The Cambridge Illustrated History of China is an illuminating account of the full sweep of Chinese civilisation - from prehistoric times to the intellectual ferment of the Warring States Period, through the rise and fall of the imperial dynasties, to the modern communist state. Written by a leading scholar and lavishly illustrated, its narrative draws together everything from the influence of key intellectual figures, to political innovations, art and material culture, family and religious life, not to mention wars and modern conflicts. This third revised edition includes new archaeological discoveries and gives fuller treatment of environmental history and Chinese interaction with the wider world, placing China in global context. The Qing dynasty is now covered in two chapters, while the final chapter brings the story into the twenty-first century, covering the transformation of China into one of the world's leading economies and the challenges it faces. Lively and highly visual, this book will be appreciated by anyone interested in Chinese history.

In Mughal Occidentalism, Mika Natif elucidates the meaningful and complex ways in which Mughal artists engaged with European art and techniques from the 1580s-1630s. Using visual and textual sources, this book argues that artists repurposed Christian and Renaissance visual idioms to embody themes from classical Persian literature and represent Mughal policy, ideology and dynastic history. A reevaluation of illustrated manuscripts and album paintings incorporating landscape scenery, portraiture, and European objects demonstrates that the appropriation of European elements was highly motivated by Mughal concerns. This book aims to establish a better understanding of cross-cultural exchange from the Mughal perspective by emphasizing the agency of local artists active in the workshops of Emperors Akbar and Jahangir.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women's work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their "war stories." Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.

The bead played a vital role in Pueblo Indian jewelry design, and its influence continues today in modernist American design. In these pages, featuring more than 250 breathtaking photos, renowned expert Baxter integrates her decades of research with updated findings. Beads were made in the prehistoric American Southwest by the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians, and survived into the historic era. Bead jewelry creations in shell, stone, and silver are important in the Native American jewelry marketplace. This book revisits some leading misconceptions about Pueblo jewelry-making in the existing literature. A survey of modern Pueblo jewelry innovation confirms that its design is second to none, and discusses how Pueblo design meshed with American mid-century modernist expression. Today's Pueblo jewelers, also featured here, continue to offer invention and originality.

Seeing the Inside is the first detailed study of one of the world's great visual art traditions and its role in the society that produces it. The bark painting of Aboriginal artists in western Arnhem Land is the product of a unique tradition of many thousands of years' duration. In recent years it has attracted enormous interest in the rest of Australia and beyond, with the result that the artists, who live primarily as hunters in this relatively secluded region of northern Australia, now paint for sale to the world art market.
Though the richness and power of Aboriginal arts are now, belatedly, finding wide recognition, they remain insufficiently understood. In this thoroughly illustrated book Luke Taylor examines the creative methods of the bark painters and the cultural meaning of their work. He discusses, on the one hand, the arrangements which allow the artists to project their culture onto an international stage, and on the other, the continuing social and religious roles of their paintings within their own society. The result is a remarkable and fascinating picture of artistic creativity in a changing world.

This book offers a reassessment of how "matter" - in the context of art history, criticism, and architecture - pursued a radical definition of "multiplicity", against the dominant and hierarchical tendencies underwriting post-fascist Japan. Through theoretical analysis of works by artists and critics such as Okamoto Taro, Hanada Kiyoteru, Kawara On, Isozaki Arata, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, and Nakahira Takuma, this highly illustrated text identifies formal oppositions frequently evoked in the Japanese avant-garde, between cognition and image, self and other, human and thing, and one and many, in mediums ranging from painting and photography, to sculpture and architecture. In addition to an "aesthetics of separation" which refuses the integrationist implications of the human, the author proposes the "anthropofugal" - meaning fleeing the human - as an original concept through which to understand matter in the epistemic universe of the postwar Japanese avant-garde. Chapters in this publication offer critical insights into how artists and critics grounded their work in active disengagement, to advance an ethics of nondominance. Avant-Garde Art and Nondominant Thought in Postwar Japan will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese studies, art history, and visual cultures more widely.

The iconic masks of the Italian commedia dell'arte-Harlequin, Pierrot, Colombina, Pulcinella, and others-have been vagabonding the roads of Russian cultural history for more than three centuries. This book explores how these masks, and the artistic principles of the commedia dell'arte that they embody, have profoundly affected the Russian artistic imagination, providing a source of inspiration for leading Russian artists as diverse as nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Gogol, modernist theater director Evgenii Vakhtangov, Vladimir Nabokov, and the empress of Russian popular culture Alla Pugacheva. The author presents a new perspective on this topic, showing how the commedia dell'arte has nourished a rich cultural tradition in Russia.

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, Experiments in Exile charts a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, it argues that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, it shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.

The Making of A Modern Art World explores the artistic institutions and discursive practices prevailing in Republican Shanghai, aiming to reconstruct the operational logic and the stratified hierarchy of Shanghai's art world. Using guohua as the point of entry, this book interrogates the discourse both of guohua itself, and the wider discourse of Chinese modernism in the visual arts. In the light of the sociological definition of 'art world', this book contextualizes guohua through focusing on the modes of production and consumption of painting in Shanghai, examining newly adopted modern artistic practices, namely, art associations, periodicals, art colleges, exhibitions, and the art market.

This commentary on the Chinese masterpiece, The Classic of Tea, offers a fascinating perspective on this ancient pastime and art. The Classic of Tea, the first known monograph on tea in the world, was written in the 8th century by Lu Yu who devoted his entire life to the study of tea and is respected as the Sage of Tea. Wu Juenong, an agronomist and economist specializing in agriculture, has studied tea all his life. This book is the culmination of lifelong research on Chinese tea culture and history, introducing the readers to modern findings of effects and properties of tea, types of tea preparations, the evolution of tea growing regions and tea drinking customs across China, in addition to extensive annotation. Both scholarly and informative, An Illustrated Modern Reader of 'The Classic of Tea' has been acclaimed as a New Classic of Tea. An Illustrated Modern Reader of 'The Classic of Tea' also includes vivid illustrations and pictures of tools and utensils for the making and drinking of tea, either hand-drawn or collected by him, which the original The Classic of Tea lacked. Selected Chinese traditional paintings in the book illuminate the elegant art of brewing and drinking tea, the social rituals associated with tea drinking, and the reformative and cultural significance of tea ceremonies.

In Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs Fourth Edition, scholar C.A.S. Williams offers concise explanations of the important symbols and motifs relevant to Chinese literature, arts and crafts, and architecture. This reference book has been a standard among students of Chinese culture and history since 1941 and, in its Fourth Edition, has been completely reset with Pinyin pronunciation of Chinese names and words. Organized alphabetically, enhanced by over 400 illustrations, and clearly written for accessibility across a variety of fields, this book not only explains symbols and motifs essential to any designer, art collector, or historian, but delves into ancient customs in religion, food, agriculture, and medicine. Some of the symbols and motifs explicated are: The Eight Immortals, The Five Elements, The Dragon, The Phoenix, Yin and Yang. With Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs, you can access hidden insights into the intentions behind works of Chinese craftsmanship, and the thorough explanations of each symbol, accompanied by the historical origins from which they arose, will complement your existing knowledge of any area of Chinese culture, or help you confidently explore new topics within the realm of Asian art and history.

Chinese-Islamic studies have concentrated thus far on the arts of earlier periods with less attention paid to works from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). This book focuses on works of Chinese-Islamic art from the late seventeenth century to the present day and bring to the reader's attention several new areas for consideration. The book examines glass wares which were probably made for a local Chinese-Muslim clientele, illustrating a fascinating mixture of traditional Chinese and Muslim craft traditions. While the inscriptions on them can be related directly to the mosque lamps of the Arab world, their form and style of decoration is characteristically that of Han Chinese. Several contemporary Chinese Muslim artists have succeeded in developing a unique fusion of calligraphic styles from both cultures. Other works examined include enamels, porcelains, and interior painted snuff bottles, with emphasis on either those with Arabic inscriptions, or on works by Chinese Muslim artists. The book includes a chapter written by Dr. Shelly Xue and an addendum written by Dr. Riccardo Joppert. This book will appeal to scholars working in art history, religious studies, Chinese studies, Chinese history, religious history, and material culture.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art explores the effects of Queensland government policies on urban First Nation artists. While such art has often been misinterpreted as derivative lesser copies of 'true' Indigenous works, this book unveils new histories and understandings about the mixed legacy left for Queensland Indigenous artists. Gretchen Stolte uses rich ethnographic detail to illuminate how both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists understand and express their heritage. She specifically focuses on artwork at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art studio in the Tropical North Queensland College of Technical and Further Education (TNQT TAFE), Cairns. Stolte's ethnography further develops methodologies in art history and anthropology by identifying additional methods for understanding how art is produced and meaning is created.

Redraws the contours of Asian American art, attempting to free it from a categorization that stifles more than it reveals. Charting its historical conditions and the expansive contexts of its emergence, Susette Min challenges the notion of Asian American art as a site of reconciliation or as a way for marginalized artists to enter into the canon or mainstream art scene. Pressing critically on the politics of visibility and how this categorization reduces artworks by Asian American artists within narrow parameters of interpretation, Unnamable reconceives Asian American art not as a subset of objects, but as a medium that disrupts representations and embedded knowledge. By approaching Asian American art in this way, Min refigures the way we see Asian American art as an oppositional practice, less in terms of its aspirations to be seen-its greater visibility-and more in terms of how it models a different way of seeing and encountering the world. Uniquely presented, the chapters are organized thematically as mini-exhibitions, and offer readings of select works by contemporary artists including Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Simon Leung, Mary Lum, and Nikki S. Lee. Min displays a curatorial practice and reading method that conceives of these works not as "exemplary" instances of Asian American art, but as engaged in an aesthetic practice that is open-ended. Ultimately, Unnamable insists that in order to reassess Asian American art and its place in art history, we need to let go not only of established viewing practices, but potentially even the category of Asian American art itself.

'Timed out' is a pioneering study of modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire. It addresses the current 'global turn' in the study of art by way of the transnational Caribbean, offering an in-depth account of the Atlantic world in relation to the mainstream history of art. It looks at why art of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora have been placed not only 'outside' but 'behind' the dominant art canons, and how the politics of space and time can be used to rethink the global geography of art. This is an essential addition to the growing field of 'world art studies', bringing concerns around temporality together with cross-cultural issues and debates. It shows how art and artists of the Caribbean have encountered and challenged the charges of belatedness, anachronism, provincialism and marginalisation that are fundamental to the time-space logic of art history. -- .

This unique book presents an integrated approach to the chemistry of art materials, exploring the many chemical processes involved. The Chemistry and Mechanism of Art Materials: Unsuspected Properties and Outcomes engages readers with historical vignettes detailing examples of unexpected outcomes due to materials used by known artists. The book discusses artists' materials focusing on relevant chemical mechanisms which underlie the synthesis and deterioration of inorganic pigments in paintings, the ageing of the binder in oil paintings, and sulfation of wall paintings as well as the toxicology of these pigments and solvents used by artists. Mechanisms illustrate the stepwise structural transformation of a variety of art materials. Based on the author's years of experience teaching college chemistry, the approach is descriptive and non-mathematical throughout. An introductory section includes a review of basic concepts and provides concise descriptions of analytical methods used in contemporary art conservation. Additional features include: Illustrations of chemical reactivity associated with art materials Includes a review of chemical bonding principles, redox and mechanism writing Covers analytical techniques used by art conservation scientists Accessible for readers with a limited science background Provides numerous references for readers seeking additional information

Amaze your friends and family with these easy-to-fold paper sculptures! This beginner-friendly kit contains everything you need to learn the art of Japanese paper folding! It teaches you how to create 30 of the most popular origami models (including ones with "interactive" moving parts!)--from animals, puppets, boxes and boats to the classic crane. The 30 elegant and easy-to-fold origami models in this kit include: Cute animals like the Folksy Fox and Lounging Frog--that your family will love! Action figures like the Dragon Puppet and Coyote Storyteller--paper puppets that "talk"! Paper airplanes like the High-tail-it Plane--give them a toss and watch them soar! Origami boxes such as the Bird Basket and Handy Candy Box--perfect for storing small trinkets and for presenting small gifts! And many more! The kit includes 78 sheets of beautiful origami paper in two sizes (6" and 4") plus a 64-page full-color book with easy-to-follow instructions to guide you through the projects.

Sandpainting has it origin in the religious tradition and practice of the Navajo people. It forms a central part of their religious chants, being a place where Earth People and Holy People come into harmony, giving healing and protection. Sandpainting is understood as being very powerful, and for many years it was deemed unwise and even dangerous not to erase the paintings when the ritual was completed. In the course of the twentieth century this attitude has modified allowing for many representations to be made, while still not violating the religious traditions. Sandpainting thus have come to be an internationally appreciated and collected art form. In this newly revised and expanded volume, over 400 sandpaintings are illustrated in full color. They range from the most traditional to the new forms that are being developed today. The sandpaintings are organized by artist, making this an important reference for collectors.

How museums' visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulation Sarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulation-capitalist, colonial, and racial-than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation," usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation. Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the American drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of this accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.

The book investigates the aesthetic theology embedded in the Franciscan artistic tradition. The novelty of the approach is in applying concepts gleaned from Franciscan textual sources to create a deeper understanding of how art in all its sensual forms was foundational to the Franciscan milieu. Chapters range from studies of statements about aesthetics and the arts in theological textual sources to examples of visual, auditory, and tactile arts communicating theological ideas found in texts. The essays cover not only European art and textual sources, but also Franciscan influences in the Americas found in both texts and artifacts.

Winner of the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association The Benue River Valley is the source of some of the most abstract, dramatic, and inventive sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa. A vast region, the Valley extends from the heart of present-day Nigeria eastward to its border with Cameroon, and is home to a large number of ethnic and linguistic groups, all of whom have produced sculptures that are remarkable for their variety. This book brings together figurative wood sculptures and ceramic vessels, masks, and elaborate bronze and iron regalia drawn from public and private collections in Europe and the United States, selected to exemplify important typologies within the region, along with many historical photographs. The 18 contributors demonstrate that the stylistic tendencies were constantly evolving due to cultural exchanges, mutual influences, and other points of contact in an area that like the Benue River itself was historically in a state of flux. These objects speak to us not only through their superb formal qualities but also through the circumstances of their being rooted in a turbulent past, situated between war and colonization.

Much has changed in the world of folk art since the millennium. Many of the recognized ""masters"" have died and new artists have emerged. Many galleries have closed but few new ones have opened, as artists and dealers increasingly sell through websites and social media. The growth and popularity of auction houses has altered the relationship between artists and collectors. In its third edition, this book provides updated information on artists, galleries, museums, auctions, organizations and publications for both experienced and aspiring collectors of self-taught, outsider and folk art. Gallery and museum entries are organized geographically and alphabetically by state and city.

A Revolution in Movement is the first book to illuminate how collaborations between dancers and painters shaped Mexico's postrevolutionary cultural identity. K. Mitchell Snow traces this relationship throughout nearly half a century of developments in Mexican dance-the emulation of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the 1920s, the adoption of U.S.-style modern dance in the 1940s, and the creation of ballet-inspired folk dance in the 1960s.Snow describes the appearances in Mexico by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and Spanish concert dancer Tortola Valencia, who helped motivated Mexico to express its own national identity through dance. He discusses the work of muralists and other visual artists in tandem with Mexico's theatrical dance world, including Diego Rivera's collaborations with ballet composer Carlos Chavez; Carlos Merida's leadership of the National School of Dance; Jose Clemente Orozco's involvement in the creation of the Ballet de la Ciudad de Mexico; and Miguel Covarrubias, who led the "golden age" of Mexican modern dance. Snow draws from a rich trove of historical newspaper accounts and other contemporary documents to show how these collaborations produced an image of modern Mexico that would prove popular both locally and internationally and continues to endure today.

* Offers readers information about the current growth in museum-based art therapy and wellness through the contributions of authors with various experience and approaches in the US and Canada museums * Includes chapter examples of successful museum art therapy and wellness initiatives by authors who have worked in the field of museum art therapy and wellness in the past decade, and who have implemented art therapy and wellness projects of significant depth and scope in museums * In addition to at therapy students, it serves as a resource for new museum-based teaching artists, museum administrators and executive staff interested in implementing cutting edge art therapy, health and wellness programming in cultural institutions, to engage communities of all abilities in arts-based inclusive educational and wellness programs

Originally published in 1950, this book shows that the religious and ethical values that St. Francis was striving after are as essential today as they were in his time. The book presents St. Francis as a complex personality and corrects the rather mawkish interpretation of certain legends. It deals with the environment and development of the saint's personality and chapters from his biographies by Thomas of Celano or St. Bonaventure and many black and white plates illustrating them which are reproductions of paintings by Italian masters from the XIIIth to the late XVth century.