Results by title

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways?  
 
In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.  
 
These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations.

Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The sites, images, narratives, and practices it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations. This insightful study approaches cultural recall via two theoretical principles—the first understands memory as a social construct that is as much about the past as it is of the present, and the second observes that what distinguishes memory from history is affect. Understanding recollection and storytelling as practices that can help constitute communities of belonging, Tandeciarz suggests that by inciting deep reflection and an active engagement with the legacies of state violence, interventions like those studied here may advance transitional justice and contribute to the construction of less violent futures.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

During the 1930s, the United States government founded the Jersey Homesteads community (now known as Roosevelt, New Jersey) to help a group of pioneering Jewish immigrants create a new and ambitious cooperative experiment. Two hundred urban garment worker families moved from New York City to rural New Jersey to develop an intentional community with a focus and reliance upon both agriculture and craft. The community worked to unite the Jewish cooperative agricultural movement with the New Deal priorities of back-to-the-land rural resettlement. Notably, the town also embraced modernist aesthetics through homes designed by Louis Kahn and Alfred Kastner, and a public mural by Ben Shahn depicting the community’s creation. 

This book tells the inspiring yet under-appreciated history of the town’s establishment, revealing its historical utopian commune precursors and detailing how such an unconventional project could only have been possible at its precise moment because of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal government support. The Jersey Homesteads project brought together the forces of community, identity, and art as a unified force for betterment in the brave new world of New Deal America. It is a story about a specific time and place with significant lessons for our understanding of American modernism and Jewish identity during the 1930s and beyond. 

Honorable Mention, Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies, Latin American Studies Association–Visual Culture Studies Section, 2023

Extractivism has increasingly become the ground on which activists and scholars in Latin America frame the dynamics of ecological devastation, accumulation of wealth, and erosion of rights. These maladies are the direct consequences of long-standing extraction-oriented economies, and more recently from the expansion of the extractive frontier and the implementation of new technologies in the extraction of fossil fuels, mining, and agriculture. But the fields of sociology, political ecology, anthropology, and geography have largely ignored the role of art and cultural practices in studies of extractivism and post-extractivism.

The field of art theory, on the other hand, has offered a number of texts that put forward insightful analyses of artwork addressing extraction, environmental devastation, and the climate crisis. However, an art theory perspective that does not engage firsthand and in depth with collective action remains limited and fails to provide an account of the role, processes, and politics of art in anti- and post-extractivist movements.

Creating Worlds Otherwise examines the narratives that subaltern groups generate around extractivism, and how they develop, communicate, and mobilize these narratives through art and cultural practices. It reports on a six-year project on creative resistance to extractivism in Argentina and builds on long-term engagement working on environmental justice projects and campaigns in Argentina and the UK.

It is an innovative contribution to the fields of Latin American studies, political ecology, cultural studies, and art theory, and addresses pressing questions regarding what post-extractivist worlds might look like as well as how such visions are put into practice.

Essays on the relationship between artists and entrepreneurship. 

As in sports, business, and other sectors, the top 1% of artists have disproportionately influenced public expectations for what it means to be successful. In Creative Infrastructures, Linda Essig takes an unconventional approach and looks at the quotidian artist—and at what they do, not what they make. All too often, artists who are attentive to the business side of their creative practice are accused of selling out. But for many working artists, that attention to business is what enables them not just to survive but to thrive. When artists follow their mission, Essig contends that they don’t sell out, they spiral up by keeping mission at the forefront. Through illustrative case studies from culturally and racially diverse communities, Essig examines the relationships between art, innovation, entrepreneurship, and money while offering a theory for arts entrepreneurship that places more emphasis on means than ends. 

The vibrant fine arts and mass culture that the United Stated exported to Britain in the postwar period had a powerful and far-reaching impact on many British artists, art students and critics. In a fascinating social and cultural history covering the period from the 1940s to the 1990s, but with emphasis on the 1950s and 1960s, John A. Walker offers a scholarly but accessible account of America's Cold War cultural offensive and the role played by American artists living in Britain.

This is the first text to document in detail the variegated responses of British artists to postwar America and its art, criticism and mass media. Their reactions that ranged from Americanism – enthusiasm and compliance – to Anti-Americanism – criticism and resistance. Covering significant art movements such as Abstract Expressionism, the Independent Group and Pop Art, Walker synthesises information from hundreds of published sources and interviews to paint a vivid picture of a crucial period in British culture. 

Many of the critics, painters and sculptors featured – Lawrence Alloway, Peter Blake, Reyner Banham, Anthony Caro, Clement Greenberg, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, R.B. Kitaj,  John Latham, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Herbert Read, Bridget Riley, Larry Rivers – are now internationally famous. The study is brought up to date with an overview of the decline in American influence during in the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of Brit Art.

Since the 2008 financial crisis and Occupy movements around the globe, artists have increasingly turned to socially engaged public art to create new models of artistic production and community engagement. Curating the Commons examines this turn through an in-depth study of performance-centered public art presented in Athens and Piraeus, Greece, during the austerity years. Extending from Henri Lefebvre’s theory of social space, Arfara examines art and social engagement in relation to the commons and self-organized solidarity initiatives, including performance, photography, film, and sculptures that appeared in unexpected urban spaces to complicate notions of memory, mobility, and belonging. These works all ask the question: Who has the right to the city? Combining her scholarly and curatorial work, Arfara advocates for performance-centered public art that resists processes of exclusion and segregation, reclaiming public space as a commons. 

By sharing critical insights, Arfara immerses the reader in the working processes of artists and collectives, showing how public art can address ecosocial concerns in aesthetic forms. Curating the Commons offers a grounded perspective on the making of cutting-edge, socially engaged public artworks and contributes to the larger effort to craft more-than-human narratives in response to global events.