The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.

They call it Spanish Harlem or sometimes just El Barrio. But for over a century, East Harlem has been a melting pot of many ethnic groups, including Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Italian, Jewish, and African American communities. Though gentrification is rapidly changing the face of this section of upper Manhattan, it is still full of sites that attest to its rich cultural heritage.
 
Now East Harlem native Christopher Bell takes you on a tour of his beloved neighborhood. He takes you on three separate walking tours, each visiting a different part of East Harlem and each full of stories about its theaters, museums, art spaces, schools, community centers, churches, mosques, and synagogues. You’ll also learn about the famous people who lived in El Barrio, such as actress Cecily Tyson, opera singer Marian Anderson, portrait artist Alice Neel, incomparable poet Julia De Burgos, and King of Latin Music Tito Puente.
 
Lavishly illustrated with over fifty photos, Walking East Harlem points out not only the many architectural and cultural landmarks in the neighborhood but also the historical buildings that have since been demolished. Whether you are a tourist or a resident, this guide will give you a new appreciation for El Barrio’s exciting history, cultural diversity, and continued artistic vibrancy.  

This edited collection highlights ways that arts-educators address learning with the land through walking practices across spatial, temporal, and cultural differences.

In Walking in Art Education, authors explore walking and a/r/tography in their local contexts. As a result, the book finds that kinship and relationality are significant themes that permeate across a/r/tographic practices focused on ecopedagogy and learning with the land. These walking practices serve as ecopedagogical moments that attune us to human-land and more-than-human relationships, while also moving us past Western-centric understandings of land and place. More than this, the book situates this work in a/r/tographic practices taking up walking as one method for engagement.
 

A revealing cultural history of this American art form.

In her intriguing and heavily illustrated look at post office murals of the 1930s, Karal Ann Marling examines these unique government-sponsored works of art not only as paintings but as part of American cultural history. Depicting scenes from the farm, the frontier, and the factories, these murals were commissioned by the Treasury Department during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Placed in the building where everyone in town had reason to stop, the thousand-odd paintings discussed here were truly intended to hold appeal for everyone. This spirited and often irreverent discussion offers a close look at the murals and what they represented to small-town America during the Great Depression.

An exciting tour of remarkable wall art around the globe, from prehistoric caves to futuristic wonders.

People have been drawing on walls since ancient times. They do it to create beauty, to tell a story, to make a statement, or just to say, “I was here.” You can find wall art in a remote cave in Patagonia and a desert castle in Jordan, a kingly palace in the Republic of Benin and the National Palace of Mexico, a miles-long flood channel in Los Angeles and a sky-high rooftop in Norway.

In Wall to Wall, award-winning author, illustrator, and muralist Mary Ann Fraser takes readers on a worldwide journey through time, stopping to see amazing mural art along the way. Stunning color illustrations and fascinating photographs illuminate both famous and little-known examples, and lighthearted text tells engaging stories about the people who inspired or created them. A glossary, selected bibliography, and section about the preservation of murals conclude the book. No reader will ever again pass by a mural—whether in a historic building, a museum, or out on the street—without stopping to take a closer look.

Ages ten to fourteen

Walls of Algiers examines the historical processes that transformed Ottoman Algiers, the "Bulwark of Islam," into "Alger la blanche," the colonial urban showpiece—and, after the outbreak of revolution in 1954—counter-model of France's global empire. In this volume, the city of Algiers serves as a case study for the analysis of the proactive and reactive social, political, technical, and artistic forces that generate a city's form. Visual sources—prints, photographs, paintings, architectural drawings, urban designs, and film—are treated as primary evidence that complements and even challenges textual documents.

The contributors' wide-ranging but intersecting essays span the disciplines of art history, social and cultural history, urban studies, and film history. Walls of Algiers presents a multifaceted look at the social use of urban space in a North African city. Its contributors' innovative methodologies allow important insights into often overlooked aspects of life in a city whose name even today conjures up enchantment as well as incomprehensible violence.

Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenist imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory. Providing readers with a history and genealogy of key muralists' productions, Guisela Latorre also showcases new material and original research on works and artists never before examined in print.

An art form often associated with male creative endeavors, muralism in fact reflects significant contributions by Chicana artists. Encompassing these and other aspects of contemporary dialogues, including the often tense relationship between graffiti and muralism, Walls of Empowerment is a comprehensive study that, unlike many previous endeavors, does not privilege non-public Latina/o art. In addition, Latorre introduces readers to the role of new media, including performance, sculpture, and digital technology, in shaping the muralist's "canvas."

Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, this timely endeavor highlights the ways in which California's Mexican American communities have used images of indigenous peoples to raise awareness of the region's original citizens. Latorre also casts murals as a radical force for decolonization and liberation, and she provides a stirring description of the decades, particularly the late 1960s through 1980s, that saw California's rise as the epicenter of mural production. Blending the perspectives of art history and sociology with firsthand accounts drawn from artists' interviews, Walls of Empowerment represents a crucial turning point in the study of these iconographic artifacts.

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.

In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.

Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.

In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.

Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written word.

This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist--a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.

Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the many facets of his thought. (The magnum opus of Benjamin’s Paris years, The Arcades Project, has been published in a separate volume.)Walter Benjamin emerged from the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined “to be considered as the principal critic of German literature.” But the scene, as he found it, was dominated by “talented fakes,” so—to use his words—“only a terrorist campaign would I suffice” to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with “One Way Street,” one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany’s most influential journals.The volume includes a number of his most important works, including “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” “The Task of the Translator,” and “One Way Street.” He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics.Benjamin’s sentences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and challenging of critical writers.

Success in war ultimately depends on the consolidation of political order. Nadia Schadlow argues that the steps needed to consolidate a new political order are not separate from war. They are instead an essential component of war and victory.

The challenge of governance operations did not start with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US Army’s involvement in the political and economic reconstruction of states has been central to all its armed conflicts from large-scale conventional wars to so-called irregular or counterinsurgency wars. Yet, US policymakers and military leaders have failed to institutionalize lessons on how to consolidate combat gains into desired political outcomes. War and the Art of Governance examines fifteen historical cases of US Army military interventions, from the Mexican War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Improving future outcomes will require US policymakers and military leaders to accept that plans, timelines, and resources must be shaped to reflect this reality before they intervene in a conflict, not after things go wrong.

Schadlow provides clear lessons for students and scholars of security studies and military history, as well as for policymakers and the military personnel who will be involved in the next foreign intervention.

Demonstrates the role of Beirut’s postwar graffiti and street art in transforming the cityscape and animating resistance.

Over the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physical and social spaces. In A War of Colors, Nadine Sinno examines how graffiti and street art have been used in postwar Beirut to comment on the rapidly changing social dynamics of the country and region. Analyzing how graffiti makers can reclaim and transform cityscapes that were damaged or monopolized by militias during the war, Sinno explores graffiti’s other roles, including forging civic engagement, commemorating cultural icons, protesting political corruption and environmental violence, and animating resistance. In addition, she argues that graffiti making can offer voices to those who are often marginalized, especially women and LGBTQ people. Copiously illustrated with images of graffiti and street art, A War of Colors is a visually captivating and thought-provoking journey through Beirut, where local and global discourses intersect on both scarred and polished walls in the city.

Winner of the 2019 Gournay Prize
“What are these fragments we’ve Jersey Shored against our ruin?” asks M. I. Devine, remixing T. S. Eliot, in this dizzying collection of essays that pays homage to the cultural forms that hold us steady. These fragments are stored in Warhol’s Mother’s Pantry, which takes us deep beneath the surfaces of pop to explore our shared quest for meaning today. Julia Warhola, an immigrant who arrived as the US was closing its borders a century ago, is the muse of reuse in these essays that cross boundaries—between now and then, high and low. She is the mom in pop who cut tin cans into flowers and taught Andy (and us) how to reshape and redeem our world. In essays as lyrical, witty, and experimental as the works they cover, Devine offers a new account of pop humanism. How we cut new things from the traditions we’re given, why we don’t stop believin’ (and carry on, wayward sons) when so much is stacked against us. Here are Leonard Cohen’s last songs and Molly Bloom’s last words; Vampire Weekend’s Rostam and Philip Larkin too; Stevie Smith, John Donne, and Kendrick Lamar; sonnets and selfies; early cinema and post–9/11 film, pop hooks, and pop art. In Devine’s hands, these literary and cultural artifacts are provocatively reassembled into an urgent and refreshing history that refuses to let its readers forget where pop came from and where it can go.

After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. More than four thousand editions have been published since the late fifteenth century, but few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which resides in the Library of Congress. Now, a stunning facsimile edition meticulously reproduced in full color brings this beautiful illuminated manuscript to a new generation.

Joel ben Simeon, the creator of this unusually well-preserved codex, was among the most gifted and prolific scribe-artists in the history of the Jewish book. David Stern’s introduction reconstructs his professional biography and situates this masterwork within the historical development of the haggadah, tracing the different forms the text took in the Jewish centers of Europe at the dawn of modernity.

Katrin Kogman-Appel shows how ben Simeon, more than just a copyist, was an active agent of cultural exchange. As he traveled between Jewish communities, he brought elements of Ashkenazi haggadah illustration to Italy and returned with stylistic devices acquired during his journeys. In addition to traditional Passover images, realistic illustrations of day-to-day life provide a rare window into the world of late fifteenth-century Europe.

This edition faithfully preserves the original text, with the Hebrew facsimile appearing in the original right-to-left orientation. It will be read and treasured by anyone interested in Jewish history, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and the history of the haggadah.

A collection that explores evolving interdisciplinary rhetoric across spatial design disciplines.

Watch this Space examines key emerging and evolving practices, theories, and methodologies that operate in the blurred boundary between spatial design disciplines and moving image studies more broadly. The collection is premised on the argument that the understanding of “space” in these areas continues to expand, reaching the point in which it blurs with multiple other disciplines including media art, cultural studies, art practice, and more. The result of this evolving interdisciplinary understating of space in design disciplines and moving image studies is an expanded field of haptic-visual practice and theory that can be investigated as both a material and an image-based construct.

The work engages with an evolving set of ideas, underlining how each of its primary discipline areas now increasingly incorporates tools and methodologies from each other’s fields. For example, architects routinely engage with cinematic practice as a means of exploring space; cultural theorists inspect filmic space as a two-dimensional surrogate of the real; media artists incorporate knowledge of spatial design in video installations; and filmmakers create spaces on screen that are informed by architectural theory. This all follows what can be defined as a discursive turn in our view of spatial relationships across disciplines which, by definition, is complex, eclectic, occasionally contradictory, and at times characterized by surprising confluences.
 
The varied essays collected here explore the diversity of how we today define, understand, and engage with notions of the body in architectural–urban space. It does so through a triadic structure that progresses from haptic relationships of the body in architectural space, through film readings of represented space in mainstream cinema, to experimental spatial projects inspired by film and the moving image. This tripartite structure specifically encourages a look across disciplines, broadening architectural, urbanist, media, and cinematic concerns through insightful case studies.
 

Marking the three hundredth anniversary of Jean Antoine Watteau’s death, this publication takes a close, revealing look at his recently rediscovered painting La Surprise.
 
The painting La Surprise by Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) belongs to a new genre of painting invented by the artist himself—the fête galante. These works, which show graceful open-air gatherings filled with scenes of courtship, music and dance, strolling lovers, and actors, do not so much tell a story as set a mood: one of playful, wistful, nostalgic reverie. Esteemed by collectors in Watteau’s day as a work that showed the artist at the height of his skill and success, La Surprise vanished from public view in 1848, not to reemerge for more than a century and a half. Acquired by the Getty Museum in 2017, it has never before been the subject of a dedicated publication. Marking the three hundredth anniversary of Watteau’s death, this book considers La Surprise within the context of the artist’s oeuvre and discusses the surprising history of collecting Watteau in Los Angeles.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from November 23, 2021, to February 20, 2022.

The Pacific Coast of the Americas linked Pre-Columbian complex societies from Mexico to Peru, facilitating exploration, communication, and transportation in a way that terrestrial routes could not match. Yet West Mexico, the Isthmo-Colombian Area, and Ecuador, with their great stretches of coastline, were marginalized by the definition of the Mesoamerican and Andean culture areas in the 1940s. Waves of Influence seeks to renew the inquiry into Pacific coastal contacts and bring fresh attention to connections among regions often seen as isolated from one another.

This volume reassesses the evidence for Pre-Columbian maritime contacts along the Pacific Coast, from western Mexico to northwestern South America. The authors draw upon recent models of globalization, technological style, and ritual commensality alongside methods such as computer simulation, iconographic analysis, skeletal studies, and operational chains. No single model can characterize the coastal network over 4,000 km of coastline and over 4,000 years of interaction, and authors present individual case studies to demonstrate how each region participated in its own distinct networks. Essays address the difficulty of maritime movement, the transfer of crops, technology, and knowledge, the identification of different modalities of contact, and the detection of important nodes and social actors within the coastal network.

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga’s perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian Middle Ages as a sad transitional phase between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance persists. Yet, a series of exceptionally significant cultural developments mark the period.

The Waxing of the Middle Ages sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study of these developments and to reassert that late medieval France is crucial in its own right. The collection argues for an approach that views the late medieval period not as an afterthought, or a blind spot, but as a period that is key in understanding the fluidity of time, traditions, culture, and history. Each essay explores some “cultural form,” to borrow Huizinga’s expression, to expose the false divide that has dominated modern scholarship. 

On a large canvas and in very broad scope Mr. Richardson has laid in the whole development of nineteenth-century western art. Breaking away from the detailed analysis of individual artists and individual events, which has absorbed recent criticism, he has achieved a synthesis of all the arts, treating them together as an expression of civilization. He feels that the history of art during the past one hundred and fifty years is, like that of the Middle Ages, a record of the life and ideals and dreams of our civilization and not something produced in a vacuum to be judged by a special esthetic faculty. He adopts, moreover, the view that there has been as great a degree of intellectual and spiritual connection between modern nations (at least in the arts) as there ever was between the nations of the Middle Ages; and he therefore treats western art as a unit. He has limited his perspective to France, England, Germany, Austria, and the United States. Treating western art in this way involves the question of the place of American art in the larger whole of modern civilization. Furthermore it involves to a considerable degree a re-survey and re-estimation of much of our nineteenth century art and likewise the inclusion of a great deal of English, German, and Austrian work of wide interest. The volume is notable for the unusually large number of illustrations, which not only illuminate the discussion but add to the attractiveness of the work for personal study and for use as a holiday gift.

A firsthand account of the life and work of Barbara T. Smith, one of the most important yet underrecognized performance artists in the United States.
 
For over fifty years, Barbara T. Smith has been at the forefront of artistic movements in California. Her work across many mediums explores concepts that strike at the core of human nature, including sexuality, physical and spiritual sustenance, technology, and death. In this memoir, Smith weaves together descriptive accounts of her pioneering performances with an intimate narrative of her life.
 
The Way to Be covers the years 1931 to 1981, up to the artist’s fiftieth birthday, resulting in an exhaustive catalogue of her early work. It reveals the personal stories and events behind her pieces and the challenges she faced in an art world dominated by sexism and machismo. Drawing on Smith’s archive at the Getty Research Institute, this enthralling book presents previously unpublished notes, documents, photographs, and firsthand accounts of her life and practice, as well as her more recent reflections on the past. The Way to Be demonstrates Smith’s lasting contributions to the field of contemporary art and provides an engaging commentary on a recent period of great cultural and political change.
 
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center from February 28 to July 16, 2023.

We Take Care of Our Own traces the evolution of Bruce Springsteen’s beliefs, beginning with his New Jersey childhood and ending with his most recent works from Springsteen on Broadway to Letter to You. The author follows the singer’s life, examining his albums and a variety of influences (both musical and nonmusical), especially his Catholic upbringing and his family life, to show how he became an outspoken icon for working-class America—indeed for working-class life throughout the world. In this way, the author emphasizes the universality of Springsteen’s canon and depicts how a working-class sensibility can apply to anyone anywhere who believes in fairness and respect. In addition, the author places Springsteen in the historical context not only of literature (especially John Steinbeck) but also of the art world (specifically the work of Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper). Among the themes explored in the book include community, a sense of place, America as the Promised Land, the myth of the West, and, ultimately, mortality.
 

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.

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.

A reexamination of the Westkunst exhibition archives.

In 1981, the Cologne trade-fair center hosted a large exhibition titled Westkunst: Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939 (Western Art: Contemporary Art since 1939). Organized by art critic Laszlo Glozer and curator Kasper König, the Western-centric survey highlighted avant-garde art and politically charged themes of freedom and individual expression. By examining Westkunst’s historiographical stakes in light of the Iron Curtain division of Europe, the show is revealed as paradigmatic of the ways in which hegemonic concepts of Western art and the accompanying processes of othering were fashioned in the art world. 

In this collective volume, Westkunst’s universalizing claims are scrutinized by focusing on the artistic tendencies exhibited; on exhibitionary discourses and practices of decontextualization, comparison, and appropriation; on the alleged realization of the values of progress, freedom, and autonomy; on the enacted conceptions of temporality and the architectural devices of narrativization; and on the exhibition’s blind spots and exclusions and the critical reactions it elicited. This analytic output makes fresh use of the archival materials, which are neither centralized nor systematized, with significant excerpts republished throughout the book. 

Seen through the lens of exhibition history, this revisiting of Westkunst sheds light on a broader trend of cultural conservatism that was gaining strength in the 1980s, just before the end of the Cold War and the start of new forms of globalization.

What Art Is Like is a comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art. It provides welcome relief from prevailing modes of explaining art that involve definitions, philosophical claims, and critical judgments put forth by third parties. Scrapping all such chatter, Miguel Tamen’s aphoristic lark with aesthetic questions proceeds by taking its technical vocabulary only from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

According to Tamen, it would be ridiculous to think of poems or paintings or films or any variety of artistic production as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about many other relevant and important matters. Tamen offers a series of analogies and similes to help us imagine these connected experiences. One, taken from the analytical table of contents where the book is writ small, suggests that “understanding a poem is like understanding a cat; neither ever says anything back and you can’t keep a conversation with them. All art is like this, but not only art is like this; nature, the past, numbers are also like this.”

Tamen takes up many central issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including the connection between art and having fuzzy ideas about art, the mistake of imagining that art-decisions are put forth by art-courts where you are both judge and jury, and the notion that what happens with art also happens to you.

A history of the evolving field of African art.
 
This book examines the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. It starts with a simple question: What do we mean when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Peter Probst identifies “African art” as a conceptual vessel that manifests wider societal transformations.
 
What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field’s history. Starting with the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the book first discusses the colonial formation of the field by focusing on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual cultures as relations of power. It then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift toward contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it examines the post- and decolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of representation, repair, and restitution.
 
 

Seven facets of arts and design-driven research to span new ways of knowing, acting, experiencing, and inspiring the mission of the research university.

Diverse experiences, academic trajectories, and disciplinary backgrounds drive our understanding and interpretations of research, creative practice, and academic values. Despite its long and richly textured history, arts research is still relatively new to many academic departments and disciplines. For most practitioners, arts research is neither a formalized nor a codified process; it can take many paths. And because it can mean different things to different people, defining ‘arts research’ is a spectacular opportunity to create shared awareness, understanding and practice.

Eight epistemologies to characterize research that spans traditional activities and new practices — shaping how people will come to understand the world in the century ahead.

Because faculty and students have so many wide-ranging experiences, academic trajectories, and disciplinary backgrounds, they don’t necessarily have the same set of concepts in mind when it comes to talking about research, what it means, or how it’s done. For many, “research” is an abstract, culturally constructed concept. With many different definitions and experiences, it can be critical to build a shared foundation for understanding — especially when issues of “what counts” as knowledge, tenure and promotion, and research process are at stake.

In What Music Did, experimental filmmaker and violinist Tony Conrad explores in depth the relationship between music and mathematics. A work of decades that was left unfinished at the time of his death in 2016, Conrad’s expansive history of the interrelationship of music and mathematics is published here for the first time. Editor Patrick Nickleson describes Conrad’s method as that of an anarchic, interarts haberdasher; much of the research comes from musty and out-of-print sources, giving the impression that Conrad followed paths opened up for him in used book shops and conversations, rather than seeking a direct scholarly argument. 

Throughout the book, readers encounter scenes from over two thousand years of history, mathematics, and music: Pythagoras using pebbles to articulate didactic number games to his disciples; Galileo fretting a hill and listening with a musician’s ear to calculate the rate of acceleration under gravity; Rameau trapping Western music in a five-limit tuning system, and what could have been if he were more adept with numbers. Even when drawing on classical sources to explore canonical figures like Saint Augustine, What Music Did offers idiosyncratic critical insights that highlight our ongoing cultural reverence when answers result in simple whole number ratios like 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4. What Music Did is Tony Conrad’s extended indictment of music’s role, from the Pythagoreans to the twentieth century, in upholding the use of number as a clandestine and circumscribed armature of power.

A collective case study of photographic culture through the lens of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

A massive quantity of museums’ photographic holdings resides not on gallery walls or archives, but outside of their formal collections, including reference photos and ephemera that are integral to the workings of museums. What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. Studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this collection asks complex and ambiguous questions about how accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories, and knowledge systems of a museum ecosystem. Chapters are comprised of short, auto-ethnographic interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work, providing an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs do in museums while also expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat opened a major new chapter in the history of literacy when she demonstrated that the cuneiform script invented in the ancient Near East in the late fourth millennium BC—the world's oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device. Her discovery, which she published in Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform and How Writing Came About, was widely reported in professional journals and the popular press. In 1999, American Scientist chose How Writing Came About as one of the "100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science."

In When Writing Met Art, Schmandt-Besserat expands her history of writing into the visual realm of communication. Using examples of ancient Near Eastern writing and masterpieces of art, she shows that between 3500 and 3000 BC the conventions of writing—everything from its linear organization to its semantic use of the form, size, order, and placement of signs—spread to the making of art, resulting in artworks that presented complex visual narratives in place of the repetitive motifs found on preliterate art objects. Schmandt-Besserat then demonstrates art's reciprocal impact on the development of writing. She shows how, beginning in 2700-2600 BC, the inclusion of inscriptions on funerary and votive art objects emancipated writing from its original accounting function. To fulfill its new role, writing evolved to replicate speech; this in turn made it possible to compile, organize, and synthesize unlimited amounts of information; and to preserve and disseminate information across time and space.

Schmandt-Besserat's pioneering investigation of the interface between writing and art documents a key turning point in human history, when two of our most fundamental information media reciprocally multiplied their capacities to communicate. When writing met art, literate civilization was born.

Who Tells Your Story gathers contemporary analyses of monument and commemoration controversies from across the United States and the world. Sanford Levinson and the contributors in this volume ask whose stories get to be told, who gets to tell them, what happens when monuments disappear, and how these memorials impact national narratives. From the removal of Confederate statutes in the United States and those of Lenin in Ukraine to the efficacy of national holidays in furthering the causes they claim to celebrate, these essays dissect how the collaborative process of memorialization brings purported intention, private agenda, and final outcome into constant friction with each other. Who Tells Your Story is an accessible and provoking examination on public memory and what forces shape it.

Contributors. Zachary Bray, Deborah Gerhardt, Emily Greenfield, Randall Kennedy, Larysa Kulyvas, Sanford Levinson, Kimberly Probolus, Kermit Roosevelt III, Anna Saunders, Richard C. Shragger, Bruce Scates, Agata Tatarenko, Aleksandra Kucynskak-Zonik

Governments around the world spend millions on art and cultural institutions, evidence of a basic human need for what the author refers to as “creating aesthetic significance.” Yet what function or purpose does art satisfy in today’s society? In this thorough and accessible text, Richard Hickman rejects the current vogue for social and cultural accounts of the nature of art-making in favor of a largely psychological approach aimed at addressing contemporary developmental issues in art education. Bringing to bear current ideas about evolutionary psychology, this second edition will be an important resource for anyone interested in arts education.

In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures revealing the “exact proportions” of sea monsters—all were created by members of the Royal Society of London, the leading institutional platform of the early Scientific Revolution. Wicked Intelligence reveals that these natural philosophers shaped Restoration London’s emergent artistic cultures by forging collaborations with court painters, penning art theory, and designing triumphs of baroque architecture such as St Paul’s Cathedral.

Will Barnet’s artistic career as a painter and printmaker spanned nearly eight decades of continuous creativity. Few artists, other than perhaps Picasso or Monet, can claim such an extended period of uninterrupted and innovative art making. From the darkness of the Great Depression to the opening decade of the twenty-first century, his oeuvre reflects his unique interpretation of the art world’s evolving genres: Social Realism, Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and ultimately representational Minimalism with the human figure as his primary subject. Barnet was devoted to making art every day and worked diligently even at the very end of his life. “The Old Masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be,” he once said. “At the age of 10 or 12, I discovered that being an artist would give me an ability to create something which would live on after death.” Live on it does; in addition to his acclaimed body of work, he influenced a broad spectrum of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly, and Ethel Fisher, and he held teaching positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Barnet’s works can be found in nearly every major public collection in the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the first Artist’s Lifetime Achievement Award Medal given on the occasion of the National Academy of Design’s 175th anniversary. He was also awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in 2011. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted and honored to announce the upcoming publication of Will Barnet, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist in nearly 40 years. With scholarly essays by the four distinguished authors, an extensive plate section, a comprehensive chronology, lists of awards and exhibitions, as well as a detailed bibliography, this monograph will be a thorough presentation of Barnet’s iconic images and consistently evolving style while celebrating his unquenchable joie de vivre.

Amsterdam painter Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721) created early depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese sugar plantations, as well as ornate hunting still lifes and portraits of colonial elites. Edited by Willem de Rooij and Karwan Fatah Black, this volume combines a catalogue raisonné developed in collaboration with the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague – and a critical reader featuring newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars. It is conceived as a pendant to De Rooij’s installation Valkenburg, which opened at the Centraal Museum Utrecht in September 2025. This book and the exhibition together invite reflection on how 18th-century visual culture helped normalize colonial ideology.

A narrative of the early modern Indian sculpture known as the Mithuna couple.

Meena Kandasamy writes about the Mithuna couple, a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu, India, depicting lovers. Kandasamy unfurls a multi-layered, multi-directional narrative built from images, questions, and contradictions evoked by the sculpture. “How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it?” Kandasamy asks and then examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. Such knowledge complicates easy associations of love that may be evoked by the couple. 

Refusing any impulse to idealize or exoticize, Kandasamy connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom, and how. She sets the intimate alongside the institutional to interrogate terms such as decolonize, restitution, and preservation. Through an astonishing stylistic mix, including Twitter, academic discourse, poetry, and memoir, she talks back, forward, and sideways with the object.

From apparent melodrama and eroticism to fantasy and horror, these eight directors redefine satire’s limits, providing evidence that irony in cinema often goes unrecognized.

In Without Empathy, MK Raghavendra investigates how irony and satire function in cinema by focusing on the work of eight visionary directors—Luis Buñuel, R.W. Fassbinder, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Paul Verhoeven, Aki Kaurismäki, Aleksei Balabanov, and David Lynch. At a time when irony is increasingly scrutinized as a mode of expression, this book reconsiders its role in film, revealing how these auteurs deploy wit and subversion in ways that unsettle audience expectations.

Through close readings of selected works, Raghavendra identifies layers of meaning beneath the surface of films often misread. The book situates these directors within broader traditions of cinematic satire, while simultaneously interrogating what their work has to say about society, culture, and human folly. Without Empathy is a lucid read for scholars and students of film studies and communication, providing a provocative lens on how satirical intent is not always recognizable today and how its actual targets can make society uncomfortable.

Essays by Adorno on art and cinema, available in English for the first time.
 
In Without Model, Theodor W. Adorno strikingly demonstrates the intellectual range for which he is known. Taking the premise of the title as his guiding principle, that artistic and philosophical thought must eschew preconceptions and instead adapt itself to its time, circumstances, and object, Adorno presents a series of essays reflecting on culture at different levels, from the details of individual products to the social conditions of their production. He shows his more nostalgic side in the childhood reminiscences of ‘Amorbach’, but also his acute sociocultural analysis on the central topic of the culture industry. He criticizes attempts to maintain tradition in music and visual art, arguing against a restorative approach by stressing the modernity and individuality of historical works in the context of their time. In all of these essays, available for the first time in English, Adorno displays the remarkable thinking of one both steeped in tradition and dedicated to seeing beyond it.
 

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.

Written and illustrated by master wood engraver Barry Moser, this primer on the art of wood engraving is filled with valuable knowledge including how to prepare a printing block; how to think in the medium’s properties of line, shape, and ink; and how to transfer a drawing onto a block. It also offers practical advice on which tools to use for a project and which ink works best. A highly illustrated guide to this art form, Wood Engraving will be useful to experienced and beginner engravers alike. This book features stunning examples of Moser’s art and skill to admire and inspire.

In this study of the Japanese jeweled pagoda mandalas, Halle O’Neal reveals the entangled realms of sacred body, beauty, and salvation. Much of the previous scholarship on these paintings concentrates on formal analysis and iconographic study of their narrative vignettes. This has marginalized the intriguing interplay of text and image at their heart, precluding a holistic understanding of the mandalas and diluting their full import in Buddhist visual culture. Word Embodied offers an alternative methodology, developing interdisciplinary insights into the social, religious, and artistic implications of this provocative entwining of word and image.

O’Neal unpacks the paintings’ revolutionary use of text as picture to show how this visual conflation mirrors important conceptual indivisibilities in medieval Japan. The textual pagoda projects the complex constellation of relics, reliquaries, scripture, and body in religious doctrine, practice, and art. Word Embodied also expands our thinking about the demands of viewing, recasting the audience as active producers of meaning and offering a novel perspective on disciplinary discussions of word and image that often presuppose an ontological divide between them. This examination of the jeweled pagoda mandalas, therefore, recovers crucial dynamics underlying Japanese Buddhist art, including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment.

Conceived during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown and the accompanying rise in anti-Asian bigotry, Word of Mouth: Asian American Artists Sharing Recipes is an artists’ cookbook featuring stories and artwork from twenty-three Asian American and Asian diaspora artists from across the United States, with contributions that range from Los Angeles–based performance artist Kristina Wong’s “Recipe for Political Action” to New Orleans–based painter Francis Wong’s family recipe for stir-fried Szechuan alligator.

Word of Mouth was first published as an online exhibition through the Virtual Asian American Art Museum. This print version features a new introduction by art historian Michelle Yee, expanded essays, and brand-new recipes. Each contribution is accompanied by an original illustration and enriched by the artist’s reflections on how their cuisine has been impacted by histories of war, migration, relocation, labor, or mixing.

A pandemic project turned illustrated cookbook, this unique collection disrupts genre expectations to celebrate how artists use food to nurture and sustain their diverse communities and artistic practices as well as to build connection during times of isolation, grief, and loss.

Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general—in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was revolutionary about Benjamin’s explorations on media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin’s best-known work alongside fascinating, little-known essays—some appearing for the first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin’s media theory can be fully appreciated.