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.

What does rock art say about gender and how can our understanding of gender shape the way that we view rock art? A significant contribution to the relatively unexplored field of gender in rock art, this volume contains a wealth of information for archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians interested in past gender systems. Hays-Gilpin argues that art is at once a product of its physical and social environment and at the same time a tool of influence in shaping behavior and ideas within a society. Taking this stance, rock art is shown to be very often one of the strongest lines of evidence avaliable to scholars in understanding ritual practices, gender roles, and ideologicial constructs of prehistoric peoples. Subsequently issues of representation and the people who made these forms of art are also discussed.

Miniatures - canoes, houses and totems, and human figurines - have been produced on the Northwest Coast since at least the sixteenth century. What has motivated Indigenous artists to produce these tiny artworks? Through case studies and conversations with artists themselves, So Much More Than Art convincingly dismisses the persistent understanding that miniatures are simply children's toys or tourist trinkets. Jack Davy's highly original exploration of this intricate pursuit demonstrates the importance of miniaturization as a technique for communicating complex cultural ideas between generations and communities, as well as across the divide that separates Indigenous and settler societies.

World is Africa brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most part are identified with the African diaspora. None of the texts are available online and none have been available outside of the original publication in which they first appeared. The volume contains several new pieces of writing, including a consideration of the art world 'fetishization' of the 1980s, as the manifestation of a reluctance to accept the majority of Black British artists as valid individual practitioners, choosing instead to shackle them to exhibitions that took place three decades ago. Another new text re-examines the 'map paintings' of Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. The third introduces the little-known record sleeve illustrations of Charles White, the American artist who was the subject of a major retrospective in 2018 at major galleries across the US. Among the other new texts is a critical reflection on the patronage the Greater London Council extended to Black artists in 1980s London. World is Africa makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history, the field of African diaspora studies and African diaspora art history.

This exciting new investigation explores the rich variety of indigenous arts in the US and Canada from the early pre-contact period to the present day. It shows the importance of the visual arts in maintaining the integrity of spiritual, social, political, and economic systems within Native North American societies and examines such issues as gender, representation, the colonial encounter, and contemporary arts. Basketry, wood and rock carvings, dance masks, and beadwork, are discussed alongside the paintings and installations of modern artists such as Robert Davidson, Emmi Whitehorse, and Alex Janvier.

Throughout the East, writing is held to be a gift from the gods, and the divinely inspired letters and characters are objects of the highest veneration. The religious significance of calligraphy has thus led to a unique development of the art of brush and ink in Japan, China, India, and Tibet. This beautifully illustrated book covers such topics as the history and spirit of Eastern calligraphy, the art of copying religious texts, the biographies of important Zen calligraphers, and practical instructions on materials and techniques for the contemporary student. No knowledge of the languages discussed is required for the reader to appreciate the study of this ancient practice.

John Stevens lived in Japan for thirty-five years, where he was a professor of Buddhist studies at Tohoku Fukushi University in Sendai. Stevens is a widely respected translator, an ordained Buddhist priest, a curator of several major exhibitions of Zen art, and an aikido instructor. He has authored over thirty books and is one of the foremost Western experts on Aikido, holding a ranking of 7th dan Aikikai. Stevens has also studied calligraphy for decades, authoring this classic "Sacred Calligraphy of the East." Other John Stevens titles that are likely to be of interest include "The Philosophy of Aikido, Extraordinary Zen Masters, " and "The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei."

Discover the ancient images in ancient landscapes through this guide. Learn how the designs were created and what is known about the people who made them. A directory to 28 outstanding sites in 7 states. Includes an information guide to southwestern research centers, websites, and national and international rock-art organizations.

As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller's life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller's important role in laying the foundation for the movement. In telling Fuller's story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement's international dimensions, the ways the movement took shape at the local level, the impact of race and other factors, and the challenges--corporate, political, and personal--that Fuller and others faced in trying to build black institutions. An innovative study that approaches the movement from a historical perspective, Building the Black Arts Movement is a much-needed reassessment of the trajectory of African American culture over two explosive decades.

"An excellent reference work on the subject." Library Journal (starred review) For fans, culture watchers, and perplexed outsiders, this expanded edition offers an engaging tour of the anime megaverse, from older artistic traditions to the works of modern creators like Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo, Satoshi Kon, and CLAMP. Examined are all of anime's major themes, styles, and conventions, plus the familiar tropes of giant robots, samurai, furry beasts, high school heroines, and gay/girl/fanboy love. Concluding are fifteen essays on favorite anime, including Evangelion, Escaflowne, Sailor Moon, Patlabor, and Fullmetal Alchemist. Patrick Drazen is an anime historian who lives in Bloomington Normal, Illinois.

Over the years, Kobena Mercer has critically illuminated the visual innovations of African American and black British artists. In Travel & See he presents a diasporic model of criticism that gives close attention to aesthetic strategies while tracing the shifting political and cultural contexts in which black visual art circulates. In eighteen essays, which cover the period from 1992 to 2012 and discuss such leading artists as Isaac Julien, Renee Green, Kerry James Marshall, and Yinka Shonibare, Mercer provides nothing less than a counternarrative of global contemporary art that reveals how the "dialogical principle" of cross-cultural interaction not only has transformed commonplace perceptions of blackness today but challenges us to rethink the entangled history of modernism as well.

Winner of the Shimada Prize for Outstanding Work of East Asian Art History By the end of the sixth century CE, both the royal courts and the educated elite in China were collecting works of art, particularly scrolls of calligraphy and paintings done by known artists. By the time of Emperor Huizong (1082-1135) of the Song dynasty (960-1279), both scholars and the imperial court were cataloguing their collections and also collecting ancient bronzes and rubbings of ancient inscriptions. The catalogues of Huizong's painting, calligraphy, and antiquities collections list over 9,000 items, and the tiny fraction of the listed items that survive today are all among the masterpieces of early Chinese art. Patricia Ebrey's study of Huizong's collections places them in both political and art historical context. The acts of adding to and cataloguing the imperial collections were political ones, among the strategies that the Song court used to demonstrate its patronage of the culture of the brush, and they need to be seen in the context of contemporary political divisions and controversies. At the same time, court intervention in the art market was both influenced by, and had an impact on, the production, circulation, and imagination of art outside the court. Accumulating Culture provides a rich context for interpreting the three book-length catalogues of Huizong's collection and specific objects that have survived. It contributes to a rethinking of the cultural side of Chinese imperial rule and of the court as a patron of scholars and the arts, neither glorifying Huizong as a man of the arts nor castigating him as a megalomaniac, but rather taking a hardheaded look at the political and cultural ramifications of collecting and the reasons for choices made by Huizong and his curators. The reader is offered glimpses of the magnificence of the collections he formed and the disparate fates of the objects after they were seized as booty by the Jurchen invaders in 1127. The heart of the book examines in detail the primary fields of collecting -- antiquities, calligraphy, and painting. Chapters devoted to each of these use Huizong's catalogues to reconstruct what was in his collection and to probe choices made by the cataloguers. The acts of inclusion, exclusion, and sequencing that they performed allowed them to influence how people thought of the collection, and to attempt to promote or demote particular artists and styles. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese art history, social history, and culture, as well as art collectors. Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation.

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

From the fluttering fabric of a tent, to the blurred motion of the potter's wheel, to the rhythm of a horse puppet's wooden hooves-these scenes make up a set of mid-1980s art exhibitions as part of the U.S. Festival of India. The festival was conceived at a meeting between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan to strengthen relations between the two countries at a time of late Cold War tensions and global economic change, when America's image of India was as a place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. Displaying Time unpacks the intimate, small-scale durations of time at work in the gallery from the transformation of clay into ceramic to the one-on-one, personal encounters between museum visitors and artists. Using extensive archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats, and visitors, Rebecca Brown analyzes a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India to unfurl new exhibitionary modes: the time of transformation, of interruption, of potential and the future, as well as the contemporary and the now.

Afterimage of Empire provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, Zahid R. Chaudhary explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment. Chaudhary scrutinizes the colonial context to understand the production of sense itself, proposing a new theory of interpreting the historical difference of aesthetic forms. In rereading colonial photographic images, he shows how the histories of colonialism became aesthetically, mimetically, and perceptually generative. He suggests that photography arrived in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that eventually extended and transformed sight for photographers and the body politic, both British and Indian. Ultimately, Afterimage of Empire uncovers what the colonial history of the medium of photography can teach us about the making of the modern perceptual apparatus, the transformation of aesthetic experience, and the linkages between perception and meaning.

A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture presents a collection of 26 original essays from top scholars in the field that explore and critically examine various aspects of Asian art and architectural history. * Brings together top international scholars of Asian art and architecture * Represents the current state of the field while highlighting the wide range of scholarly approaches to Asian Art * Features work on Korea and Southeast Asia, two regions often overlooked in a field that is often defined as India-China-Japan * Explores the influences on Asian art of global and colonial interactions and of the diasporic communities in the US and UK * Showcases a wide range of topics including imperial commissions, ancient tombs, gardens, monastic spaces, performances, and pilgrimages.

Japanese Art: Critical and Primary Sources is a four-volume reference work offering a critical overview of the history and culture of Japanese art. Drawing upon a wide range of English-language texts, the volumes explore the diverse and changing material and visual cultures of Japan from the pre-modern period to the present day. Over 75 essays from Asia, North America and Europe are assembled in this set and they address four major themes - material cultures (Buddhist objects, ceramics, textiles, interiors), visual cultures (painting, calligraphy, photography), printed matter (wood-block prints, books) and the context for Japan's art history (networks of patronage, sites of artistic production and consumption). Each volume is separately introduced and the selected materials are presented thematically, and chronologically within categories. Together the four volumes of Japanese Art present a major scholarly resource for the field.

With essays on sojourning artists like Situ Qiao and local artists such as Tchang Ju Chi, Singaporean scholar and educator Yeo Mang Thong demonstrates how Singapore was an important hub for artists who travelled to and lived in Singapore. Yeo's research, originally in Chinese, lls a gap in scholarship on the pre-war visual arts scene in Singapore; this English translation aims to bring his research to a broader audience.

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

Finely decorated ceramic vessels made for cooking, storage, and serving were a hallmark of Native Caddo cultures. The tradition began as many as 3,000 years ago among Woodland-period ancestors, thrived between c. 800 and 1800, and continues today in the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. In Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Traditions, eighteen experts offer a comprehensive assessment of recent findings about the manufacture and use of Caddo pottery, touching on craft technology, artistic and stylistic variation, and links between ancestral production and modern artistic expression. Part I discusses the evolution of ceramic design and morphology in the Caddo Archaeological Area by geographic region: southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, southeastern Oklahoma, and East Texas. It also gives focused study to the salt-making industry and its associated pottery. Part II features ceramic studies employing state-of-the-art techniques such as geochemical analysis, fine-grained analysis of stylistic elements, iconography, and network analysis. These essays yield increased understanding of specialized craft production and long-distance exchange; decorative variation at community and regional scales to reveal past communities of practice and identity; ancient Caddo cosmological and religious beliefs; and geographical variation in vessel forms. In Part III, two contemporary Caddos furnish an important Native perspective. Drawing on personal experience, they explore meaning and inspiration behind modern pottery productions as a cultural strategy for the persistence of community and identity. The first volume of its kind for Caddo archaeology, Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Traditions is also a valuable reference on ceramic practices across the broader southeastern archaeological region.

First published in 1948, Mechanization Takes Command is an examination of mechanization and its effects on everyday life. A monumental figure in the field of architectural history, Sigfried Giedion traces the evolution and resulting philosophical implications of such disparate innovations as the slaughterhouse, the Yale lock, the assembly line, tractors, ovens, and "comfort" as defined by advancements in furniture design. A groundbreaking text when originally published, Giedion's pioneering work remains an important contribution to architecture, philosophy, and technology studies.

Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Colbert offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and American studies.

This new guidebook introduces readers to Buddhist art through the celebrated collections of the Smithsonian's museums of Asian art in Washington, DC. Paths to Perfection explores Buddhist art and its history across cultures. An intriguing look at artistic responses to one of the world's great religions.