Search results for ""Author Glenn Adamson""

The definitive volume on Gaetano Pesce’s incomparable life and career, as told in the artist-designer’s own words In a category all his own, Gaetano Pesce is widely considered one of the most important, and elusive, creative figures of the last half century. Bridging numerous key art and design movements, while never belonging to any of them, Pesce’s singular practice has remained steadfastly provocative, defying convention, utility, and good taste. Glenn Adamson, the acclaimed curator and writer, conducted the wide-ranging interview with Pesce on which this book is based, drawing out new stories and insights, as well as providing an introduction that thoroughly contextualizes Pesce’s unique position in contemporary art and design. As postmodern design has become increasingly desirable, interest in Pesce has grown with renewed exhibition activity and critical attention, and his work has become even more valuable and collectible. In this long overdue summary co-published with Salon 94, Pesce looks back at his incomparable and wildly inventive career, recounting his life and practice in his own words.

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Glenn Adamson's last book, Thinking Through Craft, offered an influential account of craft's position within modern and contemporary art. Now, in his engaging sequel, The Invention of Craft, his theoretical discussion of skilled work is extended back in time and across numerous disciplines. Adamson searches out the origins of modern craft, locating its emergence in the period of the industrial revolution. He demonstrates how craft was invented as industry's "other", a necessary counterpart to ideas of progress and upheaval. In the process, the magical and secretive culture of artisans was gradually dominated through division and explication. This left craft with an oppositional stance, a traditional or anti-modern position. The Invention of Craft ranges widely across media, from lock-making, wood-carving and iron-casting to fashion, architecture and design. It also moves back and forth between periods, from the 18th century to the present day, demonstrating how contemporary practice can be informed through the study of modern craft in its moment of invention.

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An expansive look at the multifaceted American artist Toshiko Takaezu within the history of postwar artmaking

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Things matter. So why are we losing touch with them? From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York comes a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. In this delightful exploration of craft in its many forms, curator and scholar Glenn Adamson explores how raw materials, tools, design and technique come together to produce objects of beauty and utility. A thoughtful meditation on the value of care and attention in an age of disappearing things, Fewer, Better Things invites us to reconnect with the physical world and its objects.

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Co-published in Association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London This book is a timely and engaging introduction to the way that artists working in all media think about craft. Workmanship is key to today's visual arts, when high ‘production values' are becoming increasingly commonplace. Yet craft's centrality to contemporary art has received little serious attention from critics and historians. Dispensing with clichéd arguments that craft is art, Adamson persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion. The interesting thing about craft, he argues, is that it is perceived to be 'inferior' to art. The book consists of an overview of various aspects of this second-class identity - supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur. It also provides historical case studies analysing craft's role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, contemporary art, and the crafts themselves. Thinking Through Craft will be essential reading for anyone interested in craft or the broader visual arts.

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Nina Malterud is one of Norway’s most prominent ceramics artists. Over the course of her five-decade-long career, she has developed a unique artistic oeuvre with references to traditional ceramic objects like plates, bowls, and tiles, but the emphasis is more on expression than on function. She explores the possibilities of clay and glazes in a free and undogmatic way, and is open to the visual results that can arise through controlled coincidences. The traces of the process are an essential part of her visual language. Sometimes the motifs are recognizable, but for the most part, she works with abstraction. The pieces radiate both tenderness and fragility, strength, and power. Combined with the materiality and weight of ceramics, the results are artworks with a strong sensory appeal.

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The most comprehensive monograph available on the greatest living glassblower, Lino Tagliapietra. Lino Tagliapietra has been described as the world’s greatest glassblower, a figure born from the five-hundred-year-old culture of Venetian glass, but one who also revolutionized glass as a discipline, inventing new techniques to create his masterful works. Even more astonishing, as Tagliapietra hit his full stride, he has become a notable figure in the unfolding story of modern sculpture – an artist whose distinctive works are coveted by collectors of contemporary abstract art and whose vision makes us think about art history in new and profound ways. This is the most comprehensive monograph available on his work and features insightful texts by Glenn Adamson and Henry Adams, as well as hundreds of new photographs, which showcase the impressive breadth and depth of Taglipietra’s repertoire.

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Today’s artists have an unprecedented level of choice with regard to materials and methods available to them, yet the processes involved in making artworks are rarely addressed in books or exhibitions on art. Here, Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the materials and methods used to make artworks hold the key to artists’ motivations, their attitudes to authorship, uniqueness and the value of objects, the economic and social contexts from which they emerge, and their approach to the perceived opposition between materiality and conceptualism in art. The book’s introduction sets out a history of trends in artistic production and the possible catalysts for the proliferation of production strategies since the mid-twentieth century, followed by nine chapters that explore different methods and media. Detailed examples are interwoven with the discussion, including visuals that reveal the intricacies of each technique or material and its overall effect when presented as an artwork. Artists featured include Ai Weiwei, Ron Arad, Chris Burden, Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Jeff Koons, Los Carpinteros, Haroon Mirza, Takashi Murakami, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo and Santiago Sierra

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A multifaceted look at the work of award-winning American industrial designer Stephen Burks Through essays, photo-essays, and a conversation between Black designer Stephen Burks (b. 1969) and the late cultural critic bell hooks, this book contextualizes Burks’s wide-ranging work while exploring design’s influence on politics, society, and culture. Burks’s work is underpinned by his belief in a pluralistic vision of design that is inclusive of all cultural perspectives; the award-winning designer has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading design-driven brands to develop collections that engage hand production as a strategy for innovation. The book centers the industrial design and craft collaborations within Burks’s workshop-based design practice and offers an opportunity to reflect on the potential of design at a time when racial, social, and environmental justice remain in jeopardy. Topics explored in the book include an overview of the designer’s practice, from the foundational architecture culture of Chicago (Burks’s birthplace) to his latest speculative project; the workshop-based collaborative ethos of his studio, Stephen Burks Man Made; and the politics of design. In the conversation between bell hooks and Burks, hooks brings her critical eye to design as it relates to the broader field of African American cultural production. Distributed for the High Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule:High Museum of Art, Atlanta (September 16, 2022–March 5, 2023)Philadelphia Museum of Art (November 19, 2023–April 14, 2024)

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A 'vessel for living' - such were the words Glenn Adamson used to describe this remarkable residence. Richard Meier designed the Grotta home to house Sandra and Louis Grotta's collection of contemporary studio jewellery and significant works in wood, ceramic and fibre. The building was conceived around the collection, framing the objects within the open architecture, which comprises an equal blend of glass and concrete. Nature, visible from many vantage points, plays an essential supporting role. The Grotta Home by Richard Meier: A Marriage of Architecture and Craft is rich in photographs of the collection and provides impressive insights into this exceptionally personal project. The accompanying essays afford the reader a greater sense of how the Grottas have not simply acquired art, but have immersed themselves in it.

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A richly illustrated exploration of Hannah Wilke’s provocative art and trailblazing feminismOne of the most groundbreaking artists to emerge in American art in the 1960s, Hannah Wilke consistently challenged the prevailing narratives of women’s bodies and their representation throughout her career, until her untimely death in 1993. Wilke established a uniquely feminist iconography in virtually all of the mediums she engaged with—painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance art—and offered a life-affirming expression of vitality and bodily pleasure in her work.Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake highlights the artist’s full range of expression, bringing together photographs, works on paper, video, and examples of Wilke’s sculptures in clay and other, nonconventional materials such as latex, kneaded erasers, and chewing gum. New object photography brings clarity to Wilke’s boundary-crossing art practice, making many of her rarely shown works accessible to readers for the first time. The book features a previously unpublished 1975 interview with Wilke by art critic and historian Cindy Nemser as well as a narrative chronology of Wilke’s art and life with many previously unpublished archival photographs. It includes essays by Glenn Adamson, Connie Butler, and Tamara Schenkenberg, and responses to Wilke’s work by contemporary artists Hayv Kahraman, Nadia Myre, Jeanine Oleson, and Catherine Opie.Offering fresh perspectives on this influential artist, Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake sheds new light on Wilke’s technical and formal virtuosity, her important role in shaping postwar American art, and the nuance and poignancy of her feminist subject matter.Published in association with the Pulitzer Arts FoundationExhibition SchedulePulitzer Arts Foundation, St. LouisJune 4, 2021–January 16, 2022

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The first monograph on the work of a groundbreaking artist in stained glass. From her start in the 1980s, Judith Schaechter (b. 1961) has stretched the medium of stained glass into an incisive art form for the twenty-first century, boldly paving her path in the diverse arena of contemporary art. With deep respect for history, a provocative rebelliousness, and a feminist sensibility, Schaechter has aptly been called a "post-punk stained-glass sorceress." This catalog accompanies "The Path to Paradise: Judith Schaechter's Stained-Glass Art", the first survey and major scholarly assessment of this groundbreaking artist's 37-year career. This catalog explores the range of critical registers Schaechter's work spans, illuminating and contextualizing the artist's unique contributions to the contemporary canon. Published in association with the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester NY

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Objects: USA 2020 hails a new generation of artist-craftspeople by revisiting a groundbreaking event that redefined American art. In 1969, an exhibition opened at the Smithsonian Institution that redefined American art. Objects: USA united a cohort of artists inventing new approaches to art-making by way of craft media. Subsequently touring to twenty-two museums across the country, where it was viewed by over half a million Americans, and then to eleven cities in Europe, the exhibition canonized such artists as Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Wharton Esherick, Wendell Castle, and George Nakashima, and introduced others who would go on to achieve widespread art-world acclaim, including Dale Chihuly, Michele Oka Doner, J. B. Blunk, and Ron Nagle. Objects: USA 2020 revisits this revolutionary exhibition and its accompanying catalog - which has become a bible of sorts to curators, gallerists, dealers, craftspeople, and artists - by pairing fifty participants from the original exhibition with fifty contemporary artists representing the next generation of practitioners to use - and upend - the traditional methods and materials of craft to create new forms of art. Published to coincide with an exhibition of the same title at the renowned gallery R & Company, and featuring essays by some of the foremost authorities on craft at the intersection of art, including Glenn Adamson, curator and former director of the Museum of Arts & Design; James Zemaitis, curator and former head of twentieth-century design at Sotheby's; and Lena Vigna, curator of exhibitions at the Racine Art Musuem; an interview with Paul J. Smith, the cocurator of Objects: USA 2020 is an essential art historical reference that traces how craft was elevated to the status of museum-quality art, and sets its trajectory forward.

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The catalogue Tunnel presents works from 2018 to 2023 by ceramicist Johannes Nagel (*1979). The majority of the objects were formed by the artist’s hands digging into sand to form cavities, negative spaces, which were then molded and revealed using liquid porcelain. By doing this, says co-author Esther Niebel, the artist imprints his own presence in to the objects. In addition to the extraordinary shapes thus created, expressive colours and the painting of the objects play a central role in Nagel’s work. Accompanied by essays, the excavated and cast pieces are presented in full-page photographs in a staccato portrayal of objects and ideas. Text in English and German.

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Explore one of America’s most creative cities in a new way with the trailblazer for city-based studies of contemporary craft. For craft and history enthusiasts alike, this collection of essays from writers and curators connects Philadelphia’s heritage to its current stature as a national craft capital. We discover how small workshops for fabric, wool, ceramics, and textile starting as early as 1751 grew into the still expanding craft world that Philadelphia has today. A useful example: the Liberty Bell cracked on the very first attempt to make it sound, and had to be recast twice and remolded with additional copper to improve its alloy. Today, it remains an unbeatable icon of Philadelphia craft. Contributions by Elisabeth Agro, Sarah Archer, Chad Curtis, Anthony Elms, Elizabeth Essner, Michelle Millar Fisher, Jessica Kourkounis, Don Miller, Jennifer-Navva Milliken, Heather Gibson Moqtaderi, Kelli Morgan, and Jennifer Zwilling.

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