Spell Songs is a musical companion piece to The Lost Words: A Spell Book by author Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris. This mixed media CD is accompanied by sumptuous illustrations from Jackie Morris, new 'spells' by Robert Macfarlane, enlightening thoughts by Robert, Jackie and Spell Singer Karine Polwart and stunning photography by Elly Lucas. In 2018 Folk by the Oak Festival commissioned Spell Songs because of their love of The Lost Words book. Spell Songs comprises eight remarkable musicians whose music engages deeply with landscape and nature; musicians who are perfectly placed to respond to the creatures, art and language of The Lost Words. They spent a week in Herefordshire bringing this music together in the company of Jackie Morris. Art inspired music and music inspired art. Jackie Morris immersed herself in the musical residency where she generously created new iconesque artwork of each musician and their instruments portrayed in an unexpected and enchanting way. These stunning new artworks accompany the CD. Spell Songs allowed these acclaimed and diverse musicians to weave together elements of British folk music, Senegalese folk traditions, and experimental and classical music to create an inspiring new body of work. Here are 14 songs which capture the essence of The Lost Words book. Spoken voice, whispers, accents, dialects, native languages, proverbs, sayings, birdsong, river chatter and insect hum all increase the intimacy of the musical world conjured by the songs. Inspired by the words, art and ethos of The Lost Words book, each musician brings new imaginings, embellishments and diversions which are rooted in personal experience, a deep respect for the natural world, protest at the loss of nature and its language and an appreciation for wildness and beauty. In February 2019 Spell Songs enjoyed standing ovations at sell-out performances in major venues across the UK culminating at The Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre, London. Spell Songs was a highlight of The Hay International Literary Festival 2019 and in August 2019 they were invited to perform at the BBC's Lost Words Prom in the Royal Albert Hall. They will continue to tour each year. "There are songs here that would live with me for the rest of my years, even if I'd had no part in their making". Robert Macfarlane

What is the difference between ratio and proportion? When is a harmonic rectangle also geometric? Do pentagons, hexagons and heptagons really each have their own characters? Is there a secret to great art? In this beautiful little book, art educator Michael Schneider presents a groundbreaking synthesis of proportion in the ancient world. From temples to dinner plates, paintings to pots, archways to jewellery, discover the eternally useful tools and techniques of the masters.

Antique Jewish art visualized the idea that the essence of God is beyond the world of forms. In the Bible, the Israelites were commanded to build sanctuaries without cult statues. Following the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews turned to literary and visual aids to fill the void. In this accessible survey, Shulamit Laderman traces the visualizations of the Tabernacle implements, including the seven-branch menorah, the Torah ark, the shofar, the four species, and other motifs associated with the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish calendar. These motifs evolved into iconographic symbols visualized in a range of media, including coins, funerary art, and synagogue decorations in both Israel and the Diaspora. Particular attention is given to important discoveries such as the frescoes of the third-century CE synagogue in Dura-Europos, mosaic floors in synagogues in Galilee, and architectural and carved motifs that decorated burial places.

Since ancient times Leviathan and other monsters from the biblical world symbolize the life-threatening powers in nature and history. They represent the dark aspects of human nature and political entities and reveal the supernatural dimensions of evil. Ancient texts and pictures regarding these monsters reflect an environment of polytheism and religious pluralism. Remarkably, however, the biblical writings and post-biblical traditions use these venerated symbols in portraying God as being sovereign over the entire universe, a theme that is also prominent in the reception of these texts in subsequent contexts. This volume explores this tension and elucidates the theological and cultural meaning of 'Leviathan' by studying its ancient Near Eastern background and its attestation in biblical texts, early and rabbinic Judaism, Christian theology, Early Modern art, and film.

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.

'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.

Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians. Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution's legacy-and what it meant to be authentically Mexican.

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.

Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya's attention to the act and consequences of literacy-apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations-is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented. Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya's work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya's attention to the act and consequences of literacy-apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations-is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented. Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya's work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

This book demonstrates how Japanese Americans have developed traditions of complex silences to survive historic moments of racial and religious oppression and how they continue to adapt these traditions today. In order to examine Japanese Americans' complex relationship to silence, Brett Esaki offers four case studies of Japanese American art-gardening, origami, jazz, and monument construction-and examines how each artistic practice has responded to a historic moment of oppression. In doing so, he finds that these artistic silences incorporate and convey obfuscated religious ideas from Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Shinto, indigenous religions, and contemporary spirituality. While silence is often thought of as the binary opposite and absence of sound, this book provides a non-binary theory of silence that articulates how multidimensional silences are formed and how they function. Brett Esaki argues that non-binary silences have allowed Japanese Americans to disguise, adapt, and innovate religious resources in order to negotiate racism and oppressive ideologies from both the United States and Japan. Drawing from the fields of religious studies, ethnic studies, theology, anthropology, art, music, history, and psychoanalysis, this book highlights the ways in which silence has been used to communicate the complex emotions of historical survival, religious experience, and artistic inspiration.

Explore the works of one of the greatest artists of all time.

Vincent Van Gogh art deck is a stunning collection of 50 cards featuring some of the most iconic paintings of this legendary artist.

Each card explores a different masterpiece in intricate detail, offering a deep dive into Van Gogh's creative process, artistic technique, and personal life.

From the vibrant swirls of Starry Night to the delicate blooms of Almond Blossom, these cards offer a unique perspective on the life and work of one of the greatest artists of all time.

Whether you're an art lover, a Van Gogh aficionado, or simply looking for a beautiful and informative deck of cards, Vincent Van Gogh art deck is the perfect addition to your coffee table, bookcase, or desk.

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.

A visual feast of eclectic artwork informed and inspired by spiritual beliefs, magical techniques, mythology and otherworldly experiences. Mystical beliefs and practices have existed for millennia, but why do we still chase the esoteric? From the beginning of human creativity itself, image-makers have been drawn to these unknown spheres and have created curious artworks that transcend time and place - but what is it that attracts artists to these magical realms? From theosophy and kabbalah, to the zodiac and alchemy; spiritualism and ceremonial magic, to the elements and sacred geometry - The Art of the Occult introduces major occult themes and showcases the artists who have been influenced and led by them. Discover the symbolic and mythical images of the Pre-Raphaelites; the automatic drawing of Hilma af Klint and Madge Gill; Leonora Carrington's surrealist interpretation of myth, alchemy and kabbalah; and much more. Featuring prominent, marginalised and little-known artists, The Art of the Occult crosses mystical spheres in a bid to inspire and delight. Divided into thematic chapters (The Cosmos, Higher Beings, Practitioners), the book acts as an entertaining introduction to the art of mysticism - with essays examining each practice and over 175 artworks to discover. The art of the occult has always existed in the margins but inspired the masses, and this book will spark curiosity in all fans of magic, mysticism and the mysterious.

A sumptuous survey of over 300 women painters and their work spanning almost five centuries.

Great Women Painters is a groundbreaking book that reveals a richer and more varied telling of the story of painting. Featuring more than 300 artists from around the world, it includes both well-known women painters from history and today's most exciting rising stars.

Covering nearly 500 years of skill and innovation, this survey continues Phaidon's celebrated The Art Book series and reveals and champions a more diverse history of art, showcasing recently discovered and newly appreciated work and artists throughout its more than 300 pages and images.

Artists featured include: Hilma af Klint, Eileen Agar, Sofonisba Anguissola, Cecily Brown, Leonora Carrington, Mary Cassatt, Elaine de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Nicole Eisenman, Jadé Fadojutimi, Helen Frankenthaler, Artemisia Gentileschi, Maggi Hambling, Carmen Herrera, Gwen John, Frida Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Plautilla Nelli, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Dana Schutz, Lee Krasner, Yayoi Kusama

The Art of Frenzy presents a masterful analysis of public madness from the Renaissance to the Industrial Age. Frenzy--the most flagrant and political form of madness--is the madness of warrior-heroes, kings, scolds, and the possessed. Its representation incorporates a range of traditional characters and figures, from Hercules and Orlando to Medea and Britannia. Understood as abusive power and belligerence out of control, and described in terms drawn equally from definitions of tyranny and liberty, frenzy has always been articulated with a significant degree of political meaning. Integrating art history with cultural studies, political history, and the history of medicine, Jane Kromm draws on a wide range of mediums and contexts--from asylum sculpture to political broadsheets, medical texts, the imagery of revolution, caricature and medical illustrations--to clarify the importance of this interpretative pattern.

In Do You Remember? Celebrating Fifty Years of Earth, Wind & Fire, Trenton Bailey traces the humble beginning of Maurice White, his development as a musician, and his formation of Earth, Wind & Fire, a band that became a global phenomenon during the 1970s. By the early 1980s, the music industry was changing, and White had grown weary after working constantly for more than a decade. He decided to put the band on hiatus for more than three years. The band made a comeback in 1987, but White's health crisis soon forced them to tour without him. During the twenty-first century, the band has received numerous accolades and lifetime achievement and hall of fame awards. The band remains relevant today, collaborating with younger artists and maintaining their classic sound. Earth, Wind & Fire stood apart from other soul bands with their philosophical lyrics and extravagant visual art, much of which is studied in the book, including album covers, concerts, and music videos. The lyrics of hit songs are examined alongside an analysis of the band's chart success. Earth, Wind & Fire has produced twenty-one studio albums and several compilation albums. Each album is analyzed for content and quality. Earth, Wind & Fire is also known for using ancient Egyptian symbols, and Bailey thoroughly details those symbols and Maurice White's fascination with Egyptology. After enduring many personnel changes, Earth, Wind & Fire continues to perform around the world and captivate diverse audiences.

"By 1966, the composer Virgil Thomson would write, "Truth is, there is no avant-garde today." How did the avant garde dissolve, and why? In this thought-provoking work, Stuart D. Hobbs traces the avant garde from its origins to its eventual appropriation by a conservative political agenda, consumer culture, and the institutional world of art.

Review: ...a strong and engaged spectrum of essays by leading scholars that reflects the range and depth of Caravaggio scholarship today. It constitutes a milestone contribution to our understanding of this artist and his complex historical reception, as well as the range of approaches currently at work in the study of early modern European art.'- Genevieve Warwick, University of Edinburgh and Editor, Art History'This is a distinguished collection of original essays by well-established scholars of Italian Baroque art and Caravaggio in particular. It is remarkable for the diversity of questions asked and methodological resources deployed in answering them. Such is the sureness of scholarship that underpins each essay, however, that there is little to no contradiction among them. Each essay contributes to a fuller understanding of Caravaggio that is greater than the sum of its excellent parts.' - Charles DempseyProfessor of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art EmeritusThe Johns Hopkins University.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is widely recognized as the preeminent institution that defined twentieth-century art through its collection – shaping our understandings of the history of art, with its hierarchies and exclusions, as they sediment over time. MoMA’s lesser-known holdings of art from Latin America shed light on a key period which created stylistic categories that have since come to be accepted by many today as the Modernist canon. This study sheds light on an as yet unstudied aspect of MoMA’s preeminent role in establishing the definition of the problematic term "Latin American art" in the United States. In examining shifting categorization of these works according to stylistic and geographic taxonomies, we gain a greater understanding of the organization of the Museum’s collections as a whole during the 1940s and 1950s. This book is the first to document these institutional precedents, crucial for the understanding of the articulation of a Modernist canon and its contested legacy today. MoMAs early collection displays suggest ways in which artists from areas of the world formerly excluded from collections can be incorporated within today’s increasingly global museums. Its approach prefigured attitudes adopted by several museums since the 1990s, creating geographically-defined curatorial positions as a way to redress gaps in collecting art from Latin America and other areas of the world. In this book, author Miriam Basilio offers a closer study of the history of collection displays as a means to understand canon-formation in modern art museums.

Islamic Visual Culture, 1100-1800 is the second in a set of four volumes of studies on Islamic art by Oleg Grabar. Between them they bring together more than eighty articles, studies and essays, work spanning half a century by a master of the field. Each volume takes a particular section of the topic, the three other volumes being entitled: Early Islamic Art 650-1100; Islamic Art and Beyond; and Jerusalem. Reflecting the many incidents of a long academic life, they illustrate one scholar's attempt at making order and sense of 1400 years of artistic growth. They deal with architecture, painting, objects, iconography, theories of art, aesthetics and ornament, and they seek to integrate our knowledge of Islamic art with Islamic culture and history as well as with the global concerns of the History of Art. In addition to the articles selected, each volume contains an introduction which describes, often in highly personal ways, the context in which Grabar's scholarship developed and the people who directed and mentored his efforts. The focus of the present volume is on the key centuries - the eleventh through fourteenth - during which the main directions of traditional Islamic art were created and developed and for which classical approaches of the History of Art were adopted. Manuscript illustrations and the arts of objects dominate the selection of articles, but there are also forays into later times like Mughal India and into definitions of area and period styles, as with the Mamluks in Egypt and the Ottomans, or into parallels between Islamic and Christian medieval arts.

"Sounds have colors and colors have smells." This sentence in "Ada"""is only one of the many moments in Nabokov's work where he sought to merge the visual into his rich and sensual writing. This lavishly illustrated study is the first to examine the role of the visual arts in Nabokov's oeuvre and to explore how art deepens the potency of the prominent themes threaded throughout his work.
The authors trace the role of art in Nabokov's life, from his alphabetic chromesthesia--a psychological condition in which letters evoke specific colors--to his training under Marc Chagall's painting instructor to his deep admiration for Leonardo da Vinci and Hieronymus Bosch. They then examine over 150 references to specific works of art in such novels as "Laughter in the Dark," " The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," "Pnin," "Lolita," "Ada," and "Pale Fire" and consider how such references reveal new emotional aspects of Nabokov's fiction.
A fascinating and wholly original study, "Nabokov and the Art of Painting" will be invaluable reading for scholars and enthusiasts of Nabokov alike.

This volume features new research on Russia’s historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule. It interrogates how Russia’s perception of its position on the periphery of the west and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power shaped its artistic, cultural and national identity as a heterogenous, multi-ethnic empire. It also explores the extent to which cultural practitioners participated in the discursive matrices that advanced Russia’s colonial machinery on the one hand and critiqued and challenged it on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between the east and the west. -- .

This lushly illustrated book examines the cross-cultural influences and unique artistic dialogue between Hispano and Native American arts in the Southwest over the past 400 years since Spanish colonization. Insightful essays by historians, artists, and scholars including Estevan Rael-Galvez, Lane Coulter, Enrique R. Lamadrid, Marc Simmons, and others, explore the impact of cultural interaction on various art forms including painting, sculpture, metalwork, textiles, architecture, furniture and performance and ceremonial arts. Over 150 art works and photographs gathered from museums across the country are testimony to the unique Southwestern aesthetic that developed from this dynamic cultural exchange. Published as companion to an exhibition at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico on display through September 30, 2010.

Using five case studies of contemporary art, this book uses ideas of systems and dispersion to understand identity and experience in late capitalism. This book considers five artists who exemplify contemporary art practice: Seth Price; Liam Gillick; Martin Creed; Hito Steyerl and Theaster Gates. Given the diversity of materials used in art today, once-traditional artistic mediums and practices have become obsolete in describing what artists do today. Francis Halsall argues that, in the face of this obsolescence, the ideas of system and dispersion become very useful in understanding contemporary art. That is, practitioners now can be seen to be using whatever systems of distribution and display are available to them as their creative mediums. The two central arguments are first that any understanding of what art is will always be underwritten by a related view of what a human being is; and second that these both have a particular character in late capitalism or, as is named here, the Age of Dispersion. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in art history, contemporary art, studio art, and theories of systems and networks.