Results by title
82 books match the query 'Arts and society' and 8 start with s
Seeing Race Before Race
Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern WorldEdited by Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023
Explores the deployment of racial thinking and racial formations in the visual culture of the pre-modern world.
The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance.
Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls “the racial matrix” and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race”—a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library—as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.
The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance.
Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls “the racial matrix” and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race”—a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library—as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.
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Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture
Detour to the ImaginaryStuart Hall. Edited by Gilane Tawadros
Duke University Press, 2024
Stuart Hall’s work on culture, politics, race, and media is familiar to readers throughout the world. Equally important was his decades-long commitment to visual art. As the first collection to bring together Hall’s work on the visual, this volume assembles two dozen of Hall’s essays, lectures, reviews, catalog texts, and conversations on art, film, and photography. Providing rare insights into Hall’s engagement with the “radically different” intellectual and aesthetic space of the visual imaginary, these works articulate the importance of the visual as a site of contestation at the same time as it is a space in which Black artists and filmmakers reframe questions about diaspora, identity, and globalization. Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture demonstrates the breadth and range of Hall’s thinking on art, film, photography, archives, and museums. In so doing, it enables us to arrive at radical and innovative ways of understanding the world.
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Selected Writings, Volume 1
Toward a New African Art DiscourseOkwui Enwezor. Edited by Terry Smith.
Duke University Press, 2025
Okwui Enwezor is widely regarded as a leader among the brilliant curators who emerged in the 1990s to set agendas for understanding the global expansiveness of contemporary art. Among his pathfinding exhibitions were the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the paradigm-shifting Documenta11 (2002), Archive Fever (2008), and Postwar (2016). In addition to breaking ground as a curator, Enwezor was also a prolific critic, essayist, and theorist. Selected Writings—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Enwezor’s most influential and foundational works. Spanning a quarter-century, these selections reflect the depth and breadth of Enwezor’s writing and its role in his tireless efforts to decolonize the art world. Volume 1, Toward a New African Art Discourse, includes fifteen essays written between 1994 and 2006. Drawn from exhibition catalogs, art journals, interviews with artists, art reviews, curatorial statements, historical studies, and book chapters, these texts show him striving to fulfil the first main ambition that drove his career: to found and sustain what he called a “New African Art Discourse.” Demonstrating that his writing helped fulfill this goal, this collection reaffirms Enwezor’s status as a transformational figure in the global contemporary art world.
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Selected Writings, Volume 2
Curating the Postcolonial Condition, Volume 2Okwui Enwezor. Edited by Terry Smith.
Duke University Press, 2025
Okwui Enwezor is widely regarded as a leader among the brilliant curators who emerged in the 1990s to set agendas for understanding the global expansiveness of contemporary art. Among his pathfinding exhibitions were the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the paradigm-shifting Documenta 11 (2002), Archive Fever (2008), and Postwar (2016). In addition to breaking ground as a curator, Enwezor was also a prolific critic, essayist, and theorist. Selected Writings—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Enwezor’s most influential and foundational works. Spanning a quarter-century, these selections reflect the depth and breadth of Enwezor’s writing and its role in his tireless efforts to decolonize the art world. Volume 2, Curating the Postcolonial Condition, includes seventeen essays written between 2006 and 2019. Drawn from exhibition catalogs, art journals, interviews with artists, art reviews, curatorial statements, historical studies, and book chapters, these texts show him striving to fulfil the second main ambition that drove his career: enabling a critical, diasporic imagining of postcoloniality that would become pervasive within global art discourse. Demonstrating that his writing helped fulfill this goal, this collection reaffirms Enwezor’s status as a transformational figure in the global contemporary art world.
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Singular Examples
Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-GardeTyrus Miller
Northwestern University Press, 2008
This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial "compositions"—verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematic—of the avant-gardes in the period following World War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar avant-gardes and their works. The book’s geographical span is primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach, it comprehends an international context of American postwar cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as "the free world."
The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the so-called "neo–avant-garde" with its inherent contradiction: an avant-garde whose newness is defined by its seeming reiteration of an earlier historical formation. Concentrating on the rhetorical, contextual, and performative characteristic of neo–avant-garde practice, including its relation to politics, Miller emphasizes the centrality of the example in this practice. John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, and Samuel Beckett are among the artists whose exemplary works feature in Singular Examples. Miller’s key readings of these major artists of the period open up some of the most difficult texts of the neo–avant-garde even as they contribute to an eloquent argument for "artistic politics." Underlining the relation between material particulars and their thematic implications, between particular works and larger theoretical claims, between avant-garde aesthetics and formalist analysis, Singular Examples is exemplary in its own right, revealing the ultimate shape and direction of a postwar avant-garde contending with the historical predicaments of radical modernism.
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Sons And Daughters Of Los
Culture And Community In L.A.David James
Temple University Press, 2003
Los Angeles. A city that is synonymous with celebrity and mass-market culture, is also, according to David James, synonymous with social alienation and dispersal. In the communities of Los Angeles, artists, cultural institutions and activities exist in ways that are often concealed from sight, obscured by the powerful presence of Hollywood and its machinations. In this significant collection of original essays, The Sons and Daughters of Los reconstructs the city of Los Angeles with new cultural connections. Explored here are the communities that offer alternatives to the picture of L..A. as a conglomeration of studios and mass media. Each essay examines a particular piece of, or place in, Los Angeles cultural life: from the Beyond Baroque Poetry Foundation, the Woman's Building, to Highways, and LACE, as well as the achievements of these grassroots initiatives. Also included is critical commentary on important artists, including Harry Gamboa, Jr., and others whose work have done much to shape popular culture in L.A. The cumulative effect of reading this book is to see a very different city take shape, one whose cultural landscape is far more innovative and reflective of the diversity of the city's people than mainstream notions of it suggest. The Sons and Daughters of Los offers a substantive and complicated picture of the way culture plays itself it out on the smallest scale—in one of the largest metropolises on earth—contributing to a richer, more textured understanding of the vibrancy of urban life and art.
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Specular City
The Transformation Of Culture, ConsumptionLaura Podalsky
Temple University Press, 2004
A sweeping account of one of the cultural centers of Latin America, Specular City tells the history of Buenos Aires during the interregnum after Juan Perón's fall from power and before his restoration. During those two decades, the city experienced a rapid metamorphosis at the behest of its middle class citizens, who were eager to cast off the working-class imprint left by the Perónists. Laura Podalsky discusses the ways in which the proliferation of skyscrapers, the emergence of car culture, and the diffusion of an emerging revolution in the arts helped transform Buenos Aires, and, in so doing, redefine Argentine collective history.More than a cultural and material history of this city, this book also presents Buenos Aires as a crucible for urban life. Examining its structures through films, literatures, new magazines, advertising and architecture, Specular City reveals the prominent place of Buenos Aires in the massive changes that Latin America underwent for a new, modern definition of itself.
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Speculation, Now
Essays and ArtworkVyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, with Prem Krishnamurty and Carin Kuoni, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Interdisciplinary in design and concept, Speculation, Now illuminates unexpected convergences between images, concepts, and language. Artwork is interspersed among essays that approach speculation and progressive change from surprising perspectives. A radical cartographer asks whether "the speculative" can be represented on a map. An ethnographer investigates religious possession in Islam to contemplate states between the divine and the seemingly human. A financial technologist queries understandings of speculation in financial markets. A multimedia artist and activist considers the relation between social change and assumptions about the conditions to be changed, and an architect posits purposeful neglect as political strategy. The book includes an extensive glossary with more than twenty short entries in which scholars contemplate such speculation-related notions as insurance, hallucination, prophecy, the paradox of beginnings, and states of half-knowledge. The book's artful, nonlinear design mirrors and reinforces the notion of contingency that animates it. By embracing speculation substantively, stylistically, seriously, and playfully, Speculation, Now reveals its subversive and critical potential.
Artists and essayists include William Darity Jr., Filip De Boeck, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Darrick Hamilton, Laura Kurgan, Lin + Lam, Gary Lincoff, Lize Mogel, Christina Moon, Stefania Pandolfo, Satya Pemmaraju, Mary Poovey, Walid Raad, Sherene Schostak, Robert Sember, and Srdjan Jovanović Weiss.
Published by Duke University Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School
Artists and essayists include William Darity Jr., Filip De Boeck, Boris Groys, Hans Haacke, Darrick Hamilton, Laura Kurgan, Lin + Lam, Gary Lincoff, Lize Mogel, Christina Moon, Stefania Pandolfo, Satya Pemmaraju, Mary Poovey, Walid Raad, Sherene Schostak, Robert Sember, and Srdjan Jovanović Weiss.
Published by Duke University Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School
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