A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY25 start with K start with K
Teiwes explains the role of the Katsina spirit in Hopi religion and that of the kachina doll—the carved representation of a Katsina—in the ritual and economic life of the Hopis. In tracing the history of the kachina doll in Hopi culture, she shows how these wooden figures have changed since carvers came to be influenced by their marketability among Anglos and how their carving has been characterized by increasingly refined techniques. Unique to this book are Teiwes's description of the most recent trends in kachina doll carving and her profiles of twenty-seven modern carvers, including such nationally known artists as Alvin James Makya and Cecil Calnimptewa. Enhancing the text are more than one hundred photographs, including twenty-five breathtaking color plates that bring to life the latest examples of this popular art form.
Kartoon Kings is the first monographic and comprehensive analysis of the graphic artwork of Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio. This work showcases a collection of full-color images excerpted from comic book projects, videos, billboards, and more of the artists’ collaborative public contributions created over the past fifteen years. To supplement the images an interview with the artists by Kristina Olson is included, along with essays by Joshua Decter and Paul Krainak. Grennan and Sperandio work together by conspiring about their creative ideas on the Internet. Their teamwork must be done this way because Grennan lives in England, while Sperandio lives in the United States.
More of Sperandio and Grennan’s work can be seen at www.kartoonkings.com.
Against the historical background of distinctly Russian progressive cultural and scientific movements, the authors define affinities between Malevich's work and other nonpolitical revolutions: relativity and quantum theory in physics; the work of Roman Jakobson and the "Prague School" in linguistics; and the exploration of language in the writings of the poet Velimir Khlebnikov. They situate the artist within the fundamental epistemological shift from nineteenth-century objectivity to an all-pervasive modernist subjectivity, relying upon Malevich's contribution to illustrate the ways cultural production is mediated through various modes of transmission.
Issues of ecology--both as they appear in the works of nature writers and in the works of literary writers for whom place and the land are central issues--have long been of interest to literary critics, and have given rise over the last two decades to the now firmly established field of ecocriticism. The essays in this volume, written by art historians and literary critics, seek to bring the study of American art into the expanding discourse of ecocriticism.
A Keener Perception offers a series of case studies on topics ranging from John White's watercolors of the Carolina landscape executed during Sir Walter Raleigh's 1585 Roanoke expedition to photographs by environmental activist Eliot Porter. Rather than merely resurrect past instances of ecologically attuned art, this volume features essays that resituate many canonical figures, such as Thomas Eakins, Aaron Douglas, and Thomas Cole, in an ecocritical light by which they have yet to be viewed. Studying such artists and artworks through an ecocritical lens not only provides a better understanding of these works and the American landscape, but also brings a new interpretive paradigm to the field of art history--a field that many of these critics believe would do well to embrace environmental concerns as a vital area of research.
In highlighting the work of scholars who bring ecological agendas to their study of American art, as well as providing models for literary scholars who might like to better incorporate the visual arts into their own scholarship and teaching, A Keener Perception is truly a landmark collection--timely, consequential, and controversial.
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.
“In the annals of American diplomacy, the presence of George F. Kennan stands tall and daunting, a figure of articulate intelligence who thought about the action but also beyond it. He was not always a great diplomat, for his imagination was lively, and he lacked the self-effacing patience which is so essential to the profession at its most mundane; but he was a great analyst and policymaker, one of the very few this country has produced in foreign affairs, perhaps finest since John Quincy Adams.”
Thus begins Anders Stephanson's penetrating study of this complicated, often controversial, yet highly respected public man. From an array of intellectual reference points, Stephanson has written what is not only the most serious assessment of Kennan to appear but is also a work of general significance for a wide range of contemporary issues in foreign and domestic politics and culture. Appropriately, the book's emphasis is on Kennan's lifelong attempt to grasp Soviet foreign policy and devise an effective American response, particularly during the decisive period around the Second World War when the contours of our present world order gradually emerged: the period of wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, the ensuing “containment” policies and division of Europe and much of the world into hostile blocs. Stephanson also examines Kennan's strategic vision, his “realistic” approach to foreign policy, and his disdain for the Third World.
An extended final section, “Class and Country,” then situates Kennan as an essentially European kind of “organicist” conservative with no obvious political home in American society, a society manifestly unorganic in all its mobility and mass culture. An outsider without class attachment, he could never reconcile his dislike of American politics and culture with his attachment to values of order and hierarchy. These warring sensibilities produced, for example, vehement denunciations of McCarthyism as well as of the student revolts of the following decade. Yet it was Kennan's marginality, his functional detachment from domestic politics, that made possible his often clairvoyant analyses of foreign affairs.
Stephanson's work is an unusually broad and deep characterization of a reflective, sometimes enigmatic but always outstanding American policymaker and man of letters.
The Vietnam War (1964–1975) divided American society like no other war of the twentieth century, and some of the most memorable American art and art-related activism of the last fifty years protested U.S. involvement. At a time when Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art dominated the American art world, individual artists and art collectives played a significant role in antiwar protest and inspired subsequent generations of artists. This significant story of engagement, which has never been covered in a book-length survey before, is the subject of Kill for Peace.
Writing for both general and academic audiences, Matthew Israel recounts the major moments in the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement and describes artists’ individual and collective responses to them. He discusses major artists such as Leon Golub, Edward Kienholz, Martha Rosler, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, and Robert Morris; artists’ groups including the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) and the Artists Protest Committee (APC); and iconic works of collective protest art such as AWC’s Q. And Babies? A. And Babies and APC’s The Artists Tower of Protest. Israel also formulates a typology of antiwar engagement, identifying and naming artists’ approaches to protest. These approaches range from extra-aesthetic actions—advertisements, strikes, walk-outs, and petitions without a visual aspect—to advance memorials, which were war memorials purposefully created before the war’s end that criticized both the war and the form and content of traditional war memorials.
Co-winner of the 2018 Ethnography Division’s Best Book from the NCA
In recent decades, poetry slams and the spoken word artists who compete in them have sparked a resurgent fascination with the world of poetry. However, there is little critical dialogue that fully engages with the cultural complexities present in slam and spoken word poetry communities, as well as their ramifications.
In Killing Poetry, renowned slam poet, Javon Johnson unpacks some of the complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces. He argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in imagining and working towards altogether different social relationships. His illuminating ethnography provides a critical history of the slam, contextualizes contemporary black poets in larger black literary traditions, and does away with the notion that poetry slams are inherently radically democratic and utopic.
Killing Poetry—at times autobiographical, poetic, and journalistic—analyzes the masculine posturing in the Southern California community in particular, the sexual assault in the national community, and the ways in which related social media inadvertently replicate many of the same white supremacist, patriarchal, and mainstream logics so many spoken word poets seem to be working against. Throughout, Johnson examines the promises and problems within slam and spoken word, while illustrating how community is made and remade in hopes of eventually creating the radical spaces so many of these poets strive to achieve.
In this book, Alexander offers the first major intellectual history of kinaesthetic knowing and its influence on the formation of modern art and architecture and especially modern design education. Focusing in particular on Germany and tracing the story up to the start of World War II, Alexander reveals the tension between intellectual meditation and immediate experience to be at the heart of the modern discourse of aesthetics, playing a major part in the artistic and teaching practices of numerous key figures of the period, including Heinrich Wölfflin, Hermann Obrist, August Endell, László Moholy-Nagy, and many others. Ultimately, she shows, kinaesthetic knowing did not become the foundation of the human sciences, as some of its advocates had hoped, but it did lay the groundwork—at such institutions as the Bauhaus—for modern art and architecture in the twentieth century.
A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being. Encouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices offers innovative and critical perspectives on topics ranging from art to sport, film to physical therapy.
King of Hearts shows how drag king performers are thriving in an unlikely location: Southern Bible Belt states like Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. Based on observations and interviews with sixty Southern drag kings, this study reveals how they are challenging the region’s gender norms while creating a unique community with its own distinctive Southern flair. Reflecting the region’s racial diversity, it profiles not only white drag kings, but also those who are African American, multiracial, and Hispanic.
Queer scholar Baker A. Rogers—who has also performed as drag king Macon Love—takes you on an insider’s tour of Southern drag king culture, exploring its history, the communal bonds that unite it, and the controversies that have divided it. King of Hearts offers a groundbreaking look at a subculture that presents a subversion of gender norms while also providing a vital lifeline for non-gender-conforming Southerners.
Kingdom of Beauty shows that the discovery of mingei (folk art) by Japanese intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s was central to the complex process by which Japan became both a modern nation and an imperial world power. Kim Brandt’s account of the mingei movement locates its origins in colonial Korea, where middle-class Japanese artists and collectors discovered that imperialism offered them special opportunities to amass art objects and gain social, cultural, and even political influence. Later, mingei enthusiasts worked with (and against) other groups—such as state officials, fascist ideologues, rival folk art organizations, local artisans, newspaper and magazine editors, and department store managers—to promote their own vision of beautiful prosperity for Japan, Asia, and indeed the world. In tracing the history of mingei activism, Brandt considers not only Yanagi Muneyoshi, Hamada Shōji, Kawai Kanjirō, and other well-known leaders of the folk art movement but also the often overlooked networks of provincial intellectuals, craftspeople, marketers, and shoppers who were just as important to its success. The result of their collective efforts, she makes clear, was the transformation of a once-obscure category of pre-industrial rural artifacts into an icon of modern national style.
In this innovative cultural history, hair is the portal through which Emanuele Lugli accesses the cultural production of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s Florence. Lugli reflects on the ways writers, doctors, and artists expressed religious prejudices, health beliefs, and gender and class subjugation through alluring works of art, in medical and political writings, and in poetry. He considers what may have compelled Sandro Botticelli, the young Leonardo da Vinci, and dozens of their contemporaries to obsess over braids, knots, and hairdos by examining their engagement with scientific, philosophical, and theological practices.
By studying hundreds of fifteenth-century documents that engage with hair, Lugli foregrounds hair’s association to death and gathers insights about human life at a time when Renaissance thinkers redefined what it meant to be human and to be alive. Lugli uncovers overlooked perceptions of hair when it came to be identified as a potential vector for liberating culture, and he corrects a centuries-old prejudice that sees hair as a trivial subject, relegated to passing fashion or the decorative. He shows hair, instead, to be at the heart of Florentine culture, whose inherent violence Lugli reveals by prompting questions about the entanglement of politics and desire.
Author Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, a practitioner of the Palo Monte devotional arts, illustrates with graphics and rock art how the Bakongo’s ideographic and pictographic signs are used to organize daily life, enable interactions between humans and the natural and spiritual worlds, and preserve and transmit cosmological and cosmogonical belief systems.
Exploring cultural diffusion and exchange, collective memory and identity, Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign artfully brings together analyses of the complex interconnections among Kongo traditions of religion, philosophy and visual/gestural communication on both sides of the African Atlantic world.
The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.
Charlotte Horlyck covers the critical and revolutionary period that stretches from Korean artists’ first encounters with oil paintings in the late nineteenth century to the varied and vibrant creative outputs of the twenty-first. She explores artists’ interpretations of new and traditional art forms ranging from oil and ink paintings to video art, multi-media installations, ready-mades, and performance art, showing how artists at every turn have questioned the role of art and artists within society. Opening up this fascinating world to general audiences, this book will appeal to anyone wanting to explore this rich and fascinating era in Korea’s cultural history.
Known for their beautiful textile art, the Kuna of Panama have been scrutinized by anthropologists for decades. Perhaps surprisingly, this scrutiny has overlooked the magnificent Kuna craft of nuchukana—wooden anthropomorphic carvings—which play vital roles in curing and other Kuna rituals. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Paolo Fortis at last brings to light this crucial cultural facet, illuminating not only Kuna aesthetics and art production but also their relation to wider social and cosmological concerns.
Exploring an art form that informs birth and death, personhood, the dream world, the natural world, religion, gender roles, and ecology, Kuna Art and Shamanism provides a rich understanding of this society’s visual system, and the ways in which these groundbreaking ethnographic findings can enhance Amerindian scholarship overall. Fortis also explores the fact that to ask what it means for the Kuna people to carve the figure of a person is to pose a riddle about the culture’s complete concept of knowing.
Also incorporating notions of landscape (islands, gardens, and ancient trees) as well as cycles of life, including the influence of illness, Fortis places the statues at the center of a network of social relationships that entangle people with nonhuman entities. As an activity carried out by skilled elderly men, who possess embodied knowledge of lifelong transformations, the carving process is one that mediates mortal worlds with those of immortal primordial spirits. Kuna Art and Shamanism immerses readers in this sense of unity and opposition between soul and body, internal forms and external appearances, and image and design.
Kunstkammer, art and curiosity cabinets housed in a dedicated room or suite of chambers, were often filled with thousands of diverse and sometimes shocking objects reflecting the bounty of nature and human creativity. These could range from a cherry pit carved with dozens of faces to an intricate drinking cup fashioned from a rhinoceros horn. Whether as a setting for personal contemplation or as a manifestation of the wealth and prestige of its owners, these proto-museums dazzled visitors of the time. This book offers the first in-depth comparative examination of the history, theory, organization, and character of the major Kunstkammern in the Holy Roman Empire.
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