This book marks the culmination of Giancarlo M.G. Scoditti's renowned series of publications on the cultural production of the northern Massim island of Kitawa, Papua New Guinea. It explores how the Nowau 'creators of images' conceive of the way their artistic compositions come about - sketching Kitawan cognitive philosophy and aesthetic practice. Describing how for them images grow like the loops of the Nautilus shell - one of nature's prominant demonstrations of the logarithmic spiral and the golden section - Scoditti's analysis of Kitawan cognitive and artistic principles resonates with Levi-Strauss's work on myth and Kant's notion of the mental schema, and makes a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the 'oral mind'.

In 1573, 712 bales of Chinese silk arrived in New Spain in the cargos of two Manila galleons. The emergence and the subsequent rapid development of this trans-Pacific silk trade reflected the final formation of the global circulation network. The first book-length English-language study focusing on the early modern export of Chinese silk to New Spain from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, An Object of Seduction compares and contrasts the two regions from perspectives of the sericulture development, the widespread circulation of silk fashion, and the government attempts at regulating the use of silk. Xiaolin Duan argues that the increasing demand for silk on the worldwide market on the one hand contributed to the parallel development of silk fashion and sericulture in China and New Spain, and on the other hand created conflicts on imperial regulations about foreign trade and hierarchical systems. Incorporating evidence from local gazetteers, correspondence, manual books, illustrated treatises, and miscellanies, An Object of Seduction explores how the growing desire for and production of raw silk and silk textiles empowered individuals and societies to claim and redefine their positions in changing time and space, thus breaking away from the traditional state control.

This fully revised and updated third edition offers students and artists valuable insights into traditional color theory and its practical application using today's cutting-edge technology. The text is lavishly illustrated, stressing issues of contemporary color use and examining how today's artists and designers are using color in a multitude of mediums in their work. It is the only book that has parity between the male and female artists and designers represented, while containing more multicultural and global examples of art and design than any other text. This book begins with how we see color and its biological basis, progressing to the various theories about color and delving into the psychological meaning of color and its use. There are individual chapters on color use in art and design, as well as global and multicultural color use. One chapter investigates cross cultural life events such as marriages and funerals, while examining the six major religions' conceptual and psychological underpinnings of color use. The final chapter explores the future of color. Contemporary Color is the ideal text for color theory courses, but also for beginning art and design students, no matter what their future major discipline or emphasis may be. It provides the foundation on which to build their career and develop their own personal artistic voice and vision.

Knowing Native Arts brings Nancy Marie Mithlo's Native insider perspective to understanding the significance of Indigenous arts in national and global milieus. These musings, written from the perspective of a senior academic and curator traversing a dynamic and at turns fraught era of Native self-determination, are a critical appraisal of a system that is often broken for Native peoples seeking equity in the arts. Mithlo addresses crucial issues, such as the professionalization of Native arts scholarship, disparities in philanthropy and training, ethnic fraud, and the receptive scope of Native arts in new global and digital realms. This contribution to the field of fine arts broadens the scope of discussions and offers insights that are often excluded from contemporary appraisals.

The complete and unabridged full-color edition First published in 1856, The Grammar of Ornament remains a design classic. Its inspiration came from pioneering British architect and designer Owen Jones (1809-1874), who produced a comprehensive design treatise for the machine age, lavishly illustrated in vivid chromolithographic color. Jones made detailed observations of decorative arts on his travels in Europe, the Middle East, and in his native London, where he studied objects on display at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 and at local museums. His aim was to improve the quality of Western design by changing the habits of Victorian designers, who indiscriminately mixed elements from a wide variety of sources. Jones's resulting study is a comprehensive analysis of styles of ornamental design, presenting key examples ranging from Maori tattoos, Egyptian columns, and Greek borders to Byzantine mosaic, Indian embroidery, and Elizabethan carvings. At once splendidly Victorian and insistently modern, The Grammar of Ornament celebrates objects of beauty from across time periods and continents, and remains an indispensable sourcebook today.

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers-and settlers-into the territories of the old and new worlds. In the twentieth century, abstract expressionism transformed painting to encompass something beyond the visual world, and, later, minimalism and the Land Art movement broadened the genre of landscape art to include sculptural forms and site-specific installations. In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding and reconceptualizing the forms of the genre, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick's tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson's videos to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman's dioramas, this art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity. Shifting Grounds explores themes of presence and absence, survival and vulnerability, memory and commemoration, and power and resistance, illuminating the artists' engagement not only with land and landscape but also with the history of representation itself.

'Even a seasoned art history buff will find new things to discover in this book.' - Hyperallergic 'Fascinating facts and illuminating anecdotes.' - The Art Newspaper The perfect miscellany for every art lover - an essential and engaging collection of facts, figures, and findings about art, artists, and the art world, past and present This extraordinary compendium of compelling facts, figures, and findings gathers and distils obscure and fascinating information about art, artists, and the art world. Fun, surprising, and compelling, in this covetable book you will learn: - which artist's work is stolen most often (Picasso) - names of artists' pets: Fat Fat & Cous-Cous (Louise Nevelson's cats), Giotto and Goya (John Baldessari's dogs) - artist couples (Nancy Rubins and Chris Burden; Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely; Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst) - things artists collect: prosthetic arms and legs (Sophie Calle), glass eyes (Hiroshi Sugimoto) - odd jobs and side hustles: telephone marketer (Tomma Abts), crop duster (James Turrell) - artists who were rejected from art school (Francisco Goya, Auguste Rodin) ... and hundreds of other miscellaneous details. Thoughtfully and thoroughly researched, this intriguing book offers refreshing and surprising perspectives on the world of art. The five page-turning chapters cover: - Artists - Art School - Art Studio - Art Museum - Art World

This edited volume maps dialogues between science and technology studies research on the arts and the emerging field of artistic research. The main themes in the book are an advanced understanding of discursivity and reasoning in arts-based research, the methodological relevance of material practices and things, and innovative ways of connecting, staging, and publishing research in art and academia. This book touches on topics including studies of artistic practices; reflexive practitioners at the boundaries between the arts, science, and technology; non-propositional forms of reasoning; unconventional (arts-based) research methods and enhanced modes of presentation and publication.

Building a beautiful ornamented ‘white canoe’ was a way for the Lau people of Malaita in Solomon Islands to honour the ghosts of their ancestors in the days before they became Christians. This book tells the story of the last of these canoes, built in 1968 by one of the few clans still following their traditional religion, as witnessed by the late anthropologist Pierre Maranda. Maranda observed how the great artistic projects of Malaita were once supported by elaborate ritual procedures and celebrated with community festivals, all richly illustrated here by his photographs. James Tuita was among the Lau boys who played with Maranda’s son and, years later, he visited Quebec to help Maranda with his research. Besides writing the Lau text for this book, he contributes his own acutely felt insights into the radical changes in Lau society during his lifetime and the importance of maintaining its cultural traditions. Ben Burt, a curator at the British Museum, knew Maranda through his own anthropological research in Malaita and worked with James Tuita to ensure that Maranda’s plans for his ethnographic research were realized after his death. It is published, as Maranda intended, in Lau and English languages, to return some of their cultural heritage to the people of Lau, Malaita and Solomon Islands.

A compelling blend of art history, social analysis, and personal testimony, "Creative Collectives" presents a new paradigm for understanding Chicana/o studies. By following the artistic and ideological journeys of two groups of northern California Chicana artists, MarA-a Ochoa argues that the women involved in these collectives created complex images whose powerful visual social commentary sprang from the daily experiences of their lives.

Ochoa's artistic narrative first focuses on Mujeres Muralistas, a pathbreaking San Francisco group of mural painters organized in the early 1970s at the height of the Chicana/o Movement. The story then turns its attention to Co-Madres Artistas, a group of artists who came together in the 1990s after spending decades tending their families, becoming successful in their careers, and launching key Chicana/o cultural institutions in the Sacramento Valley. Ochoa tells the stories of the individual members of these collectives to show how they combined art and activism.

Through an innovative application of oral history interviews, a fascinating compilation of individual and collective stories emerges. Creative Collectives is notable for its skillful weaving of personal recollections, representational analysis of mural and easel painting, and social movement narration.

First published in 1917, On Collecting Japanese-Prints is meant to assist the amateur who has started a collection for the first time, or the person who, while not actually a collector, is sufficiently interested to read about the subject, yet finds the more exhaustive and advanced works thereon somewhat beyond them. How to distinguish forgeries and imitations; what prices should be given; what examples can still be obtained, are some of the questions which the writer has attempted to answer. The following chapters being primarily written for the beginner, artists whose work is very rare, or whose prints they are unlikely to come across in their search for examples, are not mentioned, unless where necessary from a historical or artistic point of view.

This volume explores the relationship between oneiric and historical episodes of atrocity as depicted in transnational twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, film, literature and theatre. Examining the political and aesthetic power harnessed by dreams in increasingly 'dark times', it takes as its starting point the overlooked significance granted to the oneiric beyond Freudian psychoanalysis. By reading the oneiric within variously known cultural texts - including Holocaust fiction, world cinema, Bronx theatre, surrealist art and two collections of wartime dream transcriptions - the volume also offers a renewed perspective on modern and contemporary trauma. In so doing, it demonstrates the relevance of the oneiric, beyond the interpretative framework of psychoanalysis, as an aesthetic and political tool with which to alert us and respond to the violence of our contemporary world. -- .

This book is a unique study which offers new perspectives on contemporary Islamic iconography and the use of imageries in ritual contexts. The representation of prophets and saints in Islam is erroneously considered nonexistent by many scholars of Islam, Muslims, and the general public. The issue is often dealt with superficially without attention to its deep roots in piety and religiosity. "Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shiism" offers new understanding of Islamic iconography and Muslim perspectives on the use of imageries in ritual contexts and devotional life. Combining iconographic and ethnographic approaches, Ingvild Flaskerud introduces and analyzes imageries (tile-paintings, posters and wall-hangings), ritual contexts and interviews with male and female local viewers to discuss the representation, reception and function of imageries in contemporary Iranian Shia environments. This book presents the argument that images and decorative programmes have stimulating qualities to mentally evoke the saints in the minds of devotees and inspire their recollection, transforming emotions and stimulating cultic behaviours. Visualization and seeing are significant to the dissemination of religious knowledge, the understanding of spiritual and ethical values, the promotion of personal piety, and functions as modes of venerating God and the saints.

A system of myths, symbols, and rituals, dating back to the Paleolithic and Neolithic, survives in present-day imagery. In exploring this system, special attention is drawn to the linkage between ancient and contemporary civilizations of Eurasia and Mesoamerica, as seen in their cosmology, and expressed in common mythological and iconographic themes. The author examines contemporary Middle American and eastern European textiles, especially women's garments, that contain an elaborated sacred code of symbols, and include remnants of the four horizontal directions, and the three vertical worlds that portray the structure of the universe. The cosmology contained in patterns around the world denotes striking parallels that attest to internal connections between different cultures, beyond time and place.

What is the significance of the visual representation of revolution? How is history articulated through public images? How can these images communicate new histories of struggle? Imprints of Revolution highlights how revolutions and revolutionary moments are historically constructed and locally contextualized through the visual. It explores a range of spatial and temporal formations to illustrate how movements are articulated, reconstituted, and communicated. The collective work illustrates how the visual serves as both a mobilizing and demobilizing force in the wake of globalization. Radical performances, cultural artefacts, architectural and fashion design as well as social and print media are examples of the visual mediums analysed as alternative archives that propose new understandings of revolution. The volume illustrates how revolution remains significant in visually communicating and articulating social change with the ability to transform our contemporary understanding of local, national, and transnational spaces and processes.

One of the most magnificent and enduring themes in Chinese painting history can be found depicted in Daoist temples from the local village up to the very capital, viz., the paintings of the Heavenly Court (chaoyuan tu). Surprisingly, its images have remained largely unstudied in Western scholarship. Drawing on a comparative study of four complete sets of wall paintings dating back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (the oldest examples), and their related images, painting criticism, stele inscriptions, and Daoist ritual manuals, the author offers the first comprehensive study of the historical development, iconography, ritual context, methods of mural design, and the personalisations made by patrons of the four Heavenly Court paintings.

A new, updated and expanded edition of this classic survey on the history of Caribbean art, featuring the work of over 100 artists from the period of colonialism to the present day. Caribbean Art presents and discusses the diverse, fascinating and highly accomplished work of Caribbean artists, whether indigenous or from the diaspora, popular or 'high' culture, rural or urban based, politically radical or religious. This expanded edition has a new preface, and has been updated to reflect on recent challenges to the ideological premises and institutions of conventional art-historical practice and their connections to histories of colonialism, Eurocentricity and race. Two new chapters focus on public monuments linked to the history of the Caribbean, and the intersections between art and tourism, raising important questions about cultural representation. Featuring the work of internationally recognized artists such as Sonia Boyce, Christopher Cozier, Wifredo Lam, Ana Mendieta, Ebony G. Patterson, Herve Telemaque, and more than 100 others working across a variety of media, this new edition makes an important contribution to the understanding of Caribbean art and its context, in ways that invite and encourage further explorations on the subject.

In A Grand Materialism in the New Art from China, Mary Bittner Wiseman shows that material matters in the work of Chinese artists, where the goal is to call attention to its subjects through the directness and immediacy of its material, like dust from 9/11, 1001 Chinese citizens, paintings made with gunpowder, written words, or the specificity of its sites, like the Three Gorges Dam. Artists are working below the level of language where matter and gesture, texture and touch, instinct and intuition live. Not reduced to the words applied to them, art's subjects appear in their concrete particularity, embedded in the stories of their materials or their sites. Wiseman argues that it is global in being able to be understood by all, as are the materials in the new art and the stories that accompany them: here are items from Song Dong's mother's home in the Cultural Revolution, here is dust from 6/11.Finally, it satisfies Arthur Danto's characterization of art asany representation that shows something new about its subject or puts it in a new light, by way of a rhetorical figure that the viewer interprets. Danto has given criteria for a given work's making the case for itself hat it is art. The material art from China is the paradigm for an art that is global and contemporary.