As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, it changes its identity, status, value, and purpose in local and larger contexts. Focusing on a school of Australian Aboriginal painting that has become popular in the contemporary art world, Robyn Ferrell traces the influence of cultural exchanges on art, the self, and attitudes toward the other.

Aboriginal acrylic painting, produced by indigenous women artists of the Australian Desert, bears a superficial resemblance to abstract expressionism and is often read as such by viewers. Yet to see this art only through a Western lens is to miss its unique ontology, logics of sensation, and rich politics and religion. Ferrell explores the culture that produces these paintings and connects its aesthetic to the brutal environmental and economic realities of its people. From here, she travels to urban locales, observing museums and department stores as they traffic interchangeably in art and commodities.

Ferrell ties the history of these desert works to global acts of genocide and dispossession. Rethinking the value of the artistic image in the global market and different interpretations of the sacred, she considers photojournalism, ecotourism, and other sacred sites of the western subject, investigating the intersection of modern art and postmodern culture. She ultimately challenges the primacy of the "European gaze" and its fascination with sacred cultures, constructing a more balanced intercultural dialogue that deemphasizes the aesthetic of the real championed by western philosophy.

This trans-historical exhibition of drawings is devoted to the subject of the artist at work. Drawn principally from a very fine specialist private collection, this display will focus on the depictions of artists' studios, their own portraits, models and assistants in symbolic, as well as from life, representations of the metier of drawing, painting and sculpture. Art historians have interpreted these themes variously as the means of elevating the social and economic status of artists; of illustrating the marriage of intellectual knowledge and practical skill proposed by academic theorists, or as sophisticated allegories of the philosophical significance of visual art. Even at the most pragmatic level of recording the clutter of the everyday studio, drawing human models or antique casts in an academy, or small figures sketching in landscape, works with these subjects are imbued with layers of meaning. This focused exhibition, spanning from the 16th to the 20th centuries, proposes to explore this rich subject matter through a carefully selected group of graphic works.

According to the contributors to this volume, the relationship of Buddhism and the arts in Japan is less the rendering of Buddhist philosophical ideas through artistic imagery than it is the development of concepts and expressions in a virtually inseparable unity. By challenging those who consider religion to be the primary phenomenon and art the secondary arena for the apprehension of religious meanings, these essays reveal the collapse of other dichotomies as well. Touching on works produced at every social level, they explore a fascinating set of connections within Japanese culture and move to re-envision such usual distinctions as religion and art, sacred and secular, Buddhism and Shinto, theory and substance, elite and popular, and even audience and artist. The essays range from visual and literary hagiographies to No drama, to Sermon-Ballads, to a painting of the Nirvana of Vegetables. The contributors to the volume are James H. Foard, Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, Frank Hoff, Laura S. Kaufman, William R. LaFleur, Susan Matisoff, Barbara Ruch, Yoshiaki Shimizu, and Royall Tyler.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Bauhaus school in Germany has long been understood through the writings of its founding director, Walter Gropius, and well-known artists who taught there such as Wassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts by women in the school's weaving workshop. In "Bauhaus Weaving Theory, " T'ai Smith uncovers new significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers.

From colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of soundproofing and light-reflective fabric, the workshop's innovative creations influenced a modernist theory of weaving. In the first careful examination of the writings of Bauhaus weavers, including Anni Albers, Gunta Stozl, and Otti Berger, Smith details how these women challenged assumptions about the feminine nature of their craft. As they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines like painting, architecture, and photography, Smith argues, the weavers resisted modernist thinking about distinct media. In parsing texts about tapestries and functional textiles, the vital role these women played in debates about medium in the twentieth century and a nuanced history of the Bauhaus comes to light.

"Bauhaus Weaving Theory" deftly reframes the Bauhaus weaving workshop as central to theoretical inquiry at the school. Putting questions of how value and legitimacy are established in the art world into dialogue with the limits of modernism, Smith confronts the belief that the crafts are manual and technical but never intellectual arts.

In the literary and artistic milieu of early modern Japan the Chinese and Japanese arts flourished side by side. Kod?jin, the "Old Taoist" (1865-1944), was the last of these great poet-painters in Japan. Under the support of various patrons, he composed a number of Taoist-influenced Chinese and Japanese poems and did lively and delightful ink paintings, continuing the tradition of the poet-sage who devotes himself to study of the ancients, lives quietly and modestly, and creates art primarily for himself and his friends.

Portraying this last representative of a tradition of gentle and refined artistry in the midst of a society that valued economic growth and national achievement above all, this beautifully illustrated book brings together 150 of Kod?jin's Chinese poems (introduced and translated by Jonathan Chaves), more than 100 of his haiku and tanka (introduced and translated by Stephen Addiss), and many examples of his calligraphy and ink paintings. Addiss's in-depth introduction details the importance of the poet-painter tradition, outlines the life of Kod?jin, and offers a critical appraisal of his work, while J. Thomas Rimer's essay puts the literary work of the Old Taoist in context.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical. if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War-era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases-flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions-this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.

Masked Histories celebrates the remarkable Torres Strait Islander turtle shell masks that were taken or traded by Europeans throughout the nineteenth century. Displayed as curiosities or art in museums and galleries around the world, the Islander knowledges they held were silenced. Delving into old stories from both Islanders and the foreigners who had travelled to the region, Lui-Chivizhe reanimates the masks with their Islander meaning and purpose and, in so doing, powerfully recreates the past. Masked Histories advances a vivid new history, uncovering the profound importance of the turtle shell masks to all Islanders and revealing much about the people who created them.

Muzan-e ('cruel pictures') and Chimidoro-e ('bloody pictures') together constitute a significant strand of Ukiyo-e, the populist art of late Edo-period Japan. This title collects and considers over 100 of the most blood-drenched and disturbing artworks produced by Yoshiiku and others.

A sweeping painterly chronicle of the war, and a vital part of Australia's heritage.Richard Travers, the author of Diggers in France: Australian Soldiers on the Western Front, now turns his attention to the Australians who painted the Great War. In To Paint A War he follows artists such as Tom Roberts, Grace Cossington Smith, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Arthur Streeton and George Coates - detailing how they left Australia in search of inspiration and fame in London and Paris and lived enviable lives suddenly interrupted by the outbreak of war.To Paint A War is the story of their response to the crisis. Their work, in all its richness and variety, is a sweeping painterly chronicle of the war, and a vital part of Australia's heritage.

In the early twenty-first century, China occupies a place on center stage in the international art world. But what does it mean to be a Chinese artist in the modern age? This first comprehensive study of modern Chinese art history traces its evolution chronologically and thematically from the Age of Imperialism to the present day. Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen pay particular attention to the dynamic tension between modernity and tradition, as well as the interplay of global cosmopolitanism and cultural nationalism. This lively, accessible, and beautifully illustrated text will serve and enlighten scholars, students, collectors, and anyone with an interest in Asian art and artists.

Considered the definitive book on dream catchers, this book is for all readers that want to learn about these important symbols in Native American tradition. It features close-up photographs of dream catchers; covers their history, legends, lore and cultural symbolism; and presents a stunning collection of dream catchers that are at once craft and high art. The text is suitable for a popular audience while also thorough, rigorous and valuable in research. This edition has been redesigned with a new cover. The exact genesis of dream catchers is unknown and origin stories vary as do beliefs about how they work. One legend has it that a medicine woman made a circle from a willow branch and used sinew to weave a spider-web pattern across the hoop. The circular talisman was hung over the bed of a sick child where it would 'catch' bad dreams and protect the child, or it would catch good dreams to bless the child. However it worked, the child would recover by morning. Purchasers of dream catchers might find such a story attached to it. Dream catchers made by artists and artisans vary in their design and decoration, and range from craft to high art. Making dream catchers is a popular project for craft groups; conversely, dream catchers are exhibited at museum and galleries where they can fetch a high price. Each element of a dream catcher carries a meaning and function, and these are discussed in the book. * Part 1: Legend and Distribution - Origins; Algonquian Cultures; Dreaming. * Part 2: Net Charms - Power in Lines and Knots; Non-Algonquian Cultures; Dream Catchers Today. * Part 3: Scale - Fascination with 'Indians'; Marketing; Artists and Manufacturing; The Future. More than 40 colour photographs feature contemporary dream catchers and artifacts with captions that identify and comment on the different patterns and their significance. The book features original works by Nick Huard, who creates dream catchers in his studio near Montreal.