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Tracing the evolution of the Italian avant-garde’s pioneering experiments with art and technology and their subversion of freedom and control

In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies as both tools of artistic production and a means to reconceptualize the dynamic interrelation between individual freedom and collectivity. Working contrary to assumptions that the rigid, structural nature of programming limits subjectivity, this book traces the multifaceted practices of these groundbreaking artists and their conviction that technology could provide the conditions for a liberated social life.

Situating their developments within the context of the Cold War and the ensuing crisis among the Italian left, Arte Programmata describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory. Creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculptures, domestic home goods, and other multimedia art and design works, artists such as Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and others looked to the conceptual frameworks provided by this new technology to envision a way out of the ideological impasses of the age.

Showcasing the ingenuity of Italy’s earliest computer-based art, this study highlights its distinguishing characteristics while also exploring concurrent developments across the globe. Centered on the relationships between art, technology, and politics, Arte Programmata considers an important antecedent to the digital age. 

Sanchez argues that the seemingly hopeless cycle of violence experienced by Mexico in the 20th century, as reflected in its "crime genre," reveals a broader intrinsic cultural and political failure that suggests grave implications for the current state of crisis. Tracing the development of a national Mexican identity from the 1910 Mexican Revolution onward, Sanchez focuses on the indelible presence of violence and crime underlying the major works that contributed to a larger communal narrative.

Artful Assassins ultimately offers a panoramic overview of the evolution of Mexican arts and letters, as well as nationalism, by claiming murder and assassination as literary and cinematic motifs. The collapse of post-revolutionary political unity was presaged all along in Mexican culture, Sanchez argues. It need only to have been sought in the art of the nation.

This book explores the cultural and ethical implications of generative AI through the lens of Indigenous visual culture in Latin America. 

Responding to the rise of tools like DALL·E 2 and Midjourney, this groundbreaking volume documents the AIAI project (2023–), which invited a group of Indigenous artists and writers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru to critically engage with image generation technologies. Through collaborative experimentation with a range of both commercial and bespoke tools, contributors reflect on the promises and pitfalls of AI—from its potential for ‘dreaming,’ for imagining Indigenous futures, to the frustration of its ability to ‘hallucinate,’ to distort, and misrepresent Indigenous cultures.

Bringing together artists, writers, and scholars, the book challenges dominant narratives around AI and representation, using a decolonial framework rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. Structured in three parts—context and theory, creative reflections, and generative critique—it foregrounds multivocal and multilingual perspectives, resisting homogenization and reframing participatory research. This is the first book-length study of generative AI’s impact on Indigenous visual culture in Latin America, making a timely and vital contribution to global debates on AI, art, and cultural sovereignty.

Artist Scholar: Reflections on Writing and Research is part history, introduction, and discussion for artists and designers entering, graduating, and employed by the contemporary art academy in the United States. The evolution of art education in the university continues to expand in the 21st century as the variables of craft, skill, technique, theory, history and criticism shift and expand as the perspective of arts-based research is introduced into this professionalized environment. Given this context: what can M.F.A. students do to improve their understanding of writing and research without sacrificing their commitment to their studio art process?

Through a series of essays, the text argues for better writing at the M.F.A. level with the purpose of becoming better artists. By contextualizing art practice in the university and providing a foundation for future artist scholarship, it serves as an invitation to artist scholars to push their work further and develop the confidence to situate their art in the university context.

Is an artist-teacher a mere professional who balances a career—or does the duality of making and teaching art merit a more profound investigation? Rejecting a conventional understanding of the artist-teacher, this book sets out to present a robust history from the classical era to the twenty-first century. Particular pedagogical portraits—featuring George Wallis, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Victor Pashmore, Richard Hamilton, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Hans Hofmann—illustrate the artist-teacher in various contexts. This book offers a revelation of the complex thinking processes artists utilize when teaching, and a reconciliation of the artistic and educational enterprises as complimentary partners.

Few artists have ever been so beloved—or so controversial among art critics—as Andrew Wyeth. The groundbreaking book Artists of Wyeth Country presents an unauthorized and unbiased biographical portrait of Wyeth, based on interviews with family, friends, neighbors—even actress Eva Marie Saint.  Journalist W. Barksdale Maynard shines new light on the reclusive artist, emphasizing Wyeth’s artistic debt to Howard Pyle as well as his surprising interest in surrealism. The book is filled with brand-new information and fresh interpretations.
 
Artists of Wyeth Country also comprises the first-ever guidebook to the artistic world of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, center of the Brandywine Tradition begun by Howard Pyle. Six in-depth tours for walking or driving allow the reader to stand exactly where N. C. and Andrew Wyeth stood, as has never been fully possible before.
 
As Maynard explains, Andrew Wyeth’s artistic process was influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s nature-worship and by his habit of walking daily. Newly commissioned maps, rare aerial photographs, as well as glorious full-color images and artworks of the landscape (many never reproduced before) illustrate the text.
 
A fascinating exploration of the world of Andrew Wyeth, Artists of Wyeth Country is sure to become an essential new source for those who love American art as well as for admirers of the scenic landscapes of the Mid-Atlantic, of which the Brandywine Valley is an exceptional example. As a rare, unauthorized biography of Andrew Wyeth, it opens the door for an entirely new understanding of the American master.
 

 

In this special edition of Artivate built around the expanded field of arts entrepreneurship, guest editors Adrienne Callander and Johanna K. Taylor collect scholars’ research on ideas they see as both central and pivotal in driving the field forward. In a futurecasting glossary, past, present, and future Artivate editors gather their thinking around such ideas, exploring where and how arts entrepreneurship currently happens beyond expected models. The three articles contained in this issue explore arts entrepreneurship’s overlaps from policy to activism to philanthropy through new adaptable organizational modeling. Starting with an in-depth analysis of hybrid practice as a mode of institutional entrepreneurship, the conversation turns to a view on artist activism as a form of arts entrepreneurship, followed by a case study of the Maniobra program of cultural employment supporting artists. To culminate in this issue’s galleries, an artist showcase profiles participating artists in the Maniobra program.

This edition of Common Threads investigates the intersection of social justice work with education in the visual arts, music, theatre, dance, and literature. Weaving together resources from a range of University of Illinois Press journals, the editors offer articles on the scholarly inquiry, theory, and practice of social justice arts education. Selections from the past three decades reflect the synergy of the diverse scholars, educators, and artists actively engaged in such projects. Together, the contributors bring awareness to the importance of critically reflective and inclusive pedagogy in arts educational contexts. They also provide pedagogical theory and practical tools for building a social justice orientation through the arts.

Contributors: Joni Boyd Acuff, Seema Bahl, Elizabeth Delacruz, Elizabeth Garber, Elizabeth Gould, Kirstin Hotelling, Tuulikki Laes, Monica Prendergast, Elizabeth Saccá, Alexandra Schulteis, Amritjit Singh, and Stephanie Springgay

In this collection of essays, an acclaimed poet and playwright searches for meaning amid catastrophe.

The twenty candid essays in Ash: Catastrophe, Performance, & the Craft are the culmination of a ten-year project by acclaimed poet and playwright Dan O’Brien. Divided into three parts, this volume—portions of which originally appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, and The Times Literary Supplement—combines the deeply personal with the artistic and professional, coalescing around the experience of trauma (physical, mental, moral) and the challenges presented by catastrophe and its aftermath.

In the title essay, O'Brien links the smoke and debris of the Los Angeles wildfires to the toxic legacy of September 11, tracing the lasting repercussions of collective disaster. In “Dear Brother,” he revisits a sibling’s suicide attempt and the family silences that shaped both his life and his writing. Elsewhere, in reflections on documentary theater, political violence, and a long collaboration with Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter Paul Watson, he weighs the responsibility and the cost of bearing witness to suffering.

Running through the book, and indeed through O’Brien’s career as poet, playwright, essayist, and memoirist, is a search for meaning in the midst of calamity, whether it results from terrorism, from conflagration, from cancer, or from victimhood and abuse. Written over a decade marked by devastating illness, profound cultural upheaval, and hard-won hope, Ash is both an intimate record of survival and a searching meditation on the resilience and reinvention to be found in the creative act.

By examining the stunning stone buildings and dynamic spaces of the royal estate of Chinchero, Nair brings to light the rich complexity of Inca architecture. This investigation ranges from the paradigms of Inca scholarship and a summary of Inca cultural practices to the key events of Topa Inca’s reign and the many individual elements of Chinchero’s extraordinary built environment.

What emerges are the subtle, often sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture in order to impose their authority, identity, and agenda. The remains of grand buildings, as well as a series of deft architectural gestures in the landscape, reveal the unique places that were created within the royal estate and how one space deeply informed the other. These dynamic settings created private places for an aging ruler to spend time with a preferred wife and son, while also providing impressive spaces for imperial theatrics that reiterated the power of Topa Inca, the choice of his preferred heir, and the ruler’s close relationship with sacred forces.

This careful study of architectural details also exposes several false paradigms that have profoundly misguided how we understand Inca architecture, including the belief that it ended with the arrival of Spaniards in the Andes. Instead, Nair reveals how, amidst the entanglement and violence of the European encounter, an indigenous town emerged that was rooted in Inca ways of understanding space, place, and architecture and that paid homage to a landscape that defined home for Topa Inca.

In the twenty-first century, we are continually confronted with the existential side of technology—the relationships between identity and the mechanizations that have become extensions of the self. Focusing on one of humanity’s most ubiquitous machines, Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art combines critical theory and new media theory to form the first philosophical analysis of the car within works of conceptual art. These works are broadly defined to encompass a wide range of creative expressions, particularly in car-based conceptual art by both older, established artists and younger, emerging artists, including Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Richard Prince, Sylvie Fleury, Yael Bartana, Jeremy Deller, and Jonathan Schipper.

At its core, the book offers an alternative formation of conceptual art understood according to technology, the body moving through space, and what art historian, curator, and artist Jack Burnham calls “relations.” This thought-provoking study illuminates the ways in which the automobile becomes a naturalized extension of the human body, incarnating new forms of “car art” and spurring a technological reframing of conceptual art. Steeped in a sophisticated take on the image and semiotics of the car, the chapters probe the politics of materialism as well as high/low debates about taste, culture, and art. The result is a highly innovative approach to contemporary intersections of art and technology.