Facing the monumental issues of our time.In a 2012 performance piece, Rebecca Belmore transformed an oak tree surrounded by monuments to colonialism in Toronto's Queens Park into a temporary "non-monument" to the Earth.For more than 30 years, she has given voice in her art to social and political issues, making her one of the most important contemporary artists working today.Employing a language that is both poetic and provocative, Belmore's art has tackled subjects such as water and land rights, women's lives and dignity, and state violence against Indigenous people. Writes Wanda Nanibush, "by capturing the universal truths of empathy, hope and transformation, her work positions the viewer as a witness and encourages us all to face what is monumental."Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental presents 28 of her most famous works, including Fountain, her entry to the 2005 Venice Biennale, and At Pelican Falls, her moving tribute to residential school survivors, as well as numerous new and in-progress works. The book also includes an essay by Wanda Nanibush, Curator of Indigenous Art at the AGO, that examines the intersection of art and politics. It will accompany an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario scheduled from 12 July to 21 October 2018.Rebecca Belmore is one of Canada's most distinguished artists. She has won the Hnatyshyn Award (2009), the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2013), and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2016). A member of Lac Seul First Nation, she was the first Aboriginal woman to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. She has also participated in more than 60 one-person and group exhibitions around the world.

The catalogue for the groundbreaking exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Nomads and Networks presents an unparalleled overview of the sophisticated culture of pastoral nomadic populations who lived on the territory of present-day Kazakhstan from roughly the middle of the first millennium BCE to the early centuries CE. Focusing on material from the Altai and Tianshan regions, Nomads and Networks explores the specific conditions of mobile lifeways that resulted from particular ecological conditions in the steppes and high valleys of Inner Eurasia. Highlights of the exhibition are grave goods from the burial mounds at the site of Berel and gold mortuary ornaments from Shilikty, Zhalauli, and Kargaly. Attesting to a sophisticated decorative art flourishing among these nomadic populations, the objects skillfully combine older iconographic traditions of animal style in the steppe with more recent influences from foreign cultures--most notably Persia and China. Contributors include Nursan Alimbai, Nikolay A. Bokovenko, Claudia Chang, Bryan K. Hanks, Sagynbay Myrgabayev, Karen S. Rubinson, Zainolla S. Samashev, Soren Stark, and Abdesh T. Toleubaev. Cover photograph (c) Bruce M. White, 2016

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.

Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya's attention to the act and consequences of literacy-apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations-is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented. Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya's work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

In today's art world many strange, even shocking, things qualify as art. In this Very Short Introduction Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many fascinating examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, museums, sex, and politics, clarifying contemporary and historical accounts of the nature, function, and interpretation of the arts. Freeland also propels us into the future by surveying cutting-edge web sites, alongside the latest research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, provocative book engages with the big debates surrounding our responses to art and is an invaluable introduction to anyone interested in thinking about art. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Offering a concise introduction of the invention and development of Chinese characters the book teases out the glyphic characteristics and rules for creating different calligraphic styles; visualizes the glyphic evolution of 132 commonly used characters and analyses a selection of over 60 outstanding type designs of renowned designers. It will enable designers to maximize the expression value of Chinese characters in visuals! Recent years have witnessed a Chinese character design boom, with influential activities popping up one after another across Asia. Institutions such as The Central Academy of Fine Arts, Just Fonts, 3type, Mojijuku have launched courses for Chinese character design. Meanwhile, various exhibitions, lectures, seminars, and competitions, online or offline, are popular with young designers. The innovative use of Chinese characters as main visual elements in design, such as brand identity, logos, books, and posters, enjoys growing trend globally. On the other hand, the cultural uniqueness of Chinese characters demands a sound understanding of its history from designers.

Patronized by royalty between the sixth and eighth centuries, the monuments of Guatemala's ancient Maya city of Piedras Negras were carved by sculptors with remarkable skills and virtuosity. Together patrons and sculptors created monumental imagery in a manner unique within the larger history of ancient Maya art by engaging public viewers through illustrations of ceremonies focusing on family and the feminine in royal agendas.
Flora Clancy's introduction contextualizes her work with other studies and lays out her methodological framework. She then discusses the known monuments of the city sequentially by reigns. Individual rulers are characterized by a biography drawn from the hieroglyphic texts and the icons or imagery of their monuments are analyzed and discussed.
Although the monuments of Piedras Negras are acknowledged as social, political, and cultural productions, Clancy also treats them as works of art that at their best operate on transcendent levels dissolving and overruling the contingencies of history and cultural differences.

Art for a New Understanding, an exhibition from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opening this October, seeks to radically expand and reposition the narrative of American art since 1950 by charting a history of the development of contemporary Indigenous art from the United States and Canada, beginning when artists moved from more regionally-based conversations and practices to national and international contemporary art contexts.This accompanying book documents and expands on the histories and themes of this exciting exhibition. This fully illustrated volume includes essays by art historians and historians and reflections by the artists included in the collection. Also included are key contemporary writings-from the 1950s onward-by artists, scholars, and critics, investigating the themes of transculturalism and pan-Indian identity, traditional practices conducted in radically new ways, displacement, forced migration, shadow histories, the role of personal mythologies as a means to reimagine the future, and much more. As both a survey of the development of Indigenous art from the 1950s to the present and a consideration of Native artists within contemporary art more broadly, Art for a New Understanding expands the definition of American art and sets the tone for future considerations of the subject. It is an essential publication for any institution or individual with an interest in contemporary Native American art, and an invaluable resource in ongoing scholarly considerations of the American contemporary art landscape at large.

Built upon the politics of difference, The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon examines artistic practice through an international lens. This vibrant collection of essays and writings – produced in different cultural contexts and collected over two decades – introduces the reader to the thought, method of analysis and everyday experiences that have emerged from an increasingly globalized world, presenting a potentially radical frame through which to understand contemporary art. Gilane Tawadros experiments with methodology to draw cultural difference to the surface: from traditional criticism to fictional narratives, this critical variety mirrors her embrace of different perspectives and hints to the myriad ways in which contemporary art is created and presented. Using these techniques she explores the work of leading artists such as Adel Abdessemed, Richard Avedon, Sonia Boyce and Frank Bowling, offering expert guidance on the rich cultural and historical contexts of global and contemporary art through intimate engagement with lived experience. Playing with forms of writing, from critical analyses to fictional narratives, The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon functions as a practice-based meditation on how to write about contemporary art.

As an important part of Chinese culture, Lingnan culture, mainly those in Guangdong province, plays a key role in the world culture. Elegant Guangdong Series cover 5 subjects of the Lingnan cultural and traditional gems in South China. Each volume has used vivid and precious illustrations and portraits. Maolong Brush tells the origin, inventor, making, unique artistic characters and inheritance of this specialized grass brush in Lingnan region.

This edited volume programmatically reconsiders the creative contribution of the littoral and insular regions of Maritime Asia to shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China. This collective body of work brings together new research aiming to recalibrate the importance of these innovations in art and architecture, thereby highlighting the cultural creativity of the monsoon-influenced Southern rim of the Asian landmass.

La grande sfida dell'arte italiana tra l'Unita e la Prima guerra mondiale e quella di creare uno stile nazionale competitivo e riconoscibile a livello europeo. Il volume intende indagare gli sviluppi artistici italiani nei loro rapporti internazionali Tra Oltralpe e Mediterraneo mettendo in rilievo il ruolo di cerniera giocato dall'Italia nell'Europa del tempo, sia dal punto di vista geografico, sia culturale. I singoli casi di studio indagano l'aggiornamento di artisti, critici e amatori d'arte italiani verso la contemporanea scena artistica europea, cercando di creare contatti con i colleghi stranieri dall'Inghilterra alla Turchia, dalla Scandinavia alla Spagna. Ne emerge una piu complessa trama di rapporti nella quale, piu che l'influsso, domina lo scambio. Nach der Staatsgrundung 1861 sahen sich italienische Kunstler mit der Herausforderung konfrontiert, eine eigenstandige und auf europaischer Ebene wettbewerbsfahige Formsprache zu entwickeln. Der Band thematisiert den kunstlerischen Wandel in Italien im Spiegel seiner internationalen Beziehungen von Nordeuropa bis zum Mittelmeerraum. Sowohl in geografischer als auch in kultureller Hinsicht kommt dem Land dabei eine Schlusselposition innerhalb Europas zu. Fallstudien untersuchen, wie italienische Kunstler, Kritiker und Kunstliebhaber sich uber aktuelle kunstlerische Entwicklungen jenseits der Landesgrenzen auf dem Laufenden hielten und Kontakte mit Kollegen von England bis zur Turkei und von Skandinavien bis nach Spanien knupften. Die Ergebnisse dieser Recherchen zeichnen ein komplexeres Bild der italienisch-europaischen Beziehungen, die weniger von einseitiger Beeinflussung als vielmehr von einem wechselseitigen Austausch gepragt waren. After the unification in 1861 the creation of a national art, unique and competitive at a European level, represented a major challenge for Italian artists. This volume analyses artistic developments in Italy with regard to their international relations from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean. In the late 19th century Italy held a key position both from a geographical and from a cultural perspective. Case studies demonstrate how Italian artists, critics and art lovers kept themselves up-to-date about current artistic developments in Europe trying to stay in touch with colleagues from England to Turkey and from Scandinavia to Spain. The results of this research paint a more vivid picture of the Italian-European relationship that was less characterised by one-sided influences than by a mutual exchange, thus benefiting both sides.