This beautifully photographed book catalogs the collection of nearly five hundred Alutiiq cultural items held by the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, or the Kunstkamera, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Gathered between 1780 and 1867, many of the artifacts are composed of fur, feathers, gut, hair, and other delicate materials, which prevent their transport for display or study.

Illustrated with stunning new photography, this catalogue details the J. Paul Getty Museum’s phenomenal holdings of ancient glass, spanning three millennia.

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of ancient glass—astonishingly delicate, richly hued, and fancifully shaped—is among the most celebrated in the United States. Ranging from the Bronze Age to the medieval period (1500 BCE–1000 CE), the 584 objects included in this publication originated from a wide geographical area, including the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and central Europe.

This catalogue, written by acclaimed scholar Anastassios Antonaras, begins with a fascinating essay on the history of glassmaking—a highly technical art form that is still practiced similarly today—and continues with detailed and informative entries on the works. Each entry is accompanied by vivid photography. The book also includes a history of the collection, glossary of glassmaking terms, technical study, and full bibliography.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/ancient-glass/ and includes 360-degree views and zoomable high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue of the largest collection of Greek manuscripts in America, including 110 codices and fragments ranging from the fourth to the nineteenth century. The collection, held in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Michigan Library, contains many manuscripts from Epirus and the Meteora monasteries built on high pinnacles of rocks in Thessaly. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann has based the manuscript descriptions on the latest developments in the fields of paleography and codicology, including the newest recommendations of the Institute for Research and History of Texts in Paris. The catalogue includes high-resolution plates of all the manuscripts, allowing researchers to compare the entries with other Greek manuscripts around the world. This catalogue contains a trove of fascinating information related to Byzantine culture that will be available for the first time to scholars working on various disciplines of the humanities such as Classical and Byzantine Studies, Art History, Medieval Studies, Theology, and History.
    This is the first volume of a projected two-volume set. Volume 2, also by Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann, will contain descriptions of remaining Greek manuscripts in the Library’s collection, starting with Mich. Ms. 59 and ending with Mich. Ms. 238, for a total of 53 manuscripts and 8 fragments. Both volumes will have the same format – catalogue entries for each manuscript together with extensive illustrations. The publication date for Volume 2 has not been established.

A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Volume II unveils the rich diversity and enduring legacy of the Greek manuscript tradition preserved in one of North America's largest collections. Building on the acclaimed first volume, this second and concluding volume offers comprehensive illustrated descriptions of eighty-four manuscripts and fragments housed in the University of Michigan Library's Special Collections Research Center. The discovery of twenty-three previously unknown manuscripts and fragments significantly expands our understanding of Byzantine and post-Byzantine book culture, illuminating the remarkable continuity of Greek scholarly, liturgical, and artistic traditions from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries.

Each entry integrates codicological features, handwriting analysis, textual content, decoration, binding, provenance, and references to earlier scholarship as well as high-quality color plates to illustrate representative pages, script types, and illuminations. Among the exceptional highlights are a fragment of The Great Calculation According to the Indians by Maximos Planoudes, preserving portions of this rare mathematical treatise otherwise lost; an illuminated 1371 copy of The Heavenly Ladder by John Klimax, created by the renowned scribe Joasaph II of the Hodegon Monastery in Constantinople; and a newly identified manuscript containing rare patristic homilies linked to the sixteenth-century Choniates scriptorium in Venice.

Considered a definitive source for scholars and students, this highly acclaimed series illustrates the impact of Greek and Latin texts on the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Considered a definitive source for scholars and students, this highly acclaimed series illustrates the impact of Greek and Latin texts on the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Quilts bear witness to the American experience. With a history that spans the early republic to the present day, this form of textile art can illuminate many areas of American life, such as immigration and settlement, the development of our nation’s textile industry, and the growth of mass media and marketing. In short, each quilt tells a story that is integral to America’s history.

Comfort and Glory introduces an outstanding collection of American quilts and quilt history documentation, the Winedale Quilt Collection at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. This volume showcases 115 quilts—nearly one-quarter of the Winedale Collection—through stunning color photographs (including details) and essays about each quilt’s history and construction. The selections span more than two hundred years of American quiltmaking and represent a broad range of traditional styles and functions. Utility quilts, some worn or faded, join show quilts, needlework masterpieces, and “best” quilts saved for special occasions. Texas quilts, including those made in or brought to Texas during the nineteenth century, constitute a significant number of the selections. Color photographs of related documents and material culture objects from the Briscoe Center’s collections—quilting templates, a painted bride’s box, sheet music, a homespun dress, a brass sewing bird, and political ephemera, among them—enrich the stories of many of the quilts.

A comprehensive catalogue of every known figurine from the Fremont culture

The Fremont culture is famous for its anthropomorphic figurines—small clay figures occasionally dressed in clothing and decorated with jewelry—but surprisingly, archaeologists know very little about these important artifacts and their place in Fremont society. In Faces of the Fremont, the largest study of the subject ever undertaken, David T. Yoder takes a straightforward approach to cultural commentary through artifactual analysis as he interprets over 800 figurines and anthropomorphic objects.

Unlike previous research on the subject, this volume explores neglected topics within Fremont studies, including sex and gender, clothing and body decoration, hairstyles, and childhood. Complete with in-depth analysis and interpretation of the significance of the figurines to the Fremont people, as well as hundreds of beautiful color photographs, Faces of the Fremont provides a nuanced understanding of figurine manufacture, formalizes a classification system for figurine traits, and documents new and interesting geographic and temporal patterns.

A New Scientist Best Book of the Year

Beautiful photographs of stunning shells from London's Natural History Museum, home to one of the most significant and comprehensive collections in the world.

Collected and treasured for their beauty, used in religious rituals, or even traded as currency, shells have fascinated humans for millennia. Ancient and enchanting, dazzling in form and variety, these beautiful objects come from mollusks, one of the most diverse groups in the animal kingdom, including snails, oysters, cuttlefish, and chitons. Soft-bodied, these creatures rely on shells for protection from enemies and their environments, from snowy mountains to arid deserts, in deep-sea hydrothermal vents and the jungles of the tropics, on rocky shores, and in coral reefs.

In this book, mollusk expert Andreia Salvador profiles some of the world’s most beautiful and quirky shells, each selected from the more than eight million specimens held in the collection at London’s Natural History Museum. We lock eyes with the hundred-eyed cowry, named after "the all-seeing one," the giant Argus Panoptes of Greek mythology. We see how shells' appearances translate into defense strategies, as with the zigzag nerite, which varies its patterning to deceive and confuse predators. And we meet shell inhabitants, such as the amber snail, which eats earthworms by sucking them up like spaghetti. Reproduced in full color and striking detail, these shells have much to reveal about the history of collecting, the science of taxonomy, and the human desire to understand the natural world.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The collections include seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960s and continuing to the present.The first printed catalog of the Video Data Bank's complete holdings, Feedback offers readers essays on the history of media arts, the Video Data Bank, video activism, experimental performance art, and the On Art and Artists Collection. It includes 325 frame grabs and stills from some of the collection's most important pieces and outlines the styles and directions taken by artists throughout the entire history of video art. An indispensable guide and reference for artists, students, teachers, and collectors, Feedback is an essential book for any film and video bookshelf.

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum’s significant collection of French Rococo ébénisterie furniture.

This catalogue focuses on French ébénisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum’s founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976.
 
The Museum’s collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696–ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694–1763), and Jean-François Oeben (1721–1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste.
 
The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection’s acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/rococo/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

Vividly illustrated, this is the first comprehensive catalogue of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s celebrated collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French silver.
 
The collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French silver at the J. Paul Getty Museum is of exceptional quality and state of preservation. Each piece is remarkable for its beauty, inventive form, skillful execution, illustrious provenance, and the renown of its maker. This volume is the first complete study of these exquisite objects, with more than 250 color photographs bringing into focus extraordinary details such as minuscule makers’ marks, inscriptions, and heraldic armorials.
 
The publication details the formation of the Museum’s collection of French silver, several pieces of which were selected by J. Paul Getty himself, and discusses the regulations of the historic Parisian guild of gold- and silversmiths that set quality controls and consumer protections. Comprehensive entries catalogue a total of thirty-three pieces with descriptions, provenance, exhibition history, and technical information. The related commentaries shed light on the function of these objects and the roles they played in the daily lives of their prosperous owners. The book also includes maker biographies and a full bibliography.
 
The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/french-silver/ and includes 360-degree views and zoomable high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

From frontier times in the Republic of Texas until today, Texans have been making gorgeous quilts. Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes documented the first 150 years of the state's rich heritage of quilt art in Lone Stars: A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1836–1936 and Lone Stars II: A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1936–1986. Now in Lone Stars III, they bring the Texas quilt story into the twenty-first century, presenting two hundred traditional and art quilts that represent "the best of the best" quilts created since 1986.

The quilts in Lone Stars III display the explosion of creativity that has transformed quilting over the last quarter century. Some of the quilts tell stories, create landscapes, record events, and memorialize people. Others present abstract designs that celebrate form and color. Their makers have embraced machine quilting, as well as hand sewing, and they often embellish their quilts with buttons, beads, lace, ribbon, and even more exotic items. Each quilt is pictured in its entirely, and some entries also include photographs of quilt details. The accompanying text describes the quilt's creation, its maker, and its physical details.

With 16.3 million American quilters who spend $3.6 billion annually on their pastime, the quilting community has truly become a force to reckon with both artistically and socially. Lone Stars III is the perfect introduction to this world of creativity.

Complex, controversial, and prolific, Howard Barnstone was a central figure in the world of twentieth-century modern architecture. Recognized as Houston’s foremost modern architect in the 1950s, Barnstone came to prominence for his designs with partner Preston M. Bolton, which transposed the rigorous and austere architectural practices of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the hot, steamy coastal plain of Texas. Barnstone was a man of contradictions—charming and witty but also self-centered, caustic, and abusive—who shaped new settings that were imbued, at once, with spatial calm and emotional intensity.

Making Houston Modern explores the provocative architect’s life and work, not only through the lens of his architectural practice but also by delving into his personal life, class identity, and connections to the artists, critics, collectors, and museum directors who forged Houston’s distinctive culture in the postwar era. Edited by three renowned voices in the architecture world, this volume situates Barnstone within the contexts of American architecture, modernism, and Jewish culture to unravel the legacy of a charismatic personality whose imaginative work as an architect, author, teacher, and civic commentator helped redefine architecture in Texas.

The purpose of this book is to provide an authoritative guide to a number of important authors and genres of Middle English prose. Although, distinguished work has been undertaken on particular authors or groups of works, no previous study has attempted a comprehensive overview of this highly diversified range of material.

New texts from Greek antiquity continue to emerge on scraps of papyrus from the sands of Egypt, not only adding to the surviving corpus of classical and Hellenistic literature, but also occasionally offering a glimpse into how these poems were studied in antiquity. New Literary Papyri from the Michigan Collection: Mythographic Lyric and a Catalogue of Poetic First Lines presents three such new texts: an innovative lyric poem on the Trojan cycle, a scholarly anthology of lyric verses, and a brief but enigmatic third text. Cassandra Borges and C. Michael Sampson offer the original Greek text of these pieces, along with their scholarly commentary, analyzing their features in a variety of contexts—historical, cultural, poetic, mythological, religious, and scholarly.

The fragments collected here are of considerable antiquity (late third to second century BCE) a fact that is significant inasmuch as it places them among the oldest Greek papyri, but all the more so because in this period, a scholarly community was thriving in Ptolemaic Alexandria, the political and cultural capital of Hellenistic Egypt. The fragments bear witness to that scholarly activity: not only is their anthology of poetic verses consistent with other scholarly selections, but the very survival of these texts may well be at least partially indebted to the work of the Alexandrians in studying and propagating Greek literature in Egypt.

This edition supplements the 1970s work of Reinhold Merkelbach and Denys Page. Recent digitizing for the APIS project revealed a previously unsuspected join with other material, however, which alone warrants a new, comprehensive edition and analysis.

Photographer and filmmaker Nic Nicosia makes pictures. Since the late 1970s, Nicosia has staged and constructed sets, objects, and situations to be photographed rather than to reproduce something that already exists. These conceptual fabrications have ranged from elaborate sets with live actors to dioramas and abstract constructions. Whether his pictures contain a disturbing suburban narrative, or are fabricated by the act of drawing, or are simply created by the use of common objects with dramatic lighting, the familiar thread of Nicosia’s unique vision and sensibility is always present.

Nic Nicosia is the first major publication of the artist’s work and covers his entire oeuvre through 2011. The catalog presents images from all of Nicosia’s major photographic series, including Domestic Dramas, Near (modern) Disasters, The Cast, Life as We Know It, Real Pictures, Love + Lust, Acts, Sex Acts, Untitled Landscapes, 365 SaFe Days, Untitled (drawing), Space Time Light, I See Light, and in the absence of others, as well as stills from the videos Middletown, Moving Picture, Middletown Morning, Cerchi E Quadratti, On Acting America, and 9 1/2 Hours to SaFe. Accompanying the catalog is an overview of Nicosia’s career by Michelle White, an interview with the artist by Sue Graze, and an original short story by Philipp Meyer that powerfully resonates with the sense of wonder and menace in Nicosia’s art.

Alaska preserves and exhibits its own culture and history in the Andrew P. Kashevaroff Building in Juneau, the home of the State Library, Archives, and Museum. With this catalog and guide, the meaning of the museum exhibits gains new depth. Our Story in Many Voices orients visitors to the museum, explains the objects, and explores the changing history and interpretation of Alaska’s story in the many voices of its telling.
 
Charles Wohlforth provides three major text sections—an introduction to Alaska, a summary of the museum exhibits, and a history of the exhibit development process—before the catalog of art and artifacts. Richly illustrated and presenting perspectives from Native and non-Native peoples, the book enhances visits to the museum and helps visitors recall and process their experiences, as well as broaden their general understanding of the state.
 
There is no single history of Alaska. Understanding the place and its peoples can be achieved only by viewing the multiple, complex, and even contradictory ways different people and groups perceive Alaska. Rather than present an official view of the state, Our Story in Many Voices contains independent and critical perspectives that use the extraordinary resources of the museum to consider Alaska’s most challenging cultural issues, reaching toward understanding and reconciliation.
 
 

Association of American University Presses Book Jacket Award, 1977 "As a key to Philadelphia's historic environment, this will become a standard work." --Museum News Today, William Penn's town is the living history of 300 years of architecture told in outstanding examples of Colonial, Federal, Italianate, and other early styles, and in the twentieth-century innovations of LeCorbusier, Kahn, and Wright. This new paperback edition updates the Historic American Buildings Survey collection, with new information on buildings lost through fire or demolition, or altered to restore the original architecture. Organized by the traditional sections of the city, the entries include extensive physical descriptions of the structures, analyses of architecturally notable features, dates of construction, alteration, or demolition, and a new street index. The book contains more than 100 drawings, photos, and maps from the HABS collection. "[F]rom Colonial, Federal and Italiante styles to the 20th-century innovation of LeCorbusier, Kahn, and Wright." --Philadelphia Inquirer "A cause for celebration. The editor's introductions set each part of the city into understandable units. The book is a clearly told story of success and failure in historic preservation." --J.E. Mooney, Director, Historical Society of Pennsylvania "A lovely portrait of Philadelphia's rich history of buildings." --The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

A gorgeously illustrated look at snuff boxes and bottles carved from the Brazilian coquilla nut reveals a larger history of commerce, cultural exchange, and power in the Atlantic world.
 
Portraits in a Nutshell showcases intricately carved snuff boxes and bottles sculpted from the Brazilian coquilla nut between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Both utilitarian and decorative, these bottles and boxes were produced and used by diverse people of wide-ranging geographic origin, racial background, and social standing. As a result, coquilla nut snuff boxes present a rich material archive of the Atlantic world and the central role of Indigenous and Black histories within it.
 
Despite being just three or four inches long, these coquilla nut snuff boxes encapsulate an early modern history of transoceanic movement and creativity. The carvings depict animals and fantastical creatures, scenes of religious and courtly life, portraits of political and military leaders, abolitionists and activists, and people at the margins of colonial society. These images are available to the public and to scholars for the first time in this book and will be of interest to antique collectors, art historians, social historians, and anyone interested in the unusual and the curious.
 
Over 250 detailed photographs of snuff bottles and boxes from the unique and wide-ranging collection of David Badger not only illustrate the exceptional skill of their creators but also tell the story of millions of Africans transported to Brazil during centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. The text demonstrates the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world, the movements of peoples and ideas, and the commercial exchange of goods and cultural and material objects in Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. In this beautiful book, these objects reveal a story never before told.
 
With a preface by Matthew Francis Rarey, associate professor of African and Black Atlantic art history at Oberlin College, and an introduction by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Arthur Ross Gallery.

A comprehensive look at a memorable period in the celebrated painter and printmaker's life and career, Robert Kipniss: Paintings and Poetry, 1950–1964 is the result of his many arduous months revisiting his more-than-half-a-century-ago writings and peoms that were stashed away and essentially forgotten. "Some of the poems are straightforward, some are infused with surreal irony, and some are angry," says Kipniss in his candid and honest preface. Thoughtful and articulate from conception to completion, his never-before-published poems are choreographed with his early paintings in this monograph's contemplation of these influential and foundational fourteen years. "When I stopped writing [in 1961] my vision was no longer divided between word-thinking and picture-thinking: these approaches had merged and in expressing myself I was more whole," reflects Kipniss in his retrospective musings.

This written and visual account of previously unpublished poems and critically acclaimed early paintings includes two astute and illustrative essays that further engage the reader in the evolution of the artist's prolific oeuvre. His prints, drawings, and paintings are remarkable for their eloquence and refinement, earning him international recognition for his expansive landscapes and small town vistas, as well as quiet interors and intimate still lifes.

Readers of this seminal volume are all the richer for catching a glimpse of an intensely personal segment of this accomplished artist's private history. In an unambiguous assessment, Kipniss elaborates, "The most significant insight that arose in this undertaking...came when I began to collate reproductions of my paintings of the 1950s. I could clearly see that my work in the two mediums were from very differing parts of my psyche, and that while they were both in themselves completely engaged, they were not in any way together."

At the turn of the twentieth century, Francis W. Kelsey began to amass a large collection of artifacts from ancient sites across the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on Imperial Rome, to broaden the teaching of antiquity at the University of Michigan. Among the objects now housed in the museum that bears his name is a collection of seven hundred colorful stones dating to the Roman period, one of the largest and most varied collections of Roman decorative stones outside Europe. These pieces were obtained as archaeological artifacts, mostly architectural, with many deriving from well-known ancient buildings, such as the Baths of Diocletian in Rome and the Palace of Herod in Jericho, allowing for new interpretations of their architectural decoration and design. Chapters trace the formation of the collection, study the archaeology of the artifacts, and detail the history of each stone and its study with a comprehensive bibliography. 

In keeping with the nature of the collection, Roman Decorative Stone Collections focuses on archaeological contexts and object biographies, from the stones’ first use to their eventual display in the Kelsey Museum. Entries are accompanied by rich photographs detailing the stones’ appearances, environmental factors, and their collectors. The fully illustrated catalog includes essays deriving from Kelsey’s original notes on sources, buildings, sites, and dealers. As the first formal catalog of these items, Roman Decorative Stone Collections is an accessible resource of Roman archaeology, antiquities, and the decorative arts.

Official Companion to the Library of Congress Exhibition.

The campaign for women’s suffrage—considered the largest reform movement in American history—lasted more than seven decades. The struggle was not for the fainthearted. For years, determined women organized, lobbied, paraded, petitioned, lectured, picketed, and faced imprisonment in pursuit of the right to vote. Drawing from the Library’s extensive collections of photographs, personal papers, and the organizational records of such figures as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, the National Woman’s Party, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Shall Not Be Denied traces the movement leading to the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, the contributions of suffragists who worked to persuade women that they deserved the same rights as men, the divergent political strategies and internal divisions they overcame, the push for a federal women’s suffrage amendment, and the legacy of the movement.
 
A companion to the exhibition staged by the Library of Congress, which opened on June 4, 2019—the 100th anniversary of the US Senate’s passage of the suffrage amendment that would become the 19th amendment—Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote is part of the national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

Published by Rutgers University Press in association with the Library of Congress.
 

Virtue and Venom traces the history of a previously neglected genre, the catalog of women, from its origins in Greece and Rome to the late Middle Ages, revealing the catalogs’ considerable importance as cultural documents of the evolution of the Western definition of womankind. These catalogs were simple listings of past heroines, sometimes described in extended biographies, sometimes merely enumerated by name. Catalog heroines often appeared in familiar guises—anonymous mothers of great men, fascinating seductresses, self-effacing spouses, abused victims of love, strong and bnilliant achievers. Wnitten by some of the finest authors of the ages, the catalogs fulfilled important functions. By defining women typologically, they instilled stereotypes in the popular mind, and by illustrating proper and improper feminine conduct they reinforced the late medieval link between literature and ethics. Despite the repetitive form of the genre, the catalogs were extremely flexible, able to illustrate different, even antithetical views of femininity—invoking the past as authority or reinterpreting the past in an attempt to associate femininity with changing cultural values. Thus, as well as being the vehicle for the transmission of knowledge, the form could also be manipulated to contest authority, in the guise of invoking it, and present new paradigms. McLeod examines a host of catalogs, including those of Homer, Hesiod, Vergil, Ovid, Juvenal, Plutarch, St. Jerome, and Jean de Meun, but gives special attention to Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. She then shows how the tradition ultimately produced the first major defense of womankind in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames. This book will be of interest to classicists, medievalists, Renaissance and feminist scholars, and anyone interested in the misogynist tradition in the West and the response it engendered.

Virtue and Venom traces the history of a previously neglected genre, the catalog of women, from its origins in Greece and Rome to the late Middle Ages, revealing the catalogs’ considerable importance as cultural documents of the evolution of the Western definition of womankind. These catalogs were simple listings of past heroines, sometimes described in extended biographies, sometimes merely enumerated by name. Catalog heroines often appeared in familiar guises—anonymous mothers of great men, fascinating seductresses, self-effacing spouses, abused victims of love, strong and bnilliant achievers. Wnitten by some of the finest authors of the ages, the catalogs fulfilled important functions. By defining women typologically, they instilled stereotypes in the popular mind, and by illustrating proper and improper feminine conduct they reinforced the late medieval link between literature and ethics. Despite the repetitive form of the genre, the catalogs were extremely flexible, able to illustrate different, even antithetical views of femininity—invoking the past as authority or reinterpreting the past in an attempt to associate femininity with changing cultural values. Thus, as well as being the vehicle for the transmission of knowledge, the form could also be manipulated to contest authority, in the guise of invoking it, and present new paradigms. McLeod examines a host of catalogs, including those of Homer, Hesiod, Vergil, Ovid, Juvenal, Plutarch, St. Jerome, and Jean de Meun, but gives special attention to Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. She then shows how the tradition ultimately produced the first major defense of womankind in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames. This book will be of interest to classicists, medievalists, Renaissance and feminist scholars, and anyone interested in the misogynist tradition in the West and the response it engendered.

In the beginning was basketry. Around the world, the intertwining of fibers by hand to form a container is a most ancient of crafts. It is older than pottery and metalwork, older than loom weaving.

Woven from the Center presents breathtaking basketry from some of the greatest weavers in the Southwest. Each sandal and mat fragment, each bowl and jar, every water bottle and whimsy is infused with layers of aesthetic, cultural, and historical meanings. This book offers stunning photos and descriptions of woven works from Tohono O’odham, Akimel O’odham, Hopi, Western Apache, Yavapai, Navajo, Pai, Paiute, New Mexico Pueblo, Eastern Apache, Seri, Yaqui, Mayo, and Tarahumara communities.

This richly illustrated volume stands on its own as a definitive look at basketry of the Greater Southwest, including northern Mexico. It also serves as a companion to the peerless collection of U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexican Native American basketry curated at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, Arizona. Comprehensive in its coverage, this work is based on decades of research on weavers, collectors, and donors. It includes ample illustrations of basket weavers, past and present, bringing to life the people behind these wonderful woven treasures.

This richly illustrated volume examines the remarkable Kashmiri shawls of the Walter Koelz Collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Part I presents the history, production, forms, and ornamentation of Kashmiri shawls, focusing on the impact of social contexts and the advent of the Jacquard loom on shawl development. Part II is a detailed descriptive catalogue of the shawls in the Koelz Collection. An accompanying CD-ROM includes color illustrations of the shawls in the collection as well as a transcribed manuscript by Koelz.

Yale Papyri in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library IV springs from work undertaken at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at its Papyrological Summer Institute in 2003. This fourth volume of Yale papyri presents three groups of texts dating from the second century BCE to the seventh century CE. Editions are presented in chronological order, and include items such as samples of scribal training, mathematical tables and exercises, schoolroom work, letters, tax- receipts, contracts, and petitions. Contributors in addition to the volume editors include Daniel Markovich, Charles W. Hedrick, Jr., Jitse H. F. Dijkstra, Kevin Wilkinson, AnneMarie Luijendijk, Richard L. Phillips, Gary Reger, Shane Berg, Elizabeth Penland, George Bevan, Josiah E. Davis, Mariam Dandamayeva, Andrew T. Crislip, and Jean Gascou.

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.