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I Love My Selfie
Essay by Ilan Stavans / Auto-Portraits by ADÁL
Duke University Press, 2017
What explains our current obsession with selfies? In I Love My Selfie noted cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the selfie's historical and cultural roots by discussing everything from Greek mythology and Shakespeare to Andy Warhol, James Franco, and Pope Francis. He sees selfies as tools people use to disguise or present themselves as spontaneous and casual. This collaboration includes a portfolio of fifty autoportraits by the artist ADÁL; he and Stavans use them as a way to question the notion of the self and to engage with artists, celebrities, technology, identity, and politics. Provocative and engaging, I Love My Selfie will change the way readers think about this unavoidable phenomenon of twenty-first-century life.
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In American Waters
The Sea in American Painting
Daniel Finamore
University of Arkansas Press, 2021

In American Waters is the catalog of an exhibition co-organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

The exhibition and this associated catalog invite visitors to discover the sea as an expansive way to reflect on American culture and environment, learn how coastal and maritime symbols moved inland across the United States, and question what it means to be “in American waters.” Work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Amy Sherald, Kay WalkingStick, Norman Rockwell, Hale Woodruff, Paul Cadmus, Thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence, Valerie Hegarty, Stuart Davis, and many others is included, along with essays from scholars, critics, and the curators.

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In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde
An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum
Matti Bunzl
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In 2008, anthropologist Matti Bunzl was given rare access to observe the curatorial department of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. For five months, he sat with the institution’s staff, witnessing firsthand what truly goes on behind the scenes at a contemporary art museum. From fund-raising and owner loans to museum-artist relations to the immense effort involved in safely shipping sixty works from twenty-seven lenders in fourteen cities and five countries, Matti Bunzl’s In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde illustrates the inner workings of one of Chicago’s premier cultural institutions.

Bunzl’s ethnography is designed to show how a commitment to the avant-garde can come into conflict with an imperative for growth, leading to the abandonment of the new and difficult in favor of the entertaining and profitable. Jeff Koons, whose massive retrospective debuted during Bunzl's research, occupies a central place in his book and exposes the anxieties caused by such seemingly pornographic work as the infamous Made in Heaven series. Featuring cameos by other leading artists, including Liam Gillick, Jenny Holzer, Karen Kilimnik, and Tino Sehgal, the drama Bunzl narrates is palpable and entertaining and sheds an altogether new light on the contemporary art boom.
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The Interface Experience
A User's Guide
Kimon Keramidas
Bard Graduate Center, 2015
The last forty years have seen the rise of the personal computer, a device that has enabled ordinary individuals to access a tool that had been exclusive to laboratories and corporate technology centers. During this time, computers have become smaller, faster, more powerful, and more complex. So much has happened with so many products, in fact, that we often take for granted the uniqueness of our experiences with different machines over time.

The Interface Experience surveys some of the landmark devices in the history of personal computing—including the Commodore 64, Apple Macintosh Plus, Palm Pilot Professional, and Microsoft Kinect—and helps us to better understand the historical shifts that have occurred with the design and material experience of each machine. With its spiral-bound design reminiscent of early computer user manuals and thorough consideration of the cultural moment represented by each device, The Interface Experience is a one-of-a-kind tour of modern computing technology.
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Intersecting Colors
Josef Albers and His Contemporaries
Vanja Malloy, editor
Amherst College Press, 2015
Josef Albers (1888–1976) was an artist, teacher, and seminal thinker on the perception of color. A member of the Bauhaus who fled to the U.S. in 1933, his ideas about how the mind understands color influenced generations of students, inspired countless artists, and anticipated the findings of neuroscience in the latter half of the twentieth century. With contributions from the disciplines of art history, the intellectual and cultural significance of Gestalt psychology, and neuroscience, Intersecting Colors offers a timely reappraisal of the immense impact of Albers’s thinking, writing, teaching, and art on generations of students. It shows the formative influence on his work of non-scientific approaches to color (notably the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) and the emergence of Gestalt psychology in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work also shows how much of Albers’s approach to color—dismissed in its day by a scientific approach to the study and taxonomy of color driven chiefly by industrial and commercial interests—ultimately anticipated what neuroscience now reveals about how we perceive this most fundamental element of our visual experience. Edited by Vanja Malloy, with contributions from Brenda Danilowitz, Sarah Lowengard, Karen Koehler, Jeffrey Saletnik, and Susan R. Barry.
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The Invention of Photography and Its Impact on Learning
Photographs from Harvard University and Radcliffe College and from the Collection of Harrison D. Horblit
Eugenia Janis
Harvard University Press, 1989

The invention of photography 150 years ago changed profoundly the way we learn about the world. Photographs can make the distant and exotic familiar, and the familiar strange; they can rewrite history, challenge aesthetic notions, and arrest time.

In this volume eight scholars share their insights concerning the impact of photography on their fields, illustrating their essays with a rich and varied selection of photographs from the resources of Harvard, Radcliffe, and the collection of Harrison D. Horblit. The fields range from art history to anthropology to medicine; among the 96 photographs are nineteenth-century views of Florence and Beirut, impressionist landscapes, Civil War battlefield scenes, family portraits, haunting studies of inmates of the mental hospital of Sainte-Anne. As Eugenia Parry Janis says in her introductory essay, photographs of “science, reportage, physiognomy of illness and health, visions of modern cities in war time or of ancient ruins, even a shred of cloth isolated under the camera eye, all increase our learning by utterly removing things from the grasp of actuality…we begin to ponder on all that is known, and how we know it, and what to believe because of it.”

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Irina Nakhova
Museum on the Edge
Jane A. Sharp
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Throughout her extensive career, Russian conceptual artist Irina Nakhova has frequently pushed the limits of what constitutes art and how we experience the art museum. One of her famous early pieces, for instance, transformed a room in her very own Moscow apartment into an art installation.
 
Released in conjunction with Nakhova’s first museum retrospective exhibition in the United States, this book includes many full-color illustrations of her work, spanning the entirety of her forty-year career and demonstrating her facility with a variety of media. It also includes essays by a variety of world-renowned curators and art historians, each cataloging Nakhova’s artistic innovations and exploring how she deals with themes of everyday life, memory, viewer engagement, and moral responsibility. It concludes with a new interview with Nakhova herself, giving new insight into her creative process and artistic goals. Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge provides a vivid look at the work of a visionary artist. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.
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Ivory Diptych Sundials, 1570–1750
Steven Lloyd, Penelope Gouk, A. J. Turner
Harvard University Press, 1992

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ivory diptych sundials were widely used to determine the time by day or night. These elaborate portable sundials, which could be adjusted for different latitudes, incorporated various devices useful for merchants and others who traveled extensively in Europe. This catalog illustrates in detail Harvard's collection of eighty-three ivory diptych sundials, one of the largest holdings of these instruments in the world. The collection encompasses a comprehensive array of styles and designs from Nuremberg, Paris, and Dieppe, the major centers of their production, as well as from other parts of Europe.

This catalog is the fourth publication of Harvard University's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and the first to appear in twenty-two years. This collection, which was established in 1949 as a resource for the history of science and technology, has one of the three largest university holdings of its kind in the world. It comprises about 15,000 instruments covering a broad range of scientific disciplines dating from 1500 to the present. Illustrated catalogues of other parts of the collection are anticipated in the near future. These will include volumes on early telephones and phonographs, psychological instruments, and apparatus for teaching science in Colonial America.

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