front cover of African Vodun
African Vodun
Art, Psychology, and Power
Suzanne Preston Blier
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Beads, bones, rags, straw, leather, pottery, fur, feathers and blood—these are the raw materials of vodun artworks. The power of these images lies not only in their aesthetic, and counter-aesthetic, appeal but also in their psychological and emotional effect. As objects of fury and force, these works are intended to protect and empower people and cultures that have long been oppressed.

In this first major study of its kind, Suzanne Preston Blier examines the artworks of the contemporary vodun cultures of southern Benin and Togo in West Africa as well as the related voudou traditions of Haiti, New Orleans, and historic Salem, Massachusetts. Blier employs a variety of theoretically sophisticated psychological, anthropological, and art historical approaches to explore the contrasts inherent in the vodun arts—commoners versus royalty, popular versus elite, "low" art versus "high." She examines the relation between art and the slave trade, the psychological dynamics of artistic expression, the significance of the body in sculptural expression, and indigenous perceptions of the psyche.

Throughout, Blier pushes African art history to a new height of cultural awareness that recognizes the complexity of traditional African societies as it acknowledges the role of social power in shaping aesthetics and meaning generally. This book will be of critical importance not only to those concerned with African, African American, and Caribbean art, but also to anthropologists, African diaspora scholars, students of comparative religion and comparative psychology, and anyone fascinated by the traditions of voudou and vodun.

"An extraordinary tour de force."—Choice

"Extraordinarily detailed....Blier's examination of the entire, often mysterious history of vodun is...in a word, definitive."—Booklist

"A serious study that concentrates on the hidden power of objects and the meaning behind that potency is long overdue. Welcome Susan Blier's African Vodun....Certainly a must for...those concerned with the psychology of art."—Janet L. Stanley, Art Documentation

"[Blier] is usually sensitive to the need to resist imposing Western artistic values and academic methodologies inappropriately upon such art. But she offers the reader a gift even more precious; she offers rare insights into how various art forms—sculpture and home architecture in particular—yield meanings for the African users of such art.—Norman Weinstein, Boston Book Review
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Animals in Four Worlds
Sculptures from India
Stella Snead
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Animals play a special role in Indian culture. In opposition to deities, they help to frame the human community. Indian philosophy assumes the basic unity of animals and humans and in everyday life animals symbolize various ideas and sentiments. In the realm of Indian art, animals appear everywhere.

In this splendid and unique collection of photographs, Stella Snead captures the extraordinary vitality, intelligence, and variety of animals in Indian sculpture found at sites from prehistory through the eighteenth century. Here are cats, peacocks, mongooses, anteaters, cows, hyenas, and tigers, as well as such fantastic creatures as double-bodied lions and elephants with fish tails. Collected from all areas of India, these photographs include images from famous Indian monuments, and museum collections, as well as images from remote sites, some of which have never before been published.

Wendy Doniger's essay explores and explains the four worlds or dimensions that animals occupy in Indian thought: nature, the human world, the divine world, and the world of fantasy. George Michell places Indian sculptures of animals in their architectural and art historical context. His chronological survey identifies the location and the subject of the animals photographed and describes the artistic activity of the regions and period from which the photographs are drawn.

This beautifully illustrated book will appeal to a wide audience: to those interested in Asian studies, art, architecture, and animals, and to those drawn to Snead's powerful photographs, which capture both the idiosyncratic genius of tiny details and the grand sweep of cosmic symbols.
[more]

front cover of Antony Gormley on Sculpture
Antony Gormley on Sculpture
Antony Gormley
University of Chicago Press, 2015
One of the most exciting sculptors of our time, Antony Gormley is the creator of breathtaking public installations. Even casual fans will recognize Event Horizon, a collection of thirty-one life-size casts of the artist’s body that have been installed atop buildings in places like London’s South Bank and New York’s Madison Square, and Field, formed by tens of thousands of standing clay figurines overflowing across a room’s floor. Projects like these demonstrate Gormley’s ongoing interest in exploring the human form and its relationships with the rest of the material world, and in Antony Gormley on Sculpture, he shares valuable insight into his work and the history of sculpture itself.

Combining commentary on his own works with discussions of other artists and the Eastern religious traditions that have inspired him, Gormley offers wisdom on topics such as the body in space, how to approach an environment when conceiving an installation, bringing mindfulness and internal balance to sculpture, and much more. Lavishly illustrated, this book will be of interest to not only art lovers, curators, and critics, but also artists and art students. Dynamic and thought-provoking, Antony Gormley on Sculpture is essential reading for anyone fascinated by sculpture and its long and complex history as a medium.
[more]

front cover of Artistry in Bronze
Artistry in Bronze
The Greeks and Their Legacy XIXth International Congress on Ancient Bronzes
Jens M Daehner
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2017
The papers in this volume derive from the proceedings of the nineteenth International Bronze Congress, held at the Getty Center and Villa in October 2015 in connection with the exhibition Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World. The study of large-scale ancient bronzes has long focused on aspects of technology and production. Analytical work of materials, processes, and techniques has significantly enriched our understanding of the medium. Most recently, the restoration history of bronzes has established itself as a distinct area of investigation. How does this scholarship bear on the understanding of bronzes within the wider history of ancient art? How do these technical data relate to our ideas of styles and development? How has the material itself affected ancient and modern perceptions of form, value, and status of works of art? 

The free online edition of this open-access book is available at www.getty.edu/publications/artistryinbronze/ and includes zoomable figures and tables. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.
[more]

front cover of Aspects
Aspects
Fred Sandback's Sculpture
Edward A. Vazquez
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003) created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major study of Sandback, explores the full range of his art, which not only disrupts traditional conceptions of material presence, but also stages an ethics of interaction between object and observer.

Drawing on Sandback’s substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist’s work—with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s—creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback’s site-determined practice draws viewers’ focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback’s art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.
[more]

front cover of Boaz Vaadia
Boaz Vaadia
Sculpture
Wendy Steiner
The Artist Book Foundation, 2016
Boaz Vaadia (1951–2017), the internationally acclaimed sculptor, amassed a prodigious body of work over his 40-year artistic career. With Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture, Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey, presented the first retrospective exhibition of his indoor and outdoor works in 2016 in a comprehensive survey of the artist’s journey from abstraction to figuration. Detailing 125 works installed in two buildings and throughout the 42-acre sculpture park, the exhibition’s color catalogue presents Vaadia’s ritualistic and highly personal early works, his later sculptures in stone, slate, and bronze, and his explorations of the ancient genre of bas-relief. With the global recognition his art has received, he continued working at the edge, discovering new possibilities in the constantly shifting grounds of his sculpture. Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture is a celebration of the artist’s long and prolific career, and his unwavering advancement of his art.
[more]

front cover of Camille Claudel
Camille Claudel
Emerson Bowyer
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
Abundantly illustrated, this catalogue is a fascinating and comprehensive reevaluation of the French modernist sculptor Camille Claudel.

Camille Claudel (1864–1943) was among the most daring and visionary sculptors of the late nineteenth century. Although much attention has been paid to her tumultuous life—her affair with her mentor, Auguste Rodin; the premature end to her career; her thirty-year institutionalization in an asylum—her art remains little known outside of France. Memorably praised by critic Octave Mirbeau in 1895 as “a revolt of nature: a woman of genius,” Claudel was celebrated for her brilliance during a time when women sculptors were rare.

Featuring more than two hundred photographs along with contributions from leading experts, this publication accompanies the first comprehensive survey of Claudel’s oeuvre in nearly forty years. With essays exploring the many facets of her life, work, and reception; a biography; commentary by American sculptor Kiki Smith; and a fascinating appendix of documents written by Claudel and her contemporaries, this volume reevaluates the artist’s work on its own merits and repositions her legacy within a more complex genealogy of modernism.

This volume, copublished with The Art Institute of Chicago, accompanies an exhibition on view at The Art Institute of Chicago from October 7, 2023, to February 19, 2024 and at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from April 2 to July 21, 2024.
[more]

front cover of Chicago's Fabulous Fountains
Chicago's Fabulous Fountains
Greg Borzo. Photographs by Julia Thiel. Foreword by Geoffrey Baer. Preface by Debra Shore.
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
2018 IPPY Award Silver Medalist for Great Lakes Nonfiction
Winner, ISHS Annual Award for Other Publications, 2018


Most people do not realize it, but Chicago is home to many diverse, artistic, fascinating, and architecturally and historically important fountains. In this attractive volume, Greg Borzo reveals more than one hundred outdoor public fountains of Chicago with noteworthy, amusing, or surprising stories about these gems. Complementing Borzo’s engagingly written text are around one hundred beautiful fine-art color photos of the fountains, taken by photographer Julia Thiel for this book, and a smaller number of historical photos.

Greg Borzo begins by providing an overview of Chicago’s fountains and discussing the oldest ones, explaining who built them and why, how they survived as long as they have, and what they tell us about early Chicago. At the heart of the book are four thematic chapters on drinking fountains, iconic fountains, plaza fountains, and park and parkway fountains. Among the iconic fountains described are Buckingham (in Grant Park), Crown (in Millennium Park), Centennial (with its water cannon shooting over the Chicago River), and two fountains designed by famed sculptor Lorado Taft (Time and Great Lakes). Plazas all around Chicago—in the neighborhoods as well as downtown—have fountains that anchor communities or enhance the skyscrapers they adorn. Also presented are the fountains in Chicago’s parks, some designed by renowned artists and many often overlooked or taken for granted. A chapter on the self-proclaimed City of Fountains, Kansas City, Missouri, shows how Chicago’s city planners could raise public awareness and funding for the care and preservation of these important landmarks. Also covered are a brief period of fountain building and rehabbing (1997–2002) that vastly enriched the city; fountains that no longer exist; and proposed Chicago fountains that were never built, as well as the future of fountain design.

A beautiful photography book and a guide to the city’s many fountains, Chicago’s Fabulous Fountains also provides fascinating histories and behind-the-scenes stories of these underappreciated artistic and architectural treasures of the Windy City.
[more]

front cover of Don Gummer
Don Gummer
Peter Plagens
The Artist Book Foundation, 2021
The trajectory of Don Gummer’s career as a sculptor began in New York City in the late 1970s with his wall reliefs of painted wood, carefully layered geometric works exhibiting a strong architectural influence. Moving beyond wood to stone, bronze, stainless steel, aluminum, and glass as his primary materials, his artworks evolved into subtly inventive freestanding sculptures, often of monumental scale, that exhibit his unfailing attention to craftsmanship and detail. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of Don Gummer, a new monograph on the artist and his highly acclaimed body of work. Gummer was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1946 and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University. He subsequently received both a BFA and an MFA from Yale University’s School of Fine Arts. In a 2001 interview with Peter Plagens, American artist and art critic, Gummer described his interest in sculpture as “the recontextualization of natural phenomena, of unaltered things brought into aesthetic balance by choosing and placing.” Using balance, proportion, and his unique sense of harmony, the artist is able to make durable materials seem almost buoyant. Negative space becomes an intrinsic element in his work, imparting a sense that his exquisite, seemingly permanent forms are ultimately as fleeting as any of nature’s creations would be. The artist’s works can be found in many public collections including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts; and Chase Manhattan Bank and Chemical Bank, both in New York City. He has received a number of awards from prestigious organizations such as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Some of his most recent sculptures appeared around Indianapolis in conjunction with his 2016 exhibition, Back Home Again.
[more]

front cover of Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo
Edited by Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine Grynsztejn
University of Chicago Press, 2015
A mountain of chairs piled between buildings. Shoes sewn behind animal membranes into a wall. A massive crack running through the floor of Tate Modern. Powerful works like these by sculptor Doris Salcedo evoke the significance of bearing witness and processes of collective healing. Salcedo, who lives and works in Bogotá, roots her art in Colombia’s social and political landscape—including its long history of civil wars—with an elegance and poetic sensibility that balances the gravitas of her subjects. Her work is undergirded by intense fieldwork, including interviews with people who have suffered loss and endured trauma from political violence. In recent years, Salcedo has become increasingly interested in the universality of these experiences and has expanded her research to Turkey, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States.

Published to accompany Salcedo’s first retrospective exhibition and the American debut of her major work Plegaria muda, Doris Salcedo is the most comprehensive survey of her sculptures and installations to date. In addition to featuring new contributions by respected scholars and curators, the book includes over one hundred color illustrations highlighting many pieces from Salcedo’s thirty-year career. Offering fresh perspectives on a vital body of work, Doris Salcedo is a testament to the power of one of today’s most important international artists.
[more]

front cover of Early Pottery in the Southeast
Early Pottery in the Southeast
Tradition and Innovation in Cooking Technology
Kenneth E. Sassaman
University of Alabama Press, 1993

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

Among southeastern Indians pottery was an innovation that enhanced the economic value of native foods and the efficiency of food preparation. But even though pottery was available in the Southeast as early as 4,500 years ago, it took nearly two millenia before it was widely used. Why would an innovation of such economic value take so long to be adopted?

The answer lies in the social and political contexts of traditional cooking technology. Sassaman's book questions the value of using technological traits alone to mark temporal and spatial boundaries of prehistoric cultures and shows how social process shapes the prehistoric archaeological record.



[more]

front cover of The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture
The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture
Richard Neer
University of Chicago Press, 2010


In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer offers a new way to understand the epoch-making sculpture of classical Greece. Working at the intersection of art history, archaeology, literature, and aesthetics, he reveals a people fascinated with the power of sculpture to provoke wonder in beholders.  Wonder, not accuracy, realism, naturalism or truth, was the supreme objective of Greek sculptors. Neer traces this way of thinking about art from the poems of Homer to the philosophy of Plato. Then, through meticulous accounts of major sculpture from around the Greek world, he shows how the demand for wonder-inducing statues gave rise to some of the greatest masterpieces of Greek art. Rewriting the history of Greek sculpture in Greek terms and restoring wonder to a sometimes dusty subject, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the art of sculpture or the history of the ancient world.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Ethnic Sculpture
Malcolm McLeod and John Mack
Harvard University Press, 1985
This book covers the vast field of sculpture produced by traditional societies of the non-Western world. The sculptures range from the delicate and affectionate ivory carvings of the Eskimo hunters of the Arctic to the dignified King figures of the Bakuba people of Central Africa. The wealth and variety of these works of art, only recently appreciated by Europeans, is one of the great cultural inheritances of mankind. This lively and authoritative work examines the thinking behind the creation of such sculptures, describes the virtuoso skills and imaginative powers of their creators and shows how different materials and techniques influence the sculptural forms produced.
[more]

front cover of Exhibiting Antonio Canova
Exhibiting Antonio Canova
Display and the Transformation of Sculptural Theory
Christina Ferando
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Exhibiting Antonio Canova: Display and the Transformation of Sculptural Theory argues that the display of Canova’s sculptures in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries acted as a catalyst for discourse across a broad range of subjects. By enshrining his marble figures alongside plaster casts of ancient works, bathing them in candlelight, staining and waxing their surfaces, and even setting them in motion on rotating bases, Canova engaged viewers intellectually, physically, and emotionally. These displays inspired discussions on topics as diverse as originality and artistic production, the association between the sculptural surface, flesh, and anatomy, the relationship between painting and sculpture, and the role of public museums. Beholders’ discussions also shaped the legacy of important sculptural theories. They helped usher in their modern definitions and created the lenses through which we experience and interpret works of art, establishing modern attitudes not just towards sculpture, but towards cultural patrimony in general.
[more]

front cover of The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame
The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame
Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity
Michael Camille
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Most of the seven million people who visit the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris each year probably do not realize that the legendary gargoyles adorning this medieval masterpiece were not constructed until the nineteenth century. The first comprehensive history of these world-famous monsters, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame argues that they transformed the iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument.

Michael Camille begins his long-awaited study by recounting architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s ambitious restoration of the structure from 1843 to 1864, when the gargoyles were designed, sculpted by the little-known Victor Pyanet, and installed. These gargoyles, Camille contends, were not mere avatars of the Middle Ages, but rather fresh creations—symbolizing an imagined past—whose modernity lay precisely in their nostalgia. He goes on to map the critical reception and many-layered afterlives of these chimeras, notably in the works of such artists and writers as Charles Méryon, Victor Hugo, and photographer Henri Le Secq. Tracing their eventual evolution into icons of high kitsch, Camille ultimately locates the gargoyles’ place in the twentieth-century imagination, exploring interpretations by everyone from Winslow Homer to the Walt Disney Company.

Lavishly illustrated with more than three hundred images of its monumental yet whimsical subjects, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is a must-read for historians of art and architecture and anyone whose imagination has been sparked by the lovable monsters gazing out over Paris from one of the world’s most renowned vantage points.
[more]

front cover of Gods in the Time of Democracy
Gods in the Time of Democracy
Kajri Jain
Duke University Press, 2021
In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Greek Architecture and Its Sculpture
Ian Jenkins
Harvard University Press, 2006

From Athens and Arcadia on one side of the Aegean Sea and from Ionia, Lycia, and Karia on the other, this book brings together some of the great monuments of classical antiquity --among them two of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the later temple of Artemis at Ephesos and the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos.

Drawing on the Greek and Lycian architecture and sculpture in the British Museum--a collection second to none in quality, quantity, and geographical and chronological range--this lavishly illustrated volume tells a remarkable story reaching from the archaic temple of Artemis, the Parthenon, and other temples of the Athenian Acropolis to the temple of Apollo at Bassai, the sculptured tombs of Lycia, the Mausoleum, and the temple of Athena Polias at Priene. Ian Jenkins explains each as a work of art and as a historical phenomenon, revealing how the complex personality of these buildings is bound up with the people who funded, designed, built, used, destroyed, discovered, and studied them. With 250 photographs and specially commissioned line drawings, the book comprises a monumental narrative of the art and architecture that gave form, direction, and meaning to much of Western culture.

[more]

front cover of The Hall of Fame for Great Americans
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans
A Biography of Stanford White's Forgotten Memorial
Sheila Gerami
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans provides a window into the cultural changes taking place in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. This book is the first examination of the institutional and social history of America’s first hall of fame, from its dynamic opening in 1901 through its protracted decline in the late twentieth century and its brief return to relevancy in the early twenty-first century.

It also examines in depth what is arguably the least studied project of Stanford White, one of the most distinguished architects of the Gilded Age. Originally designed for New York University’s new campus in the Bronx, the Hall of Fame once housed ninety-eight bronze busts of men and women deemed “great Americans” within its elegant colonnade, including the likes of George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and Robert E. Lee.

The Hall was conceived when the Great Man theory dominated American thought. However, as times changed, challenges to ideas concerning greatness and heroism grew, and heroes once celebrated were scrutinized for their flaws. The monument is now a shell of its former glory and largely forgotten, and the NYU campus that once housed the colonnade was eventually sold to Bronx Community College.

In 2017, following the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, by white supremacists attempting to prevent the removal of a monument to General Lee, Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, thrust the Hall of Fame back into the limelight by ordering the busts of Lee and Stonewall Jackson to be removed. This action joined a national trend to remove monuments deemed offensive. Gerami argues that the rise and fall of this institution mirrors the nation’s changing conception of what comprises a hero. This biography of a public art memorial answers questions about the importance of art history and the cultural evolution of what it means to be great in America.
[more]

front cover of Hellenistic Sculpture II
Hellenistic Sculpture II
The Styles of ca. 200–100 B.C.
Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
The second century B.C. is one of the most prolific periods in the production of Greek and Hellenistic art, but it is a period extremely vexing to scholars. Very few of the works traditionally cited as examples of this century's art can be dated with certainty, and those that plausibly belong to it reflect no obvious general trends in function, iconography, or style. In Hellenistic Sculpture II: The Styles of ca. 200-100 B.C., the second of Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway's three volumes on Hellenistic sculpture, she takes on the challenge of interpreting and dating the art of this complex and lively century.
During this period, artistic production was stimulated by the encounter between Greece and Rome and fueled by the desire of the kings of Pergamon to emulate the past glories of fifth-century Athens. Statuary in relief and in the round, often at monumental scale, was created in a variety of styles. Ridgway attempts to determine what can be securely considered to have been produced during the second century B.C. In the course of her exploration, she critically scrutinizes most of the best-known pieces of Greek sculpture, ultimately revealing a tentative but plausible picture of the artistic trends of 200–100 B.C.
[more]

front cover of Infinity Net
Infinity Net
The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama
University of Chicago Press, 2011

In 1957, encouraged by Georgia O’Keeffe, artist Yayoi Kusama left Japan for New York City to become a star. By the time she returned to her home country in 1973, she had established herself as a leader of New York’s avant-garde movement, known for creating happenings and public orgies to protest the Vietnam War and for the polka dots that had become a trademark of her work. Her sculptures, videos, paintings, and installations are to this day included in major international exhibitions.

Available for the first time in English, Infinity Net paints a multilayered portrait of this fascinating artist. Taking us from her oppressive childhood in postwar Japan to her present life in the psychiatric hospital where she voluntarily stays—and is still productive—Kusama’s autobiography offers insight into the persona of mental illness that has informed her work. While she vibrantly describes the hallucinatory episodes she experiences, her tale is punctuated by stories of her pluck and drive in making her artistic voice heard. Conveying the breadth and ambition of her own work, Kusama also offers a dazzling snapshot of 1960s and 1970s New York City and her encounters with its artists—she collaborates with Andy Warhol, shares an apartment with Donald Judd, and becomes romantically entangled with Joseph Cornell. Replete with the sense of the sheer necessity within an artist to create, Infinity Net is an energetic and juicy page-turner that offers a glimpse into Kusama’s exhilarating world.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Inside the Spiral
The Passions of Robert Smithson
Suzaan Boettger
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.

While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family’s history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ’s passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.

Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson’s destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson’s iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

[more]

front cover of Isa Genzken
Isa Genzken
Sculpture as World Receiver
Lisa Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio.
           
Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.
[more]

front cover of Jean-Antoine Houdon
Jean-Antoine Houdon
Sculptor of the Enlightenment
Anne L. Poulet
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1826) has long been recognized as the greatest European portrait sculptor of the late eighteenth century, flourishing during both the American and French Revolutions as well as during the Directoire and Empire in France. Whether sculpting a head of state, an intellectual, or a young child, Houdon had an uncanny ability to capture the essence of his subject with a characteristic pose or expression. Yet until now, Houdon's exquisite sculptures have never been the subject of a major exhibition.

This lavish exhibition catalogue will immediately take its rightful place as the definitive work on Houdon. With more than one hundred color plates and two hundred black and white halftones, Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment illustrates every stage of the sculptor's fascinating career, from his early portrayals of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to his stunning portraits of American patriots such as George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed the images we hold dear of legendary Enlightenment figures like Diderot, Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Voltaire are based on works by Houdon. More than mere representations, these sculptures provide us fascinating, intimate glimpses into the very core of who these figures were. Houdon's genius animated even his less illustrious subjects, like his portraits of his family and friends, and filled his sculptures of children with delicacy and freshness. Accompanying the images of Houdon's masterworks are four insightful essays that discuss Houdon's views on art (based in part on a newly discovered manuscript written by the artist) as well as his prominence in the highly varied cultures of eighteenth-century France, Germany, and Russia.

From aristocrats to revolutionaries, actors to philosophers, Houdon's amazingly vivid portraits constitute the visual record of the Enlightenment and capture the true spirit of a remarkable age. Jean-Antoine Houdon finally gives these gorgeous works their due.
[more]

front cover of John Van Alstine
John Van Alstine
Sculpture, 1971–2018
Howard Fox
The Artist Book Foundation, 2019
For nearly fifty years, John Van Alstine has created abstract sculptures forged from steel and stone. In John Van Alstine: Sculpture, 1971–2018, three notable essayists explore the sculptor’s abstract landscapes that reveal the complex synergy between natural forces and man-made elements; by grappling with the challenges of balancing stone and steel, Van Alstine’s indoor, outdoor, and site-specific sculptures are measured and calculated, yet simultaneously poetic; their swooping angular lines create expansive spaces beyond the limits of their stone-and-steel frames to unveil our collective history and imagination, illuminating a deft interplay of natural energies and the human experience. The artist weaves into his works elements of mythology, celestial navigation, implements, human figures, movement, urban forms, and found objects, while using motion, balance, and inertia to incorporate the eternal forces of gravity, tension, and erosion. In an essay on his drawings, Van Alstine details the critical role they play in the initiation and planning of his projects, offering the reader a firsthand perspective on the artist’s creative process. Van Alstine’s works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and are found in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, and the Phillips Collection, to name but a few. His works are also found in numerous public and private collections. The Artist Book Foundation is gratified to announce the publication of this lavishly illustrated monograph on an esteemed and prolific contemporary artist.
[more]

front cover of Keep It Moving?
Keep It Moving?
Conserving Kinetic Art
Rachel Rivenc
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2018
Kinetic art not only includes movement but often depends on it to produce an intended effect and therefore fully realize its nature as art. It can take a multiplicity of forms and include a wide range of motion, from motorized and electrically driven movement to motion as the result of wind, light, or other sources of energy. Kinetic art emerged throughout the twentieth century and had its major developments in the 1950s and 1960s. 
 
Professionals responsible for conserving contemporary art are in the midst of rethinking the concept of authenticity and solving the dichotomy often felt between original materials and functionality of the work of art. The contrast is especially acute with kinetic art when a compromise between the two often seems impossible. Also to be considered are issues of technological obsolescence and the fact that an artist’s chosen technology often carries with it strong sociological and historical information and meanings. 

The free online edition of this open-access book is available at www.getty.edu/publications/keepitmoving/ and includes zoomable figures and videos. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.
[more]

front cover of The Learned Collector
The Learned Collector
Mythological Statuettes and Classical Taste in Late Antique Gaul
Lea M. Stirling
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Inspired by a classical education, wealthy Romans populated the glittering interiors of their villas and homes with marble statuettes of ancestors, emperors, gods, and mythological figures. In The Learned Collector, Lea M. Stirling shows how the literary education received by all aristocrats, pagan and Christian alike, was fundamental in shaping their artistic taste while demonstrating how that taste was considered an important marker of status. Surveying collections across the empire, Stirling examines different ways that sculptural collections expressed not only the wealth but the identity of their aristocratic owners.

The majority of statues in late antique homes were heirlooms and antiques. Mythological statuary, which would be interpreted in varying degrees of complexity, favored themes reflecting aristocratic pastimes such as dining and hunting. The Learned Collector investigates the manufacture of these distinctive statuettes in the later fourth century, the reasons for their popularity, and their modes of display in Gaul and the empire.

Although the destruction of ancient artwork looms large in the common view of late antiquity, statuary of mythological figures continued to be displayed and manufactured into the early fifth century. Stirling surveys the sculptural decor of late antique villas across the empire to reveal the universal and regional trends in the late antique confluence of literary education, mythological references, aristocratic mores, and classicizing taste. Deftly combining art historical, archaeological, and literary evidence, this book will be important to classicists and art historians alike. Stirling's accessible writing style makes this an important work for scholars, students, and anyone with an interest in Roman statues of this era.

Lea M. Stirling is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Manitoba and holds a Canada Research Council Chair in Roman Archaeology. She co-directs excavations at the ancient city of Leptiminus, Tunisia.


[more]

front cover of Legends in Limestone
Legends in Limestone
Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun
Linda Seidel
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Whereas twelfth-century pilgrims flocked to the church of St-Lazare in Autun to visit the relics of its patron saint, present-day pilgrims journey there to admire its superb sculpture, said to have been created by the artist Gislebertus whose name is inscribed above one of the church doors. These two cults, of sculptor and of saint, form points of departure and arrival for Linda Seidel's study.

Legends in Limestone reveals how "Gislebertus, sculptor" was discovered and subsequently sanctified over the course of the last century. Seidel makes a compelling case for the identification of the name with an ancestor of the local ducal family, invoked for his role in the acquisition of the precious relics. With the aid of evidence drawn from the richly carved decoration of the building, she demonstrates how medieval visitors would have read a different holy narrative in the church fabric, one that constructed before their eyes an account of their patron saint's life.

Legends in Limestone, an absorbing study of one of France's most revered medieval monuments, provides fresh insights into modern and medieval interpretive practices.

[more]

front cover of The Light Club
The Light Club
On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia"
Josiah McElheny
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass architecture, Scheerbart’s satirical fantasies envisioned an electrified future, a world composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass.

In 1912, Scheerbart published The Light Club of Batavia, a Novelle about the formation of a club dedicated to building a spa for bathing—not in water, but in light—at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft. Translated here into English for the first time, this rare story serves as a point of departure for Josiah McElheny, who, with an esteemed group of collaborators, offers a fascinating array of responses to this enigmatic work.

The Light Club
makes clear that the themes of utopian hope, desire, and madness in Scheerbart’s tale represent a part of modernism’s lost project: a world based on political and spiritual ideals rather than efficiency and logic. In his compelling introduction, McElheny describes Scheerbart’s life as well as his own enchantment with the writer, and he explains the ways in which The Light Club of Batavia inspired him to produce art of uncommon breadth. The Light Club also features inspired writings from Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Müller, Andrea Geyer, and Branden W. Joseph, as well as translations of original texts by and about Scheerbart. A unique response by one visionary artist to another, The Light Club is an unforgettable examination of what it might mean to see radical potential in absolute illumination.
[more]

front cover of Lorado Taft
Lorado Taft
The Chicago Years
Allen Stuart Weller; Edited by Robert G. La France and Henry Adams with Stephen P. Thomas
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Sculptor Lorado Taft helped build Chicago's worldwide reputation as the epicenter of the City Beautiful Movement. In this new biography, art historian Allen Stuart Weller picks up where his earlier book Lorado in Paris left off, drawing on the sculptor's papers to generate a fascinating account of the most productive and influential years of Taft's long career.

Returning to Chicago from France, Taft established a bustling studio and began a twenty-one-year career as an instructor at the Art Institute, succeeded by three decades as head of the Midway Studios at the University of Chicago. This triumphant era included ephemeral sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; a prolific turn-of-the-century period marked by the gold-medal-winning The Solitude of the Soul; the 1913 Fountain of the Great Lakes; the 1929 Alma Mater at the University of Illinois; and large-scale projects such as his ambitious program for Chicago's Midway with the monumental Fountain of Time. In addition, the book charts Taft's mentoring of women artists, including the so-called White Rabbits at the World's Fair, many of whom went on to achieve artistic success.

Lavishly illustrated with color images of Taft's most celebrated works, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years completes the first major study of a great American artist.

[more]

front cover of Louise Bourgeois' Spider
Louise Bourgeois' Spider
The Architecture of Art-Writing
Mieke Bal
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The sculptor Louise Bourgeois is best known for her monumental abstract sculptures, one of the most striking of which is the installation Spider (1997). Too vast in scale to be viewed all at once, this elusive structure resists simple narration. It fits both no genre and all of them—architecture, sculpture, installation. Its contents and associations evoke social issues without being reducible to any one of them. Here, literary critic and theorist Mieke Bal presents the work as a theoretical object, one that can teach us how to think, speak, and write about art.

Known for her commentary on the issue of temporality in art, Bal argues that art must be understood in relationship to the present time of viewing as opposed to the less-immediate contexts of what has preceded the viewing, such as the historical past of influences and art movements, biography and interpretation. In ten short chapters, or "takes," Bal demonstrates that the closer the engagement with the work of art, the more adequate the result of the analysis. She also confronts issues of biography and autobiography—key themes in Bourgeois's work—and evaluates the consequences of "ahistorical" experiences for art criticism, drawing on diverse sources such as Bernini and Benjamin, Homer and Eisenstein.

This short, beautiful book offers both a theoretical model for analyzing art "out of context" and a meditation on a key work by one of the most engaging artists of our era.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture
Jeanne L. Wasserman
Harvard University Press, 1975

The detective work of art history—recreating the past with visual clues and often scanty documentation—becomes particularly challenging in the case of cast sculpture since the nineteenth century. Increasing popular demand for small versions of well-known monuments, and technical advances which made mass production of sculpture available for the first time, tempted nineteenth-century artists to profitably reproduce their works. Collectors, dealers, and scholars today are faced with the problem of unraveling the histories of the legions of reproductions left behind.

Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture confronts the question of originality through visual comparison of similar works brought together, possibly for the first time. Groups of sculptures by Houdon, Barye, Carpeaux, Rodin, Saint-Gaudens, and Daniel Chester French are considered. Problems of quality and the obvious or subtle changes in the character of a sculpture as it is changed in size, translated into other materials, or cast from other casts must all be faced in the evaluation of a serial piece. Here technical specialists have joined with art scholars to retrace the evolution of each series from the artist’s original concept to its final edition, in many cases long after the sculptor’s death.

After two years of consultation and correspondence with almost seventy lenders, the Fogg Museum at Harvard chose more than one hundred objects for first-hand study. Then Professor Jacques de Caso, who wrote the historical and legal introduction, and six other authorities on the sculptors traveled to Cambridge to confront the objects and consult with Jeanne Wasserman. The material in these chapters is a synthesis of the knowledge and insights contributed by both technical specialists and art historians.

[more]

front cover of Michelangelo’s Sculpture
Michelangelo’s Sculpture
Selected Essays
Leo Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Leo Steinberg was one of the most original and daring art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretative risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures that ranged from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His works, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading.
 
For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo’s work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist’s highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures explicates many of Michelangelo’s most celebrated sculptures, applying principles gleaned from long, hard looking. Almost everything Steinberg wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but here put to the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo’s rendering of figures as well as their gestures and interrelations conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body and its actions to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers—or, as Steinberg put it, in Michelangelo’s art, “anatomy becomes theology.”
 
Michelangelo’s Sculpture is the first in a series of volumes of Steinberg’s selected writings and unpublished lectures, edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz. The volume also includes a book review debunking psychoanalytic interpretation of the master’s work, a light-hearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession and, finally, the shortest piece Steinberg ever published.
 
[more]

front cover of Monument Lab
Monument Lab
Creative Speculations for Philadelphia
Paul M. Farber
Temple University Press, 2020

What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? That was the question posed by the curators, artists, scholars, and students who comprise the Philadelphia-based public art and history studio Monument Lab. And in 2017, along with Mural Arts Philadelphia, they produced and organized a groundbreaking, city-wide exhibition of temporary, site-specific works that engaged directly with the community. The installations, by a cohort of diverse artists considering issues of identity, appeared in iconic public squares and neighborhood parks with research and learning labs and prototype monuments. 

Monument Lab is a fabulous compendium of the exhibition and a critical reflection of the proceedings, including contributions from interlocutors and collaborators. The exhibition and this handbook were designed to generate new ways of thinking about monuments and public art as well as to find new, critical perspectives to reflect on the monuments we have inherited and to imagine those we have yet to build. Monument Lab energizes acivic dialogue about place and history as forces for a deeper questioning of what it means to be Philadelphian in a time of renewal and continuing struggle.

Contributors: Alexander Alberro, Alliyah Allen, Laurie Allen, Andrew Friedman, Justin Geller, Kristen Giannantonio, Jane Golden, Aviva Kapust, Fariah Khan, Homay King, Stephanie Mach, Trapeta B. Mayson, Nathaniel Popkin, Ursula Rucker, Jodi Throckmorton, Salamishah Tillet, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Bethany Wiggin, Mariam I. Williams, Leslie Willis-Lowry,  and the editors.

Artists: Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Kara Crombie, Tyree Guyton, Hans Haacke, David Hartt, Sharon Hayes, King Britt and Joshua Mays, Klip Collective, Duane Linklater, Emeka Ogboh, Karyn Olivier, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Kaitlin Pomerantz, RAIR, Alexander Rosenberg, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Shira Walinsky and Southeast by Southeast, and Marisa Williamson.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Parthenon Sculptures
Ian Jenkins
Harvard University Press, 2007

The Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum are unrivaled examples of classical Greek art, an inspiration to artists and writers since their creation in the fifth century bce. A superb visual introduction to these wonders of antiquity, this book offers a photographic tour of the most famous of the surviving sculptures from ancient Greece, viewed within their cultural and art-historical context.

Ian Jenkins offers an account of the history of the Parthenon and its architectural refinements. He introduces the sculptures as architecture--pediments, metopes, Ionic frieze--and provides an overview of their subject matter and possible meaning for the people of ancient Athens. Accompanying photographs focus on the pediment sculptures that filled the triangular gables at each end of the temple; the metopes that crowned the architrave surmounting the outer columns; and the frieze that ran around the four sides of the building, inside the colonnade. Comparative images, showing the sculptures in full and fine detail, bring out particular features of design and help to contrast Greek ideas with those of other cultures.

The book further reflects on how, over 2,500 years, the cultural identity of the Parthenon sculptures has changed. In particular, Jenkins expands on the irony of our intimate knowledge and appreciation of the sculptures--a relationship far more intense than that experienced by their ancient, intended spectators--as they have been transformed from architectural ornaments into objects of art.

[more]

front cover of The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums
The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums
Staging Contemporary Art
Tatja Scholte
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Site-specific installations are created for specific locations and are usually intended as temporary artworks. The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums: Staging Contemporary Art shows that these artworks consist of more than a singular manifestation and that their lifespan is often extended. In this book, Tatja Scholte offers an in-depth account of the artistic production of the last forty years. With a wealth of case studies the author illuminates the diversity of site-specific art in both form and content, as well as in the conservation strategies applied. A conceptual framework is provided for scholars and museum professionals to better understand how site-specific installations gain new meanings during successive stages of their biographies and may become agents for change in professional routines.
[more]

front cover of The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai
The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai
By Mary Stieber
University of Texas Press, 2004

Some of the loveliest works of Archaic art were the Athenian korai—sculptures of beautiful young women presenting offerings to the goddess Athena that stood on the Acropolis. Sculpted in the sixth and early fifth centuries B.C., they served as votives until Persians sacked the citadel in 480/79 B.C. Subsequently, they were buried as a group and forgotten for nearly twenty-four centuries, until archaeologists excavated them in the 1880s. Today, they are among the treasures of the Acropolis Museum.

Mary Stieber takes a fresh look at the Attic korai in this book. Challenging the longstanding view that the sculptures are generic female images, she persuasively argues that they are instead highly individualized, mimetically realistic representations of Archaic young women, perhaps even portraits of real people. Marshalling a wide array of visual and literary evidence to support her claims, she shows that while the korai lack the naturalism that characterizes later Classical art, they display a wealth and realism of detail that makes it impossible to view them as generic, idealized images. This iconoclastic interpretation of the Attic korai adds a new dimension to our understanding of Archaic art and to the distinction between realism and naturalism in the art of all periods.

[more]

front cover of Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition
Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition
Warren G. Moon
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

Polykleitos of Argos is one of the most celebrated sculptors of classical Greece. This richly illustrated volume of superb essays by art historians, classical scholars, and archaeologists discusses Polykleitos’ life and influence, his intellectual and cultural milieu, and his best-known work—the bronze Doryphoros, or “Spear-Bearer.”
    Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition displays an impressive range of approaches–from commentary on the artistic and philosophical antecedents that influenced Polykleitos’ own aesthetic to the role of contemporary Greek anatomical knowledge in his representation of the human form. The essays offer extended analysis of his work as well as reflections of his style in sculpture, paintings, coins, and other art in Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. This volume also contains a thorough discussion of Polykleitos’ original bronze Doryphoros, its pose, its relation to other spear-bearer sculptures, and the fine Roman marble copy of it now at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

[more]

front cover of The Pygmalion Effect
The Pygmalion Effect
From Ovid to Hitchcock
Victor I. Stoichita
University of Chicago Press, 2008
 
Between life and the art that imitates it is a vague, more shadowy category: images that exist autonomously. Pygmalion’s mythical sculpture, which magnanimous gods endowed with life after he fell in love with it, marks perhaps the first such instance in Western art history of an image that exists on its own terms, rather than simply imitating something (or someone) else. In The Pygmalion Effect, Victor I. Stoichita delivers this living image—as well as its many avatars over the centuries—from the long shadow cast by art that merely replicates reality.

Stoichita traces the reverberations of Ovid’s founding myth from ancient times through the advent of cinema. Emphasizing its erotic origins, he locates echoes of this famous fable in everything from legendary incarnations of Helen of Troy to surrealist painting to photographs of both sculpture and people artfully posed to simulate statues. But it was only with the invention of moving pictures, Stoichita argues, that the modern age found a fitting embodiment of the Pygmalion story’s influence. Concluding with an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock films that focuses on Kim Novak’s double persona in Vertigo, The Pygmalion Effect illuminates the fluctuating connections that link aesthetics, magic, and technical skill. In the process, it sheds new light on a mysterious world of living artifacts that, until now, has occupied a dark and little-understood realm in the history of Western image making.
[more]

front cover of Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Outdoor Painted Sculpture
Julie Wolfe
J. Paul Getty Trust, The
The first book-length study to examine the materials and techniques used in the fabrication and painting of the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s outdoor sculpture.
 
Vibrant color was essential to the paintings of the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), and when he began exploring the creation of outdoor sculpture in the late 1970s, vivid hues remained an important part of his artistic vocabulary. Today, preserving these remarkable works after they have endured decades in outdoor environments around the world is an issue of pressing concern.
 
This abundantly illustrated volume is based on extensive archival research of Lichtenstein’s studio materials, interviews with his assistants, and a thorough technical analysis of the sculpture Three Brushstrokes. The book concludes with a chapter showing various options for the care, conservation, and restoration of his sculptural works, making this an essential resource for conservators, curators, and others interested both in the iconic artist and modern sculpture in general.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Screens
Viewing Media Installation Art
Kate Mondloch
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Media screens—film, video, and computer screens—have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along with their subjective effects, remains largely unexplored. Screens addresses this gap, offering a historical and theoretical framework for understanding screen-reliant installation art and the spectatorship it evokes.
 
Examining a range of installations created over the past fifty years that investigate the rich terrain between the sculptural and the cinematic, including works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Snow, Kate Mondloch traces the construction of screen spectatorship in art from the seminal film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s to the new media artworks of today’s digital culture.
 
Mondloch identifies a momentous shift in contemporary art that challenges key premises of spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the subject’s field of vision. As a result she proposes that contemporary viewers are, quite literally, screen subjects and offers the unique critical leverage of art as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality.
[more]

front cover of Sculpting a Life
Sculpting a Life
Chana Orloff between Paris and Tel Aviv
Paula J. Birnbaum
Brandeis University Press, 2022
The first biography of sculptor Chana Orloff.
 
In Sculpting a Life, the first book-length biography of sculptor Chana Orloff (1888-1968), author Paula Birnbaum tells the story of a fiercely determined and ambitious woman who fled antisemitism in Ukraine, emigrated to Palestine with her family, then travelled to Paris to work in haute couture before becoming an internationally recognized artist. Against the backdrop of revolution, world wars, a global pandemic and forced migrations, her sculptures embody themes of gender, displacement, exile, and belonging. A major figure in the School of Paris, Orloff contributed to the canon of modern art alongside Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall.
 
Stories from her unpublished memoir enrich this life story of courage, perseverance, and extraordinary artistic accomplishments that take us through the aftermath of the Holocaust when Orloff lived between Paris and Tel Aviv. This biography brings new perspectives and understandings to Orloff’s multiple identities as a cosmopolitan émigré, woman, and Jew, and is a much-needed intervention into the narrative of modern art.
 
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Sculpture and Coins
Margarete Bieber as Scholar and Collector
Carmen Arnold-Biucchi
Harvard University Press

This volume addresses the question of the relation between sculpture and coins—or large statuary and miniature art—in the private and public domain. It originates in the Harvard Art Museums 2011 Ilse and Leo Mildenberg interdisciplinary symposium celebrating the acquisition of Margarete Bieber’s coin collection. The papers examine the function of Greek and Roman portraiture and the importance of coins for its identification and interpretation. The authors are scholars from different backgrounds and present case studies from their individual fields of expertise: sculpture, public monuments, coins, and literary sources.

Sculpture and Coins also pays homage to the art historian Margarete Bieber (1879–1978) whose work on ancient theater and Hellenistic sculpture remains seminal. She was the first woman to receive the prestigious travel fellowship from the German Archaeological Institute and the first female professor at the University of Giessen. Dismissed by the Nazis, she came to the United States and taught at Columbia. This publication cannot answer all the questions: its merit is to reopen and broaden a conversation on a topic seldom tackled by numismatists and archaeologists together since the time of Bernard Ashmole, Phyllis Lehmann and Léon Lacroix.

[more]

front cover of Sculpture in Gotham
Sculpture in Gotham
Art and Urban Renewal in New York City
Michele H. Bogart
Reaktion Books, 2018
Public sculpture is a major draw in today’s cities, and nowhere is this more the case than in New York. In the Big Apple, urban art has become synonymous with the municipal “brand,” highlighting the metropolis as vibrant, creative, tolerant, orderly, and above all, safe. Sculpture in Gotham tells the story of how the City of New York came to be committed to public art patronage beginning in the mid-1960s. In that era of political turbulence, cultural activists and city officials for a time shifted away from traditional monuments, joining forces to sponsor ambitious sculptural projects as an instrument for urban revitalization.

Focusing on specific people, agencies and organizations, and both temporary and permanent projects, from the 1960s forward, Michele H. Bogart reveals the changing forms and meanings of municipal public art. Sculpture in Gotham illustrates how such shifts came about at a time when art theories and styles were morphing markedly, and when municipalities were reeling from racial unrest, economic decline, and countercultural challenges—to culture as well as the state. While sculptural installations on New York City property took time and were not without controversy, Gotham’s processes and policies produced notable results, providing precedents and lessons for cities the world over.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Sculpture of India, 3000 B.C.–A.D. 1300
Catalogue of an Exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, May 3–September 2, 1985
Pramod Chandra
Harvard University Press

Among the many artistic events of 1985 and 1986 devoted to the history and culture of India, one of the most notable is the exhibition of Indian sculpture organized by Pramod Chandra for the National Gallery of Art. It comprises more than one hundred choice sculptures in stone, ivory, and bronze from all regions of the subcontinent, many from very remote locations. Approximately half of them have never left India before. Several are familiar masterpieces of the highest quality; others are newly discovered works of great interest and beauty. Collectively they epitomize the richness of India's artistic heritage.

The exhibition catalogue has been written by Chandra, one of the world's leading experts on Indian art. He provides an introductory survey of Indian sculpture over the ages—its various styles and schools and diverse idioms—followed by illuminating analyses of the individual works. His descriptions are accompanied by stunning photographs, most of them taken in India, in situ, especially for this volume. Beyond its visual appeal, the catalogue, which includes a glossary and bibliography, makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Indian art.

[more]

front cover of The Sculpture of Robyn Horn
The Sculpture of Robyn Horn
Robyn Horn
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
In Robyn Horn’s thirty years as a wood sculptor, her work has evolved from small, lathe-turned objects to ten-foot-high redwood compositions like her Already Set in Motion #1170, which graces a garden at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In creating these forms that rise from the earth at improbable angles, Horn’s primary tool is the chainsaw, and yet a tenderness for her medium reveals itself in the delicate balance of planes that allows her sculptures to both loom and flow, visually indicating that they are precarious when in fact they are sturdy.

The essays and images in The Sculpture of Robyn Horn sketch the industrious career of this Little Rock, Arkansas-based sculptor, illuminating her attention to geometry, physics, and the philosophy of design, and exploring the context and origin of the various series—Geodes, Millstones, Standing Stones, and Slipping Stones, among others—that characterize her body of work.

 
[more]

front cover of Sculpture
Sculpture
Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream
Johann Gottfried Herder
University of Chicago Press, 2002
"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface; it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."—Johann Gottfried Herder

Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's Plastik (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought with a wide range of sources—from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible—to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture.

Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, Sculpture is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory.

Jason Gaiger's translation of Sculpture includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text.
[more]

front cover of Spiral Jetta
Spiral Jetta
A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West
Erin Hogan
University of Chicago Press, 2008

Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. Spiral Jetta is a chronicle of this journey.

A lapsed art historian and devoted urbanite, Hogan initially sought firsthand experience of the monumental earthworks of the 1970s and the 1980s—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, and the contemporary art mecca of Marfa, Texas. Armed with spotty directions, no compass, and less-than-desert-appropriate clothing, she found most of what she was looking for and then some.

“I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out . . . or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In Spiral Jetta, an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art doesn’t magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing.”—Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times Book Review

“The reader emerges enlightened and even delighted. . . . Casually scrutinizing the artistic works . . . while gamely playing up her fish-out-of-water status, Hogan delivers an ingeniously engaging travelogue-cum-art history.”—Atlantic

“Smart and unexpectedly hilarious.”—Kevin Nance, Chicago Sun-Times

“One of the funniest and most entertaining road trips to be published in quite some time.”—June Sawyers, Chicago Tribune

“Hogan ruminates on how the work affects our sense of time, space, size, and scale. She is at her best when she reexamines the precepts of modernism in the changing light of New Mexico, and shows how the human body is meant to be a participant in these grand constructions.”—New Yorker

[more]

front cover of Spiral Jetta
Spiral Jetta
A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West
Erin Hogan
University of Chicago Press, 2008

Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. Spiral Jetta is a chronicle of this journey.

A lapsed art historian and devoted urbanite, Hogan initially sought firsthand experience of the monumental earthworks of the 1970s and the 1980s—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, and the contemporary art mecca of Marfa, Texas. Armed with spotty directions, no compass, and less-than-desert-appropriate clothing, she found most of what she was looking for and then some.

“I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out . . . or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In Spiral Jetta, an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art doesn’t magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing.”—Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times Book Review

“The reader emerges enlightened and even delighted. . . . Casually scrutinizing the artistic works . . . while gamely playing up her fish-out-of-water status, Hogan delivers an ingeniously engaging travelogue-cum-art history.”—Atlantic

“Smart and unexpectedly hilarious.”—Kevin Nance, Chicago Sun-Times

“One of the funniest and most entertaining road trips to be published in quite some time.”—June Sawyers, Chicago Tribune

“Hogan ruminates on how the work affects our sense of time, space, size, and scale. She is at her best when she reexamines the precepts of modernism in the changing light of New Mexico, and shows how the human body is meant to be a participant in these grand constructions.”—New Yorker

[more]

front cover of Spiral Jetta Summer
Spiral Jetta Summer
Swimming in the Great Salt Lake
Erin Hogan
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her completed journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. Spiral Jetta Summer is a chronicle of this adventure, and it reveals Hogan’s unpretentious and boisterous narrative flair on the roads of middle-of-nowhere Utah in pursuit of Robert Smithson’s classic work Spiral Jetty. Along the way, Hogan writes about venturing outside of her urban comfort zone; who she encounters; and most importantly, how she found most of what she was looking for and then some.

[more]

front cover of The Spirit of the City
The Spirit of the City
Marshall Fredericks Sculptures in Detroit
Janna Jones
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Marshall Fredericks’s Detroit sculptures capture the spirit of the Motor City and its dramatic transformation from the 1950s to the present day. In this book, Janna Jones analyzes eight of these enormous works of public art, situating them and their structures in metro Detroit’s distinctive midcentury milieu and bringing much-needed critical attention to this sculptor’s oeuvre. Sadly, some of these artworks have suffered along with the city as it shrank from its postwar zenith. Both the buildings and the sculptures erected for them deserve to be rescued from neglect, and then maintained and preserved for the future.
 
[more]

front cover of Swimmers
Swimmers
Carole Feuerman
John Yau
The Artist Book Foundation, 2014
Realist sculptor Carole A. Feuerman’s human-figure sculptures express a refreshing perspective on the mundane but intensely personal activities of modern life. Her powers of observation and versatility find unique expression through various materials that include marble, bronze, vinyl, and painted resins, while she incorporates both ancient and contemporary methods in the creation of her works. Swimmers: Carole Feuerman is a gorgeous and shimmering glimpse at transitory, contemplative moments in time, often captured in a veil of clear resin that replicates tumbling water droplets. In his astute and insightful essay, John Yau describes Feuerman’sexquisitely rendered figures as subjects “caught in a moment of transition that radiates an intense eroticism.” She evokes an inward life for her figures that invites our speculation, while revealing a mysterious chasm between them and the viewer that can never be plumbed. We cannot know their thoughts and perhaps that is exactly the point. Feuerman fuses the tactile nature of her sculpture with a visual verisimilitude that provides us a fleeting glimpse into private and isolated environments—women stepping out of the shower, in the rain, or swimming—that suggest a meditative bliss. Feuerman’s museum retrospectives have included exhibitions at the Venice Biennale; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; The State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia; The Palazzo Strozzi Foundation in Florence, Italy; and the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, among others. Her work is featured in public, private, and corporate collections, including Grounds For Sculpture, Trenton, NJ; the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; and art-st-urban, Lucerne, Switzerland. Her large-scale Olympic Swimmer was featured in the Olympic Fine Arts exhibition at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.
[more]

logo for University of Pittsburgh Press
Thaddeus Mosley
African American Sculptor
David Lewis
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

Thaddeus “Thad” Mosley is a self-taught African American sculptor.  Earning a living throughout his adult life as a postal worker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so that he could support his family by day and work as a sculptor by night, he has evolved an individual and powerful African American voice.  He worked alone, patiently developing a sculptural language absolutely his own, yet traceable to his primary sources of inspiration, the vitality of African art and American jazz on the one hand, and on the other, two twentieth-century artists, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the Asian American sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

From the beginning Thad Mosley has been a carver.  His materials have always been those “at hand,” logs from the trees of his native Western Pennsylvania, stones from the sites of demolished buildings in Pittsburgh, and metals from local scrapyards.  Finding within each log or block of stone an essential vitality, his carvings invariably bear a syncopation of chisel marks evoking the rhythms and surging freedoms of jazz.  Mosley’s perseverence and his pride in who he is offer an inspiring example of the unquenchable spirit of a true artists.

This short book introduces the life and work of this remarkable man.  Davis Lewis, architect, writer, and painter, has been a friend of the artist for twenty-five years.  His narrative is distilled from hours of taped interviews with Thad Mosley, as well as from a deep understanding of his art and influences.  Lonnie Graham is a nationally known African-American photographer.

[more]

front cover of Thomas Hirschhorn
Thomas Hirschhorn
A New Political Understanding of Art?
Christina Braun
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
Thomas Hirschhorn, a leading installation artist whose work is owned and exhibited by modern art museums throughout Europe and the United States, is known for compelling, often site-specific and interactive environments tackling issues of critical theory, global politics, and consumerism. His work initially engages the viewer through sheer superabundance. Combining found images and texts, bound up in handcrafted constructions of cardboard, foil, and packing tape, the artworks reflect the intellectual scavenging and sensory overload that characterize our own attempts to grapple with the excess of information in daily life. Christina Braun, the first to compile and systematically analyze the extensive source material on this artist’s theoretical principles, sheds light on the complicated yet constitutive relations between Hirschhorn’s work and theory. Her study, now translated into English, makes a major contribution to the study of contemporary art.
[more]

front cover of Tilted Arc Controversy
Tilted Arc Controversy
Dangerous Precedent
Harriet F. Senie
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
A comprehensive look at a controversy that continues to fuel debates about the role of public art in America. Since its installation at and subsequent removal from New York City's Federal Plaza, noted sculptor Richard Serra's Tilted Arc has been a touchstone for debates over the role of public art. Installed in 1981, the 10-foot-high, 120-foot-long curved wall of Cor-Ten self-rusting steel instantly became a magnet for criticism. Art critics in the New York Times and the Village Voice labeled it the city's worst public sculpture, and many denounced it as an example of the elitism associated with art and as an obstacle to the use and enjoyment of the plaza. Harriet F. Senie explores the history of Tilted Arc, including its 1979 commission and the heated public hearings that eventually led to its removal in 1989 (it was dismantled and is currently stored in a government warehouse in Maryland). Analyzing the archive of popular opinion, Senie shows how the sculpture was caught in an avalanche of shifting local and national discussions about public funding for the arts. She examines the tactics of those opposed to the sculpture and the media's superficial and sensational coverage of the controversy, reframing the dialogue in terms of public art, public space, and public policy instead of the question of whether the removal of Tilted Arc was poetic justice or a dangerous precedent. Senie provides an enlightening history and analysis of a controversy that will continue to inform our discussions about public art for years to come. Harriet F. Senie is director of museum studies and professor of art history at the City University of New York's City College and professor of art history at CUNY's Graduate Center. $21.95 Paper ISBN 0-8166-3786-5 224 pages | 53 halftones | 7 x 10 | 2001
[more]

front cover of Trucks
Trucks
Recent Works by John Himmelfarb
Scott Griffin
The Artist Book Foundation, 2014
With sculpture, paintings, prints, and drawings, award-winning artist John Himmelfarb explores the iconic American truck. An in-depth consideration of the vehicles that are intrinsically and culturally significant to the American landscape, TRUCKS: Recent Works by John Himmelfarb showcases the artist’s diverse and lighthearted approach, adeptly shifting between mediums, style, and message during his decade-long contemplation of trucks and their specific functions. Under his skillful hands, the utilitarian vehicles of commerce and construction become unique and provocative art forms. In 2005 and 2006, the truck as narrative becomes center stage for Himmelfarb’s work. With his seamless, animated traverse of multiple mediums, viewers cannot help but smile as they appreciate the common truck through unique perspectives. In 2007, another tectonic change occurs in Himmelfarb’s pursuit of his theme: as a result of a three-month residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry program, he begins his first meaningful foray into three-dimensional works. Himmelfarb’s artworks can be found in distinguished international collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Art Museum; the British Museum, London; the Boston Public Library Print Collection; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the University of Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor.
[more]

front cover of Wendell Castle
Wendell Castle
A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958–2012
Emily Evans Eerdmans
The Artist Book Foundation, 2014
Sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle (1932–2018) carved a distinct path in furniture making over nearly six decades of a distinguished career, and this long-awaited recording of his oeuvre, Wendell Castle: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958–2012, beautifully presents the extraordinary scope of his artistry and craftsmanship. The voluminous accounting of his works, beginning with Castle’s earliest, mid-century works through to his unabashed experiments with unconventional materials (gel-coated fiberglass and metallic automobile paint) and his latest signature wood laminations, is comprehensive and detailed. Three essays of varying perspectives introduce the catalogue raisonné followed by an extensive accounting of his enormous oeuvre, his exhibitions, numerous awards, and the collections of his works, as well as a substantive bibliography. With his organic and whimsical approach to his various mediums, he seamlessly merged sculpture and design into one discipline, obscuring the distinction between the two. He invented the technique of carving stacked laminations of wood, and his later explorations into the qualities of fiberglass as a sculptural medium are unparalleled. Castle is widely collected and his works are in the permanent collections of more than 40 museums and cultural institutions around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Museum of Modern Art (New York); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (Quebec, Canada); and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).Castle has also been the recipient of many honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants, three honorary degrees, the American Craft Council Gold Medal, and a Life-time Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
[more]

front cover of Wendell Castle Remastered
Wendell Castle Remastered
Glenn Adamson
The Artist Book Foundation, 2015
Wendell Castle (1932–2018), master furniture maker, designer, sculptor, and educator, was in the sixth decade of his extraordinary creativity when an emblematic exhibition of his signature works was mounted by the Museum of Art and Design 2016. It blended the artist’s seminal works with his latest collection, produced with digital technology. In part a self-reflection, this eponymous, full-color companion book examines some of Castle’s historically representative works as well as significant contemporary furniture pieces, continuing his highly respected and acclaimed sculptural/functional dialogue. Castle, ever the innovator, was remarkable for his openness to new technologies; he not only embraced an initially complex practice but has “remastered” it. His vast oeuvre represents a prodigious lifework that began in 1958 and aligns with the development of the American art furniture movement. The solo exhibition was a somewhat self-reflective examination of his early ground-breaking works that tested the boundaries of traditional furniture making by presenting his later innovations using new digital technologies such as 3D scanning and modeling, and computer-controlled milling—a digital “remastering” of his immense oeuvre. Unique perspectives on the master’s work are presented by informative essays by authors well-versed on Castle’s celebrated career.
[more]

front cover of Whose Art Is It?
Whose Art Is It?
Jane Kramer
Duke University Press, 1994
Whose Art Is It? is the story of sculptor John Ahearn, a white artist in a black and Hispanic neighborhood of the South Bronx, and of the people he cast for a series of public sculptures commissioned for an intersection outside a police station. Jane Kramer, telling this story, raises one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we live in a society we share with people who are, often by their own definitions, "different?" Ahearn’s subjects were "not the best of the neighborhood." They were a junkie, a hustler, and a street kid. Their images sparked a controversy throughout the community—and New York itself—over issues of white representations of people of color and the appropriateness of particular images as civic art. The sculptures, cast in bronze and painted, were up for only five days before Ahearn removed them.
This compelling narrative raises questions about community and public art policies, about stereotypes and multiculturalism. With wit, drama, sympathy, and circumspection, Kramer draws the reader into the multicultural debate, challenging our assumptions about art, image, and their relation to community. Her portrait of the South Bronx takes the argument to its grass roots—provocative, surprising in its contradictions and complexities and not at all easy to resolve.
Accompanied by an introduction by Catharine R. Stimpson exploring the issues of artistic freedom, "political correctness," and multiculturalism, Whose Art Is It? is a lively and accessible introduction to the ongoing debate on representation and private expression in the public sphere.
[more]

front cover of Women Artists on the Leading Edge
Women Artists on the Leading Edge
Visual Arts at Douglass College
Joan M. Marter
Rutgers University Press, 2020

How do students develop a personal style from their instruction in a visual arts program? Women Artists on the Leading Edge explores this question as it describes the emergence of an important group of young women artists from an innovative post-war visual arts program at Douglass College.

The women who studied with avant-garde artists at Douglas were among the first students in the nation to be introduced to performance art, conceptual art, Fluxus, and Pop Art. These young artists were among the first to experience new approaches to artmaking that rejected the predominant style of the 1950s: Abstract Expressionism. The New Art espoused by faculty including Robert Watts, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Geoffrey Hendricks, and others advocated that art should be based on everyday life. The phrase “anything can be art” was frequently repeated in the creation of Happenings, multi-media installations, and video art. Experimental approaches to methods of creation using a remarkable range of materials were investigated by these young women. Interdisciplinary aspects of the Douglass curriculum became the basis for performances, videos, photography, and constructions. Sculpture was created using new technologies and industrial materials. The Douglass women artists included in this book were among the first to implement the message and direction of their instructors.

Ultimately, the artistic careers of these young women have reflected the successful interaction of students with a cutting-edge faculty. From this BA and MFA program in the Visual Arts emerged women such as Alice Aycock. Rita Myers, Joan Snyder, Mimi Smith, and Jackie Winsor, who went on to become lifelong innovators. Camaraderie was important among the Douglass art students, and many continue to be instructors within a close circle of associates from their college years. Even before the inception of the women’s art movement of the 1970s, these women students were encouraged to pursue professional careers, and to remain independent in their approach to making art. The message of the New Art was to relate one’s art production to life itself and to personal experiences. From these directions emerged a “proto-feminist” art of great originality identified with women’s issues. The legacy of these artists can be found in radical changes in art instruction since the 1950s, the promotion of non-hierarchical approaches to media, and acceptance of conceptual art as a viable art form.

[more]

front cover of Writings/Interviews
Writings/Interviews
Richard Serra
University of Chicago Press, 1994
One of the most important sculptors of this century, Richard Serra has been a spokesman on the nature and status of art in our day. Best known for site-specific works in steel, Serra has much to say about the relation of sculpture to place, whether urban, natural, or architectural, and about the nature of art itself, whether political, decorative, or personal. In interviews with writers including Douglas and Davis Sylvester, he discusses specific installations and offers insights into his approach to the problem each presents. Interviews by Peter Eisenman and Alan Colquhoun elicit Serra's thoughts on the relation of architecture to contemporary sculpture, a primary component in his own work. From essays like "Extended Notes from Sight Point Road" to Serra's extended commentary on the Tilted Arc fiasco, the pieces in this volume comprise a document of one artist's engagement with the practical, philosophical, and political problems of art.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter