Crafting Democracy: Fiber Arts and Activism calls upon craft, during an era of political disruption, as a creative force to voice dissent, express hope, critique the curtailment of civil rights, and to restore dignity to the human experience. The essays and artwork featured in this exhibition catalogue are framed within the context of American democracy and disclose how we, as individuals and as a culture, "craft democracy" and ultimately question what democracy means today. This is the catalogue of an exhibition held at Harold Hacker Hall, Central Library of Rochester [New York] & Monroe County: August-October, 2019. Juilee Decker is associate professor of museum studies at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her publications include the 3rd edition of Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (2017) and the four-volume series Innovative Approaches for Museums (2015). Hinda Mandell is associate professor in the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology and is a co-editor of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (University of Rochester Press, 2018). She is editor of Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats (forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield).

Showcasing marbled paper, paste paper, fold-and-dye papers, and more, this book reveals a little-known arts phenomenon from its grass roots in the 1960s to artistic heights in the following decades Pattern and Flow chronicles the flourishing of American decorated paper arts beginning in the 1960s and extending to the 2000s, with an ongoing legacy today. As knowledge and skills were shared across a grass-roots community in the 1960s, decorated paper became increasingly popular, with centers for the study of the book and paper arts emerging across the United States, and artists developing new, innovative styles of paper. The book begins with an introductory essay outlining the history of decorated paper arts in America up to the 1960s, followed by a chronological narrative, which surveys the development of the field and introduces the artists working from the 1960s to the 2000s, and an illustrated reference section with essential biographical and professional information for each artist. Designed to be an immersive experience, Pattern and Flow conveys the vivid visual world of American decorated paper, celebrating the variety and variations that are key features of the art. Stunning illustrations show designs with intricate, tessellated patterns and others that flow with forms and waves that seem liquid; some explore subtle, muted tones, while others are explosive in their use of brilliant colors. Distributed for the Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Grolier Club, New York (January 17-April 8, 2023)

`Sound Art` is the catalogue that accompanies a new exhibition at the Fundacio Juan Miro Gallery in Barcelona. It offers a critical interrogation of this category in art and presents an overview of the sonorisation of the art object from the later C19 to today. The exhibition examines how, in the late C19 and early C20 many visual artists worked references to sound and music into their pieces using a variety of strategies. In turn, it also addresses the influence of visual arts on contemporary musical practices. It considers how several composers and visual artists turned the music score into a space for experimentation and performativity, and explains how the introduction of sound enables art objects to state their presence in a radically different, augmented way. In the text of this book, the experimental musician and artist Max Neuhaus questions the validity of the term `Sound Art` and so creates the starting point for the various artists and critics who also contribute to the discussion, including Suzanne Delehanty, Jean-Yves Bosseur, Maija Julius and Miki Yui, David Toop, Fiona McGovern, Ursula and Rene Block and Arnau Horta, who is the curator the exhibition and editor of this book.

A New York Times best art book of 2021 "[A] gold mine of a book . . . Funny, biting, morbid, it's a page-turner for sure."-Holland Cotter, New York Times Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a renowned maker of meticulous collages whose works influenced movements including Pop Art, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. Emerging from the interdisciplinary community of artists and poets at Black Mountain College, Johnson was extraordinarily adept at using social interaction as an artistic endeavor and founded a mail art network known as the New York Correspondence School. Drawing on the vast collection of Johnson's work at the Art Institute of Chicago, this volume gives new shape to our understanding of his artistic practice and features hundreds of pieces that include artist's books, collages, drawings, mail art, and performance documentation. In keeping with Johnson's democratic, rhizomatic, and antihierarchical ethos, this indispensable resource on the artist's oeuvre contains 700 illustrations, many of them never before published, and twenty-one short essays by various contributors that allow readers to dip into and out of the book in a nonlinear manner. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (November 26, 2021-March 21, 2022)

In Animation Sketchbooks, fifty of the leading contemporary talents working in independent animation offer a glimpse into their private sketchbooks. During the conceptual stages of their projects, these groundbreaking and award-winning artists employ a variety of mediums to exercise their creativity, including pencil, paint, collage, puppetry, and photography. Each artist shares a selection of their craft along with personal insights into their influences and the artistic processes behind their unique sketches, character studies, storyboards, and doodles. The range of visions and techniques on display provide endless inspiration and allow a rare insight into the scope of the animator's art.

Bringing together more than 100 items of clothing, this book reveals the intricacies of Japanese dress from the 18th century to the present. Including garments for women, men and children, the details have been selected both for their exquisite beauty and craftsmanship, and for how much they impart about the wearer's identity, be it age, status or taste. A comprehensive introduction, illuminating the main periods and key themes of Japanese fashion history, is followed by thematic chapters that cover all aspects of clothing, from hair accessories and necklines to hemlines and shoes. Each garment or object is accompanied by a short text exploring its structure and the fascinating range of decorative techniques employed, including embroidery, weaving, lacquering, stencilling, dyeing and digital technology. Specially commissioned detail photography and line drawings provide an invaluable resource for Japanophiles, students, collectors, designers and lovers of fashion and world dress.

The first volume in two centuries on Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments in Paris, this study presents a comprehensive picture of a seminal project of French Revolutionary cultural policy, one crucial to the development of the modern museum institution. The book offers a new critical perspective of the Museum's importance and continuing relevance to the history of material culture and collecting, through juxtaposition with its main opponent, the respected connoisseur and theorist Quatremere de Quincy. This innovative approach highlights the cultural and intellectual context of the debate, situating it in the dilemmas of emerging modernity, the idea of nationhood, and changing attitudes to art and its histories. Open only from 1795 to 1816, the Museum of French Monuments was at once popular and controversial. The salvaged sculptures and architectural fragments that formed its collection presented the first chronological panorama of French art, which drew the public; it also drew the ire of critics, who saw the Museum as an offense against the monuments' artistic integrity. Underlying this localized conflict were emerging ideas about the nature of art and its relationship to history, which still define our understanding of notions of heritage, monument, and the museum.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

This book is based on the artwork of Sue Jane Taylor. She is no stranger to extreme working environments, having worked for over thirty years recording the lives of workers in the North Sea oil industry on sites such as Piper Alpha, Piper B, Forties platforms and recently Murchison in the Northern Seas. Her work now extends to the offshore renewable energy industry. The book brings a unique perspective to the relationship between art, environment and industry while revealing a relatively alien way of life on board a North Sea oil platform. Among other themes it will consider the future of energy in Scotland. The book has an introductory essay by Elsa Cox, Senior Curator of Technology at National Museums Scotland, illustrated by relevant objects from the collections in the National Museum. This is followed by Sue Jane Taylor's artwork, with extended captions.

Modernism, referring to the period dating roughly from the late 19th century to 1970, is regarded as a crucial moment in the history of American art. Although Modernist artists adopted a wide range of styles, they were linked by a desire to interpret a rapidly changing society and to cast aside the conventions of representational art. Some, such as Stuart Davis and Joseph Stella, responded to consumerism, urbanism and industrial technology; others, such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe, found inspiration in nature and the Native American culture of the Southwest. This magnificent new book presents the works of the Vilcek Collection, an unparalleled private collection of American Modernist paintings, drawings and sculpture. Art historian Lewis Kachur explores almost 100 rarely seen works by 20 leading artists active during the first half of the last century, while William C. Agee contributes an incisive introduction. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Masterpieces of American Modernism provides an outstanding overview of the radical shift in art driven by this major aesthetic movement.

The Ashmolean is fortunate in having the finest collection of Indian art in Britain outside London, one which includes many works of great beauty and expressive power. For this we are indebted above all to the generosity, knowledge and taste of our benefactors and donors from the 17th century to the present. This book offers a short account of how the collection developed and a selection of some of its more outstanding or interesting works of art. While it is written mainly for the general reader and museum visitor, it includes many fine objects or pictures, some of them unpublished, that should interest specialist scholars and students. Since 1987, the Ashmolean has made many significant new acquisitions of Indian art and these are highlighted in this collection. As the book's title implies, it also ventures beyond the bounds of the Indian subcontinent by including works from Afghanistan and Central Asian Silk Road sites as well as many from Nepal, Tibet and Southeast Asia. From the early centuries AD, Indian trading links with these diverse regions of Asia led to a widespread cultural diffusion and regional adoptions of Buddhism and Hinduism along with their related arts. Local reinterpretations of such Indic subjects, themes and styles then grew into flourishing and enduring artistic traditions which are also part of the story of this book. The selection of works ends around 1900. By the 16th century and the early modern period in India, growing European interventions and Western artistic influences under Mughal rule saw a significant shift in sensibility and the practice of more secular and naturalistic forms of court art such as portraiture. By the late 19th century, fundamental cultural changes under British rule and the advent of new technologies brought about a gradual decline in many of India's traditional arts.

"Life, Legend, Landscape" presents a rich selection of Victorian drawings and watercolors from the Courtauld Gallery collection, ranging from finished watercolors intended for public exhibition to informal sketches and preparatory drawings for paintings or sculpture. The selection includes a study by Edwin Landseer for the famous lions used at the base of Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square, London; the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti's intimate portrait of his muse, Elizabeth Siddal, seated at her easel; Whistler's delicate study of the young Elinor Leyland, and Fredrick Walker's outstanding The Old Farm Garden.

Looking past the apparent lack of a sustainable Irish display culture, this book demonstrates that there is a very full story to tell of the way Ireland displayed its art from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Ireland on Show analyzes the impact of the display of art as a significant political and cultural feature in the make-up of nineteenth-century Ireland - and in how Ireland was viewed beyond its own shores, in particular in Great Britain and the United States. Fintan Cullen directs much-needed critical attention and analysis to a subject that has been largely overlooked from an Irish perspective. This study moves beyond museums, to address the range of art institutions in Irish cities that displayed art, from the Royal Hibernian Academy, founded in the 1820s, to Hugh Lane's Municipal Art Gallery, opened in Dublin in 1908. Throughout, the book explores the battle between the display of a unionist ethos and a nationalist point of view, a constant that resurfaces over the period. By highlighting the tension between unionist and nationalist viewpoints, Cullen uses the display of art to investigate the complexities of Irish cultural life before the founding of the Free State.

The Tyrolean State Museums, Innsbruck, Austria, hold a treasure-trove of over 5 million objects and offer an extensive, interdisciplinary program of exhibitions and events to introduce new audiences to the region and to explore the links between past and present. The core of the collection, the Ferdinandeum, is a sprawling art and culture complex that has continued to thrive since it was founded in 1823. Named after Archduke Ferdinand, it is the third oldest national Museum of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Inside, visitors can explore the Tyrol's past, present and future through archeological, historical, scientific, cultural, music and art exhibits that help define the Tyrol's place in the world. Thirty-seven significant objects were selected for this guide in order to highlight the wide range and complexity of the collections. Uncover the secrets of the Tyrolean at this world-class institution, which showcases the unique stories, events and characters that have helped shape the Tyrol's history.