151 books match the query 'Exhibitions' and 11 start with m

cover of Machine Art, 1934

Machine Art, 1934

Jennifer Jane Marshall

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In 1934, New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged a major exhibition of ball bearings, airplane propellers, pots and pans, cocktail tumblers, petri dishes, protractors, and other machine parts and products. The exhibition, titled Machine Art, explored these ordinary objects as works of modern art, teaching museumgoers about the nature of beauty and value in the era of mass production.

Telling the story of this extraordinarily popular but controversial show, Jennifer Jane Marshall examines its history and the relationship between the museum’s director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and its curator, Philip Johnson, who oversaw it. She situates the show within the tumultuous climate of the interwar period and the Great Depression, considering how these unadorned objects served as a response to timely debates over photography, abstract art, the end of the American gold standard, and John Dewey’s insight that how a person experiences things depends on the context in which they are encountered. An engaging investigation of interwar American modernism, Machine Art, 1934 reveals how even simple things can serve as a defense against uncertainty.
[more]
cover of Maine’s Lithographic Landscapes: Town and City Views, 1830-1870

Maine’s Lithographic Landscapes

Town and City Views, 1830-1870

Earle G. Shettleworth Jr.

Brandeis University Press, 2020

During the nineteenth century, Americans celebrated their towns and cities through printed landscapes. In Maine, lithographs were commissioned from such leading artists as Fitz Henry Lane and talented, lesser known local artists, such as Esteria Butler. This book reproduces many of these works and provides insights into how these growing centers of commerce and industry viewed themselves and wished to be viewed by others. 

It’s the perfect book for those who love Maine, both full-time residents and those who make it a beloved summer destination. 

Published in association with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art on the occasion of the bicentennial of Maine statehood.

[more]
cover of Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hogai and the Search for Images

Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting

Kano Hogai and the Search for Images

Chelsea Foxwell

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The Western discovery of Japanese paintings at nineteenth-century world’s fairs and export shops catapulted Japanese art to new levels of international popularity. With that popularity, however, came criticism, as Western writers began to lament a perceived end to pure Japanese art and a rise in westernized cultural hybrids. The Japanese response: nihonga, a traditional style of painting that reframed existing techniques to distinguish them from Western artistic conventions. Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting explores the visual characteristics and social functions of nihonga and traces its relationship to the past, its viewers, and emerging notions of the modern Japanese state.

Chelsea Foxwell sheds light on interlinked trends in Japanese nationalist discourse, government art policy, American and European commentary on Japanese art, and the demands of export. The seminal artist Kano Hogai (1828–88) is one telling example: originally a painter for the shogun, his art eventually evolved into novel, eerie images meant to satisfy both Japanese and Western audiences. Rather than simply absorbing Western approaches, nihonga as practiced by Hogai and others broke with pre-Meiji painting even as it worked to neutralize the rupture.

By arguing that fundamental changes to audience expectations led to the emergence of nihonga—a traditional interpretation of Japanese art for a contemporary, international market—Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting offers a fresh look at an important aspect of Japan’s development into a modern nation.
[more]
cover of Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible

Manifold Greatness

The Making of the King James Bible

Edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

Published to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Manifold Greatness tells the story of the creation and immediate afterlife of the King James translation of the Bible, first published in 1611. Revolutionary at its time, the King James translation quickly became the dominant authorized translation of the Christian Bible in English. There are more than one billion copies in print, making it the best-selling book of all time, and its effect on the English language is incalculable, both in common speech and in literature. 

This accessible and richly illustrated visual history contains eighty color illustrations, including images of rare manuscripts, artifacts, and archival material such as the annotated Bodleian Bishops’ Bible of 1602, pages from the Wycliffite and Tyndale Bibles, and an edition of the Bishop’s Bible owned by Elizabeth I. Eight chapters contributed by leading academics in the field discuss the history of biblical translation, the political background of the project, the Oxford Translators—including Henry Savile, John Rainolds, and John Harmar—and their working milieu, the cultural politics, and the reception and influence of the King James Bible up until the 1769 publication of the Oxford Standard Edition, which was the first revision of the original 1611 translation.  Also included is a look at the later reception of the King James Bible in America, including a chapter specifically on the King James Bible and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Manifold Greatness
brings together key research and documentation to provide a lively and comprehensive visual account to celebrate one of the most important occasions in publishing and modern religious history.

[more]
cover of Mario Giacomelli: Figure/Ground

Mario Giacomelli

Figure/Ground

Virginia Heckert

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

A new look at the work of Mario Giacomelli, one of Italy’s foremost photographers of the twentieth century.
 
Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000) was born into poverty and lived his entire life in Senigallia, a seaside town along the Adriatic coast in Italy’s Marche region. He purchased his first camera in 1953 and quickly gained recognition for the raw expressiveness of his images. His preference for grainy, high-contrast film and paper produced bold, geometric compositions with glowing whites and deep blacks. Giacomelli most frequently focused his camera on the people, landscapes, and seascapes of the Marche, and he often spent several years expanding and reinterpreting a single body of work or repurposing an image made for one series for inclusion in another. By applying titles derived from poetry and literature to his photographs, he transformed ordinary subjects into meditations on time, memory, and existence.
 
Spanning the photographer’s earliest pictures to those made in the final years of his life, this publication celebrates the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive Giacomelli holdings, formed in large part through a significant gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 29 to October 10, 2021.
 
[more]
cover of María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Behold

Carmen Hermo

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023

This vibrantly illustrated survey of the career of contemporary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons delves into her diverse oeuvre of painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and performance.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) makes powerful work that holds and beholds the stories of historically silenced peoples and urges societal change. Her journey as an artist, teacher, and activist has taken her from Cuba through the United States, and her autobiographical compositions honor her Nigerian and Chinese ancestors while also facing the future. With an artistic practice that crosses boundaries, intertwines media—from photography to sculpture, film to performance—and references traditions and beliefs ranging from feminism to Santería, Campos-Pons’s work is deeply layered and complex.

This volume, the first critical look at the artist’s oeuvre in nearly two decades, surveys the concerns, materials, and places invoked throughout her forty-year career. Thoughtful essays explore her vibrant, arresting artwork, which confronts issues of agency and the construction of race and belonging and challenges us to reckon with these issues in our own lives.

This volume, copublished with the Brooklyn Museum, accompanies an exhibition on view at the Brooklyn Museum from September 15, 2023, to January 14, 2024, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from February 15 to June 9, 2024, the Frist Art Museum from September 27, 2024, to January 5, 2025, and the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from February 11 to May 4, 2025.

 
[more]
cover of Matt Saunders: Parallel Plot

Matt Saunders

Parallel Plot

Matt Saunders

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Berlin-based artist Matt Saunders has in recent years captured the art world’s eye with a striking series of hybrid images and animated films produced using techniques from both photography and painting. Using movie stars such as German actress Hertha Thiele and British actor Patrick McGoohan as subjects, Saunders recasts historical film and television images into new discourses about portraiture, iconography, and spectatorship.
 
Matt Saunders: Parallel Plot is both an artist’s book and a catalog that documents and reflects on a 2010 exhibition held at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Reproducing the stunning artwork from that show, the book also includes two conversations between Saunders and artist Josiah McElheny and an essay by experimental film scholar Bruce Jenkins that tackles the relationship among painting, photography, and film, as well as the dynamics of Saunders’s iconography. Offering insight into Saunders’s sophisticated working methods, this book is an evocative introduction to the work of this intriguing artist and the intertwined histories of film and photography.
[more]
cover of Meet Me in St. Louis

Meet Me in St. Louis

Sally Benson

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Sally Benson’s charming slice-of-life story is back in print for a new generation of readers.

Originally published as World War II raged overseas, Meet Me in St. Louis is Sally Benson’s semi-autobiographical account of the intergenerational Smith family during the twelve months leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. With warmth and tenderness, Benson chronicles the Smiths’ lives as they navigate sibling rivalries, first loves, financial hardship, jealousy, and heartaches in a poignant ode to the bonds of family.

Benson's novel is infused with wit as she details the lighthearted, pleasant existence of the Smith family’s five children—one rife with chaste crushes, victimless pranks, and other childhood escapades. Yet, the novel’s episodic, squeaky-clean veneer belies a dark comedic brilliance that transcends the ages and speaks, even today, to the universal experience of growing up.

Long out of print, this new edition of Benson’s timeless work includes a foreword by bestselling author Benjamin Dreyer, who comments both on the book's origins and its afterlife in popular culture as the source material for Judy Garland’s beloved musical of the same name. An effervescent midcentury novel waiting to be rediscovered, Meet Me in St. Louis is ready to meet its new generation of readers.

[more]
cover of Men of Steel, Women of Wonder: Modern American Superheroes in Contemporary Art

Men of Steel, Women of Wonder

Modern American Superheroes in Contemporary Art

Alejo Benedetti

University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Saturated in patriotic colors, Superman and Wonder Woman are about as American as baseball and apple pie. Superman, created in 1938, materialized as the brawny answer to the Great Depression, and when Wonder Woman arrived three years later, she supported her adopted country by fighting alongside Allied troops in World War II. As the proverbial mother and father of the superhero genre, these icons appeared to a society in crisis as unwavering beacons of national morality, a quality that lent them success on the battlefield—and on the newsstand.

As new crises arise our comic-book champions continue to be called into action. They adapt and evolve but remain the same potent, if flawed, symbols of the American way. The artists in Men of Steel, Women of Wonder, an exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, wrestle with Wonder Woman’s standing as a feminist icon, position Superman as a Soviet-era weapon, and question the immigration status of both characters. Featuring more than seventy artworks that range from loving endorsements to brutal critiques of American culture, this exhibition catalog reveals the enduring presence of these characters and the diverse ways artists employ them.

[more]
cover of Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit

Minor White

Manifestations of the Spirit

Paul Martineau

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2014

A beautifully illustrated tribute to one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.

Controversial, misunderstood, and sometimes overlooked, Minor White (1908–1976) is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, whose ideas exerted a powerful influence on a generation of photographers and still resonate today. His photographic career began in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, with assignments for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). After serving in World War II and studying art history at Columbia University, White’s focus shifted toward the metaphorical. He began creating images charged with symbolism and a critical aspect called equivalency, referring to the invisible spiritual energy present in a photograph made visible to the viewer.

This book brings together White’s key biographical information—his evolution as a photographer, teacher of photography, and editor of Aperture, as well as particularly insightful quotations from his journals, which he kept for more than forty years. The result is an engaging narrative that weaves through the main threads of White’s life, his growth as an artist, as well as his spiritual search and ongoing struggle with his own sexuality and self-doubt. He sought comfort in a variety of religious practices that influenced his continually metamorphosing artistic philosophy.
[more]
cover of Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power

Mounting Frustration

The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power

Susan E. Cahan

Duke University Press, 2015

In Mounting Frustration Susan E. Cahan uncovers the moment when the civil rights movement reached New York City's elite art galleries. Focusing on three controversial exhibitions that integrated African American culture and art, Cahan shows how the art world's racial politics is far more complicated than overcoming past exclusions.
[more]