front cover of Cultural Landscapes of India
Cultural Landscapes of India
Imagined, Enacted, and Reclaimed
Amita Sinha
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Winner, 2022 J. B. Jackson Book Prize
Winner, 2022 Landscape Studies Initiative Award


Most people view cultural heritage sites as static places, frozen in time. In Cultural Landscapes of India, Amita Sinha subverts the idea of heritage as static and examines the ways that landscapes influence culture and that culture influences landscapes. The book centers around imagining, enacting, and reclaiming landscapes as subjects and settings of living cultural heritage. Drawing on case studies from different regions of India, Sinha offers new interpretations of links between land and culture using different ways of seeing—transcendental, romantic, and utilitarian. The idea of cultural landscape can be seen in ancient practices such as circumambulation and immersion in bodies of water that sustain engagement with natural elements. Pilgrim towns, medieval forts, religious sites, and contemporary memorial parks are sites of memory where myth and history converge. Engaging with these spaces allows us to reconstruct collective memory and reclaim not only historic landscapes, but ways of seeing, making, and remembering. Cultural Landscapes of India makes the case for reclaiming iconic landscapes and rethinking conventional approaches to conservation that take into consideration performative landscape as heritage.
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Heidi Kumao
Real and Imagined
Heidi Kumao
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022
Heidi Kumao: Real and Imagined documents and contextualizes narrative fabric works and animations from Kumao’s 2020 solo exhibition at the University of Michigan’s Stamps Gallery. Using fabric cutouts and stitching of everyday objects, Kumao invents a tactile visual vocabulary that distills unspoken aspects of ordinary exchanges into accessible narrative images. Weaving in her experiences as an Asian American woman, artist, and educator, Kumao creates poetic and playful open-ended visual haikus, generating a range of associations to current events, gender roles, and institutional power structures. Captured midstream, interactions from intimate relationships, medical procedures, the workplace, and the political sphere are suspended in time within felt film stills. Real and Imagined presents the reader with an opportunity to experience this remarkable oeuvre of over thirty fabric works and video animations.
 
For over thirty years, Kumao has developed an expanded art practice that includes animations, video installations, photographs, machine art, and fabric works that give physical form to the intangible parts of our lives: our emotions, psychological states, memories, thinking patterns. Her hybrid artworks have included electromechanical girl’s legs that “misbehave,” video installations about surviving confinement, surreal, experimental stop motion puppet animations, performative staged photographs, and hand crafted cinema machines. 
 
She has exhibited her award-winning artwork in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Art Science Museum Singapore, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Museum of Image and Sound (São Paulo) and the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Her work is in permanent and private collections including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Arizona State University Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
 
This exhibition catalogue marks the first significant publication on Kumao’s work and includes a selection of works from across her career. It includes written contributions by: Srimoyee Mitra, curator and Director of the Stamps Gallery and NYC-based art critic; Wendy Vogel; an interview between the artist and writer Lynn Love; and poems by the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Award winner Marilyn Chin.
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Lives Lived, Lives Imagined
Landscapes of Resilience in the Works of Miriam Toews
Sabrina Reed
University of Manitoba Press, 2022

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Real and Imagined
The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan
Heather Blair
Harvard University Press
During the Heian period (794–1185), the sacred mountain Kinpusen, literally the “Peak of Gold,” came to cultural prominence as a pilgrimage destination for the most powerful men in Japan—the Fujiwara regents and the retired emperors. Real and Imagined depicts their one-hundred-kilometer trek from the capital to the rocky summit as well as the imaginative landscape they navigated. Kinpusen was believed to be a realm of immortals, the domain of an unconventional bodhisattva, and the home of an indigenous pantheon of kami. These nominally private journeys to Kinpusen had political implications for both the pilgrims and the mountain. While members of the aristocracy and royalty used pilgrimage to legitimate themselves and compete with one another, their patronage fed rivalry among religious institutions. Thus, after flourishing under the Fujiwara regents, Kinpusen’s cult and community were rent by violent altercations with the great Nara temple Kōfukuji. The resulting institutional reconfigurations laid the groundwork for Shugendō, a new movement focused on religious mountain practice that emerged around 1300. Using archival sources, archaeological materials, noblemen’s journals, sutras, official histories, and vernacular narratives, this original study sheds new light on Kinpusen, positioning it within the broader religious and political history of the Heian period.
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Rome Measured and Imagined
Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City
Jessica Maier
University of Chicago Press, 2015
At the turn of the fifteenth century, Rome was in the midst of a dramatic transformation from what the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch had termed a “crumbling city” populated by “broken ruins” into a prosperous Christian capital. Scholars, artists, architects, and engineers fascinated by Rome were spurred to develop new graphic modes for depicting the city—and the genre known as the city portrait exploded.

In Rome Measured and Imagined, Jessica Maier explores the history of this genre—which merged the accuracy of scientific endeavor with the imaginative aspects of art—during the rise of Renaissance print culture. Through an exploration of works dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, her book interweaves the story of the city portrait with that of Rome itself.

Highly interdisciplinary and beautifully illustrated with nearly one hundred city portraits, Rome Measured and Imagined advances the scholarship on Renaissance Rome and print culture in fascinating ways.
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