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The story of dealers of Old Masters, champions of modern art, and victims of Nazi plunder.
 
Since the late 1990s, the fate of Nazi-stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal, Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first place—and what this reveals about Jews, art, and modernity. This book tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors who, against the odds, played a pivotal role in the migration of works of art from Europe to the United States and in the triumph of modern art.

Beautifully written and compellingly told, this story spans both sides of the Atlantic from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is set against the backdrop of critical transformations, among them the gradual opening of European high culture, the ambiguities of Jewish acculturation, the massive sell-off of aristocratic family art collections, the emergence of different schools of modern art, the cultural impact of World War I, and the Nazi war against the Jews.
 

In Beyond the Sovereign Self Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. Among others, Kester analyzes the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper, experimental practices associated with the escrache tradition in Argentina, and indigenous Canadian artists such as Nadia Myre and Michèle Taïna Audette, showing how socially engaged art catalyzes forms of resistance that operate beyond the institutional art world. From the Americas and Europe to Iran and South Africa, Kester presents a historical genealogy of recent engaged art practices rooted in a deep history of cultural production, beginning with nineteenth-century political struggles and continuing into contemporary anticolonial resistance and other social movements.

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

A richly illustrated book focused on Black designers, how they shaped the history of modern design, and how their designs in turn influenced modern Black life.
 
In twentieth-century Chicago, generations of Black artisans, craftspeople, art educators, clothing makers, commercial illustrators, sign painters, furniture makers, beauticians, graphic designers, art directors, and screen printers made and remade the city into an energetic center for modern design. Ambitious, enterprising, and resolutely modern, these Black designers were workers and intellectuals, activists and entrepreneurs. They created works for commercial and everyday use and helped to build community institutions such as the South Side Community Art Center and businesses like the Johnson Publishing Company. Their works ranged from branding and housewares for major corporations to pamphlets and posters made in the name of civil rights and Black Power. Together, they made Black Chicago into a dynamic design scene, working against racism in their professions while embracing the possibilities of design as a medium of social change.
 
This book is the first to chronicle their collective history while also celebrating their influence on design as well as African American culture more broadly. Based on extensive archival research and building on a major 2018 exhibition, Black Designers in Chicago presents essays by experts in African American history and design. The book features illustrations of a stunning variety of works—from graphic design to screenprints to textiles and household wares—placing African Americans at the center of modern design history, while highlighting the role of design in the cultural history of Black Chicago.
 

A profound book of essays from a celebrated master of the form.

“Darkness is not empty,” writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity—and witness the humanity of others—in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience—not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don’t.

Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole’s writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: “Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning.”
 

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.
 
Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige.