Search results for ""Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum""

Through the lens of seven scholars, this book examines fine art and commercial design as they both reflected and helped create the vibrant culture of public spectacle in late nineteenth-century Paris. Posters and prints circulated across the city, as the new art form of cinema flourished, all part of a diverse urban climate of leisure that was particularly French. These rich visual materials served to promote the careers and talents of such celebrities as Jane Avril, Loie Fuller, and Sarah Bernhardt. Alphonse Mucha and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec developed the potential of color lithography to meet the demands of these stars, while fine artists ranging from Edgar Degas andedouard Manet to Pablo Picasso andedouard Vuillard focused on such spectacles as the racetrack, ballet, cafe-concert, theater, and opera, asserting them as defining elements of Parisian modernity in this image-saturated milieu.

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Thaddeus Strode's vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. "Absolutes and Nothings" marks the artist's first major museum show, presented as part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum's "Contemporary Projects" series.Strode's images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist's own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode's aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic - and captivating - fantasies. Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, "Absolutes and Nothings" is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.

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We are in the dawn of the drone age, a turning point in history when the United States and other countries are increasingly using unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor behavior, collect data, conduct surveillance, and wage wars. As the ubiquitous vision and remote engagement of drones redefine contemporary policing and warfare, their impact is filtering into art and visual culture, generating new investigations into issues of visibility, technology, and fear. Considering an international array of video, sculpture, installation, photography, and web-based projects, this volume, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, reveals the unique potential of art to further our understanding of, and give visual form to, modern drone warfare and digital surveillance. These essays illuminate how the drone embodies a far-reaching discussion about the rapidly shifting conditions of perception of seeing, and of being seen made possible by advanced technology. What is the relation of machine vision to human vision? And how do visual technologies affect our understanding of the agency of images, and of ourselves? Featuring scholarly essays along with texts by contributing artists Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl, To See Without Being Seen is a perceptive contribution to the emerging literature on contemporary artistic practice, war, surveillance, and technology.

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The first monograph on the work of the American painter Arthur Osver (1912-2006), this publication explores Osver's entire oeuvre, from early urban realism to decades of engagement with abstraction. His long and productive career took him from Chicago to New York to Europe and back, interweaving with the art of his time, and his paintings have been collected and exhibited all over the world. Nevertheless, he remained firmly rooted in the American Midwest, settling in St. Louis to teach and paint from 1960 until his death in 2006. Beautifully designed and printed, this book includes 80 full-color plates of Osver's work throughout his life as well as an illustrated biography and selections from an interview with the artist from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

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Over the past two decades, the Chinese conceptual artist, activist, and exile Ai Weiwei has created art that addresses complex and sensitive themes of political, ethical, and social urgency. His artworks, which call upon both Western and Chinese cultural traditions, are deeply engaged with the history of art, drawing particularly on conceptualism and minimalism. Informed by the readymade—central to the work of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol—his work questions the status of the work of art itself, blurring the lines between art and non-art, invention and appropriation, structure and openness, even fiction and fact. From the start of his multifaceted career in the late 1970s, Ai has envisioned artistic practice as a deeply human, moral, and political endeavor. This volume—a hybrid between a scholarly study and an exhibition catalog—presents the artist’s work in dialogue with theoretical texts by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt alongside interpretive essays that illuminate the artist’s work on human rights, his engagement with historical Chinese artifacts, and his critical consideration of the effects of globalization. The book includes a new essay on human rights by Ai Weiwei and an interview in which he discusses his artwork and activism. It also features installation photographs of the corresponding exhibition. By exploring Ai Weiwei’s artistic practice in dialogue with philosophies, theories, and concepts that connect human life and political power, this publication offers new insights into one of the most important artists working today.

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Contemporary artist Allison Smith's diverse creative practice critically engages with popular forms of historical reenactment through a variety of media, including sculpture, textiles, ceramics, and photography. Focusing on the handmade and performative aspects of history and material culture, Smith re-stages, refigures, and replays the role of traditional crafts in large-scale installations that reconsider the construction of collective memory and identity. For the core of Allison Smith: Needle Work, the artist created contemporary revisions of European and American gas masks from World War I and World War II. Smith used art supplies found at local fabric and craft retail stores to explore a range of masklike forms - from the ghoulish to the foolish - thereby questioning essential notions of camouflage and masquerade. This exhibition catalog, illustrated throughout in color, includes an essay that considers Smith's project in light of Peter Sloterdijk's "Terror from the Air", as well as in-depth interviews with the artist and the curator.

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Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III is the third volume in a series examining the work of acclaimed video artist and photographer Sharon Lockhart. Known for collaborating with remote or marginal communities such as blue-collar workers of the twenty-first century, as she did in Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break I, the artist also blurs the line between photography, video art, and documentary. The results are staged and artificial, yet at the same time intimate and deeply human. Her newest museum installations also incorporate artworks and utilitarian objects made by others, expanding upon earlier forms of institutional critique. This book includes essays by curators and scholars who provide an international perspective on the artist's evolving series. Stunningly illustrated, Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III serves as a reminder of the power and beauty of Lockhart's art.

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