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A revealing cultural history of this American art form.

In her intriguing and heavily illustrated look at post office murals of the 1930s, Karal Ann Marling examines these unique government-sponsored works of art not only as paintings but as part of American cultural history. Depicting scenes from the farm, the frontier, and the factories, these murals were commissioned by the Treasury Department during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Placed in the building where everyone in town had reason to stop, the thousand-odd paintings discussed here were truly intended to hold appeal for everyone. This spirited and often irreverent discussion offers a close look at the murals and what they represented to small-town America during the Great Depression.

Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenist imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory. Providing readers with a history and genealogy of key muralists' productions, Guisela Latorre also showcases new material and original research on works and artists never before examined in print.

An art form often associated with male creative endeavors, muralism in fact reflects significant contributions by Chicana artists. Encompassing these and other aspects of contemporary dialogues, including the often tense relationship between graffiti and muralism, Walls of Empowerment is a comprehensive study that, unlike many previous endeavors, does not privilege non-public Latina/o art. In addition, Latorre introduces readers to the role of new media, including performance, sculpture, and digital technology, in shaping the muralist's "canvas."

Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, this timely endeavor highlights the ways in which California's Mexican American communities have used images of indigenous peoples to raise awareness of the region's original citizens. Latorre also casts murals as a radical force for decolonization and liberation, and she provides a stirring description of the decades, particularly the late 1960s through 1980s, that saw California's rise as the epicenter of mural production. Blending the perspectives of art history and sociology with firsthand accounts drawn from artists' interviews, Walls of Empowerment represents a crucial turning point in the study of these iconographic artifacts.

Rethinking darkness through the politics and possibilities of vision

Darkness is widely misunderstood, argues Kyle Parry. We take darkness as the enemy of sight, yet we can’t see without it. We call the worst parts of our lives dark, yet we wouldn’t be here without wombs, skulls, oceans, the moon, and other shadowed places. Ways of Seeing After Dark contends that darkness is not absence but presence, shaping how worlds are sensed, inhabited, and understood. Darkness brings peril, but it is also a fundamental, if increasingly threatened, condition of living together on this planet.

Tracing links between John Berger’s influential Ways of Seeing and his more poetic later writings, Parry recasts contemporary conditions defined by light pollution, digital mediation, and racialized regimes of seeing. In dialogue with artists, critics, and astronomers, Ways of Seeing After Dark examines how fear of darkness is built rather than universal and how such training intersects with broader social structures, including racism and capitalism. Showing how “felt darkness displaces physical darkness” and “brighter nights bring darker days,” Parry reveals the dark as a multifaceted phenomenon with political and perceptual significance, calling for new ways of seeing with and through the night.

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Wendell Castle (1932–2018), master furniture maker, designer, sculptor, and educator, was in the sixth decade of his extraordinary creativity when an emblematic exhibition of his signature works was mounted by the Museum of Art and Design in 2016. It blended the artist's seminal works with his latest collection, produced with digital technology. In part a self-reflection, this eponymous, full-color companion book examines some of Castle's historically representative works as well as significant contemporary furniture pieces, continuing his highly respected and acclaimed sculptural/functional dialogue. Castle, ever the innovator, was remarkable for his openness to new technologies; he not only embraced an initially complex practice but has "remastered" it. His vast oeuvre represents a prodigious lifework that began in 1958 and aligns with the development of the American art furniture movement.

The solo exhibition was a somewhat self-reflective examination of his early ground-breaking works that tested the boundaries of traditional furniture making by presenting his later innovations using new digital technologies such as 3D scanning and modeling, and computer-controlled milling—a digital "remastering" of his immense oeuvre. Unique perspectives on the master's work are presented by informative essays by authors well-versed on Castle's celebrated career.

Sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle (1932–2018) carved a distinct path in furniture making over nearly six decades of a distinguished career, and this long-awaited recording of his oeuvre, Wendell Castle: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958–2012, beautifully presents the extraordinary scope of his artistry and craftsmanship. The voluminous accounting of his works, beginning with Castle's earliest, mid-century works through to his unabashed experiments with unconventional materials (gel-coated fiberglass and metallic automobile paint) and his latest signature wood laminations, is comprehensive and detailed. Three essays of varying perpectives introduce the catalogue raisonné followed by an extensive accounting of his enormous oeuvre, his exhibitions, numerous awards, and the collections of his works, as well as a substantive bibliography.

With his organic and whimsical approach to his various mediums, Castle seamlessly merged sculpture and design into one discipline, obscuring the distinction between the two. He invented the technique of carving stacked laminations of wood, and his later explorations into the qualities of fiberglass as a sculptural medium are unparalleled.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat opened a major new chapter in the history of literacy when she demonstrated that the cuneiform script invented in the ancient Near East in the late fourth millennium BC—the world's oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device. Her discovery, which she published in Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform and How Writing Came About, was widely reported in professional journals and the popular press. In 1999, American Scientist chose How Writing Came About as one of the "100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science."

In When Writing Met Art, Schmandt-Besserat expands her history of writing into the visual realm of communication. Using examples of ancient Near Eastern writing and masterpieces of art, she shows that between 3500 and 3000 BC the conventions of writing—everything from its linear organization to its semantic use of the form, size, order, and placement of signs—spread to the making of art, resulting in artworks that presented complex visual narratives in place of the repetitive motifs found on preliterate art objects. Schmandt-Besserat then demonstrates art's reciprocal impact on the development of writing. She shows how, beginning in 2700-2600 BC, the inclusion of inscriptions on funerary and votive art objects emancipated writing from its original accounting function. To fulfill its new role, writing evolved to replicate speech; this in turn made it possible to compile, organize, and synthesize unlimited amounts of information; and to preserve and disseminate information across time and space.

Schmandt-Besserat's pioneering investigation of the interface between writing and art documents a key turning point in human history, when two of our most fundamental information media reciprocally multiplied their capacities to communicate. When writing met art, literate civilization was born.