Relatively few people in America build their own homes, but many yearn to make the places they live in more truly their own. Yard Art and Handmade Places profiles twenty homemakers who have used their yards and gardens to express their sense of individuality, to maintain connections to family and heritage, or even to create sacred spaces for personal and community refreshment and healing. Jill Nokes, an authority on native plants and ecological restoration, traveled across the state of Texas, seeking out residents who had transformed their yards and gardens into oases of art and exuberant personal expression. In this book, she presents their stories, told in their own words, about why they created these handmade places and what their yard art has come to mean to them and to their communities.

Rather than viewing yard art as a curiosity or oddity, Nokes treats it as an integral part of home-making, revealing how these places become invested with deep personal or social meaning. Yard Art and Handmade Places celebrates the fact that, despite the proliferation of look-alike suburbs, places still exist where people with ordinary means and skills are shaping space with their own hands to create a personal expression that can be enjoyed by all.

As archaeologists peel away the jungle covering that has both obscured and preserved the ancient Maya cities of Mexico and Central America, other scholars have only a limited time to study and understand the sites before the jungle, weather, and human encroachment efface them again, perhaps forever. This urgency underlies Yaxchilan: The Design of a Maya Ceremonial City, Carolyn Tate's comprehensive catalog and analysis of all the city's extant buildings and sculptures.

During a year of field work, Tate fully documented the appearance of the site as of 1987. For each sculpture and building, she records its discovery, present location, condition, measurements, and astronomical orientation and reconstructs its Long Counts and Julian dates from Calendar Rounds. Line drawings and photographs provide a visual document of the art and architecture of Yaxchilan.

More than mere documentation, however, the book explores the phenomenon of art within Maya society. Tate establishes a general framework of cultural practices, spiritual beliefs, and knowledge likely to have been shared by eighth-century Maya people. The process of making public art is considered in relation to other modes of aesthetic expression, such as oral tradition and ritual. This kind of analysis is new in Maya studies and offers fresh insight into the function of these magnificent cities and the powerful role public art and architecture play in establishing cultural norms, in education in a semiliterate society, and in developing the personal and community identities of individuals.

Several chapters cover the specifics of art and iconography at Yaxchilan as a basis for examining the creation of the city in the Late Classic period. Individual sculptures are attributed to the hands of single artists and workshops, thus aiding in dating several of the monuments. The significance of headdresses, backracks, and other costume elements seen on monuments is tied to specific rituals and fashions, and influence from other sites is traced. These analyses lead to a history of the design of the city under the reigns of Shield Jaguar (A.D. 681-741) and Bird Jaguar IV (A.D. 752-772).

In Tate's view, Yaxchilan and other Maya cities were designed as both a theater for ritual activities and a nexus of public art and social structures that were crucial in defining the self within Maya society.

The remarkable collection of the UK’s most prolific collector of postwar British studio pottery.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, “professional Yorkshireman” W. A. Ismay (1910–2001) amassed over 3,600 pieces by more than 500 potters. Surrounded by his family of pots, he lived in a tiny terraced house in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and left his collection and its associated archive to the city of York upon his death. This eclectic group of works contains objects created by many of the most significant potters working in the United Kingdom, including Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Bernard Leach, and Michael Cardew, as well as lesser-known makers. 

With new academic research into this little-studied collection and archive, Yorkshire Tea Ceremony explores Ismay’s journey as a collector and offers fresh perspectives on a marginalized area of British Modernism. Tracing the collection’s journey from private to public ownership illuminates issues surrounding the acquisition and reveals the transformative effect it has had on both curatorial practice and the ambition of regional public institutions. The W. A. Ismay Collection offers a well-documented example of the valuable contribution collectors can make to the British studio ceramics movement.

Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the collection’s move from private to public ownership, this volume accompanies an exhibition at York Art Gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA).

Part visual history, part memoir, You Can Crush the Flowers is a chronicle of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath, as it manifested itself not only in the art on the streets of Cairo but also through the wider visual culture that emerged during the revolution. Marking the ten-year anniversary of the revolution, celebrated Egyptian-Lebanese artist Bahia Shehab tells the stories that inspired both her own artwork and the work of her fellow revolutionaries. Shehab narrates the events of the revolution as they unfolded, describing on one hand the tactics deployed by the regime to drive protesters from the street—from the use of tear gas and snipers to brute force, intimidation techniques, and virginity tests—and on the other hand the retaliation by the protesters online and on the street in marches, chants, street art, and memes. Throughout this powerful and moving account, which includes over one hundred images, Shehab responds to all these aspects of the revolution as both artist and activist. The result bears witness to the brutality of the regime and pays tribute to the protestors who bravely defied it.

 

Penny Siopis is internationally acclaimed for her pathbreaking paintings and installations. Your History with Me is a comprehensive study of her short films, which have put her at the front ranks of contemporary artist-filmmakers. Siopis uses found footage to create short video essays that function as densely encrypted accounts of historical time and memory that touch on the cryptic and visceral elements of gender and power. The critics, scholars, curators, artists, and filmmakers in this volume examine her films in relation to subjects ranging from the history of Greeks in South Africa, trauma and cultural memory, and her relationship with the French New Wave to her feminist-inflected articulations of form and content and how her films comment on apartheid. They also highlight her global South perspective to articulate a mode of filmmaking highly responsive to histories of violence, displacement, migration as well as pleasure, joy, and renewal. The essays, which are paired with vivid stills from Siopis’s films throughout, collectively widen the understanding of Siopis’s oeuvre. Opening new vocabularies of thought for engaging with her films, this volume outlines how her work remakes the possibilities of film as a mode of experimentation and intervention.

Contributors. John Akomfrah, Sinazo Chiya, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Katerina Gregos, Brenda Hollweg, William Kentridge, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Griselda Pollock, Laura Rascaroli, Zineb Sedira, Penny Siopis, Hedley Twidle, Zoé Whitley

American artist Jean Lowe’s work revolves around the intersection of art history, popular culture, environmentalism, commerce, and politics. Your Place in the Multiverse: Jean Lowe is a survey of her work drawn from the past seventeen years featuring many of her most important installations. Lowe employs wit and satire to create work that is both entertaining and seductive as well as intellectually provocative. Lowe is an American pop/conceptual multimedia artist whose work carefully and humorously unpacks the ironies and challenges of our 21st century culture. This will be the first museum exhibition of Lowe’s work since 2000 and the first publication on her work to include scholarly essays by two art historians.

Dating from 2003-2020, the exhibition consists of fourteen separate installations: Empire Style, 2003; Dr’s Notes, 2004; Baby Grand, 2005; Love for Sale and Look 20 Years Younger, 2008-11; Discount Barn, 2008-2020; Bookshelf Prints, 2013;  Last Call, 2013-20; Posters and Pallet, 2014; Last Call, 2017-21, Forgotten Corner, 2019; Garden Carpet, 2019; Art and About with Bill Mackelry, 2019-2020, Town Crier (Self-Portrait as Analog), 2020, and POW!, 2021. Lowe’s installations are primarily comprised of unpretentious media such as papier-mâché and paint, which are coupled with a sophisticated and literary use of language, and a loose painterly style. Room-sized and incorporating artist made furniture, rugs, and even pianos, these beautifully-staged installations are often overwhelming, playing both on sensory overload and the irony of abundance as presented daily in our consumer culture. Through her work Lowe references European art, especially German Baroque and French Empire style, for their exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style. By conflating the French Empire style with the stylistics of American consumer culture, and big box store marketing, Lowe offers up a striking, thoughtful and revealing comparison of cultural contexts.

POW! (2020) and Art and About with Bill Mackelry (2019-2020), shown for the first time in this exhibition, look at the imbalance of male to female power in the art-world. Art and About with Bill Mackelry is a video piece in which Lowe stars as a mock male interviewer named Bill Mackelry, who interviews the artist Jean Lowe on a visual arts talk show. The installation POW! will be filled with ersatz portraits of women as fierce, crazy hags by painters such as Picasso, Willem De Kooning, and Frances Bacon painted directly on the wall.

Your Place in the Multiverse: Jean Lowe is organized by Executive Director and Chief Curator Katie Lee-Koven for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art. This fully illustrated accompanying publication, of the same title, will be the first to include art historical essays with in-depth analysis of Lowe’s work written by USU Art History Assistant Professor Marissa Vigneault and John C. Welchman, professor of Art History and Critical Studies at the University of California, San Diego.