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Illustrated highlights from the Judaica Collection of the Library of Congress.
 
Books Like Sapphires showcases a wide range of Hebraic treasures from the storied collection at the Library of Congress, many of them for the first time. Tracing the history of Judaica collecting in the twentieth-century United States, the book illuminates varied works, telling their stories alongside vibrant color images. These include a unique manuscript about a betrothal scandal in Renaissance Crete, an illustrated Esther Scroll, a poem from 1477 celebrating the new technology of printing, amusing rhymed couplets in sixteenth-century Padua, and the Washington Haggadah. This book also tells the story of the patrons and collectors, first among them Jacob Schiff, as well as archivists and curators, who made the storied Judaica archive at the Library of Congress the precious resource that it is today.

“There they rest, inert, impertinent, in gallery space—those book forms either imitated or mutilated, replicas of reading matter or its vestiges. Strange, after its long and robust career, for the book to take early retirement in a museum, not as rare manuscript but as functionless sculpture. Readymade or constructed, such book shapes are canceled as text when deposited as gallery objects, shut off from their normal reading when not, in some yet more drastic way, dismembered or reassembled.” So begins Bookwork, which follows our passion for books to its logical extreme in artists who employ found or simulated books as a sculptural medium. Investigating the conceptual labor behind this proliferating international art practice, Garrett Stewart looks at hundreds of book-like objects, alone or as part of gallery installations, in this original account of works that force attention upon a book’s material identity and cultural resonance.

Less an inquiry into the artist’s book than an exploration of the book form’s contemporary objecthood, Stewart’s interdisciplinary approach traces the lineage of these aggressive artifacts from the 1919 Unhappy Readymade of Marcel Duchamp down to the current crisis of paper-based media in the digital era. Bookwork surveys and illustrates a stunning variety of appropriated and fabricated books alike, ranging from hacksawed discards to the giant lead folios of Anselm Kiefer. The unreadable books Stewart engages with in this timely study are found, again and again, to generate graphic metaphors for the textual experience they preclude, becoming in this sense legible after all.

Twenty-first century fashion practice has become increasingly borderless and diverse in the digital era, calling into question the very boundaries that define fashion in the Western cultural context. Borderless Fashion Practice: Contemporary Fashion in the Metamodern Age principally engages the work of four fashion designers -- Virgil Abloh, Aitor Throup, Iris Van Herpen, and Eckhaus Latta -- whose work intersects with other creative disciplines such as art, technology, science, architecture, and graphic design. They do their work in what Vanessa Gerrie calls the metamodern age -- the time and place where the polarization between the modern and the postmodern collapses. Used as a framework to understand the current Western cultural zeitgeist, Gerrie's exploration of the work of contemporary practitioners and theorists finds blurred borders and seeks to blur them further, to the point of erasure.

This groundbreaking volume unearths the representation of plants and their vital impact on art, thereby advocating for the botanical world’s legitimate place in art history.

Desired for their aesthetic beauty, sought after for their medicinal properties, harvested for their scents and flavors, or grown as essential material resources, plants are indissolubly entwined with our existence. In art it is no different: plants have played a critical role. Yet despite their significant material and conceptual contributions, plants have been sidelined in the commentary of art historians and critics.

Botanical Revolutions presents a global history of plants in art, focusing on the crucial moments that signaled the formation of new movements and styles, as well as the creation of media that could not have occurred without the involvement of and interaction with the vegetal world. In this fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, author Giovanni Aloi delves deeply into the history and representation of plants in art, advocates for a change in our relationship with the botanical world, and presents an alternative history of art that foregrounds the truly indispensable contributions of plants.

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. 

Boundless expands conversations on Native and Indigenous art and literature by presenting words and images in kinship. Starting in the collections of the Mead Art Museum and the Collection of Native American Literature at Amherst College and centered on the creative production of Native peoples of the Northeast, the project follows relationships between Indigenous authors and artists across the United States and beyond borders. Boundless presents an engagement of Indigenous curatorial methods as practiced by guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) in an exhibition in two iterations hosted by the Mead in 2023 and 2024. Advisors to Boundless include Mohegan, Nipmuc, Shinnecock, and Wampanoag artists and scholars, along with others, who supported Erdrich in her urge to center the project in the Northeast. Advisors contributed both visual art and writing to the exhibition and publication. Collaborative co-creation between artists, students, faculty, Mead staff Lisa Crossman and Emily Potter-Ndiaye and the guest curator are also explored in this illustrated volume.

Amherst College’s Collection of Native American Literature contains thousands of Indigenous-authored works spanning centuries. The Collection’s abundance of books, prints, music, ephemera, and artist-made works, all by Native people, provide rich selections for Boundless. Crosscurrents of Indigenous visual art and literature are considered in this broad and interdisciplinary project. Boundless crosses generations to explore relatedness, kinship, and collegiality.

Boundless brings artists and writers together across generations, often drawing together works by members of the same tribe or even the same family to show the history, presence, and futurity of Native American creative and intellectual production.

A major scholar considers the role of the museum in art history. What begins as a meditation on "the museum" by one of the world's leading art historians becomes, in this book, a far-reaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself. Originally delivered as the 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University, the book makes its deeply complex argument remarkably accessible and powerfully clear. Concentrating on a period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, Donald Preziosi presents case studies of major institutions that, he argues, have defined--and are still defining--the possible limits of museological and art historical theory and practice. These include Sir John Soane's Museum in London, preserved in its 1837 state; the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; and four museums founded by Europeans in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, which divided up that country's history into "ethnically marked" aesthetic hierarchies and genealogies that accorded with Europe's construction of itself as the present of the world's past, and the "brain of the earth's body." Through this epistemological and institutional archaeology, Preziosi unearths the outlines of the more radical Enlightenment project that academic art history, professional museology, and art criticism have rendered marginal or invisible. Finally, he sketches a new theory about art, artifice, and visual signification in the cracks and around the margins of the "secular theologisms" of the globalized imperial capital called modernity. Addressed equally to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of art history, museology, history, and anthropology, this book goes to the heart of recent debates about race, ethnicity, nationality, colonialism, and multiculturalisms-and to the very foundations of modernity and modern modes of knowledge production. Donald Preziosi is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and research associate in art history and visual culture at Oxford University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Art of Art History (1998).

For more than five decades, Pat Lipsky has been a leading figure in American color field painting. In loosely connected vignettes, this extraordinary book looks back on a life starting in 1970s SoHo: from her pioneering days juggling painting and single motherhood in a redesigned factory loft on Wooster Street; to Paris, where an enchanting friendship develops with the former director of the Louvre, Pierre Rosenberg; to her yearslong close friendship with legendary art critic Clement Greenberg; to a marvelous love affair with the charismatic art dealer Richard Bellamy. We glimpse Lipsky’s first introduction to Cézanne as a child in 1950s Brooklyn and her studies with the mythic artist Tony Smith, who would become her mentor. There is a visit with Lee Krasner at her home in Springs and another at Lipsky’s Manhattan apartment, late-night, smoke-filled loft parties, and evenings at Max’s Kansas City where Lou Reed and Nico sing in the background while rival groups of earthwork artists, pop artists, conceptual artists, and color field painters pretend to ignore each other at the bar. Along the way we experience Lipsky’s emergence at the forefront of her generation of painters.

Brightening Glance offers a stunningly self-revealing portrait of the struggles and sacrifices, joys and excitement inherent in a modern painter’s life, and captures the evergreen allure of New York’s art world between 1970 and 2010. In stripped down, elegant prose, Lipsky summons a New York that no longer exists and ponders why we love (and hate) the art world. Ultimately, it’s a story of a contemporary woman, a mother, and a painter, who dares a career in a field where only a handful of women have succeeded.
 

A compelling exploration of fragments in sculpture across time and cultures.

Some objects draw power from the way they have been broken. Becoming beautiful abstract shapes, they provoke consideration of how destruction can create something so aesthetically appealing. Beyond the visual, these fragments are compelling because they force us to confront the often unsettling stories of their breakage.

Published in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art and accompanying a traveling exhibition, this lavishly illustrated book explores our enduring fascination with broken statues through a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, featuring contributions by scholars and artists, along with examples of striking works from around the world spanning the third millennium BCE to the present. 

Organized in three sections, Broken begins by investigating what makes fragments so intriguing and reveals the optical and neurological processes behind the strong emotions they evoke. It then moves to the act of breaking itself, exploring the forces—both natural and human—that shaped these objects, the power dynamics of iconoclastic dismantling and defacement, and how various cultures treat broken statues. The book concludes by considering one of the most powerful ways humans have responded to fragments over the course of history: by creating new works that are intentionally fractured.

A groundbreaking study of Indigenous museums and cultural self-representation.

The Chickasaw Nation, an American Indian nation headquartered in southeastern Oklahoma, entered into a period of substantial growth in the late 1980s. Following its successful reorganization and expansion, which was enabled by federal policies for tribal self-determination, the Nation pursued gaming and other industries to affect economic growth. From 1987 to 2009 the Nation’s budget increased exponentially as tribal investments produced increasingly large revenues for a growing Chickasaw population. Coincident to this growth, the Chickasaw Nation began acquiring and creating museums and heritage properties to interpret their own history, heritage, and culture through diverse exhibitionary representations. By 2009, the Chickasaw Nation directed representation of itself at five museum and heritage properties throughout its historic boundaries.

Josh Gorman examines the history of these sites and argues that the Chickasaw Nation is using museums and heritage sites as places to define itself as a coherent and legitimate contemporary Indian nation. In doing so, they are necessarily engaging with the shifting historiographical paradigms as well as changing articulations of how museums function and what they represent. The roles of the Chickasaw Nation’s museums and heritage sites in defining and creating discursive representations of sovereignty are examined within their historicized local contexts. The work describes the museum exhibitions’ dialogue with the historiography of the Chickasaw Nation, the literature of new museum studies, and the indigenous exhibitionary grammars emerging from indigenous museums throughout the United States and the world.

 

This is volume 95 issue 1 of Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in print since 1919, is devoted to new research on works in the museum’s permanent collection. Articles by DIA curators and outside specialists cover all aspects of the collection: African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art; African American art; American art; Asian art; European art; art of the Islamic world; and modern and contemporary art; as well as prints, drawings, and photographs. Issues may contain a variety of individual articles on select works of different periods, styles, and artists, or be dedicated to a single theme or area of the collection, such as ancient art, portraits, or photography.

This is volume 96 issue 1 of Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in print since 1919, is devoted to new research on works in the museum’s permanent collection. Articles by DIA curators and outside specialists cover all aspects of the collection: African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art; African American art; American art; Asian art; European art; art of the Islamic world; and modern and contemporary art; as well as prints, drawings, and photographs. Issues may contain a variety of individual articles on select works of different periods, styles, and artists, or be dedicated to a single theme or area of the collection, such as ancient art, portraits, or photography.

This is volume 97 issue 1 of Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in print since 1919, is devoted to new research on works in the museum’s permanent collection. Articles by DIA curators and outside specialists cover all aspects of the collection: African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art; African American art; American art; Asian art; European art; art of the Islamic world; and modern and contemporary art; as well as prints, drawings, and photographs. Issues may contain a variety of individual articles on select works of different periods, styles, and artists, or be dedicated to a single theme or area of the collection, such as ancient art, portraits, or photography.

This is volume 98 issue 1 of Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in print since 1919, is devoted to new research on works in the museum’s permanent collection. Articles by DIA curators and outside specialists cover all aspects of the collection: African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art; African American art; American art; Asian art; European art; art of the Islamic world; and modern and contemporary art; as well as prints, drawings, and photographs. Issues may contain a variety of individual articles on select works of different periods, styles, and artists, or be dedicated to a single theme or area of the collection, such as ancient art, portraits, or photography.

This is volume 99 issue 1 of Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in print since 1919, is devoted to new research on works in the museum’s permanent collection. Articles by DIA curators and outside specialists cover all aspects of the collection: African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American art; African American art; American art; Asian art; European art; art of the Islamic world; and modern and contemporary art; as well as prints, drawings, and photographs. Issues may contain a variety of individual articles on select works of different periods, styles, and artists, or be dedicated to a single theme or area of the collection, such as ancient art, portraits, or photography.

Buyers Beware offers a new perspective for critical inquiries about the practices of consumption in (and of) Caribbean popular culture. The book revisits commonly accepted representations of the Caribbean from “less respectable” segments of popular culture such as dancehall culture and 'sistah lit' that proudly jettison any aspirations toward middle-class respectability. Treating these pop cultural texts and phenomena with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region allows Patricia Joan Saunders to read them against the grain and consider whether and how their “pulp” preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality and national politics are constructed, performed, interpreted, disseminated and consumed from within the Caribbean.