Search results for ""Marquand Books Inc""

A spirited guide to the century-old diorama halls at Los Angeles' Natural History Museum, where habitats across the globe mergeThe diorama halls at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) are among the oldest in the world, captivating Angelenos and tourists alike for over a century. Its immersive habitats range from the windswept ice of Greenland's musk ox to the quiet bamboo forests of Kenya's bongo antelope. Fabricating Wilderness, a PST ART project, is the first book to explore the art, science and history of NHM's remarkable habitat groups. Drawing upon new research, this behind-the-scenes tour is illustrated by both contemporary photographs and archival images. It takes readers through the origin of dioramas and the turbulent early history of NHM's halls, while also introducing the gifted artists who painted picturesque background murals and meticulously recreated every natural detail. Even at 100 years old, the story of NHM's diora

Read more less

Prescient prints from the golden age of Dutch satire This volume explores the satirical visual strategies that early modern Netherlandish printmakers—such as Joan Blaeu, Romeyn de Hooghe, Willem Jacobsz and Claes Jansz Visscher—used to memorialize historical events, lionize (or demonize) domestic and international leaders, and instigate collective action. While some of their prints employ visual puns that even the illiterate could enjoy, others were captioned in Latin, French or Dutch, prompting educated elites across Europe to consider the relationship between text and image in earnest. Published for an exhibit at Krannert Art Museum, Paper Knives, Paper Crowns provides a chronological arc and thematic overview of Netherlandish political prints, addressing multiple types of printmaking as well as the medium’s relationship to other art forms, engaging with art historical scholarship and studies of early modern political history and theory in the process.

Read more less

Dreamlike oil paintings positioning our present era as part of a larger mythology Vacillating between a highly stylized approach and startling realism, Portland-based Bangladeshi painter Srijon Chowdhury (born 1987) brings an uncanny contemporary twist to traditional genres like family portraiture and the vanitas still life. Accompanying his first solo museum exhibition, this volume provides an overview of Chowdhury’s burgeoning career.

Read more less

The prismatic work of the famed Mexican-American brothers merges religious iconography and German Expressionism with Mexican vernacular arts and pre-Columbian artThis zestful publication showcases the Mexican de la Torre brothers'Einar (born 1963) and Jamex (born 1960)particular vision of the Latino experience and American culture. Wielding a combination of humor and critical earnestness, the brothers continuously explore this vision through their mixed media works in a chameleonic-kaleidoscopic process that culminates in a palimpsest of images and meanings.Published in conjunction with the traveling exhibition, Collidoscope advances the scholarship concerning Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x artists in an effort to challenge the art historical record, asserting that Chicano art is American art.

Read more less

This handsome volume is the newest publication on the artwork of Tallur L.N. (born 1971), featuring works from the last 13 years. Using a range of media including found objects, appropriated industrial machines, carved stone and wood, cast bronze, and works embedded in concrete and studded with coins, Tallur questions the value we assign to money, icons and artifacts. Building on the rich sculptural traditions of India, he references ancient religious and patriotic iconography, and often invites the viewer to become a participant through his interactive works. Among the works documented here are two new site-specific installations and a new video work, Interference; (2019). The publication includes scholarly essays by art historian Chaitanya Sambrani and curator Gary Garrido Schneider, and presents new information on the art and politics of this important 21st-century artist.

Read more less

Colombian-born painter Fanny Sanin (born 1938) has dedicated a long, prolific career to the exploration of geometric abstraction; her oeuvre is characterized by large-scale canvases depicting hard-edge geometric compositions in vibrant color configurations. Over the past five decades, Sanin has exhibited widely, mainly in Latin America and the United States (where she has lived since the 1970s, in New York), positioning herself as one of Latin America's most extraordinary colorists.This publication is a long-overdue comprehensive monograph on this pioneering painter. Featuring contributions from prominent academics and curators such as Beverly Adams, Jay Oles and Edward J. Sullivan, the book contextualizes Sanin's work within international geometric abstraction and offers a glimpse into the artist's rigorous working process. It surveys her entire career, from her energetic abstractions of the 1960s through the evolution and continual refinement of her ongoing commitment to concrete abstraction.

Read more less

Mallarmé’s magnum opus rendered as an open-ended Tarot-esque card game Upon his death, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) left hundreds of notes on an unrealized great work he called The Book. Housed in a clear Plexiglas box, this card-deck conception of his project draws from that material, and from other writings alluding to its possible forms, including a letter in which he describes “a book that is architectural…. The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the sole duty of the poet, and the literary game par excellence.” The title of this game derives from another letter in which Mallarmé writes, “perhaps the title of my volume of lyric poetry will be The Glory of the Lie, or The Glorious Lie.” Each deck contains 48 cards: three with artwork on each side, and 45 with words or phrases on each side. The size of the cards, their gold edging and the physical housing of the decks in the box reflect descriptions and clues in Mallarmé’s notes. The manner of playing the game is left open, but quotes and diagrams by Mallarmé in the accompanying 20-page booklet point to the idea of pulling cards from each of the four decks and laying them out for one reading, then flipping the cards over for a second reading. The image cards function like the Arcana of Tarot, providing a visual language equal to the word cards. The readings might be used to create poetry or, like Tarot, to divine or illuminate.

Read more less

Celebrating 25 years of Artpace San Antonio’s dynamic residency program Published on the occasion of Artpace San Antonio’s 25th anniversary, this volume traces the influential Texas residency program’s evolution. It includes new curatorial texts and full-color images documenting exhibitions by residents such as Kader Attia, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Bradford, Anne Collier, Jamal Cyrus and Jennifer Ling Datchuk.

Read more less

Photobooth Pieces brings together for the first time in print a body of work little known or seen for nearly 40 years, by the pioneering American performance artist Jared Bark (born 1944). The selection of pictures in this volume covers a short but intense period of activity that the artist, a leading figure in the New York art world, undertook in his SoHo loft during the first half of the 1970s. These innovative constructions, assembled from photobooth strips, are an important addition to the history of art and photography of that time. The works are all reproduced at full scale and the book includes an essay by art historian Catherine Damman and an interview with the artist by Hannah Howe and Elizabeth Easton.

Read more less

Published by leading outsider art imprint Raw Vision, Singular Spaces is a groundbreaking survey of art environments created by self-taught artists from across Spain. The book introduces and examines 45 artists and their idiosyncratic sculptures, gardens and buildings, most of which have never been published. The sites are developed organically, without formal architectural or engineering plans; they are at once evolving and complete. Often highly fanciful and quixotic, the work is frequently characterized by incongruous juxtapositions, an approach that appears impulsive and spontaneous. Director of the organization SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), Jo Farb Hernández, combines detailed case studies of the artists and their work with contextualized historical and theoretical references to art history, anthropology, architecture, Spanish area studies and folklore. Breaking down the standard compartmentalization of genres, she reveals how most creators of art environments, who are building within their own personal spaces, fuse their creations with their daily lives.

Read more less

The Unknown Blakelock offers new perspectives on Ralph A. Blakelock (1847–1919) by addressing the modernity of his accomplishments as reflected in the exhibition’s paintings. A self-taught artist, Blakelock digressed from habitual procedures into stylistic experiments that were considerably in advance of common practice of the time. Associated primarily with the two dominant themes of moonlight views and Indian encampments, Blakelock was already acknowledged as a colorist during his career, an aspect of his painting attesting to his receptivity to modernist developments but largely overlooked in critical discourse. The works featured in this exhibition also attest to a salient characteristic of our own time, namely, the artist’s growing autonomy. The Unknown Blakelock explores this ongoing impact of Blakelock’s work, which has previously been placed in the context of the exploration of his own—not our—contemporaries.The Unknown Blakelock is a catalog of the exhibition of lesser-known works of Blakelock held at the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, from January 25 to August 24, 2008, and at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts in New York City, from September 25, 2008, to January 4, 2009.

Read more less

This volume explores how and why the second half of the 20th century proved such a fruitful moment for the ascendance of photography. It investigates pop art, conceptual art and emerging photo-based art forms such as film and television through the lens of fine-art photography and vernacular photography. In addition to an essay on the ill-fitting place of photography in art historical surveys of the 1960s and '70s, the book also includes essays by scholars and collectors reexamining more specialized outlets for photography. These include explorations of the use of collage, the brief fashion craze of paper dresses and the significance of television programing and news photography as source material for art production. Artists include: John Baldessari, Nan Goldin, Robert Heinecken, Andrej Paruzel, Hiromi Tuschida, Nam June Paik and Martha Rosler.

Read more less

An unprecedented and intimate look at the masking traditions of a Congolese tribe The Kuba of the Democratic Republic of Congo are recognized throughout the world for the beauty and inventiveness of their figure sculptures, decorative arts and surface design traditions. However, only a few scholarly articles have detailed the importance of Kuba masking traditions. A View from the Forest documents, in more than 160 photographs, Southern Kuba masking traditions associated with male initiation and funeral rites. This firsthand, intimate view of male initiation rites and mask making is the result of the author’s own experiences together with 25 young men in a forest initiation camp. The book reflects the passion, commitment and creativity of Southern Kuba men as they reveal the esoteric lore and teach mask-construction skills to the next generation. Belgian colonialism harshly affected the lives of all Congolese. Art-making in the form of masks, costumes, and community-wide performances proved to be a powerful form of resistance.

Read more less

Objects Are Closer Than They Appear showcases the works of German-born, Los Angeles–based artist Manfred Müller (born 1950) from the past 15 years. Ranging from wall and floor-bound sculptures and site-specific installations to prints, drawings and photography, Muüller’s work explores tensions between organic form and geometrical abstraction.

Read more less

This publication is part of a series of monographs from the Beijing-based gallery Ink Studio, featuring significant contemporary artists who work with Chinese brush and ink. Impulse, Matter, Form presents Chinese artist Zheng Chongbin (born 1961), whose work synthesizes Chinese and Western explorations in calligraphy and gesture.

Read more less

A survey of the acclaimed Omaha museum’s collection of European art The collection of European art at Joslyn Art Museum includes masterworks by Titian, Paolo Veronese, Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt van Rijn, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, as well as a significant group of 19th-century French academic paintings, with major examples by Jules Breton, William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Léon Gérôme. European Paintings and Sculpture from Joslyn Art Museum provides a richly illustrated catalog of 100 European artworks in the museum, presented chronologically from the late 13th to the early 20th century. Noted scholars and specialists in the field examine these works while considering artist biography, practice and technique, and cultural and historical contexts. An introductory essay offers an engaging history of the arts in Omaha and the formation of the museum’s European collection.

Read more less

“Engravings for the people”: a fresh appraisal of the printmakers Currier & Ives and their vision of America Currier & Ives was a powerhouse of 19th-century publishing and had an immeasurable influence on American visual culture. Founded in New York in 1834 by Nathaniel Currier, the company expanded to include a new partner, James Merritt Ives, after 1857. Currier & Ives produced millions of affordably priced copies of over 7,000 original lithographs, living up to its self-appointed title as “The Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints.” The firm took advantage of New York City’s booming arts culture in the latter half of the 19th century, but its output was not seen as fine art by critics, nor was it intended as such. Its prints were first and foremost commodities; the choice subjects often determined by popularity and sales figures. Currier & Ives perpetuated Victorian ideals in its depictions of family, history, politics and urban and suburban life. But these prints also served as an important record of a nation in the midst of an extraordinary transformation from a rural and agricultural landscape to an industrialized and urbanized global power. Along with their popular appeal, Currier & Ives’s images offer a new opportunity to uncover the complexities and contradictions of our history and help shape our understanding of America’s past.

Read more less

These photographic diptychs of LGBTQ+ people in America express the acute vulnerability of coming out From 2011 to 2015, Brooklyn-based photographer Ash Kolodner (born 1987) traveled across the United States photographing hundreds of LGBTQ+ individuals of all ages. They made two consecutive portraits of each of their subjects, photographing them twice during the same sitting: once with eyes closed and then with eyes open. These diptychs symbolize the vulnerability many have felt at the outset of discovering their personal identities, and then the realization and self-actualization manifest in the intimate and profound process of coming out. Through more than 180 color portraits, along with subject interviews and contributing texts by filmmaker Kimberly Peirce and Tony award-winning producer Jordan Roth, and icon and performer, RuPaul, Gayface reflects the beauty, intimacy and sometimes the pain of a community kept in the shadows for decades. Ultimately these pictures and this handsome volume represent a revelatory statement on the profound humanity we all share. Ash Kolodner was born in Washington, DC, and holds a BFA in commercial photography from the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara and an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Their first major project, GAYFACE 1st Class, in 2013, is a series of more than 500 portraits of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals living in America. Their follow-up series, Showing Face, was exhibited across Philadelphia’s subway stations and billboards in 2016 as part of the Philadelphia Mural Arts program. As a commercial photographer, they have photographed artists and musicians including Nas, Damien Marley, Mayer Hawthorne and Nipsey Hustle. Kolodner's work, which ranges from photography to drawing to sculptural installations, has been featured in numerous magazines, newspapers, galleries and group shows, including Miami Beach Art Basel, Toronto Fashion Week, Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Project, Huffington Post, Curve magazine and Photographer’s Forum.

Read more less

Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves is the first major monograph on Denver-based artist Kim Dickey (born 1964), published on the occasion of a midcareer survey of Dickey’s work at MCA Denver. The book presents Dickey’s sculpture and works on paper, as well as her film and performance-based works. Essays explore the conceptual, historical and aesthetic concerns that have driven Dickey’s practice for three decades: her ongoing study of pattern and decoration, interest in landscape design and the history of the garden, feminist politics and references to various historical art styles and schools, ranging from medieval tapestry to Minimalist sculpture. Words Are Leaves illustrates how Dickey’s reconsideration of craft and pattern brings the decorative to the fore, and to life.

Read more less

Whether creating enormous exhibition spaces or designing living quarters for collectors and homes and studio facilities for artists, the acclaimed architect Max Gordon (1931-1990) shaped the physical settings of art in the world's major metropolises during his influential career. Following several decades of work with leading architectural firms in New York and London (during which he designed the headquarters of New Scotland Yard), in the early 1980s Gordon designed the first Saatchi Gallery in London, and went on to become celebrated and sought after as the art world's architect of choice, designing spaces for artists Elizabeth Murray, Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Serra and Joel Shapiro, and gallerists Paula Cooper, Brooke Alexander, Maeght-Lelong and Lorence-Monk in New York and Anthony d'Offay and Annely Juda in London. This first monograph offers a detailed overview of Gordon's projects for the art world, from the 100,000-square-foot exhibition space he designed for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid to the SoHo home he remodeled for Richard Serra, demonstrating throughout his elegant use of light, space and minimal decoration, and displaying his gift for always highlighting the art.

Read more less

Amid the murky ethics of archival material, Syjuco rehabilitates images of Asian and Asian American people within America's documented historiesFilipino American artist Stephanie Syjuco (born 1974) rephotographs and reconstructs photographs from museum and library collections to reveal the instability of images and the violence of the colonial gaze. Across her photographs, videos and installations, Syjuco employs visual disruptions, annotations and other cues of constructedness: artistic actions that explode the implied innocence of the archival regime. Her most recent projects have dealt with materials relating to early 20th-century American imperialism in the Philippines, including ethnological displays from the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. This full-color catalog is the artist's first monograph and accompanies a solo exhibition of her recent lens-based artworks. Essays by writer and art critic Aruna D'Souza, exhibition curator Georgia Erger and scholar

Read more less

The first monograph on the work of a multimedia artist exploring environmental destruction across the United States and Latin America LA-based Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin (born 1973) employs film, sculpture and drawing to explore the intersections of climate change and global capitalism’s frontier mythologies. Published by the Frye Art Museum, this catalog presents an overview of Tossin’s career through full-color reproductions of works that span from 2008 to 2023, including images of several new artworks commissioned by the Frye. The exhibition borrows its title from science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s Earthseed novels, in which humans seek to survive amid ecological and cultural apocalypse. Tossin’s new works explore mapping and naming as colonial technologies of discovery and conquest on Earth and beyond. Through their seamless melding of synthetic and organic materials, the artist’s works embody the tension between ecological destruction and the caretaking approaches of Indigenous communities. Essays by curator Vic Brooks, writer Leslie Dick and exhibition curator Georgia Erger offer intimate assessments of the artist’s practice at a timely moment.

Read more less

Monumental, colorful and expressive, Matt Wedel’s ceramics revel in what’s possible with clay In a bright yellow studio nestled in the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio, Matt Wedel (born 1983) builds ideas out of clay. A prolific maker, he regularly pivots between stoneware, earthenware and porcelain, exploring the expressiveness of material and color. Wedel’s focus shifts between figure and flora, representation and abstraction, monumental and intimate, object and drawing—dualities that have a supportive tension rather than being at odds with each other. For Wedel, everything that goes into the making of the object is the work of art. Matt Wedel: Phenomenal Debris investigates the development and cross-pollination of figuration and landscape in Wedel’s ceramic sculptures, as well as his own psychology and how it transforms both his work and the way he perceives his role as artist, father and global citizen.

Read more less

On the feminist sculpture and interventions of the Guerrilla Girls member and veteran of New York’s 1980s art scene Rising to prominence in the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s and 1990s, Mary Ann Unger (1945–98) was skilled in graphic composition, watercolor, large-scale conceptual sculpture and environmentally responsive, site-specific interventions. Unger was a member of the Guerrilla Girls and is acknowledged as a feminist pioneer of neo-expressionist sculptural form. This monograph brings together 50 images of the artist’s work, often monumental sculpture formed into organic shapes. Taking the reprinting of Roberta Smith's 1999 obituary for Unger as a starting point, the book’s essays provide the first full consideration of Unger, tracing her life, her studies and her network of artists and mentors. This catalog also includes an interview with Unger's daughter, the artist Eve Biddle.

Read more less

Presenting Kehinde Wiley’s hotly anticipated response to a legendary Gainsborough portrait This volume presents A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, a new portrait by Kehinde Wiley (born 1977), commissioned to mark the centennial of the acquisition of Blue Boy by Henry and Arabella Huntington. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens places Wiley's painting in conversation with Thomas Gainsborough's 18th-century masterpiece. A deep connection exists between the museum’s most famous painting and the artist who is known for creating one of the most beloved presidential portraits of our time. A native of Los Angeles, Wiley has often spoken about his childhood visits to the Huntington’s British portrait gallery and how they inspired him to become an artist. Richly illustrated with portraits by Wiley and by 18th-century masters such as Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Hudson, this book offers insight into the evolving history of portraiture and the representation of power. An essay by Malik Gaines, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, investigates Wiley’s postmodern strategy of inserting Black subjects into canonical European settings. An essay by fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell situates Wiley’s work within the traditions and trappings of 18th-century grand manner portraiture.

Read more less

Matson’s fabric works unite painterly abstraction, digital technology and textile tactility Working within a renewed interest in craft practices, Los Angeles–based artist Christy Matson (born 1979) creates woven pictures that explore memory and imagination through the layered history of textile production, while advocating for issues surrounding sustainability. Her abstract, constantly evolving compositions resemble paintings, and yet they are deeply rooted in textile history. Using a digital jacquard loom together with the language of historic weaving techniques, Matson honors the centuries-old craft while also embracing a new approach to technology. Her works allow viewers to engage with textiles of the past in thoughtful, innovative ways. A continuation of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Currents series, which highlights new trends in contemporary art, this volume brings together nearly 50 of Matson’s most recent works from the last five years, and is the first publication to explore Matson's wide-ranging textile art.

Read more less

Sanford Schwartz explores the trailblazing career of 19th-century Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks Edward Hicks (1780–1849) was the creator of one of the most familiar scenes in American art: the Peaceable Kingdom, which depicts a realm where wild and flesh-eating animals come together with defenseless creatures, and will not harm them. Because Hicks was a Quaker minister, his many renderings of the scene have been taken as largely a self-taught artist’s professions of Quaker pacifism. But here, author and curator Sanford Schwartz, in a wide-ranging study that for the first time looks at Hicks as an imaginative artist as well as a minister, shows how the Peaceable Kingdom paintings—there are some 60 examples, made over 30 years—tell a richer story. In Schwartz’s hands, Hicks emerges as a person and a painter who hardly seems to be of the past. We spend time with this passionate, vehement figure who was also empathic and ardently connected to his wide community. And we see how the Kingdom series, though labeled folk art, share much with the work of mainstream artists of the time and even with work we now call outsider art.

Read more less

When justice is at stake, artists have spearheaded challenging conversations. The work in this book bears witness to stories that challenge dominant paradigms. Among the 50 artists represented here are Carlos Amorales, Loretta Bennett, Mark Bradford, Willie Cole, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Ellen Gallagher, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu and Wangechi Mutu.

Read more less

This beautifully designed volume explores Sherwood’s multimedia adventures in cross-species communication The first monograph on Dana Sherwood (born 1977), this book showcases the New York artist’s pioneering experiments with cross-species communication. Her films, sculpture installations and paintings engage discussions around the environment, global food chains, the rapid growth of social media, feminism, animal studies and spirituality. Featuring a tipped-on cover image, metallic embossing and various page sizes and paper stocks, this book expands upon these themes, with essays and documentation of paintings, film stills and recipe and sketchbook facsimiles. Generously illustrated sections of plates are followed by a chronology of the artist’s career to date and a checklist of works.

Read more less

Surveying the American artist’s multimedia works on paper from 1964 to the present American artist Louise Fishman’s (born 1939) physical and process-driven work reimagines the Abstract Expressionist model into a vehicle for dialogue about history and emotion centered in the artist’s identities as Jewish, feminist and lesbian. Though she is primarily a painter, Fishman has worked with a number of different mediums to create works on paper since the early 1960s. A Question of Emphasis presents a vast selection of these works in a single volume, encompassing collage, oil and wax, thread, acrylic text, ink, charcoal, printmaking, oil stick, watercolor and tempera. Fishman conceives of her works on paper not as studies for later paintings but as discrete pieces of art, generally small- and medium-scale and frequently sculptural and tactile. New writing as well as an interview between Fishman and artist Ulrike Müller accompany a wide selection of works.

Read more less

This book offers an intimate look at the grassroots scenes of the historic 2016 Clinton campaign through the lens of Charles Burson (born 1944), former Chief of Staff to Vice President Al Gore, who began his pursuit of photojournalism in 2013. Burson’s lens gives us an inside look at the commitment, passion, joy and pathos of those who went to the rallies, painted the banners, marched in the parades, made the phone calls, created the lists, adjusted the sound and light, knocked on doors, organized caucuses, staffed the headquarters in towns throughout the country and raised the money. Burson’s personal connections to this political world bring us close to the intricate workings of the Clinton campaign. The result is part visual journey, part memoir, layered with the stories of the people working on the ground in an unprecedented political landscape.

Read more less

Chen Haiyan (born 1955) is remarkable for her subversive rethinking of narrative in the populist and politicized medium of woodcut prints and the fine art of traditional brush painting. This volume surveys her surreal yet everyday imagery.

Read more less

This iteration of the American Encounters series addresses artists’ conceptions of political and military authority through portraiture during and after North American and European revolutionary upheavals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The works discussed demonstrate shifting ideals of leadership through examination of artistic style, from restrained Neoclassicism to dynamic Romanticism, as well as the iconography of martial and civilian power. The publication also explores the proliferation and replication of images of leaders, particularly George Washington, as well as the demand for the revolutionary hero and first president’s likeness in France. Catalogue essays elucidate the reasons for the transmission of portraits of Washington across the Atlantic in the context of artistic, political, and military exchange between the two countries. Contributions also delve into issues of colonial, post-colonial, and post-revolutionary identity, investigating the ability of artists to navigate oscillating national, social, and cultural boundaries.

Read more less

A talented visual storyteller, Barbara Earl Thomas has drawn from history, literature, folklore, mythology, and biblical stories over her forty-year career to reflect the social fabric of our times. Thomas’s figural and narrative imagery has a deeply philosophical and emotional force, and light and dark have been especially potent concepts in her work. This book of new works meditates on the visual experience of the body within a physical and metaphorical world of light and shadow. Based on real people, the portraits "elevate to the magnificent" her family, friends, and neighbors, as well as cultural icons of the African American literary landscape. Thomas's illumination of the human figure through her light-filled artworks and portraiture encourages the viewer to reflect on how we communicate ourselves to the world and how we perceive those among us. Exhibition dates: Chrysler Museum of Art: February 24–August 20, 2023; Wichita Art Museum: October 7, 2023–January 14, 2024; Arthur Ross Gallery, the University of Pennsylvania: February 17–May 21, 2024

Read more less

A four-volume celebration of one of America's most influential gallerists, with rarely seen letters, ephemera and photographs Julien Levy (1906–81) is best remembered today as the art dealer who brought Surrealism to the United States. His eponymous New York City Gallery (1931–49) was generally regarded as the best place to view cutting-edge work by such artists as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo and Man Ray. This four-volume set, presented in a slipcase, gives readers an uncensored insider’s view of Levy, the artists he exhibited, and the influence he wielded during the 1930s and '40s. Volume one presents a biography of Levy, including a comprehensive exhibition chronology and an abundance of new information about the evolution of Levy’s career during his 18 years as an art dealer. Volumes two, three and four include chapters that discuss each of the approximately 230 solo and group exhibitions mounted by Levy, along with interesting observations about the featured artists. The authors have incorporated important new details about the workings of the gallery, allowing them to clarify or correct statements made in Levy’s 1977 Memoir of an Art Gallery and other publications. They have also uncovered some surprising revelations concerning Levy and his interactions with the artists he represented.

Read more less

How the influential American art historian used his print collection to theorize body language and the concept of the copy Beginning in the early 1960s, with only the meager budget of a part-time art history professor, Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) amassed a collection of more than 3,500 prints spanning the medium’s 500-year history in the West. Steinberg’s prints formed a visual library that shaped his scholarship in fundamental ways. His collection, incorporating the work of artists both famous and obscure, illuminates his claim that before photography, prints functioned as the "circulating lifeblood of ideas," disseminating figures and styles across boundaries. Through close observation of his prints, Steinberg developed some of his most innovative arguments about the instructive richness of the copy and the expressive potential of body language. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the development of Steinberg’s remarkable collection and its role in his scholarship. It also serves as an introduction to the history of Western printmaking that these works broadly encompass.

Read more less

On America's first modern dance company and its many collaborators, with reproductions of costumes, sets, ephemera and more Ruth St Denis (1879–1968) and Ted Shawn (1891–1972) pioneered modern dance in the US with their company Denishawn, founded in 1914. Incorporating elements from ancient, non-Western and Native American sources, Denishawn became the first important American dance company. A generation of dancers and choreographers, including Martha Graham, trained and performed with the company, and many artists, including Auguste Rodin, John Singer Sargent, Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, collaborated with them. This catalog reproduces artwork, sets, ephemera and especially costumes, many of which have not been seen since the 1930s. Some of the materials and costumes, as well as the choreography, borrow from East and South Asian and Native American cultures, and the publication interrogates the legacy of cultural appropriation in dance. The materials also demonstrate St. Denis and Shawn’s stylistic and personal connections to American and European modernists, broadening an understanding of American dance in early modernism.

Read more less

How female artists have depicted women's lives, from the 17th century to the 1960s Selected from the rich holdings of the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, Women Picturing Women explores the common themes and complex visions that emerge when women depict other women. Portraits and domestic scenes are often the vehicles through which these artists grappled with narratives found in religion, mythology or social critique, focusing on motifs of both intimacy and isolation in varying degrees. With works that range from the 17th century to the close of the 1960s, Women Picturing Women provides a varied set of examples that speak to the unique and frequently underemphasized artistic lens through which women viewed their female peers, with further scholarship on each artist and her work. Artists include: Angelica Kauffman, Berthe Morisot, Jesse Tarbox Beals, Lilly Martin Spencer, Alice Neel, Diane Arbus and Sylvia Sleigh.

Read more less