Cleo Mussi is a true original taking an innovative path to expressing her own ideas, by creating gestural, figurative mosaics from repurposed ceramic tableware. Working within the folk tradition, Cleo creates elegant, decorative and political pieces that incorporate the inherent properties gleaned from patterns, marks, forms, colour and text into a world of contemporary narratives. These works reflect modern ideas, with both humour and a lightness of touch. Cleoa s work ranges from small intimate pieces to large scale installations of up to 100, life-size works; her mosaics are in private collections worldwide, as well as in many public spaces throughout the UK.

What do exotic area rugs, handcrafted steel-string guitars, and fiddling have in common today? Many contemporary tradition bearers embrace complexity in form and content. They construct objects and performances that draw on the past and evoke nostalgia effectively but also reward close attention. In Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling: Intensification and the Rich Modern Lives of Traditional Arts, author Chris Goertzen argues that this entails three types of change that can be grouped under an umbrella term: intensification. First, traditional creativity can be intensified through virtuosity, through doing hard things extra fluently. Second, performances can be intensified through addition, by packing increased amounts of traditional materials into the conventionally sized packages. Third, in intensification through selection, artistic impact can grow even if amount of information recedes by emphasizing compelling ideas-e.g., crafting a red and black viper poised to strike rather than a pretty duck decoy featuring more colors and contours. Rugs handwoven in southern Mexico, luthier-made guitars, and southern US fiddle styles experience parallel changes, all absorbing just enough of the complex flavors, dynamics, and rhythms of modern life to translate inherited folklore into traditions that can be widely celebrated today. New mosaics of details and skeins of nuances don't transform craft into esoteric fine art, but rather enlist the twists and turns and endless variety of the contemporary world therapeutically, helping transform our daily chaos into parades of negotiable jigsaw puzzles. Intensification helps make crafts and traditional performances more accessible and understandable and thus more effective, bringing past and present closer together, helping folk arts continue to perform their magic today.

On the southern end of the Grand Rue, a major thoroughfare that runs through the center of Port-au-Prince, waits the Haitian capital's automobile repair district. This veritable junkyard of steel and rubber, recycled parts, old tires, and scrap metal might seem an unlikely foundry for art. Yet, on the street's opposite end thrives the Grand Rue Galerie, a working studio of assembled art and sculptures wrought from the refuse. Established by artists Andre Eugene and Celeur in the late 1990s, the Grand Rue's urban environmental aesthetics-defined by motifs of machinic urbanism, Vodou bricolage, the postprimitivist altermodern, and performative politics-radically challenge ideas about consumption, waste, and environmental hazards, as well as consider innovative solutions to these problems in the midst of poverty, insufficient social welfare, lack of access to arts, education, and basic needs. In Riding with Death, Jana Braziel explores the urban environmental aesthetics of the Grand Rue Sculptors and the beautifully constructed sculptures they have designed from salvaged automobile parts, rubber tires, carved wood, and other recycled materials.Through first-person accounts and fieldwork, Braziel constructs an urban ecological framework for understanding these sculptures amid environmental degradation and grinding poverty. Influenced by urban geographers, art historians, and political theorists, the book regards the underdeveloped cities of the Global South as alternate spaces for challenging the profit-driven machinations of global capitalism. Above all, Braziel presents Haitian artists who live on the most challenged Caribbean island, yet who thrive as creators reinventing refuse as art and resisting the abjection of their circumstances.

Traditions of folk drama exist throughout the world, ranging from simple forms that involve few people, rudimentary texts, and crude performance practices, to complex forms involving entire towns, highly elaborated texts, and performance practices that have developed over hundreds of years. Yet folk drama lacks, to this day, a full-length study from the perspectives of either folkloristics or drama studies. This work seeks to fill that lack by undertaking a bi-disciplinary study of the idea of folk drama, drawing on examples from around the world, including Yangge (China), Ta'ziyeh (Iran), Bhavai (India), Karagoz (Turkey), Apidan (Nigeria), and the Mummers' Play (England). It examines the meanings of "folk" and "drama," the significance of ritual and performance in folk drama, the frequently encountered problem of Eurocentric bias, the conventional tripartite division of drama into elite, popular, and folk categories, the need for a methodology capable of describing all aspects of folk drama performance, and the taxonomic place of folk drama in both folkloristics and drama studies. On the basis of this examination, Rethinking Folk Drama establishes a new basis for understanding the ubiquity and variety of folk drama.

This title documents a type of folk art in West Bengal, India, that combines traditional narrative scroll painting with singing and storytelling. It depicts the life and work of modern day artists who have reinvigorated their folk art by depicting contemporary social issues.

With the growth in interest in ethnographic materials, this is an essential publication for large public libraries serving patrons with interests in anthropology and art. Choice This indispensable directory of data on serials that contain information relevant to the study of ethnoart fills a gap long perceived by scholars of the indigenous arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, an area of academic focus in which reference materials have been generally lacking. Culled from a database developed by compiler Eugene C. Burt to track potentially useful periodicals in connection with his publication, Ethnoarts Index, the volume is designed to aid those with an interest in ethnoart in determining which serial publications best suit their research needs. In the main directory users can find information on former titles, publisher, editorial focus, content features, and a relevancy rating on each of almost 700 individual serial titles that have an editorial focus related to ethnoart. Nine separate appendices list recommended titles in various categories as well as serials that include indexing, bibliographic or abstracting services, ceased titles, and more. Titles include publications from the fields of art history, anthropology, history, area studies, librarianship, museum studies, and general interest magazines. Prefatory material explains the book's organization and the rationale for its recommendations and is followed by the major portion of the volume, the database of serials arranged alphabetically by title. In each entry more than 20 categories of information are provided including an assigned relevancy rating that rates the level of relevancy of a publication to ethnoart based on the frequency that ethnoart-oriented articles, reviews, etc. appear. Several indices make collection development recommendations based on the relevancy ratings, with approximate cost information. Additional appendices list titles by country of publication, relevant ceased titles, and more. Finally, a unique, rotated-keyword-in-title index that includes subtitles and former titles provides easy access to the main database. All of this information will be welcomed by librarians, scholars, collectors, dealers, curators, and students of ethnoart. Highly recommended for librarians building ethnoart collections; for university libraries where courses on any aspect of ethnoart are taught; and for libraries of museums and research institutions with an interest in ethnoart.

Step into a world of witchcraft both good and evil, where the iconic character of myth and legend is once more brought uniquely to life. From the first alleged witch to be hanged in Salem, and Goya's depictions of witchcraft, to Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hogwarts, and beyond, there is no shortage of inspiration, but also of recycled characterizations and central-casting stereotypes. Now, 30 of the world's most talented fantasy and concept artists discover their own, personal manifestation of the witch. Starting with research, readers will witness the alchemy of details extracted from the seemingly mundane transformed the whole body of the witch, fantastical yet unnervingly believable at the same time. The design process goes on to cast spells not only on appearance, but also the environment, practices, and magical belongings of this one-of-a-kind witch. With the final design depicted as both a line drawing and in full color, the whole character and their world is defined. A summary of each witch details their background, behaviour, strengths, weaknesses and, of course, powers. The result is 320 pages encased in a beautifully finished hardback cover, the ultimate field guide to designing witches that transcend time, place, and even the most vivid imagination.

The Day of the Dead is a festival of culture and youth, a feast of the senses and celebration of life in death. Originating in Mexico and the Latin American countries it began as a way of remembering departed relatives, as a means of embracing rather than fearing death. The beautiful rituals, the sugar skulls, the costumes and the festivities have grown into a massive counter culture across the western world. Art, movies, cartoons and literature have been consumed by the brilliant power of the Day of the Dead, tendered here in this lively new book, following Tattoo Art and Street Art, the latest title in Flame Tree's hugely successful Inspiration and Technique series.

This book examines how Mexican artisans and artistic actors participate in translations of aesthetics, politics, and history through the field of craft. The contributors build from historical and ethnographic archives and direct engagement with makers to reassemble an expanded vision of artisanal production in Mexico and the complicated classifications that surround Mexican popular art-making-from the American "craft" to the Spanish "artesania." This book also homages Dr. Janet Brody Esser's research on the Blackmen masquerades of Michoacan, exploring African culture in Mexico. The contributors provide wide-ranging insight into the colonial influences on Mexican popular art and its translation as well as the agency of creators and actors.

Since its origins in 1967, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival has gained worldwide recognition as a model for the research and public presentation of living cultural heritage and the advocacy of cultural democracy. Festival curators play a major role in interpreting the Festival's principles and shaping its practices. Curatorial Conversations brings together for the first time in one volume the combined expertise of the Festival's curatorial staff - past and present - in examining the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage's representation practices and their critical implications for issues of intangible cultural heritage policy, competing globalisms, cultural tourism, sustainable development and environment, and cultural pluralism and identity. In the volume, edited by the staff curators Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N'Diaye, contributors examine how Festival principles, philosophical underpinnings, and claims have evolved, and address broader debates on cultural representation from their own experience. This book represents the first concerted project by Smithsonian staff curators to examine systematically the Festival's institutional values as they have evolved over time and to address broader debates on cultural representation based on their own experiences at the Festival.

Now available in paperback, Performing Englishness examines the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the only study of its kind, the authors explore how the folk resurgence speaks to a broader explosion of interest in the subject of English national and cultural identity. Combining approaches from British cultural studies and ethnomusicology, the book draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with central figures of the resurgence and close analysis of music and dance as well as visual and discursive sources. Its presentation of the English case study calls for a rethinking of concepts such as revival and indigeneity. It will be of interest to students and scholars in cultural studies, ethnomusicology and related disciplines. -- .

Performing Englishness examines the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the only study of its kind, the authors explore how the folk resurgence speaks to a broader explosion of interest in the subject of English national and cultural identity. Combining approaches from British cultural studies and ethnomusicology, the book draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with central figures of the resurgence and close analysis of music and dance as well as visual and discursive sources. Its presentation of the English case study calls for a rethinking of concepts such as revival and indigeneity. It will be of interest to students and scholars in cultural studies, ethnomusicology and related disciplines. -- .