Featuring all kinds of dogs - big, small, graceful, cute, funny - The Book of the Dog is a cool and quirky collection of dog art and illustration by artists around the world. Interspersed through the illustrations are short texts about the artists and different breeds, paying homage to man's best friend. Beautifully designed and packaged, the book will appeal to dog lovers of all ages.

In this study of the Japanese jeweled pagoda mandalas, Halle O'Neal reveals the entangled realms of sacred body, beauty, and salvation. Much of the previous scholarship on these paintings concentrates on formal analysis and iconographic study of their narrative vignettes. This has marginalized the intriguing interplay of text and image at their heart, precluding a holistic understanding of the mandalas and diluting their full import in Buddhist visual culture. Word Embodied offers an alternative methodology, developing interdisciplinary insights into the social, religious, and artistic implications of this provocative entwining of word and image. O'Neal unpacks the paintings' revolutionary use of text as picture to show how this visual conflation mirrors important conceptual indivisibilities in medieval Japan. The textual pagoda projects the complex constellation of relics, reliquaries, scripture, and body in religious doctrine, practice, and art. Word Embodied also expands our thinking about the demands of viewing, recasting the audience as active producers of meaning and offering a novel perspective on disciplinary discussions of word and image that often presuppose an ontological divide between them. This examination of the jeweled pagoda mandalas, therefore, recovers crucial dynamics underlying Japanese Buddhist art, including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment.

The life and work of the outstanding Catalan-Majorcan philosopher, logician, and mystic Ramon Llull continues to fascinate thinkers, artists, and scholars worldwideIn this book, international experts from Europe and the United States address Lullism as a remarkable and distinctive method of thinking and experimenting. The origins and impact of Ramon Llull's oeuvre as a modern thinker are presented, and their interdisciplinary and intercultural implications, which continue to this day, are explored. Ars combinatoria, generative and permutative generation of texts, the epistemic and poetic power of algorithmic systems, plus the principle of unconditional dialogue between cultural groups and their individual members, are the most important coordinates of this combinatorial-dialogical media and communication theory, which appeared very early in the history of science, technology, and art. It was developed in the work of Ramon Llull during the transition from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century when Arab-Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures intersected. The legacy of Lullism lives on in poetry and in the visual and electronic-based arts, as well as in research on the history of informatics, formal logic, and media archaeology. The primary idea of Llull's teachings-to enable rational and therefore trustworthy dialogue between cultures and religions through a universally valid system of symbols-is today still topical and of great relevance, especially in the tensions prevailing in globalized spaces of possibility.Contributors: Miquel Bassols, Florian Cramer, Salvador Dali, Fernando Dominguez Reboiras, Diane Doucet-Rosenstein, Jordi Gaya, Jonathan Gray, Daniel Irrgang, David Link, Sebastian Moro Tornese, Josep E. Rubio, Henning Schmidgen, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Gianni Vattimo, Janet Zweig.

This collection focuses on David Lewis-Williams and the extent of his personal impact on the field of rock art research. It is largely through his work that San rock art has come to be understood so well, as a complex symbolic and metaphoric representation of San religious beliefs and practices. The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate the depth and wide geographical impact of Lewis-Williams' contribution, with particular emphasis on the use of theory and methodology drawn from ethnography that he has used with inspirational effect in understanding the meaning and context of rock art in various parts of the world. "Seeing and Knowing "explores how best archaeologists study rock art when there exist ethnographic or ethno-historic bases of insight, and how they study rock art when there do not appear to exist ethnographic or ethno-historic bases of insight--in short, how to understand and learn from rock art with and without ethnography. Because many of the chapters are based on solid fieldwork and ethnographic research, they offer a new body of work that provides the evidence for differentiation between knowing and simply seeing. This volume is unique in that it focuses exclusively on rock art and ethnography, and covers such a wide geographic range of examples on this topic, from southern Africa, to Scandinavia, to the United States. Many of the chapters explore studies in other rock art regions of the world where variation and constancy can be observed and explored across distances both in space and in time. The editors have entitled the book "Seeing and Knowing "to echo Lewis-Williams' "Believing and Seeing "published" "almost thirty years ago; they say "seeing" again because" "looking at rock art is and will always be central, and then" "what is seen when human eyes and minds look; they say" ""knowing" in recognition that, by his work and by his" "example, archaeologists now know a little more than they" "knew before. Even so, as Lewis-Williams will be the first to" "say, we still know only a fraction.

"Lavishly illustrated studies of the art of pre-Columbian cultures in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru"

In 2005, the Denver Art Museum hosted a symposium in conjunction with the exhibition Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca. An international array of scholars of Tiwanaku, Wari, and Inca art and archaeology presented results of the latest research conducted in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. This copiously illustrated volume, edited by Margaret Young-Sanchez of the Denver Art Museum, presents revised and amplified papers from the symposium.

Essays by archaeologists Alexei Vranich and Leonardo Benitez (both University of Pennsylvania) describe what their excavation and astronomical research have yielded at the site of Tiwanaku, in Bolivia. Georgia DeHavenon (Brooklyn Museum) surveys historical research and publications on Tiwanaku and its monuments. Christiane Clados (Free University of Berlin) and William Conklin (Field Museum, Textile Museum) each analyze styles and modes of representation in Tiwanaku art and arrive at provocative conclusions. R. Tom Zuidema reconsiders Tiwanaku iconography and sculptural composition, discerning complex calendrical information. Through a detailed analysis of Tiwanaku iconography, Krysztof Makowski (Pontifical Catholic University of Peru) examines the nature of Tiwanaku religious thought. Archaeologists and iconographers William Isbell (State University of New York, Binghamton) and Patricia Knobloch (Institute of Andean Studies) thoroughly discuss what they term the Southern Andean Interaction Sphere, which encompasses Tiwanaku, Wari, Pucara, and Atacama traditions. P. Ryan Williams (Field Museum) discusses the issue of identity and its expression at the territorial interface between the Tiwanaku and Wari states. Wari tunics and their imagery are examined by Susan Bergh (Cleveland Museum of Art), yielding evidence of ranking. And John Hoopes (University of Kansas) discusses both archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence of links between ancient Tiwanaku and the later Inca.

Bringing together current research on Pucara, Tiwanaku, Wari, and Inca art and archaeology, this volume will be an important resource for scholars and enthusiasts of ancient South America.

From personal ornamentation to funerary practice, from palace decoration to private devotion, jade has played a major role in Chinese social, cultural, and political life for millennia. Exploring the history of this revered stone through the esteemed Grenville L. Winthrop Collection at the Harvard Art Museums-which includes some of the finest examples of ancient and archaizing jades outside China-this volume explains how and why jade developed its special significance. In-depth entries on over one hundred objects present recent archaeological discoveries and new information garnered from conservation analysis, while Jenny So's broad and engaging narrative not only elucidates the layered meanings of the objects and their iconography but also delves into the unique qualities of the material and the craftsmanship involved in quarrying and working jade.

An illustrated guide to one of the most enduring masterworks of world literature Written in the eleventh century by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of prose and poetry that is widely considered the world (TM)s first novel. Melissa McCormick provides a unique companion to Murasaki (TM)s tale that combines discussions of all fifty-four of its chapters with paintings and calligraphy from the Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums, the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In this book, the album (TM)s colorful painting and calligraphy leaves are fully reproduced for the first time, followed by McCormick (TM)s insightful essays that analyze the Genji story and the album (TM)s unique combinations of word and image. This stunning compendium also includes English translations and Japanese transcriptions of the album (TM)s calligraphy, enabling a holistic experience of the work for readers today. In an introduction to the volume, McCormick tells the fascinating stories of the individuals who created the Genji Album in the sixteenth century, from the famous court painter who executed the paintings and the aristocrats who brushed the calligraphy to the work (TM)s warrior patrons and the poet-scholars who acted as their intermediaries. Beautifully illustrated, this book serves as an invaluable guide for readers interested in The Tale of Genji, Japanese literature, and the captivating visual world of Japan (TM)s most celebrated work of fiction.

The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden has compiled a bibliographic database documenting publications on South and Southeast Asian art and archaeology. Twenty editors and documentalists in Leiden, Colombo, Bangkok, Dharwad, and Jakarta have collected the material in this first volume, and over 1,000 records describe monographs, articles in monographs, and articles in periodicals including reviews and Ph.D. dissertations published in 1996 and 1997. The records are arranged geographically and according to subject: pre- and proto-history, historical archaeology, ancient and modern art history, material culture, epigraphy and paleography, numismatics and sigillography.

The ""blk alter"" of Avery R. Young's poetic vision makes its stunning debut in a multidisciplinary arsenal entitled, neckbone: visual verses. Young's years of supernatural fieldwork within the black experience and the gospel of his transitions between poetry, art and music, become the stitch, paint brush, metaphor, and narrative of arresting visual metaphors of childhood teachings and traumas, identity, and the personal reverence of pop culture's beauty and beast. A mastermind in a new language of poetry, that engages and challenges readers to see beyond the traditional spaces poems are shaped and exist, Young's neckbone extends tentacles in literature, art, and activism-redefining the collective and the sermon of the ""blk"" experience.

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage and the lasting legacy of Dutch culture in New York, this book explores the life and times of a fascinating woman, her family, and her things. Margrieta was born in the Netherlands but lived at the extremes of the Dutch colonial world, in Malacca on the Malay Peninsula and in Flatbush, Brooklyn. When she came to New York in 1686 with her husband and set up a shop, she brought an astonishing array of Eastern goods, many of which were documented in an inventory made after her death in 1695. Extensive archival research has enabled a collaborative team to reconstruct her story and establish the depth of her connection to Dutch trading establishments in Asia. This is a groundbreaking contribution to the histories of New York City, the Dutch overseas empire, women, and material culture.

The northern Chinese mountain range of Mount Wutai has been a preeminent site of international pilgrimage for over a millennium. Home to more than one hundred temples, the entire range is considered a Buddhist paradise on earth, and has received visitors ranging from emperors to monastic and lay devotees. Mount Wutai explores how Qing Buddhist rulers and clerics from Inner Asia, including Manchus, Tibetans, and Mongols, reimagined the mountain as their own during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wen-Shing Chou examines a wealth of original source materials in multiple languages and media--many never before published or translated--such as temple replicas, pilgrimage guides, hagiographic representations, and panoramic maps. She shows how literary, artistic, and architectural depictions of the mountain permanently transformed the site's religious landscape and redefined Inner Asia's relations with China. Chou addresses the pivotal but previously unacknowledged history of artistic and intellectual exchange between the varying religious, linguistic, and cultural traditions of the region. The reimagining of Mount Wutai was a fluid endeavor that proved central to the cosmopolitanism of the Qing Empire, and the mountain range became a unique site of shared diplomacy, trade, and religious devotion between different constituents, as well as a spiritual bridge between China and Tibet. A compelling exploration of the changing meaning and significance of one of the world's great religious sites, Mount Wutai offers an important new framework for understanding Buddhist sacred geography.

The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art. Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O'Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

Guide to petroglyphs found in Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. Includes drawings and possible interpretations.

Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy, art theory, and many engrossing examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, sex, web sites, and research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, lively book will engage the public, introductory students, and teachers in the arts.

A compelling examination of one of the most artistically rich and creative African kingdoms Artists from the kingdom of Kongo-a vast swath of Central Africa that today encompasses the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola-were responsible for outstanding creative achievements. With the influx of Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian merchants, missionaries, and explorers, Kongo developed a unique artistic tradition that blended European iconography with powerful indigenous art forms. An initially positive engagement with Europe in the 15th century turned turbulent in the wake of later displacement, civil war, and the slave trade-and many of the artworks created in Kongo reflect the changing times. This comprehensive study is the first major catalogue to explore Kongo's history, art forms, and cultural identity before, during, and after contact with Europe. Objects range from 15th-century "mother-and-child" figures, which reflect a time when Europeans and their Christian motifs were viewed favorably, to fearsome mangaaka, power figures that conveyed strength in the midst of the kingdom's dissolution. Lavishly illustrated with new photography and multiple views of three-dimensional works, this book presents the fascinatingly complex artistic legacy of one of Africa's most storied kingdoms.

In "American Pietas," Ruby C. Tapia reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes's suturing of race, death, and the maternal in "Camera Lucida," Tapia contends that the contradictory essence of the photograph is both as a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection.
Tapia explores the implications of this argument for racialized productions of death and the maternal in the context of specific cultural moments: the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison's and Hollywood's "Beloved"; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California's Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the "Widows of 9/11" in print and televisual journalism.
Taken together, these various visual media texts function in "American Pietas" as cultural artifacts and as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized productions of maternal bodies in contexts of national death and remembering. To engage this network is to ask how and toward what end the racial project of the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for dead. In the spaces between these different maternities, says Tapia, U.S. citizen-subjects are born--and reborn.

"With this guide, students and scholars can locate the impressive plaster casts made from classical Greek and Roman statues and other pieces that were brought to Cornell by A. D. White. They can also search out sculptures, pottery, coins, and functional objects from the ancient world that have been added to Cornell's collections over the years. Many of these antiquities are of high quality and significance. They are invaluable for research and scholarship and for teaching present-day students in fields from classics to art history to Near Eastern studies, anthropology, and city and regional planning." from the Foreword by Hunter R. Rawlings III

A Guide to the Classical Collections of Cornell University gives an overview of the Cornell Classical collections and discusses the history and instructional role played by the H. W. Sage Collection of Casts, an epitome of nineteenth-century scholarship and attitudes toward classical antiquity in the American university. It goes on to illustrate and discuss a selection of pottery, ceramics, sculpture, inscriptions, and Greek and Roman coinage in the Cornell collections. A chapter on "Life and Death in Antiquity" shows how humble objects provide an insight into this aspect of the Greek and Roman world."

In this new book, Jonathan Christie pieces together the fragments of this charming, eccentric and elusive artist's life, gathering together the scraps of information that exist on him, along with an unprecedented amount of examples of his work-approximately 70-for the first time.

The events associated with John F. Kennedy's death are etched into our nation's memory. This fascinating book tells a less familiar part of the story, about a special art exhibition organized by a group of Fort Worth citizens. On November 21, 1963, the Kennedys arrived in Fort Worth around midnight, making their way to Suite 850 of the Hotel Texas. There, installed in their honour, was an intimate exhibition that included works by Monet, Van Gogh, Marin, Eakins, Feininger, and Picasso. Due to the late hour, it was not until the following morning that the couple viewed the exhibition and phoned one of the principal organizers, Ruth Carter Johnson, to offer thanks. Mrs. Kennedy indicated that she wished she could stay longer to admire the beautiful works. The couple was due to depart for Dallas, and the rest is history. This volume reunites the works in this exhibition for the first time and features some previously unpublished images of the hotel room. Essays examine this exhibition from several angles: anecdotal, analytical, cultural, and historical, and include discussions of what the local citizens wished to convey to their distinguished viewers.

From precious jade articles to monumental stone arches, Huizhou salt merchants in Jiangnan lived surrounded by objects in eighteenth-century China. How and why did these businessmen devote themselves to these items? What can we learn about eighteenth-century China by examining the relationship between merchants and objects? Luxurious Networks examines Huizhou salt merchants in the material world of High Qing China to reveal a dynamic interaction between people and objects. The Qianlong emperor purposely used objects to expand his influence in economic and cultural fields. Thanks to their broad networks, outstanding managerial skills, and abundant financial resources, these salt merchants were ideal agents for selecting and producing objects for imperial use. In contrast to the typical caricature of merchants as mimics of the literati, these wealthy businessmen became respected individuals who played a crucial role in the political, economic, social, and cultural world of eighteenth-century China. Their life experiences illustrate the dynamic relationship between the Manchu and Han, central and local, and humans and objects in Chinese history.

The interplay of the local and the global in contemporary Thai art, as artists strive for international recognition and a new meaning of the national. Since the 1990s, Thai contemporary art has achieved international recognition, circulating globally by way of biennials, museums, and commercial galleries. Many Thai artists have shed identification with their nation; but "Thainess" remains an interpretive crutch for understanding their work. In this book, the curator and critic David Teh examines the tension between the global and the local in Thai contemporary art. Writing the first serious study of Thai art since 1992 (and noting that art history and criticism have lagged behind the market in recognizing it), he describes the competing claims to contemporaneity, as staked in Thailand and on behalf of Thai art elsewhere. He shows how the values of the global art world are exchanged with local ones, how they do and don't correspond, and how these discrepancies have been exploited. How can we make sense of globally circulating art without forgoing the interpretive resources of the local, national, or regional context? Teh examines the work of artists who straddle the local and the global, becoming willing agents of assimilation yet resisting homogenization. He describes the transition from an artistic subjectivity couched in terms of national community to a more qualified, postnational one, against the backdrop of the singular but waning sovereignty of the Thai monarchy and sustained political and economic turmoil. Among the national currencies of Thai art that Teh identifies are an agricultural symbology, a Siamese poetics of distance and itinerancy, and Hindu-Buddhist conceptions of charismatic power. Each of these currencies has been converted to a legal tender in global art-signifying sustainability, utopia, the conceptual, and the relational-but what is lost, and what may be gained, in such exchanges?

Exquisite and labor-intensive, phulkari ("floral-work" or "flower-craft") embroideries were originally produced by women in towns and villages across the greater Punjab, a region that today straddles Pakistan and India, from at least the early 19th century into the first decades of the 20th. Phulkaris were made from brightly colored silk thread on rough, earth-toned fabric. When done for domestic use, they functioned primarily as women's wraps at weddings or other important events. Especially following the Punjab's devastating partition in 1947, phulkaris were also produced as commercial exports. Focusing on a group of nineteen stunning works from the collection of Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, Phulkari surveys the genre's fascinating history. This is the first publication outside South Asia specifically on this art form. It also offers significant new information on the craft and its importance to personal, familial, and regional identity in the past and the present.

A remarkable and exhaustive study examining the intertwined histories of pop music and the visual arts, and exploring the exhilarating exchange between art schools and the pop stars that they nurtured (or, occasionally, expelled) How Art Made Pop encompasses the worldwide history of art school rock, and brings the story up to date by surveying recent trends and the practices contemporary of artist-musicians The individuals that populate How Art Made Pop may still have become successful musicians if they hadn't studied art, but the kind of musicians that they became, and the kind of music that they became interested in that was predominantly informed and modified by art school attendance. Where once these musicians would have considered themselves entertainers, they now became artists. And hence what they practiced - i.e. popular music - became an art form, not least because they said it was.