From the remote shores of Rapa Nui to the dense rainforest of Papua New Guinea, the islands of the Pacific are home to some of the most culturally diverse populations on the planet. The region embraces an extraordinary range of art forms, from delicate shell ornaments to spectacularly decorated canoes and meeting houses. These have fascinated outsiders since the exploratory voyages of Captain Cook, the first of which commenced 250 years ago in 1768, and went on to entrance Gauguin and a host of other European artists. This volume accompanies a major survey in London and Paris of art from Oceania. It brings together the most up-to-date scholarship by the leading experts in the field, encompassing a dazzling array of objects from the region, including many that have never been published before. Also included are many works that have historically been overlooked, such as painted and woven textiles, elaborate wicker assemblages and expressively sculpted vessels, alongside works by artists working in Oceania today. Objects of great aesthetic beauty, these artworks are the product of a complex web of social, mythological and historical influences.

This pack contains 500 high-quality origami sheets printed with delicate and cheerful cherry blossom designs. These colorful origami papers were developed to enhance the creative work of origami artists and paper crafters. The pack contains 12 unique designs, and all of the papers are printed with coordinating colors on the reverse to provide aesthetically pleasing combinations in origami models that show both the front and back. There's enough paper here to assemble amazing modular origami sculptures, distribute to students for a class project, or put to a multitude of other creative uses. This origami paper pack includes: 500 sheets of high-quality origami paper 12 unique designs Bright, vibrant colors Double-sided color 4 x 4 inch (10 cm) squares

More than 130 works from the collection assembled by Drs Nicole and John Dintenfass over fifty years. The Dintenfass Collection serves as a model and a source of inspiration for new and seasoned collectors alike. A different slant on collecting which is not actually just buying from dealers. A lavishly illustrated book that traces the origin of a collector's interest in African art and analyses the psychological aspects driving the passions for collecting. The Nicole and John Dintenfass Collection is well known and based on aesthetics, and the works have been reproduced in many publications. They have collected with passion, diligence, depth and rigor monumental sculptures and wooden miniatures, from most regions of Africa. Focusing on pieces of the highest artistic quality, this book shares the collectors' personal point of view about collecting and offers to readers anecdotes that provide an additional insight into this world to future and present collectors in their search for African art. Collecting is a passion that often leads to intimate inner conversations or to emotional experiences with the objects themselves. Moreover many collectors share their unique experience of joy and appreciation with twentieth-century artists who also collected African art and who generously imparted advice, suggestions and support in responding to the collectors' enthusiasm. Thanks to the multiple beautiful and sensitive photographs of each object, the viewer has a chance to form an intimate conversation that creates a connection with those African master carvers that have strongly influenced modern realism, cubism and expressionism.

A glimpse into the markets, crafts, and signage of early modern Japan Kanban are the traditional signs Japanese merchants displayed on the street to advertise their presence, represent the products and services to be found inside their shops, and lend a sense of individuality to the shops themselves. Created from wood, bamboo, iron, paper, fabric, gold leaf, and lacquer, these unique objects evoke the frenetic market scenes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan, where merchants created a multifaceted world of symbol and meaning designed to engage the viewer and entice the customer. Kanban provides a tantalizing look at this distinctive fusion of art and commerce. This beautifully illustrated book traces the history of shop signs in Japan, examines how they were created, and explores some of the businesses and trades they advertised. Some kanban are elongated panels of lacquered wood painted with elegant calligraphy and striking images, while others are ornately carved representative sculptures of munificent deities or carp climbing waterfalls. There are oversized functional Buddhist prayer beads, and everyday objects such as tobacco pipes, shoes, combs, and writing brushes. The book also includes archival photographs of market life in "old Japan," woodblock prints of bustling marketplaces, and images of the goods advertised with these intricate and beguiling objects. Providing a look into a unique, handmade world, Kanban offers new insights into Japan's commercial and artistic roots, the evolution of trade, the links between commerce and entertainment, and the emergence of mass consumer culture. Exhibition schedule: Mingei International Museum, San Diego April 15-October 15, 2017

How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects-radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism-abstract, non-objective art-to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful. With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.

In this book, Xiaolong Wu offers a comprehensive and in-depth study of the Zhongshan state during China's Warring States Period (476-221 BCE). Analyzing artefacts, inscriptions, and grandiose funerary structures within a broad archaeological context, he illuminates the connections between power and identity, and the role of material culture in asserting and communicating both. The author brings an interdisciplinary approach to this study. He combines and cross-examines all available categories of evidence, including archaeological, textual, art historical, and epigraphical, enabling innovative interpretations and conclusions that challenge conventional views regarding Zhongshan and ethnicity in ancient China. Wu reveals the complex relationship between material culture, cultural identity, and statecraft intended by the royal patrons. He demonstrates that the Zhongshan king Cuo constructed a hybrid cultural identity, consolidated his power, and aimed to maintain political order at court after his death through the buildings, sculpture, and inscriptions that he commissioned.

What role did Chinese art play in the poetic development of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens? How could they share Chinese artists' Dao, an aesthetic held to be beyond verbal representation? In this sequel to his critically acclaimed study Orientalism and Modernism, Zhaoming Qian investigates the ways in which these three modernist poets received Chinese artistic notions and assimilated them into their literary masterpieces. With forty rare and previously unpublished photographs presented with accompanying analysis, this study reconstructs the three poets' dialogue with the Chinese masters.

In addition to examining Canto 49, "Nine Nectarines," and "Six Significant Landscapes," by Pound, Moore, and Stevens, respectively, Qian provides indispensable historical and cultural material never before recorded in a single work. The Modernist Response to Chinese Art pays long-overdue attention to the role of several early collections of Chinese art in England and America; it clarifies some common misconceptions about Confucianism and Daoism; it identifies in the modernist poets both linkage to and revolt against their predecessors'--and peers'--hegemonic Orientalism; and it intensifies awareness of modernist Orientalism not as a monolithic and constant conception but as a slippery and shifting process.

Zhaoming Qian, Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, is the author of Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams and the editor of Ezra Pound and China.

Analyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of a multifaceted transnational modernism. While the work of diverse, major Egyptian artists during this era may have appeared to be secular, she argues, it reflected the subtle but essential inflection of Islam, as a faith, history, and lived experience, in the overarching development of Middle Eastern modernity. Challenging typical views of modernism in art history as solely Euro-American, and expanding the conventional periodization of Islamic art history, Seggerman theorizes a "constellational modernism" for the emerging field of global modernism. Rather than seeing modernism in a generalized, hyperconnected network, she finds that art and artists circulated in distinct constellations that encompassed finite local and transnational relations. Such constellations, which could engage visual systems both along and beyond the Nile, from Los Angeles to Delhi, were materialized in visual culture that ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to photography and prints. Based on extensive research in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, this richly illustrated book poses a compelling argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism.

HOKUSAI'S BRUSH is a companion to the Freer Gallery of Art's yearlong exhibition that celebrates the artist's fruitful career. The Freer, home to the world's largest collection of paintings by Japanese artist, Katsushika Hokusai, has put on view for the first time in a decade his incredible and rarely seen sketches, drawings and paintings. Together with essays that explore his life and career, HOKUSAI'S BRUSH offers an in-depth breakdown of each painting, providing amazing commentary that highlight Hokusai's mastery and detail. While best known for his woodblock print series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" and particularly the widely recognisable "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," Hokusai is said to have produced 30,000 pieces of art. He lived until he was ninety years old and his last words were reportedly to say that if heaven were to grant him another five or ten years, then he could become a true painter. Every stunning page of HOKUSAI'S BRUSH is a testament to the humility of that statement, emphasising his artistry and skill, the likes of which shaped the Impressionist movement by inspiring artists such as Monet, Degas and van Gogh.

Making Believe responds to a remarkable flowering of art by Mennonites in Canada. After the publication of his first novel in 1962, Rudy Wiebe was the only identifiable Mennonite literary writer in the country. Beginning in the 1970s, the numbers grew rapidly and now include writers Patrick Friesen, Sandra Birdsell, Di Brandt, Sarah Klassen, Armin Wiebe, David Bergen, Miriam Toews, Carrie Snyder, Casey Plett, and many more. A similar renaissance is evident in the visual arts (including artists Gathie Falk, Wanda Koop, and Aganetha Dyck) and in music (including composers Randolph Peters, Carol Ann Weaver, and Stephanie Martin). Confronted with an embarrassment of riches that resist survey, Magdalene Redekop opts for the use of case studies to raise questions about Mennonites and art. Part criticism, part memoir, Making Believe argues that there is no such thing as Mennonite art. At the same time, her close engagement with individual works of art paradoxically leads Redekop to identify a Mennonite sensibility at play in the space where artists from many cultures interact. Constant questioning and commitment to community are part of the Mennonite dissenting tradition. Although these values come up against the legacy of radical Anabaptist hostility to art, Redekop argues that the Early Modern roots of a contemporary crisis of representation are shared by all artists. Making Believe posits a Spielraum or play space in which all artists are dissembling tricksters, but differences in how we play are inflected by where we come from. The close readings in this book insist on respect for difference at the same time as they invite readers to find common ground while making believe across cultures.

This pack contains 500 high-quality origami sheets printed with bright and cheerful flower patterns. These colorful origami papers were developed to enhance the creative work of origami artists and paper crafters. The pack contains 12 unique designs, and all of the papers are printed with coordinating colors on the reverse to provide aesthetically pleasing combinations in origami models that show both the front and back. This origami paper pack includes: 500 sheets of high-quality origami paper 12 unique designs Bright, vibrant colors Double-sided color 6 x 6 inch (15 cm) squares Step-by-step instructions for 6 easy-to-fold origami projects

Enter the vivid world of manga and anime art, with its unique aesthetic and unmistakably rendered characters. The latest in the popular Sketching from the Imagination series, Anime captures the work of 50 artists as they put their own spin on this intriguing style and share the inspiration, processes, and techniques that brought their imaginary manga creations to life.

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.

Buddhist temples in Southeast Asia are centres for the preservation of local artistic traditions. Chief among these are manuscripts, a vital source for our understanding of Buddhist ideas and practices in the region. They are also a beautiful art form, too little understood in the West. The British Library has one of the richest collections of Southeast Asian manuscripts, principally from Thailand and Burma, anywhere in the world. It includes finely painted copies of Buddhist scriptures, literary works, historical narratives, and works on traditional medicine, law, cosmology and fortune-telling. This stunning new book illustrates over 100 examples of Buddhist art in the Library's collection, relating each manuscript to Theravada tradition and beliefs, and introducing the historical, artistic and religious contexts of their production. It is the first book in English to showcase the beauty and variety of manuscript art and reproduces many works that have never been photographed before.

The rock paintings and engravings of southern Africa have long been considered obscure, yet research has managed since to piece together that message, and we now know that this beautiful and detailed art tells us about the religious experiences of the San (bushmen) who made it: centuries ago the San believed that the art carried messages from the spirit world. This book traces the story behind that research, how it started, its failures and successes, and some of its debates, linking the art to the people who made it.

While most famously associated with numerous mid-century architects, Brutalism was a style of visual art that was also adopted by painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers. Taking into account Brutalist work by eminent artists such as Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, as well as lesser-known practitioners like Nigel Henderson and Magda Cordell , this volume focuses on a ten-year period between 1952 and 1962 when artists refused a programmatic set of aesthetics and began experimenting with images that had no set focal point, using non-traditional materials like bombsite debris in their work, and producing objects that were characterized by wit and energy along with anxiety, trauma, and melancholia. This original study offers insights into how Brutalism enabled British artists of the mid-20th century to respond ethically and aesthetically to the challenges posed by the rise of consumer culture and unbridled technological progress.

One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism. To illuminate why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, Boone deploys a supple mode of analysis that reveals how the cultural exchanges between Middle East and West have always been reciprocal and often mutual, amatory as well as bellicose. Whether examining European accounts of Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman homoerotic genres and their European imitators, or unlocking the homoerotic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable study models an ethics of crosscultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today. A contribution to studies in visual culture as well as literary and social history, The Homoerotics of Orientalism draws on primary sources ranging from untranslated Middle Eastern manuscripts and European belles-lettres to miniature paintings and photographic erotica that are presented here for the first time.

'A truly transformative read' Sunday Times STYLE 'More than ever, we need books like this' Jessica Seaton, Co-Founder of Toast and author of Gather, Cook, Feast A whole new way of looking at the world - and your life - inspired by centuries-old Japanese wisdom. Wabi sabi ("wah-bi sah-bi") is a captivating concept from Japanese aesthetics, which helps us to see beauty in imperfection, appreciate simplicity and accept the transient nature of all things. With roots in zen and the way of tea, the timeless wisdom of wabi sabi is more relevant than ever for modern life, as we search for new ways to approach life's challenges and seek meaning beyond materialism. Wabi sabi is a refreshing antidote to our fast-paced, consumption-driven world, which will encourage you to slow down, reconnect with nature, and be gentler on yourself. It will help you simplify everything, and concentrate on what really matters. From honouring the rhythm of the seasons to creating a welcoming home, from reframing failure to ageing with grace, wabi sabi will teach you to find more joy and inspiration throughout your perfectly imperfect life. This book is the definitive guide to applying the principles of wabi sabi to transform every area of your life, and finding happiness right where you are.

Part of a comprehensive catalog of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum collection, American Quilts in the Industrial Age, 1760-1870 highlights the dazzling designs and intricate needlework of America's treasured material culture. From whole cloth to pieced quilts to elaborate applique examples, all reflecting various design movements such as Neoclassicism and Eastern exoticism, the contributing authors address the development of quilt making in America from its inception in the 1700s to the period of the U.S. Civil War. Covering more than one hundred years of quilt making, this volume examines the period's quilts from both an artistic and a historical perspective. The contributors provide critical information regarding the founding of the republic and the influential republican values and ideals manifested in the quilts of this era. They also address the role that immigration and industrialization played in the evolution of materials and styles. With full-color photographs of nearly six hundred quilts, American Quilts in the Industrial Age, 1760-1870 offers new insights into American society.

Building on the extended fieldwork of numerous researchers since the 1950s, this text offers a unique window into the dynamic performance contexts of both masquerade and architecture in Central Africa. Although many societies in the Congo were once renowned for vibrant masquerades and architectural sculpture, these phenomena have only been studied as living traditions among a handful of peoples, most notably the Pende. Building on the extended fieldwork of numerous researchers since the 1950s, this text offers a unique window into the dynamic performance contexts of both masquerade and architecture in Central Africa. As much as possible, it privileges Pende voices and seeks to understand the inter-relationship between ritual practice and aesthetic form. Attentive to history, the text also shows these artistic practices have responded (sometimes unpredictably) to both colonial and post-colonial pressure. Lavish illustrations feature both iconic and hitherto unpublished masterworks, which have been selected to evoke the full range of Pende expression.

Following the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, a panoramic exploration of peoples, objects and beliefs from the celebrated author of A History of the World in 100 Objects and Germany 'Riveting, extraordinary ... tells the sweeping story of religious belief in all its inventive variety. The emphasis is not on our differences, but on shared spiritual yearnings' Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times, Books of the Year One of the central facts of human existence is that every society shares a set of beliefs and assumptions - a faith, an ideology, a religion - that goes far beyond the life of the individual. These beliefs are an essential part of a shared identity. They have a unique power to define - and to divide - us, and are a driving force in the politics of much of the world today. Throughout history they have most often been, in the widest sense, religious. Yet this book is not a history of religion, nor an argument in favour of faith. It is about the stories which give shape to our lives, and the different ways in which societies imagine their place in the world. Looking across history and around the globe, it interrogates objects, places and human activities to try to understand what shared beliefs can mean in the public life of a community or a nation, how they shape the relationship between the individual and the state, and how they help give us our sense of who we are. For in deciding how we live with our gods, we also decide how to live with each other. 'The new blockbuster by the museums maestro Neil MacGregor ... The man who chronicles world history through objects is back ... examining a new set of objects to explore the theme of faith in society' Sunday Times