Paying tribute to a professor who has profoundly shaped East Asian art history as it is today through multifaceted, comprehensive, and innovative research, this collection features 18 essays on Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art and archaeology by students of Lothar Ledderose. The geographical, temporal, and thematic range of the volume reflects the changes undergone by the discipline in recent years, with contributions that address tomb architecture, Buddhist cave temples and stone inscriptions, and exhibition and art policy. Comprehensive and well-referenced, this study also undertakes case studies of calligraphy, painting and textiles, and instances of transcultural inspiration in painting, the graphic arts, and ceramics from Europe and the Far East.

The first years of the twenty-first century have witnessed an impressive re-evaluation of Islamic art and archaeology. However, while museums and galleries become increasingly important forums for public interest in Muslim cultures, there has been little discussion about content or categories of order and their new role in the light of modern Museology, museum pedagogy and new approaches in other fields of knowledge. This volume provides a historical and conceptual analysis of Islamic art and documents the successes and failings of its presentation in museums worldwide thus far. The contributors challenge existing notions regarding the research, methodology and analysis of Islamic art and investigate the extent to which socio-historical and anthropological approaches result in new analytical perspectives. They also examine the difficulties that need to be overcome when presenting Islamic art to avoid reducing the objects merely to the visual and aesthetic. Museums covered in detail include the David Collection, Brooklyn Museum's Arts of the Islamic World Galleries, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, the Hermitage Museum, the British Museum, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and the Pergamon Museum.

A detailed look at a genre that combines virtuoso printmaking techniques, sophisticated imagery, and engaging, playful poetry This beautiful volume celebrates the tradition of the Japanese surimono print. Produced from around 1800 until 1840, during the Edo period, surimono ("printed things" in Japanese) combine intricate artwork and playful poetry, and their small print runs and exclusive audiences allowed for lavish yet subtle surface treatments, such as embossing and gilding. Enjoyed for their learned allusions to literature and contemporary culture, surimono continue to delight and perplex scholars with their visual puns and wordplay. Imagery ranges from delicate, domestic still lifes to spirited vignettes of the natural world, while the poems are often lighthearted takes on the classical Japanese waka form. With its rich text and scholarly apparatus-including names and titles in kanji characters as well as transliterations and translations of the poems on the catalogued prints-The Private World of Surimono serves as a critical resource for scholars of Japanese art and history and offers general readers insight into this rare and innovative print form. Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery

First published in 1883 and written by the foremost authority of the era, this extremely influential book offers a brief but concise introduction to Asian art. One of its major themes, the connections between spirituality and the evolution of Asian art, provided the earliest lucid English-language account of Zen Buddhism and its relation to the arts.

Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Isis Duarte Book PrizeGathering oral stories and visual art from Haiti and two of its "motherlands" in Africa, Istwa across the Water recovers the submerged histories of the island through methods drawn from its deep spiritual and cultural traditions. Toni Pressley-Sanon employs three theoretical anchors to bring together parts of the African diaspora that are profoundly fractured because of the slave trade. The first is the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, which she uses to identify parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region as Haiti's twinned sites of cultural production. Second, she draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite's idea of tidalectics-the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves-as a way to look at the cultural exchange set in motion by the transatlantic movement of captives. Finally, Pressley-Sanon searches out the places where history and memory intersect in story, expressed by the Kreyol term istwa. Challenging the tendency to read history linearly, this volume offers a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.

In Maya theology, everything from humans and crops to gods and the world itself passes through endless cycles of birth, maturation, dissolution, death, and rebirth. Traditional Maya believe that human beings perpetuate this cycle through ritual offerings and ceremonies that have the power to rebirth the world at critical points during the calendar year. The most elaborate ceremonies take place during Semana Santa (Holy Week), the days preceding Easter on the Christian calendar, during which traditionalist Maya replicate many of the most important world-renewing rituals that their ancient ancestors practiced at the end of the calendar year in anticipation of the New Year's rites. Marshaling a wealth of evidence from Pre-Columbian texts, early colonial Spanish writings, and decades of fieldwork with present-day Maya, The Burden of the Ancients presents a masterfully detailed account of world-renewing ceremonies that spans the Pre-Columbian era through the crisis of the Conquest period and the subsequent colonial occupation all the way to the present. Allen J. Christenson focuses on Santiago Atitlan, a Tz'utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, and offers the first systematic analysis of how the Maya preserved important elements of their ancient world renewal ceremonies by adopting similar elements of Roman Catholic observances and infusing them with traditional Maya meanings. His extensive description of Holy Week in Santiago Atitlan demonstrates that the community's contemporary ritual practices and mythic stories bear a remarkable resemblance to similar cultural entities from its Pre-Columbian past.

"Vessels of Influence", while examining in depth the role of Chinese ceramics in Japan, also delves into the meaning, motivation for, and rapid development of Japanese porcelain from many angles, including archaeology, heirloom and documentary evidence. The political and fiscal advantage that one lord found for his domain in creating its own local 'china' is placed in the context of the domestic and international market economy. Through an examination of the role of China and that of a domestic 'china' in Japan, a fuller picture of Japan's rich material culture emerges, revealing complex interactions between government, taste-makers, traders, merchants, consumers, imports and new technology. "Vessels of Influence" also discusses how these interactions have been viewed by historians, and the often heated debates that have occurred as a result.

In any decade the work of only a very few artists offers a template for understanding the culture and ideas of their time. Photographer Diane Arbus is one of these rare artists, and in this book Frederick Gross returns Arbus's work to the moment in which it was produced and first viewed to reveal its broader significance for analyzing and mapping the culture of the 1960s. While providing a unique view of the social, literary, and artistic context within which Arbus worked, he also, perhaps for the first time anywhere, measures the true breadth and complexity of her achievement. Gross considers Arbus less in terms of her often mythologized biography-a "Sylvia Plath with a camera"-but rather looks at how her work resonates with significant photographic portraiture, art, social currents, theoretical positions, and literature of her times, from Robert Frank and Richard Avedon to Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. He shows how her incandescent photographs seem to literalize old notions of photography as trapping a layer of the subject's soul within the frame of a picture. For Arbus, "auguries"-as in "Auguries of Innocence," her 1963 photographic spread in Harper's Bazaar-conveyed the idea that whoever was present in her photograph could attain legendary status. By shifting critical attention from the myths of Arbus's biography to the mythmaking of her art, this book gives us a new, informed appreciation of one of the twentieth century's most important photographers and a better understanding of the world in which she worked.

California Dreaming is a multi-genre collection featuring works by Asian American artists based in California. Exploring the places of "Asian America" through the migration and circulation of the arts, this volume highlights creative processes and the flow of objects to understand the rendering of California's imaginary. Here, "California" is interpreted as both a specific locale and an identity marker that moves, linking the state's cultural imaginary, labor, and economy with Asia Pacific, the Americas, and the world. Together, the works in this collection shift previous models and studies of the "Golden State" as the embodiment of "frontier mentality" and the discourse of exceptionality to a translocal, regional, and archipelagic understanding of place and cultural production. The poems, visual essays, short stories, critical essays, interviews, artist statements, and performance text excerpts featured in this collection expand notions of where knowledge is produced, directing our attention to the particularity of California's landscape and labor in the production of arts and culture. An interdisciplinary collection, California Dreaming foregrounds "sensing" and "imagining" place, vividly, as it hopes to inspire further creative responses to the notion of emplacement. In doing so, California Dreaming explores the possibilities imagined by and through Asian American arts and culture today, paving the way for what is yet to be.