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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Enrique Martínez Celaya’s aesthetic project revives and reinterprets the classic Western metaphysical tradition relating aesthetics to ethics, the Beautiful to the Good and the True. His work embodies his belief that being a certain kind of artist means being a certain kind of person and that in and through art he gains clarity about himself and his relationship to the world. His project is thus profoundly ethical and, in important ways, spiritual. Through art Martínez Celaya reconciles himself to the world as he reconciles his past with his present and projects his future. This volume also participates in the process of reconciliation and projection by interpreting his work through the series, cycles, and projects, which include painting, sculpture, photographs, poetry, and prose that have defined it since the mid-1990s. Curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Daniel A. Siedell, has worked with Martínez Celaya on several projects and offers a radical commentary on his work, arguing that Martínez Celaya’s ambitious aesthetic project is best understood as an embodiment of a religious Weltanschauung and as a search for that most elusive of religious virtues: hope. The complex cohesion of Martínez Celaya’s work is further explored by other writers, who by placing it in different contexts reveal their own distinctive engagement with it. Art critic Thomas McEvilley, a philologist who writes about art, philosophy, and religion, explores how Martínez Celaya has combined Germanic feeling with a surrealist plastic vocabulary to “present a world.” Literary critic and Paul Celan scholar John Felstiner traces the contours of an aesthetic lineage that includes Goya, Eliot, Celan, and Beethoven. Former Washington Post journalist and Hollywood producer and writer Christian Williams adopts the conventional artist’s chronology to craft a powerful account of Martínez Celaya’s life, which has become intimately entwined with his own.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star PressJoy Goswami is probably the most highly regarded Bengali poet today, a worthy successor, in a land of poets, to Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. Although his life has never been easy, his vocation as a poet has never been in doubt. The quality of Goswami’s prolific output has been widely acknowledged in West Bengal and India. Goswami’s poems are fierce—in their expression, in the impact of their juxtaposed images, and in the effect that the images have one on another. The poems possess immediacy, drawing readers pell-mell into the essential tensions and delighting in the magic of metamorphoses. Although readers might easily allow themselves to float on Goswami’s crisscrossing images, savor them on second reading, and linger with his crisp and penetrant words, they are quickly brought up short by meaning, for Goswami’s words are not just words but penetrating markers of sense. His métier is to cut through to the center of our emotional universe. Goswami has written more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose; this is the first American publication of his poems.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press For the Cowboy Junkies it all begins with a song: an acoustic guitar and a voice. But each song comes to each album with its own history, along its own strange path. Some are born and realized in a matter of minutes; others take years to finally find a place. Some pop out as perfect little gems; others mutate and transform themselves, stealing and pillaging from the unformed. XX celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the Cowboy Junkies, one of the most distinctive and influential rock bands in recent years. Starting with the seminal album The Trinity Session, the Canadian band's signature sound, based on traditional blues and post-punk rock, has garnered much critical acclaim and an uncommonly devoted international following. The Cowboy Junkies are guitarist and lyricist Michael Timmins, bassist Alan Anton, and Timmins's siblings Margo (lead vocals) and Peter (drums). This book, the first to focus on the Cowboy Junkies, offers an intimate look at the band through their own photographs and the poetic lyrics of Michael Timmins, who chose the selections. Each lyric is accompanied by a resonant illustration created by renowned artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, who is a friend and fan of the band.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press In the mid-1990s philosopher and cultural critic Richard Whittaker founded the art journal Works and Conversations to fill a gap in the contemporary discourse. Conversations with important artists have played a central role in the magazine, where Whittaker’s understated but perceptive questions have allowed artists to comment on their work, their philosophies, their influences, the difficulty of creating art, and the failures that are part of the creative process. The result of Whittaker’s attentive dialogue has been a series of fascinating and highly personal interviews that frequently contradict what others have said elsewhere about these artists. The Conversations brings together what Whittaker considers the sixteen most relevant interviews, providing remarkable insight into the individual artist’s work, mistakes, and philosophies as well as the social and cultural values in which these artists work. The artists interviewed are Richard Berger, Jim Campbell, Squeak Carnwath, James Doolin, Viola Frey, James Hubbell, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Michael C. McMillen, Nathan Oliveira, David Parker, Judy Pfaff, Irene Pijoan, Jane Rosen, Katherine Sherwood, James Turrell, and Ursula von Rydingsvard.

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In On Art and Mindfulness, world-renowned artist and celebrated teacher Enrique Martínez Celaya shares his views and advice on the art-making process, the development of a practice, the management of obstacles, and the day-to-day choices we must make in order to remain creative and honest. Drawn from the actual sold-out workshops that Martínez Celaya taught over nine years at the venerable Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado, these concise teachings are relevant not only to artists but to anyone wishing to live a mindful, productive life.Listen to an interview with Enrique Martínez Celaya. Read an excerpt.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Alchemy of Light offers an intimate look at the aesthetic world Mary Conover forms from the disparate influences of her life, the Jungian heritage, and the ineffable presence of the sea. The book explores the relationship between the wild and empty places where Conover works and her ideas about the world and her place in it. In palimpsest-like abstractions, she locates the search for self in the beauty and danger of untamed water and implacable desert. Alchemy of Light mirrors the artist’s alchemical process of acceptance and transmutation by presenting, without hierarchy, intricate personal notebooks, works in progress, influential writings, accomplished paintings in oil, collage, and digital photomontage. Conover tracks the seductions of risk in her peripatetic life. She describes how slowly acquiring the disciplines of yoga and meditation provided a structure for investigating consciousness in her work, with light as the primary metaphor. Collectively, the images and text in Alchemy of Light create a relevant portrait of an artist who transcends current trends in abstraction by the power of an internal vision.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was a skilled love poet who, through no choice of her own, became a witness to mass violence, a widely recognized exemplar of endurance and moral strength, and finally a symbol of Russian national resilience. At the start of her career, during the final years of the Russian Empire, Akhmatova was a cultural celebrity who fascinated a generation not only with her poetry but also with the drama that she created around herself. After the revolution of 1917, she was attacked as a decadent bourgeois author and driven into silence and obscurity. Living in relative poverty, with her family and friends repeatedly arrested and harassed, and she herself publicly cursed by the representatives of the state, Akhmatova survived the darkest decades of Soviet history. Near the end of her life, when timorous cultural bureaucrats allowed her to reemerge as a public figure, she revealed to readers that even if the “collective” had rejected her as an unworthy member she had continued to write poetry reflecting the trials and calamities of Soviet men and women with greater truth and moral authority than any official poet could attain.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Modeled after the famed TV sci-fi series The X-Files, The &-Files gathers together a covert body of documents following the long and often controversial career of Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism. Perceived through the eyes and ears of its longtime publisher and editor Paul Foss, The &-Files is comprised of an open letter, a lengthy interview, two questionnaires, and other commentaries and bibliographies, offering a unique insider account of the extraordinary advantages and pitfalls of publishing an art magazine.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Enrique Martínez Celaya’s blog, Bad Time for Poetry, began on August 24, 2007, and ended on May 25, 2009. In the emergence of the literary genre of the blog, Bad Time for Poetry existed as an antiblog, showing how this literary genre can be used to cultivate and preserve cultural commentary that has lasting value and is mindful of the past and responsible to the future. His posts were intended to be read closely, contemplated, and assimilated into readers’ lives. Martínez Celaya’s blog is now preserved in this complete compilation of his posts.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press This limited edition book documents the creation of four music albums in the Nomad Series. The 144-page full-color, hardcover book, wrapped in linen with a CD inset designed to hold the four volumes of the series, was designed and produced by Enrique Martínez Celaya. The book includes work drafts and photos relating to the creation of the Nomad Series as well as lyrics, essays, and original art work by Celaya.

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Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press With rare clarity and restraint, Martínez Celaya explores loss, alienation, foreignness and beauty as well as new ways to think about the art object and the problems it raises. What emerges is a body of work radically concerned with meaning. Loss and its transcendence through consciousness is the pervasive theme in Unbroken Poetry: The Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya. Martínez Celaya's world is revealed through an introspective essay by San Francisco writer and curator, Anne Trueblood Brodzky. Drawing from the artist's sketchbooks, personal interviews with the artist and the works of Martínez Celaya, Brodzky describes his impetus and methods in a conceptual volume of exceptional beauty and voice. The artist's disciplined joint pursuit of physics and art fuels conversations with New York artist Donald Baechler and Caltech physicist, Amnon Yariv. In Unbroken Poetry, we are invited to stand close to the visions of Enrique Martínez Celaya, not only to observe and empathize with his world but also to acknowledge the images brought forth from our own.

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