Frobenius' pivotal works on African culture represented a landmark in ethnography. His writings, when discovered by young African intellectuals in the early 1900s, reverberated through the community of Africans in search of cultural legitimacy. Frobenius was credited with giving Black Africa back its soul and its identity in the early part of the last century.His contributions and observations laid the groundwork for the concept of negritude, advanced by Leopold Sedar Senghor, who would later serve as president of Senegal - an expression engendered by Frobenius' work that developed hand in hand with the self-determination of the Harlem Renaissance.This collection was originally published in Germany and edited by Eike Haverlund, the 1971 recipient of the Haile Selassie prize for Ethiopian studies.

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.

A remarkable and exhaustive study examining the intertwined histories of pop music and the visual arts, and exploring the exhilarating exchange between art schools and the pop stars that they nurtured (or, occasionally, expelled) How Art Made Pop encompasses the worldwide history of art school rock, and brings the story up to date by surveying recent trends and the practices contemporary of artist-musicians The individuals that populate How Art Made Pop may still have become successful musicians if they hadn't studied art, but the kind of musicians that they became, and the kind of music that they became interested in that was predominantly informed and modified by art school attendance. Where once these musicians would have considered themselves entertainers, they now became artists. And hence what they practiced - i.e. popular music - became an art form, not least because they said it was.

The life and work of the outstanding Catalan-Majorcan philosopher, logician, and mystic Ramon Llull continues to fascinate thinkers, artists, and scholars worldwide In this book, international experts from Europe and the United States address Lullism as a remarkable and distinctive method of thinking and experimenting. The origins and impact of Ramon Llull's oeuvre as a modern thinker are presented, and their interdisciplinary and intercultural implications, which continue to this day, are explored. Ars combinatoria, generative and permutative generation of texts, the epistemic and poetic power of algorithmic systems, plus the principle of unconditional dialogue between cultural groups and their individual members, are the most important coordinates of this combinatorial-dialogical media and communication theory, which appeared very early in the history of science, technology, and art. It was developed in the work of Ramon Llull during the transition from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century when Arab-Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures intersected. The legacy of Lullism lives on in poetry and in the visual and electronic-based arts, as well as in research on the history of informatics, formal logic, and media archaeology. The primary idea of Llull's teachings-to enable rational and therefore trustworthy dialogue between cultures and religions through a universally valid system of symbols-is today still topical and of great relevance, especially in the tensions prevailing in globalized spaces of possibility. Contributors: Miquel Bassols, Florian Cramer, Salvador Dali, Fernando Dominguez Reboiras, Diane Doucet-Rosenstein, Jordi Gaya, Jonathan Gray, Daniel Irrgang, David Link, Sebastian Moro Tornese, Josep E. Rubio, Henning Schmidgen, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Gianni Vattimo, Janet Zweig.

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.

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.

How do you rationally connect the diverse literature, music, and painting of an age? Throughout the modernist era-which began roughly in 1872 with the Franco-Prussian War, climaxed with the Great War, and ended with a third catastrophe, the Great Depression-there was a special belligerence to this question. It was a cultural period that envisioned many different models of itself: to the Cubists, it looked like a vast jigsaw puzzle; to the Expressionists, it resembled a convulsive body; to the Dadaists, it brought to mind a heap of junk following an explosion. In Putting Modernism Together, Daniel Albright searches for the center of the modernist movement by assessing these various artistic models, exploring how they generated a stunning range of creative work that was nonetheless wound together aesthetically, and sorting out the cultural assumptions that made each philosophical system attractive. Emerging from Albright's lectures for a popular Harvard University course of the same name, the book investigates different methodologies for comparing the evolution and congruence of artistic movements by studying simultaneous developments that occurred during particularly key modernist years. What does it mean, Albright asks, that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, appeared at the same time as Claude Debussy's Nocturnes-beyond the fact that the word "Impressionist" has been used to describe each work? Why, in 1912, did the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the painter Vassily Kandinsky feel such striking artistic kinship? And how can we make sense of a movement, fragmented by isms, that looked for value in all sorts of under- or ill-valued places, including evil (Baudelaire), dung heaps (Chekhov), noise (Russolo), obscenity (Lawrence), and triviality (Satie)? Throughout Putting Modernism Together, Albright argues that human culture can best be understood as a growth-pattern or ramifying of artistic, intellectual, and political action. Going beyond merely explaining how the artists in these genres achieved their peculiar effects, he presents challenging new analyses of telling craft details which help students and scholars come to know more fully this bold age of aesthetic extremism.

Indian Baskets of Northern California and Oregon is a richly illustrated, detailed study of the Native American basketry of this fascinating region. The book is the result of decades of research by Ralph Shanks who is a careful scholar and delightful author.The book covers the basketry of the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Wiyot, Tolowa, Wintu, Yana, Atsugewi, and other California cultures. It also details the baskets of Oregon peoples including the Klamath, Kalapuya, Wasco, Coos, Tillamook, Tututni, and others.The book features nearly 200 previously unpublished color photographs of baskets of Northern California and Oregon from museums and private collections in the United States and Europe.

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.

Brought to Spain in the thirteenth century by Islamic artisans, the enameled earthenware known as mayA3lica is decorated with a lead glaze to which tin oxide is added to create an opaque white surface. By the fifteenth century, several areas in Spain were well known throughout Europe for the quality of these ceramics, and with Spainas expansion into the New World the mayA3lica tradition came into Mexico. There it underwent further changes, notably the use of indigenous design motifs and patterns inspired by Chinese porcelain. Over the next three centuries, the potters of New Spain produced ceramics characterized by a distinctive mestizo aesthetic. This tradition continues today in both Mexico and Spain.

Assembled in connection with a major exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, this book moves discussion of mayA3lica beyond its stylistic merits in order to understand it in historic and cultural context. The contributors, specialists in art and art history, architecture, anthropology, archaeology, and the folk arts, place the ceramics in history and daily life, illustrating their place in trade and economics. Examining both historic and contemporary examples, they also take us into the pottersa workshops.

With the help of scholars, historians and artists, and through a range of diverse media, this book sets out to follow in the footsteps of Prophet Muhammad (*), retracing his movements during the famous Hijrah 'migration', from Makkah to the oasis town of Yathrib soon to become Madinat an-Nabi, the ''City of the Prophet". Situating the Hijrah firmly within the geography in which it unfolded, the book uses the sacred landscape of the Hijrah as a receptacle for its stories, memories and the events that took place along the route, thus providing tangible links between us and this momentous journey as never before experienced. For over fourteen hundred years, al-Hijrah, the famous story of the Prophet Muhammad's (*) 'migration' from Makkah to Madinah, has been told and retold by generations of Muslims throughout the world. This story, one of endurance overcoming adversity in pursuit of religious freedom to establish a nation united by bonds of brotherhood and faith, has continued to be an inspiration from which renewed meanings have been drawn. This book follows in the footsteps of the Prophet (*), retracing his movements during this crucial journey, and examining what occurred as he left his home in Makkah to the oasis town of Yathrib soon to become the "City of the Prophet". However, unlike anything seen before, this book anchors the Hijrah firmly within the geography in which it unfolded. Acting as a receptacle for its stories, memories and the events that took place along the route, the sacred landscape of the Hijrah provides tangible links between us and this momentous journey as never before, bringing a greater appreciation of the Hijrah story.

A study of a largely forgotten optical device and its relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a small black convex mirror used by artists and spectators of landscape to reflect a view and make tonal values and areas of light and shade visible. In a groundbreaking account, Maillet goes well beyond this particular function of the glass and situates it within a richer archaeology of Western thought, exploring the uncertainties and anxieties about mirrors, reflections, and their potential distortions. He takes us from the magical and occult background of the "black mirror," through a full evaluation of its importance in the age of the picturesque, to its persistence in a range of technological and representational practices, including photography, film, and contemporary art. The Claude Glass is a lasting contribution to the history of Western visual culture.

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.

You are girlish, our images tell us. You are plastic. Girlhood and the Plastic Image explains how, revealing the increasing girlishness of contemporary media. The figure of the girl has long been prized for its mutability, for the assumed instability and flexibility of the not-yet-woman. The plasticity of girlish identity has met its match in the plastic world of digital art and cinema. A richly satisfying interdisciplinary study showing girlish transformation to be a widespread condition of mediation, Girlhood and the Plastic Image explores how and why our images promise us the adaptability of youth.
This original and engaging study will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary audience including scholars of media studies, film studies, art history, and women's studies.

Identities of power and place, as expressed in paintings from the periods before and after the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, are the subject of this book of case studies from Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya area. These sophisticated, skillfully rendered images occur with architecture, in manuscripts, on large pieces of cloth, and on ceramics.

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.

Carpets made in the "Rug Belt"-an area that includes Morocco, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and northern India-have been a source of fascination and collecting since the 13th century. This engaging and accessible book explores the history, design techniques, materials, craftsmanship, and socioeconomic contexts of these works, promoting a better understanding and appreciation of these frequently misunderstood pieces. Fifty-five examples of Islamic carpets are illustrated with new photographs and revealing details. The lively texts guide readers, teaching them "how to read" clues present in the carpets. Walter B. Denny situates these carpets within the cultural and social realm of their production, be it a nomadic encampment, a rural village, or an urban workshop. This is an essential guide for students, collectors, and professionals who want to understand the art of the Islamic carpet. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Anchored in artistic practice, this vibrant collection of essays and writings spans a period from 1992-2017 and the work of leading artists such as Adel Abdessemed, Richard Avedon, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling, Omer Fast, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Alfredo Jaar, Glenn Ligon and Shen Yuan. A key figure in British and international art, Gilane Tawadros draws difference to the surface, recuperating it as a potentially radical frame through which to understand contemporary art and the everyday world. Playing with forms of writing, from critical analyses to fictional narratives, the book functions as a practice-based meditation on how to write about contemporary art.

This volume accompanies the international traveling exhibition FOOD, that focuses on the preservation of Earth and food choices, as well as the effects of climate change, the poisoning of agricultural products, the food distribution gap, famine and other related concerns. FOOD includes artworks by international artists exploring the question of food, a highly complex issue simultaneously dealing with survival, health, economy and culture.