In 1991, 16-year-old activist Keiko Lane joined the Los Angeles chapters of Queer Nation and ACT UP. They protested against legislation aimed at dismantling rights for LGBTQ people, people living with HIV, and immigrants, while fighting for needle exchange programs, reproductive justice, safer sex education, hospice funding, and the right to die with dignity. At the same time, they were a queer chosen family of friends and lovers who took care of one another in sickness and in health. Sometimes they helped each other die. By the time Lane turned 22, most of them had died of AIDS. In her evocative memoir, Lane weaves together the love stories and afterlives of queer resistance and survival, against the landscape of the Rodney King Rebellion, the movement for queer rights, and the censorship of queer artists and sexualities. Lane interrogates the social construction of power against and in queer communities of color, and the recovery of sexual agency in the midst and aftermath of violence. Luminous and powerfully moving, Blood Loss explores survival after those we love have died.

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.

If mediatization has surprisingly revealed the secret life of inert matter and the 'face of things', the flipside of this has been the petrification of living organisms, an invasion of stone bodies in a state of suspended animation. Within a contemporary imaginary pervaded by new forms of animism, the paradigm of death looms large in many areas of artistic experimentation, pushing the modern body towards mineral modes of being which revive ancient myths of flesh-made-stone and the issue of the monument. Scholars in media, visual culture and the arts propose studies of bodies of stone, from actors simulating statues to the transmutation of the filmic body into a fossil; from the real treatment of the cadaver as a mineral living object to the rediscovery of materials such as wax; from the quest for a "thermal" equivalence between stone and flesh to the transformation of the biomedical body into a living monument.

Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity.

The twelve contributors to this volume adopt a middle position. They agree that Chinese images are conditioned by indigenous traditions and dynamics of social interaction, but they seek to explain a general Chinese body and face by charting multiple, specific bodies and faces. All of the chapters are historical case studies and investigate particular images, such as Han dynasty tomb figurines; Buddhist texts and illustrations; pictures of deprivation, illness, deformity, and ghosts; clothing; formal portraiture; and modern photographs and films. From the diversity of art forms and historical periods studied, there emerges a more complex picture of ways that the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.

A beautifully written and moving story about the power of tradition and the importance of women’s stories.
 
The Bonnet, the first work of prose by Slovak poet Katarína Kucbelová, defies easy pigeonholing: both political and personal, it is a work of literary reportage, a quest for one’s roots, a critical exploration of folk art and, not least, social commentary on the coexistence of the Slovak majority and the Roma minority, offering a nuanced and sympathetic look at the lives of Roma people in Slovakia, and raising important questions about the nature of prejudice and discrimination. Over two years, the author made regular visits to the remote village of Šumiac in Slovakia to learn the dying craft of bonnet making from one of its last practitioners, Il’ka, an elderly local woman who in the process became her mentor in more ways than one. Through the parallel stories of Il’ka and the narrator’s grandmother, The Bonnet also offers a subtly feminist reading of the position of women in rural Europe from the early twentieth century to the present day.

This fascinating volume explores an important fifteenth-century illustrated manuscript tradition that provides a revealing glimpse of how western Europeans conceptualized the world.

From the classical encyclopedias of Pliny to famous tales such as The Travels of Marco Polo, historical travel writing has had a lasting impact, despite the fact that it was based on a curious mixture of truth, legend, and outright superstition. One foundational medieval source that expands on the ancient idea of the “wonders of the world” is the fifteenth-century French Book of the Marvels of the World, an illustrated guide to the globe filled with oddities, curiosities, and wonders—tales of fantasy and reality intended for the medieval armchair traveler. The fifty-six locales featured in the manuscript are presented in a manner that suggests authority and objectivity but are rife with stereotypes and mischaracterizations, meant to simultaneously instill a sense of wonder and fear in readers.

In The Book of Marvels, the authors explore the tradition of encyclopedias and travel writing, examining the various sources for geographic knowledge in the Middle Ages. They look closely at the manuscript copies of the French text and its complex images, delving into their origins, style, content, and meaning. Ultimately, this volume seeks to unpack how medieval white Christian Europeans saw their world and how the fear of difference—so pervasive in society today—is part of a long tradition stretching back millennia.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 11 to September 1, 2024, and at the Morgan Library & Museum from January 24 to May 25, 2025.

Illustrated highlights from the Judaica Collection of the Library of Congress.
 
Books Like Sapphires showcases a wide range of Hebraic treasures from the storied collection at the Library of Congress, many of them for the first time. Tracing the history of Judaica collecting in the twentieth-century United States, the book illuminates varied works, telling their stories alongside vibrant color images. These include a unique manuscript about a betrothal scandal in Renaissance Crete, an illustrated Esther Scroll, a poem from 1477 celebrating the new technology of printing, amusing rhymed couplets in sixteenth-century Padua, and the Washington Haggadah. This book also tells the story of the patrons and collectors, first among them Jacob Schiff, as well as archivists and curators, who made the storied Judaica archive at the Library of Congress the precious resource that it is today.

“There they rest, inert, impertinent, in gallery space—those book forms either imitated or mutilated, replicas of reading matter or its vestiges. Strange, after its long and robust career, for the book to take early retirement in a museum, not as rare manuscript but as functionless sculpture. Readymade or constructed, such book shapes are canceled as text when deposited as gallery objects, shut off from their normal reading when not, in some yet more drastic way, dismembered or reassembled.” So begins Bookwork, which follows our passion for books to its logical extreme in artists who employ found or simulated books as a sculptural medium. Investigating the conceptual labor behind this proliferating international art practice, Garrett Stewart looks at hundreds of book-like objects, alone or as part of gallery installations, in this original account of works that force attention upon a book’s material identity and cultural resonance.

Less an inquiry into the artist’s book than an exploration of the book form’s contemporary objecthood, Stewart’s interdisciplinary approach traces the lineage of these aggressive artifacts from the 1919 Unhappy Readymade of Marcel Duchamp down to the current crisis of paper-based media in the digital era. Bookwork surveys and illustrates a stunning variety of appropriated and fabricated books alike, ranging from hacksawed discards to the giant lead folios of Anselm Kiefer. The unreadable books Stewart engages with in this timely study are found, again and again, to generate graphic metaphors for the textual experience they preclude, becoming in this sense legible after all.

An internationally acclaimed expert explains why Chinese-style architecture has remained so consistent for two thousand years, no matter where it is built.

For the last two millennia, an overwhelming number of Chinese buildings have been elevated on platforms, supported by pillars, and covered by ceramic-tile roofs. Less obvious features, like the brackets connecting the pillars to roof frames, also have been remarkably constant. What makes the shared features more significant, however, is that they are present in Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Islamic milieus; residential, funerary, and garden structures; in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and elsewhere. How did Chinese-style architecture maintain such standardization for so long, even beyond China’s borders?

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt examines the essential features of Chinese architecture and its global transmission and translation from the predynastic age to the eighteenth century. Across myriad political, social, and cultural contexts within China and throughout East Asia, certain design and construction principles endured. Builders never abandoned perishable wood in favor of more permanent building materials, even though Chinese engineers knew how to make brick and stone structures in the last millennium BCE. Chinese architecture the world over is also distinctive in that it was invariably accomplished by anonymous craftsmen. And Chinese buildings held consistently to the plan of the four-sided enclosure, which both afforded privacy and differentiated sacred interior space from an exterior understood as the sphere of profane activity. Finally, Chinese-style buildings have always and everywhere been organized along straight lines.

Taking note of these and other fascinating uniformities, The Borders of Chinese Architecture offers an accessible and authoritative overview of a tradition studiously preserved across time and space.

A revealing look at the commercial strategy and diverse output of this canonical Renaissance artist.
 
In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.
 
Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige. 

A major scholar considers the role of the museum in art history. What begins as a meditation on "the museum" by one of the world's leading art historians becomes, in this book, a far-reaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself. Originally delivered as the 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University, the book makes its deeply complex argument remarkably accessible and powerfully clear. Concentrating on a period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, Donald Preziosi presents case studies of major institutions that, he argues, have defined--and are still defining--the possible limits of museological and art historical theory and practice. These include Sir John Soane's Museum in London, preserved in its 1837 state; the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; and four museums founded by Europeans in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, which divided up that country's history into "ethnically marked" aesthetic hierarchies and genealogies that accorded with Europe's construction of itself as the present of the world's past, and the "brain of the earth's body." Through this epistemological and institutional archaeology, Preziosi unearths the outlines of the more radical Enlightenment project that academic art history, professional museology, and art criticism have rendered marginal or invisible. Finally, he sketches a new theory about art, artifice, and visual signification in the cracks and around the margins of the "secular theologisms" of the globalized imperial capital called modernity. Addressed equally to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of art history, museology, history, and anthropology, this book goes to the heart of recent debates about race, ethnicity, nationality, colonialism, and multiculturalisms-and to the very foundations of modernity and modern modes of knowledge production. Donald Preziosi is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and research associate in art history and visual culture at Oxford University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Art of Art History (1998).

The Monongahela River Valley in Southwestern Pennsylvania is steeped with a rich industrial history. Starting with iron, brass, tin, and glass production, the river towns—from Brownsville to Braddock—ultimately helped make Pittsburgh the one-time steelmaking capital of the world. With this industrial legacy in mind, artist Ron Donoughe set out to document the small towns in this region, one painting at a time. Over a twelve-month period, he explored the forgotten towns of Brownsville, California, Donora, Charleroi, Monessen, Monongahela, Clairton, Duquesne, McKeesport, Braddock, and the Monongahela River itself. Brownsville to Braddock provides key insight on a forty-mile stretch of river towns. The post-industrial economy led to a decline in manufacturing, and with it, substantial job losses. These towns face many significant challenges, yet there is still beauty to be found. Donoughe finds it as he paints the human spirit through the mills, factories, parks, and homes. The people he meets share their stories of family joy and sorrows, along with a genuine love for the area they call the “Mon Valley.”

French symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) seemed to thrive at the intersection of literature and art. Known as “the painter-writer,” he drew on the works of Poe, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé for his subject matter. And yet he concluded that visual art has nothing to do with literature. Examining this apparent contradiction, The Brush and the Pen transforms the way we understand Redon’s career and brings to life the interaction between writers and artists in fin-de-siècle Paris.

The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media describes, historicizes, theorizes, and creatively deploys massive media -- a set of techno-social assemblages and practices that include large outdoor projections, programmable architectural façades, and urban screens -- in order to better understand their critical and creative potential. Massive media is named as such not only because of the size and subsequent visibility of this phenomenon but also for its characteristic networks and interactive screen and cinema-like qualities. Examples include the programmable lighting of the Empire State Building and the interactive projections of Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles, as well as a number of works created by the author himself. This book argues that massive media enables and necessitates the development of new practices of expanded cinema, public data visualization, and installation art and curation that blend the logics of urban space, monumentality, and the public sphere with the aesthetics and affordances of digital information and the moving image.

This is volume 95 issue 1 of Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in print since 1919, is devoted to new research on works in the museum’s permanent collection. Articles by DIA curators and outside specialists cover all aspects of the collection: African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art; African American art; American art; Asian art; European art; art of the Islamic world; and modern and contemporary art; as well as prints, drawings, and photographs. Issues may contain a variety of individual articles on select works of different periods, styles, and artists, or be dedicated to a single theme or area of the collection, such as ancient art, portraits, or photography.

This is volume 96 issue 1 of Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in print since 1919, is devoted to new research on works in the museum’s permanent collection. Articles by DIA curators and outside specialists cover all aspects of the collection: African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art; African American art; American art; Asian art; European art; art of the Islamic world; and modern and contemporary art; as well as prints, drawings, and photographs. Issues may contain a variety of individual articles on select works of different periods, styles, and artists, or be dedicated to a single theme or area of the collection, such as ancient art, portraits, or photography.

This is volume 97 issue 1 of Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in print since 1919, is devoted to new research on works in the museum’s permanent collection. Articles by DIA curators and outside specialists cover all aspects of the collection: African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art; African American art; American art; Asian art; European art; art of the Islamic world; and modern and contemporary art; as well as prints, drawings, and photographs. Issues may contain a variety of individual articles on select works of different periods, styles, and artists, or be dedicated to a single theme or area of the collection, such as ancient art, portraits, or photography.

This book spans a half millennium which witnessed a radical transformation of the Western world. Kitzinger discerns a series of dominant stylistic trends in the many works of pictorial art he examines, from mosaics to decorative sculptures, and makes sense of the dialectic of their sequence and interaction.

Why does medieval Rome look so, for lack of a better word, Byzantine? Why do its monuments speak an aesthetic of the medieval East? And just how do we quantify that Byzantine aesthetic or even the word “Byzantine”? This book seeks to consider the ways in which the artistic styles and iconographies generally associated with the eastern medieval tradition had a life in the West and, in many cases, were just as western as they were eastern. Rome’s medieval monuments are a fundamental part of the history of the East, a history that says more about a cross- cultural exchange and interconnected “Romes” than difference and separation. Each chapter follows the political and theological relationships between the East and the West chronologically, exploring the socio-political exchanges as they manifest in the visual language of the monuments that defined the medieval landscape of Rome.