A visually rich survey of two hundred years of Alabama fine arts and artists
Alabama artists have been an integral part of the story of the state, reflecting a wide-ranging and multihued sense of place through images of the land and its people. Quilts, pottery, visionary paintings, sculpture, photography, folk art, and abstract art have all contributed to diverse visions of Alabama’s culture and environment. The works of art included in this volume have all emerged from a distinctive milieu that has nourished the creation of powerful visual expressions, statements that are both universal and indigenous.
Published to coincide with the state’s bicentennial, Alabama Creates: 200 Years of Art and Artists features ninety-four of Alabama’s most accomplished, noteworthy, and influential practitioners of the fine arts from 1819 to the present. The book highlights a broad spectrum of artists who worked in the state, from its early days to its current and contemporary scene, exhibiting the full scope and breadth of Alabama art.
This retrospective volume features biographical sketches and representative examples of each artist’s most masterful works. Alabamians like Gay Burke, William Christenberry, Roger Brown, Thornton Dial, Frank Fleming, the Gee’s Bend Quilters, Lonnie Holley, Dale Kennington, Charlie Lucas, Kerry James Marshall, David Parrish, and Bill Traylor are compared and considered with other nationally significant artists.
Alabama Creates is divided into four historical periods, each spanning roughly fifty years and introduced by editor Elliot A. Knight. Knight contextualizes each era with information about the development of Alabama art museums and institutions and the evolution of college and university art departments. The book also contains an overview of the state’s artistic heritage by Gail C. Andrews, director emerita of the Birmingham Museum of Art. Alabama Creates conveys in a sweeping and captivating way the depth of talent, the range of creativity, and the lasting contributions these artists have made to Alabama’s extraordinarily rich visual and artistic heritage.
How the United Nations headquarters became the architectural instrument and broadcast medium of global diplomacy
For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior.
Assembly by Design shows how this space leveraged media to help the UN communicate with the world. With its media infrastructure, symbols, acoustic design, and architecture, the global interior defined political assembly both inside and outside the UN headquarters, serving as the architectural medium to organize multilateral encounters of international publics around the globe. Demonstrating how aesthetics have long held sway over political work, Olga Touloumi posits that the building framed diplomacy on the ground amid a changing political landscape that brought the United States to the forefront of international politics, destabilizing old and establishing new geopolitical alliances.
Uncovering previously closed institutional and family archives, Assembly by Design offers new information about the political and aesthetic decisions that turned the UN headquarters into a communications organism. It looks back at a moment of hope, when politicians, architects, and diplomats—believing that assembly was a matter of design—worked together to deliver platforms for global democracy and governance.
With stunning photography and abundant historical details, this book is a treasure trove that will delight any fan of architecture, Chicago, or the Art Deco era.
Chicago is America’s premier city for both historic and modern architecture. Even so, many of its finest buildings remain little known to visitors and Chicagoans alike. In Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers, Joseph Gustaitis showcases nearly two dozen Art Deco towers that were built during the exhilarating years of the Jazz Age, from 1927 to 1933. These skyscrapers exemplify a state of mind from the time—an optimistic, forward-looking aesthetic that has been called the “last of the total styles,” as well as the first American style that spread across the globe. In the time between the Great War and the Great Depression, cities and their architects embraced industrial modernity and the exciting new possibilities of scale. Exploring places like the Board of Trade Building, the Merchandise Mart, and the Carbide and Carbon tower, Gustaitis tells the stories of their creation, architects and developers, construction and financing, zoning and engineering, and so much more.
With stunning aerial photography by Ian McClellan, this book also includes color photos of the buildings’ features, vintage images, a travel map, and in-depth historical information. Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers is both a guidebook to these remarkable structures and a history of the upbeat era that created them.
Published to commemorate the Deering Library’s 75th anniversary, this book explores the Deering and McCormick families, who funded the project; the building’s distinctive Collegiate Gothic architecture; its lore as a campus institution; and its role in the evolution of Northwestern University Library into one of the country’s most prominent research libraries. Richly illustrated, it is both an authoritative account of a landmark library and a rich keepsake for Northwestern alumni.
How architectural monuments survived and historical preservation was reinvented during the destructions of the twentieth century.
The twentieth century was highly destructive, but from its landscapes of ruins was born a new architectural type: the cultural monument. In the wake of World War I, an international movement arose which aimed to protect architectural monuments in large numbers, and regardless of style, hoping not only to keep them safe from future conflicts but also to make them worthy of protection from more quotidian forms of destruction. An evolving group—including architects, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, and lawyers—grew out of the new diplomacy of the League of Nations. During and after World War II, it became affiliated with the Allied Military Government and was eventually absorbed by the UN as UNESCO. By the 1970s, this organization had begun granting World Heritage status to a global register of significant sites—from buildings to bridges, shrines to city centers, ruins to colossi.
Examining key episodes in the history of this preservation effort—including projects for the Parthenon, the Cathedral of St-Lô, the temples of Abu Simbel, and the Bamyian Buddahs —Lucia Allais demonstrates how the group deployed the notion of culture to shape architectural sites, and how architecture in turn shaped the very idea of global culture. Designs of Destruction emphasizes how the technical project of ensuring various buildings’ longevity jolted preservation into establishing a transnational set of codes, values, and practices. At the same time, this paradoxically helped integrate technologies of destruction—from bombs to bulldozers—into cultural governance. Designs of Destruction not only offers a fascinating narrative of cultural diplomacy, based on extensive archival findings; it also contributes an important new chapter in the intellectual history of modernity by showing the manifold ways architectural form is charged with concretizing abstract ideas and ideals, even in its destruction.
Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 103 million vehicles crossing it in 2016. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.
Intimate and engaging, this revised and expanded edition of Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentalities. This new edition brings new insight since its initial publication in 2008, including a new chapter on the infamous “Bridgegate” Chris Christie-era scandal of 2013, when members of the governor's administration shut down access to the bridge, causing a major traffic jam and scandal and subsequently helping undermine Christie’s candidacy for the US presidency.
Stunning photos, from when the bridge was built in the late 1920s through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.
Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it someday.
.Since its founding in 1846 “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” the Smithsonian Institution has been an important feature of the American cultural landscape. In A Living Exhibition, William S. Walker examines the tangled history of cultural exhibition at the Smithsonian from its early years to the chartering of the National Museum of the American Indian in 1989. He tracks the transformation of the institution from its original ideal as a “universal museum” intended to present the totality of human experience to the variegated museum and research complex of today.
Walker pays particular attention to the half century following World War II, when the Smithsonian significantly expanded. Focusing on its exhibitions of cultural history, cultural anthropology, and folk life, he places the Smithsonian within the larger context of Cold War America and the social movements of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. Organized chronologically, the book uses the lens of the Smithsonian's changing exhibitions to show how institutional decisions become intertwined with broader public debates about pluralism, multiculturalism, and decolonization.
Yet if a trend toward more culturally specific museums and exhibitions characterized the postwar history of the institution, its leaders and curators did not abandon the vision of the universal museum. Instead, Walker shows, even as the Smithsonian evolved into an extensive complex of museums, galleries, and research centers, it continued to negotiate the imperatives of cultural convergence as well as divergence, embodying both a desire to put everything together and a need to take it all apart.
What would it be like to take an intensive tour of Milwaukee as it was during the late 1930s—at the confluence of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the run-up to World War II? That is precisely what the participants in the Federal Writers Project did while researching their Guide to Milwaukee. The fruits of their labors were ready for publication by 1940, but for a number of reasons the finished product never saw the light of day—until now.
Fortunately, the manuscript has been carefully preserved in the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives
. Seventy-five years after the work’s completion, the Wisconsin Historical Society Press and historian John D. Buenker present this guide—now serving as a time machine, ready to transport readers back to the Milwaukee of the 1930s, neighborhood by neighborhood, building by building. Much more than a nostalgic snapshot, the book examines Milwaukee’s history from its earliest days to 1940.
Buenker’s thoughtful introduction provides historical context, detailing the FWP’s development of this guide, as well as Milwaukee’s political climate leading up to, and during, the 1930s. Next, essays on thirteen "areas," ranging from Civic Center to Bay View, delve deeper into the geography, economy, and culture of old Milwaukee’s neighborhoods, and simulated auto tours take readers to locales still familiar today, exploring the city’s most celebrated landmarks and institutions. With a calendar of annual events and a list of public services and institutions, plus dozens of photographs from the era, Milwaukee in the 1930s provides a unique record of a pre–World War II American city.
Built between 1839 and 1842, the domed structure of Iowa City's Old Capitol served as the third territorial capitol and the first state capitol of Iowa. In 1857, when the state government was moved to Des Moines, Old Capitol became the first building of the new University of Iowa. It remains today the centerpiece of this handsome campus. The story of its history and restoration, told in this elegantly illustrated book, is an intriguing account of historical architectural detection.
Using primary sources, including manuscripts, vouchers, account books, newspaper stories, correspondence, and documents from the National Archives and Iowa repositories, Margaret Keyes portrays the major events of the total history of Old Capitol since its site was determined.
In a unique and groundbreaking 2015 presentation of important contemporary art rarely seen in the traditional environs of the Hudson River Valley, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and Olana, Frederic Edwin Church's Persian-inspired mansion, showcased the work of contemporary American artists such as Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Maya Lin, Martin Puryear, and Gregory Crewdson, some of the 30 artists featured in the exhibition. Stephen Hannock, celebrated Luminist painter and one of the exhibition's co-curators, stated that "this is a terrific opportunity to open up contemporary art, as well as these historic properties, to audiences who will see firsthand these shared artistic concerns."
The works of art selected for the exhibition were shown at the two venues to encourage visitors to experience both of the distinguished properties and the grandeur of their surroundings, and to present a complete overview and understanding of these contemporary works in a location where many art historians believe American art was born. The accompanying publication, River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home, provides readers with a lavish record of this extraordinary and innovative exhibition, and offers unique and highly informative perspectives on the continuity of the American artistic tradition in two of the nation's most historic sites.
In addition to an impressive plate section of more than 60 works with brief artist biographies and descriptive narratives for the individual works, this comprehensive presentation features noteworthy, exceptional contributions. Stephen Hannock's preface details the development of this remarkable exhibition, while co-curator Jason Rosenfeld reveals in his essay the exhibition's importance relative to historical perception as he considers Cole's and Church's support of conemporary art in their time. Cultural historian Maurice Berger considers the realities of race and gender from the nineteenth-century Hudson River Valley to the present, and Marvin Heiferman, curator and writer, examines photography in the exhibition and its connections to Church's work and his use of the medium. Award-winning architectural and landscape photographer Peter Aaron generously provided the stunning installation, exterior, and landscape photographs, a gorgeous complement to this outstanding catalogue.
A Tale of Two Bridges is a history of two versions of the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge: the original bridge built in 1936 and a replacement for the eastern half of the bridge finished in 2013. The 1936 bridge revolutionized transportation in the Bay Area and profoundly influenced settlement patterns in the region. It was also a remarkable feat of engineering. In the 1950s the American Society of Civil Engineers adopted a list of the “Seven Engineering Wonders” of the United States. The 1936 structure was the only bridge on the list, besting even the more famous Golden Gate Bridge. One of its greatest achievements was that it was built on time (in less than three years) and came in under budget. Mikesell explores in fascinating detail how the bridge was designed by a collection of the best-known engineers in the country as well as the heroic story of its construction by largely unskilled laborers from California, joined by highly skilled steel workers.
By contrast, the East Span replacement, which was planned between 1989 and 1998, and built between 1998 and 2013, fell victim to cost overruns in the billions of dollars, was a decade behind schedule, and suffered from structural problems that has made it a perpetual maintenance nightmare.
This is narrative history in its purest form. Mikesell excels at explaining highly technical engineering issues in language that can be understood and appreciated by general readers. Here is the story of two very important bridges, which provides a fair but uncompromising analysis of why one bridge succeeded and the other did not.
On the occasion of the Capitol’s centennial in 2017, this book tells the remarkable story of the building—in all its incarnations—and the people who made history beneath its dome. The book covers the creation of the territorial capitol in 1837, the construction of the second capitol in the 1860s (and the fire that almost completely destroyed it in 1904), the eleven-year construction project that completed the third capitol in 1917, and the extensive conservation project of the 1990s that restored the building to its grandeur. Supporting the framework of this architectural history are colorful stories about the people who shaped Wisconsin from within the Capitol—attorneys, senators, and governors (from Henry Dodge to Scott Walker), as well as protesters, reformers, secretaries, tour guides, custodians, and even Old Abe, the Capitol’s resident eagle. Combining historical photographs with modern, full-color architectural photos, The Wisconsin Capitol provides fascinating details about the building, while also emphasizing the importance of the Capitol in Wisconsin’s storied history.
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