creations by contemporary black artists.Trade ReviewA fascinating story of the changing image of Africa's people in Western art. The images are simply extraordinary and the scholarship inspiring. Anyone who cares about Western art or about Africa and her diaspora ought to know these magnificent volumes. -- Kwame Anthony AppiahReview of the previous editions: One concludes from these pioneering volumes that artistic representations were historical "events" that eventually helped to shape a mentality that justified the enslavement of millions of Africans as well as later attempts to Christianize and liberate their descendants. -- David Brion Davis * New York Review of Books *In addition to being an indispensable guide to the evolving meanings of racial difference, these dazzling volumes filled with extraordinary images and rich arguments contribute to an alternative history of the Western world. An invaluable gift for both specialists and general readers. -- Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double ConsciousnessOne of the most thorough collections depicting the African-American in works of art...The books build on the research and photo project started by art patron Dominique de Menil in the 1960s, which grew out of a frustration with segregation. The collection was then transferred and continued to grow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. De Menil's original volumes have been updated by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. and now include more detailed descriptions and provide a larger context of the artwork that spans more than 5,000 years, including the Roman Empire to present-day pieces, filling in tremendous gaps in de Menil's collection, according to some art historians. The images, printed in full-color on high-quality pages, are available for the masses to see and understand how African-Americans not only fit into the various societies of the Western world, but how those relationships evolved throughout the ages. * Kirkus Reviews *The volumes so far are a treasury of paintings and sculptures of people down the ages, taking in many strands of ritual, classicism, artlessness and humanity. -- William Feaver * Spectator *A sumptuous new edition with much additional material and copious color pictures....The books are a wonderful resource: a glitteringly decorated window into the Du Bois Institute's unrivalled archive of relevant images. The accompanying essays, which are models of erudition, are inescapable reading for anyone interested in the subject. -- Felipe Fernández-Armesto * The Art Newspaper *The joy of this series lies in the illustration and discussion of imagery found not only in paintings and woodcuts, but also in mosaics, illuminated manuscripts, and murals. -- K. Mason * Choice *Monumental and groundbreaking volumes...[with] beautifully reproduced and thought-provoking images…A vast array of different "Images of the Black" appear in these volumes, from statues of black saints such as St. Maurice or St. Benedict the Moor, to portraits of notable African ambassadors and kings, poets and musicians, or drawings of literary characters such as Shakespeare's Othello, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or Yarico from George Colman's Inkle and Yarico...Africans have been painted and sculpted by some of the most eminent artists in the Western tradition, including Titian, Tiepolo, Rubens, Rembrandt,Van Dyck, Reynolds, Hogarth, Watteau and Gainsborough. More importantly, they have not been caricatured, but sensitively portrayed by these masters, their humanity captured on canvas for all to see...In placing such a vast variety of different images together, both positive and negative, these volumes show that the "Image of the Black" was not at all homogenous but rather reflected the wide range of the Western response to the "other."...Seen through the prism of "Western Art," these "Images of the Black" often tell us more about the Europeans and their agendas than the Africans they portray. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of the images is to demonstrate a continuous black presence in the Western imagination and experience…This series will pose new questions to scholars of art, history and literature and provoke us all to reconsider the role of "the Black" in Western civilization. -- Miranda Kaufmann * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisSlaves and Liberators looks at the political implications of the representation of Africans, from the morality of slavery, through abolitionism, to European imperialism in Africa. Popular imagery and great works, like Turner's Slave Ship, cast light on widely differing European responses to Africans and their descendants.Trade ReviewA fascinating story of the changing image of Africa's people in Western art. The images are simply extraordinary and the scholarship inspiring. Anyone who cares about Western art or about Africa and her diaspora ought to know these magnificent volumes. -- Kwame Anthony AppiahIn addition to being an indispensable guide to the evolving meanings of racial difference, these dazzling volumes filled with extraordinary images and rich arguments contribute to an alternative history of the Western world. An invaluable gift for both specialists and general readers. -- Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double ConsciousnessThe Image of the Black in Western Art [is] a truly epic project...The series, scheduled for completion in 2014, is, so far, as eye-opening to view as it is to read and, one volume at a time, could be the answer to gift gifting for several years to come. -- Holland Cotter * New York Times *

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