Search results for ""fowler museum at ucla""

This lavishly illustrated volume, demonstrating the scope and depth of the vast and remarkable global collections of the Fowler Museum at ucla, has been produced as part of the ongoing celebration of the institution’s fiftieth-anniversary year. It recalls many of the highlights of the Museum’s formation, focusing not only on collections development but also on a long history of programmatic innovation. The book begins with an essay by the Museum’s director, Marla C. Berns, which sketches the Fowler’s history, and this is followed by a section reproducing in color and large format 250 stunning works from the collection. Berns’s lengthy history of involvement with the Fowler - which began when she worked for the Museum as a graduate intern while pursuing her doctorate at UCLA - and the innovative strategies she has introduced, have uniquely situated her to author this book.

Read more less

Chicano activist, poet, artist, intellectual, professor, and musician, José Montoya (1932–2013) was a veritable Renaissance man. Montoya often found inspiration in the verdant fields of the San Joaquin Valley where his family arrived from their home in New Mexico in the 1940s looking for work. The visual artist and poet humanized the farmworker and understood the backbreaking work of field labor from firsthand experience. A Chicano civil rights activist, he marched alongside Cesar Chavez and advanced the cause of the United Farm Workers movement to bring justice and dignity to agricultural laborers. José Montoya’s Abundant Harvest honors the artist’s prolific work as well as his subject matter in this energetic survey that includes eighty-one of his drawings.

Read more less

Botswana-born Meleko Mokgosi is an emerging contemporary artist whose large-scale figurative paintings are garnering growing accolades and attention worldwide. In all his work, Mokgosi emphasizes narrative storytelling. This approach inspires the viewer to think deeply about the politics, power structures, and role of history in the creation of independent nations of southern Africa. Mokgosi organizes his episodic painting cycles like chapters in a book. “Bread, Butter, and Power” forms a chapter in his current series, “Democratic Intuition,” which seeks to explore the many ways democratic concepts influence life, love, and relationships. This monograph, with an essay by the exhibition’s curator, discusses and contextualizes “Bread, Butter, and Power,” illustrating it fully and including gatefolds that allow the reader to see how the cycle is intended to be presented and experienced. Mokgosi’s work is especially important now, because he is among a small group of individuals giving voice to the generation that grew up in the post-1960s euphoria of independence. Mokgosi seeks to illustrate many untold experiences of southern Africa, drawing imagery from South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana.

Read more less

Enduring Splendor focuses on the rich and diverse silver jewelry traditions of India’s Thar Desert region, stretching across the western states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. These traditions are considered against the background of the five-thousand-year history of jewelry making across the vast Indian Subcontinent. Drawing on recent field research carried out in the city of Jaisalmer, a thriving center of contemporary jewelry production, Enduring Splendor explores for the first time the life and work of four sonis (silversmiths or goldsmiths). To contextualize this recent production, numerous illustrations of very fine examples of ninteenth- and twentieth-century jewelry types that are still worn are included. These objects have been borrowed from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Collection of Jewelry and Ritual Arts of India, part of a promised gift to UCLA, where it will find its future home with the Fowler Museum. The Linde Collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of Indian jewelry in the world. This volume highlights elaborate rural styles rendered in silver as well as selected ornate examples, largely associated with the elite, made with gold and gemstones.

Read more less

World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou gives us a large-scale immersive environment that combines the artist's sculpture, drawings, and poetry with Fowler artworks. Assembled from a stunning diversity of materials and found objects, Tayou’s art is characterized by an aesthetic of accumulation. He pierces Styrofoam with thousands of pins and razor blades, stacks hundreds of birdhouses against a wall, and adorns crystal glass figures with beads, plastic flowers, and feathers. This approach derives in part from the ways African sculpture is empowered with accumulations of materials to assert various kinds of religious, social, and political authority. Tayou uses this aesthetic to raise searching questions about inequalities of wealth and power in today’s postcolonial, global context at the same time he explores the hidden, spiritual forces that infuse ordinary, everyday life in African cities. Pascale Marthine Tayou was born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon, and lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

Read more less

Summoning the Ancestors explores a collection of 72 ofo (small ritual objects) and 74 bells produced in southern Nigeria by Igala, Igbo, Edo, Yorùbá, and other neighboring peoples, which was gifted to the Fowler Museum by Mark Clayton. The use of bronze ofo, dynamic symbols of one’s relationship with the ancestors, dates back to at least the fifteenth century. Ofo likely derive from wire-wrapped bundles of twigs from a tree venerated in southern Nigeria. Bells—largely made in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries—were cast in copper alloys of bronze or brass, using the lost-wax technique. Many were rung to invoke ancestors or nature spirits, and some announced the presence of important members of the living world, such as priests or local rulers. Richly illustrated, Summoning the Ancestors highlights the remarkable degree of variation possible even in such modest artistic genres.

Read more less

Axé Bahia examines the unique cultural role played by Salvador, the coastal capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia. An internationally renowned center of Afro-Brazilian culture, Salvador has been a vibrant and important hub of African-inspired artistic practices in Latin America since the 1940s. This volume represents the most comprehensive investigation in the United States of Bahian arts to date and features essays by eighteen international scholars. While adding to popular understandings of core expressions of African heritage, such as the religion Candomblé, the essays explore in depth the complexities of race and cultural affiliation in Brazil and the provocative ways in which artists have experienced and responded creatively to prevailing realities of Afro-Brazilian identity in Bahia. Lavishly illustrated, the book features works by artists ranging from modernists, among them Mário Cravo Neto, Rubem Valentim, and Pierre Verger, to contemporary artists Rommulo Vieira Conceicao, Caetano Dias, Helen Salomao, Ayrson Heráclito, and others—including a stunning array of sculpture, painting, photography, video, and installation art. The exhibition was part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Read more less

For hundreds of years, skilled craftspeople in the Syrian centers of Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs produced intricately woven textiles for the royal courts, worldly merchants, and elite Bedouin families of the Ottoman Empire. City dwellers were renowned for wearing brightly colored silk garments that glittered with gold and silver threads. By contrast, nomadic Bedouins wore woolen garments in hues and designs reflecting their desert lifestyle. The allure of these garments stems from the technical virtuosity with which they were woven and the aesthetic beauty of their drape and stylized designs. Dressed with Distinction offers a window onto the history of textile production in the Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until political and social changes led to the dominance of Western-style commercially manufactured attire. In addition to articulating the social and seasonal contexts in which the garments were worn, this book examines the styles of dress of women, men, and children in Ottoman Syria, including cloaks (abaya), head coverings (hatta), women’s body coverings (carsaf), and jackets (qumbas).

Read more less

For more than two millennia, African blacksmiths have transformed one of Earth’s most basic natural resources into objects of life-changing utility, empowerment, prestige, spiritual potency, and astonishing artistry—shaping African cultures in the most fundamental ways. Striking Iron combines interdisciplinary scholarship with vivid illustrations to offer the most comprehensive treatment to date of the blacksmith’s art in sub-Saharan Africa. Interspersed throughout are photographs of more than 250 diverse works from over 100 ethnic groups—including tools, blades, currencies, wood sculptures studded with iron, musical instruments, and accoutrements—with field photographs documenting blacksmiths at work and objects in use. Seventeen contributors write from the disciplinary perspectives of art history, art, anthropology, archaeology, history, and astronomy, examining how the blacksmiths’ virtuosity can harness powers of the natural and spiritual worlds, effect change and ensure protection, assist with life’s challenges and transitions, and enhance the efficacies of sacred acts. Exhibition dates: Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, November 19, 2019, to March 29, 2020

Read more less

L.A. Xicano accompanies four interrelated exhibitions that explore the diverse artistic contributions of Mexican American and Chicano artists to American art and to Los Angeles's artistic development since 1945. The volume's six illustrated essays examine the life and works of dozens of artists and photographers. The authors consider the context of their turbulent history, particularly the development of the Chicano Movement. The L.A. Xicano project was organized by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in collaboration with the Autry National Center, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art L.A. Xicano accompanies four interrelated exhibitions that explore the diverse artistic contributions of Mexican American and Chicano artists to American art and to Los Angeles's artistic development since 1945. The volume's six illustrated essays examine the life and works of dozens of artists and photographers. The authors consider the context of their turbulent history, particularly the development of the Chicano Movement. The L.A. Xicano project was organized by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in collaboration with the Autry National Center, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Best Arts Book - English from the 2012 International Latino Book Awards

Read more less

Light and Shadows highlights the 2,700-year history of Jews in Iran. It reveals centuries of oppression, fascinating cultural borrowings, and great artistic achievements. The story is told through rare archaeological artifacts, illuminated manuscripts, beautiful ritual objects and amulets, ceremonial garments, musical instruments, photographs, and more. It examines as well the large-scale exodus of the Jewish community following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Today, at least 25,000 practicing Jews remain in Iran, unwilling to give up their ancestral home and the distinctive way of life they have led there. Light and Shadows is a co-publication between the Fowler Museum at UCLA and Beit Hatfutsot--The Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.

Read more less