William Seitz was a creative witness to one of the most exciting artistic upheavals of our time. His analysis of American Abstract Expressionism is the unique testament of one who was there at the Cedar Bar and at The Club in the early 1950s, sharing the milieu of the painters about whom he writes-Gorky, de Kooning, Hofmann, Motherwell, Rothko, and Tobey. Seitz was finely tuned to their idiosyncratic development, able to document at first hand the influences entering their discourse, whether Suzuki or Empson, Klee or the French existentialists. Beyond this, the uncertainty and verbal confusion of the time, Seitz takes the reader directly to the works of art, probing not what the artists were saying, but what they were painting.

A painter himself, he could explore the passions and methods of Abstract Expressionism with the insight and technical precision of one who had labored in the studio. Seitz maintains a profound respect for the mysterious power of the individual talent, for the artist as an intellectual, and for painting as a form of knowledge. His work, confined to the "underground" of microfilm after it was completed in 1955, stands alone in conveying the anxiety, exhilaration, and richness of a movement racing ahead while its criteria were still being formed. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 paintings, many in full color, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America is a book that Motherwell describes in his foreword as "unsurpassed...in the literature of Abstract Expressionism, but also sui generis in the scholarship of Modernism."

In southeastern Morocco, around the oasis of Tafilalet, the Ait Khabbash people weave brightly colored carpets, embroider indigo head coverings, paint their faces with saffron, and wear ornate jewelry. Their extraordinarily detailed arts are rich in cultural symbolism; they are always breathtakingly beautiful—and they are typically made by women. Like other Amazigh (Berber) groups (but in contrast to the Arab societies of North Africa), the Ait Khabbash have entrusted their artistic responsibilities to women. Cynthia Becker spent years in Morocco living among these women and, through family connections and female fellowship, achieved unprecedented access to the artistic rituals of the Ait Khabbash. The result is more than a stunning examination of the arts themselves, it is also an illumination of women's roles in Islamic North Africa and the many ways in which women negotiate complex social and religious issues.

One of the reasons Amazigh women are artists is that the arts are expressions of ethnic identity, and it follows that the guardians of Amazigh identity ought to be those who literally ensure its continuation from generation to generation, the Amazigh women. Not surprisingly, the arts are visual expressions of womanhood, and fertility symbols are prevalent. Controlling the visual symbols of Amazigh identity has given these women power and prestige. Their clothing, tattoos, and jewelry are public identity statements; such public artistic expressions contrast with the stereotype that women in the Islamic world are secluded and veiled. But their role as public identity symbols can also be restrictive, and history (French colonialism, the subsequent rise of an Arab-dominated government in Morocco, and the recent emergence of a transnational Berber movement) has forced Ait Khabbash women to adapt their arts as their people adapt to the contemporary world. By framing Amazigh arts with historical and cultural context, Cynthia Becker allows the reader to see the full measure of these fascinating artworks.

“Home is an idea,” Meghan Daum writes in her foreword, “a story we tell ourselves about who we are and who and what we want closest in our midst.” In The American Idea of Home, documentary filmmaker Bernard Friedman interviews more than thirty leaders in the field of architecture about a constellation of ideas relating to housing and home. The interviewees include Pritzker Prize winners Thom Mayne, Richard Meier, and Robert Venturi; Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Goldberger and Tracy Kidder; American Institute of Architects head Robert Ivy; and legendary architects such as Denise Scott Brown, Charles Gwathmey, Kenneth Frampton, and Robert A. M. Stern.

The American idea of home and the many types of housing that embody it launch lively, wide-ranging conversations about some of the most vital and important issues in architecture today. The topics that Friedman and his interviewees discuss illuminate five overarching themes: the functions and meanings of home; history, tradition, and change in residential architecture; activism, sustainability, and the environment; cities, suburbs, and regions; and technology, innovation, and materials. Friedman frames the interviews with an extended introduction that highlights these themes and helps readers appreciate the common concerns that underlie projects as disparate as Katrina cottages and Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian houses. Readers will come away from these thought-provoking interviews with an enhanced awareness of the “under the hood” kinds of design decisions that fundamentally shape our ideas of home and the dwellings in which we live.

Arkansas Made is the culmination of Historic Arkansas Museum’s exhaustive investigations into the history of the state’s material culture. Decades of meticulous research have resulted in this exciting two-volume survey of cabinetmakers, silversmiths, potters, fine artists, quilters, and other artisans working in communities all over the state.

The work of the artisans documented here has been the driving force of Historic Arkansas Museum’s mission to collect and preserve Arkansas’s creative legacy and rich artistic traditions. The photographs and fine artworks that enliven the pages of Volume II represent not only a delightfully broad scope of talent in genres ranging from landscapes to cubist portraits to political cartoons, but also a longstanding tradition of advocacy and support for the arts in Arkansas.

This arresting graphic provides a visual overview of the impacts of arts integration and interdisciplinarity in the university. It can be a tool for case-making, communication, and further inquiry.

Scientists are famous for believing in the proven and peer-accepted, the very ground that pioneering artists often subvert; they recognize correct and incorrect where artists see only true and false. And yet in some individuals, crossover learning provides a remarkable kind of catalyst to innovation that sparks the passion, curiosity, and freedom to pursue--and to realize--challenging ideas in culture, industry, society, and research. This book is an attempt to show how innovation in the "post-Google generation" is often catalyzed by those who cross a conventional line so firmly drawn between the arts and the sciences.

David Edwards describes how contemporary creators achieve breakthroughs in the arts and sciences by developing their ideas in an intermediate zone of human creativity where neither art nor science is easily defined. These creators may innovate in culture, as in the development of new forms of music composition (through use of chaos theory), or, perhaps, through pioneering scientific investigation in the basement of the Louvre. They may innovate in research institutions, society, or industry, too. Sometimes they experiment in multiple environments, carrying a single idea to social, industrial, and cultural fruition by learning to view traditional art-science barriers as a zone of creativity that Edwards calls artscience. Through analysis of original stories of artscience innovation in France, Germany, and the United States, he argues for the development of a new cultural and educational environment, particularly relevant to today's need to innovate in increasingly complex ways, in which artists and scientists team up with cultural, industrial, social, and educational partners.