Visualizing Genocide by
Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations, and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices.
Art Is Life by
Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early champion of forgotten and overlooked women artists, he has also celebrated the pioneering work of African American, LGBTQ+, and other long-marginalized creators. Sotheby's Institute of Art has called him, simply, 'The art critic.' Now, in ART IS LIFE, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times.
Museums and Wealth by
"Museums and Wealth is a critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form. In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in "public trust" on behalf of the nation, if not humanity. The public serves as alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets. This allows for wealthy individuals at the helm to gain financial benefits from, and ideological control over, what is at its core purpose a public system. The dramatic growth of the art market and the development of financial tools based on art-collateral loans exacerbate the contradiction between the needs of museum leadership versus that of the public. Indeed, a history of private support in the US is a history of racist discrimination, and the common collections reflect this fact. This book shows why the nonprofit system, understood as third sector or "shadow state," is unfit to administer our common collections, and offers solutions for diversity reform and redistributive restructuring. A longue durée history of how private collections in city and nation states were turned public, gives context. Since the late Renaissance, private collections legitimized the right of the prince to rule, and later, with the great revolutions, display consolidated national identity. But the rise of the American museum reversed this trajectory and re-privatized the public collection. A materialist description of the museum as a model institution of the liberal nation state reveals constellations of imperialist social relations"-- Provided by publisher.
What's Next? by
By paying tribute to matter, materiality, and materialization, the examples of contemporary art assembled in What's Next? Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art challenge the social, cultural, and ethical norms that prevailed in the twentieth century. This significant frontier of contemporary culture is identified as 'Eco Materialism' because it affirms the emergent philosophy of Neo Materialism and attends to the pragmatic urgency of environmentalism.
Past in Reverse Contemporary Art by
"Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia brings together the work of twenty-two established and emerging artists and artists' groups from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. Displaying a broad range of strategies and trends in East Asian are today, the works also reveal a variety of methods by which these artists access the traditions and forms of the past to address contemporary conditions. Influences of past and present, East and West, merge within the interrelated cultural identities that define the globalized world."--BOOK JACKET.
Nonconformers by
A global history of self-taught artists advocating for a nuanced understanding of modern and contemporary art often challenged by the establishment
When the art world has paid attention to makers from outside the cultural establishment, including so-called outsider and self-taught artists, it has generally been within limiting categories. Yet these artists, including many women, people with disabilities, and people of color, have had a transformative influence on the history of modern art. Responding to growing interest in these artists, this book offers a nuanced history of their work and how it has been understood from the early twentieth century to the present day.
Pin-Up Grrrls by
Subverting stereotypical images of women, a new generation of feminist artists is remaking the pin-up, much as Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. As shocking as contemporary feminist pin-ups are intended to be, perhaps more surprising is that the pin-up has been appropriated by women for their own empowerment since its inception more than a century ago. Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up from its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism. Maria Elena Buszek documents the genre's 150-year history with more than 100 illustrations, many never before published.
Telling Tales by
The links between contemporary design, history and the imagination form the background for this beautiful and unique exploration of Design Art. Addressing works by such designers as Jurgen Bey, Tord Boontje, Dunne and Raby and Studio Job, Gareth Williams explores how overtly functional objects, 'designed' objects, can be made to carry meanings and associations, or tell tales. As contemporary design practice, the art market and art itself become more integrated, reflecting the merging of art, craft and design, this exciting book offers a valuable and perceptive assessment of our ability to read design art objects with the critical tools traditionally associated with painting, sculpture and literary theory.
The Engagement Aesthetic by
Long after painting, sculpture, photography, and film developed along with their materials - canvas and panel, marble and bronze, and celluloid film - a new generation of art has emerged in which digital, electronic, architectural, and performative materials have offered new forms for creative expression and experience. In much of this new art, the medium - no longer composed of passive materials - now embraces and challenges viewers to work as co-creators of aesthetic experience. Starting from the impossibility of understanding this new and complex art solely within the framework of contemporary art history and criticism, The Engagement Aesthetic offers new modes of critique for new media works of art, literature, and performance that operate in complex ways. Blending a range of methodologies from phenomenology, art history, linguistics, and statistical analysis, Ricardo explores how a new kinship between individual participation, electronic media, virtual and actual space, and mediated language results in a new aesthetic of mutual engagement.
When Home Won't Let You Stay by
"In this timely volume, artists and thinkers join in conversation around the topic of global migration, examining both its cultural impact and the culture of migration itself. Individual voices shed light on the societal transformations related to migration and its representation in 21st-century art, offering diverse points of entry into this massive phenomenon and its many manifestations. The featured artworks range from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, and sound art, and their makers-including Isaac Julien, Richard Mosse, Reena Saini Kallat, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Do Ho Suh, among many others-hail from around the world. Texts by experts in political science, Latin American studies, and human rights, as well as contemporary art, expand upon the political, economic, and social contexts of migration and its representation. The book also includes three conversations in which artists discuss the complexity of making work about migration. Amid worldwide tensions surrounding refugee crises and border security, this publication provides a nuanced interpretation of the current cultural moment. Intertwining themes of memory, home, activism, and more, When Home Won't Let You Stay meditates on how art both shapes and is shaped by the public discourse on migration."--Dust jacket.
Making Memory Matter by
In an ancient account of painting's origins, a woman traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions.
Exploring these artists' work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of visual representation. She pays particular attention to the groundbreaking art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for his projections of historical subjects; Kara Walker, who creates powerful silhouetted images of racial violence in American history; and Rachel Whiteread, whose work centers on making casts of empty interior spaces. Each of the artists Saltzman discusses is struggling with the roles that history and memory have come to play in an age when any historical statement is subject to question and doubt. In identifying this new and powerful movement, she provides a framework for understanding the art of our time.
Art and Nature in the Anthropocene by
This book examines how contemporary artists have engaged with histories of nature, geology, and extinction within the context of the changing planet. Susan Ballard describes how artists challenge the categories of animal, mineral, and vegetable--turning to a multispecies order of relations that opens up a new vision of what it means to live within the Anthropocene. Considering the work of a broad range of artists including Francisco de Goya, J. M. W. Turner, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Yhonnie Scarce, Joyce Campbell, Lisa Reihana, Katie Paterson, Taryn Simon, Susan Norrie, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Ken + Julia Yonetani, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Angela Tiatia, and Hito Steyerl and with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book reveals the emergence of a planetary aesthetics that challenges fixed concepts of nature in the Anthropocene.
Ways to Wander the Gallery by
In the summer of 2017 the editors led a series of weekly workshops at London's Tate Modern looking at the relationship between walking, art, experimental writing and composition (using their 2015 book Ways to Wander as a starting point). They invited each participant to create a page for this new book. Ways to Wander the Gallery includes their reflections on the workshops, on our relationship to the 'consumption' of art in the gallery space, and the 'Wander Scores'--the artists' pages which are each an invitation to readers to wander in the gallery and beyond. The book asks you to reconsider your walked relationship with art through the concept of the Wander Score.
Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art by
"The spiritual in contemporary art is everywhere evident, yet rarely examined in scholarly research. Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art addresses the subject in depth for the first time since Maurice Tuchman's seminal 1986 The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. It significantly broadens the scope of previous scholarship to include new media and non-Western and Indigenous art in addition to that of the West. Encountering the Spiritual presents art from diverse cultures with equal status, promotes its cultural specificity, and moves beyond previous notions of "center and periphery," celebrating the plurality and global nature of contemporary art today. This unprecedented book--a valuable reference for years to come--integrates different ways of exploring the spiritual in art. Essays based on cultural affinities are rhythmically interspersed with thematic categories. These themes demonstrate greater diversity and hybridity of artists' sources of inspiration and their emphasis on art-making as spiritual process. Finally, selected artists' statements further expand the knowledge of an academic and general audience"-- Provided by publisher.
Woven Threads by
Woven textiles are produced by nearly all human societies. This volume investigates evidence for patterned textiles (that is, textiles woven with elaborate designs) that were produced by two early Mediterranean civilisations: the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece, that prospered during the Aegean Bronze Age, c. 3000-1200 BC, contemporary with pharaonic Egypt. Both could boast of specialists in textile production. Together with their wine, oil, and art, Minoan and Mycenaean textiles were much desired as trade goods. Artistic images of their fabrics preserved both in the Aegean and in other parts of the Mediterranean show elaborate patterns woven with rich decorative detail and colour. Only a few small scraps of textiles survive but evidence for their production is abundant and frescoes supply detailed information about a wide variety of now-lost textile goods from luxurious costumes and beautifully patterned wall hangings and carpets, to more utilitarian decorated fabrics. A review of surviving artistic and archaeological evidence indicates that textiles played essential practical and social roles in both Minoan and Mycenaean societies. --Provided by publisher.
Dangerous Moves: performance and politics in Cuba by Posing Modernity by
"This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Edouard Manet's Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic "other." Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet's reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane "New Negro" portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet's and Matisse's depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimé Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices."--Publisher's description,
Grief and Grievance by
In recent years, the world has seen the rise of white nationalism in America and the tragic persistence of violence against African-Americans. Featuring works by more than 30 artists and writings by scholars and art historians, this book - and its accompanying exhibition - gives voice to artists addressing concepts of mourning, commemoration, and loss and considers their engagement with the social movements, from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, that Black grief has galvanized.
Pink: the History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Colour by
Today, with the advent of "millennial pink," the color formerly associated with Barbie has acquired a new identity. Nor is this the first time the symbolism of pink has been radically transformed. In collaboration with a major exhibition at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, curator and fashion historian Valerie Steele explores the history and significance of pink in fashion, art, and culture from the eighteenth century to the present.
