The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. Challenging these forces and representations, Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that something more must be added to the discussion in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art arises from several years of field research and curatorial activity in museums, universities, and cultural institutions of Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This book explores the ways in which Caribbean individuals and communities have recurred to art and visual creativity to create and sustain public spaces of discussion and social interaction. The book analyzes contemporary Caribbean art in relation to broader discussions of citizenship, cultural agency, critical geography, migration, and social justice. Covering a broad range of artistic projects, including curatorial practice, socially engaged art, institutional politics, public art, and performance, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share.

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

This beautifully produced, richly detailed, and comprehensive survey of fifty influential women artists from the Renaissance to the Post-Modern era details their vast contributions to the art world. From the Early Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi and the seventeenth-century illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian to Impressionist Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, and to modern icons such as Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois, the most important female artists are profiled in this book in chronologically arranged double-page spreads. There is a succinct biography for each artist, together with information outlining her accomplishments and influence, additional resources for further study, and, best of all, brilliant full-color reproductions of the artist's works. Packed with information, this stunning and absorbing book showcases the remarkable artistic contributions of women throughout history

A remarkable new book providing unique insight into Tate's collection through the depiction of plants and flowers With their delightful colors, incredible natural beauty, and fascinating "otherness," it is no surprise that flowers and plants have long captivated artists. They have come to symbolize a gamut of complex human emotions, including hope, delight, love, compassion, gratitude, grief, and loss. The fragility of flowers is a poignant reminder of the fleeting nature of life. Their sensory appeal--to our sight, smell, touch and even, sometimes, taste--brings us into the present moment, and they can affect our well-being in surprisingly healing ways. Bloom is a compendium of 100 of the most beautiful floral works from Tate's collection. Designed to encourage slow, mindful looking, it will bring reflection, restoration, and joy.

Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy, art theory, and many engrossing examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, sex, web sites, and research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, lively book will engage the public, introductory students, and teachers in the arts.

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history's traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world. Contributors. Bill Anthes, Peter Brunt, Karen Duffek, Erin Haney, Elizabeth Harney, Heather Igloliorte, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, W. Jackson Rushing III, Damian Skinner, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano  

Hop on the tram with Milli Ennium, Quincy, and their cohorts as they set out to explore the Getty Center. This children's book--from the creators of the popular Mr. Lunch character--takes a delightful tour through the Getty Museum, adjancent gardens, conservation laboratories and other sites at the Getty Center. Featuring the wonderful illustrations of J.otto Seibold and the beloved characters created by Seibold and coauthor Vivian Walsh, Going to the Getty is a colorful, humorous visit to the new center and sure to be enjoyed by children as well as the adult fans of Seibold and Walsh.

Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, the ten essays collected in Generations of Dissent shed light on the artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and acts of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. Born of the contributors' research on dissidence and state co-option in a variety of artistic and creative fields, the volume's core themes reflect the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focus on how protestors "finally" broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays show that the uprisings were rooted in multiple generations and various acts of resistance decades prior to 2010-11. Firat and Taleghani's volume maps the complicated trajectories of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, showing how artists have challenged institutions and governments over the past six decades.

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.

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.

The ""blk alter"" of Avery R. Young's poetic vision makes its stunning debut in a multidisciplinary arsenal entitled, neckbone: visual verses. Young's years of supernatural fieldwork within the black experience and the gospel of his transitions between poetry, art and music, become the stitch, paint brush, metaphor, and narrative of arresting visual metaphors of childhood teachings and traumas, identity, and the personal reverence of pop culture's beauty and beast. A mastermind in a new language of poetry, that engages and challenges readers to see beyond the traditional spaces poems are shaped and exist, Young's neckbone extends tentacles in literature, art, and activism-redefining the collective and the sermon of the ""blk"" experience.

Firmly established as one of the premier histories of women in the fine arts, Nancy G. Heller's "Women Artists returns in an expanded fourth edition. With coverage of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, nearly half the volume is now devoted to the remarkable period from 1960 to the present, when women artists emerged as the most dynamic force in contemporary art. New to this edition are innovative contemporary American artists such as Janine Antoni and Judith Schaechter, as well as major international figures, including Iran's Shirin Neshat, Shahzia Sikander from Pakistan, and the Icelandic sculptor and performance artist Katrin Sigurdardottir. As in past editions, all the artists' works are represented in large-format color reproductions, and the artists' careers are examined in concise critical biographies.

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.

In What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Madina Tlostanova traces how contemporary post-Soviet art mediates this human condition. Observing how the concept of the happy future—which was at the core of the project of Soviet modernity—has lapsed from the post-Soviet imagination, Tlostanova shows how the possible way out of such a sense of futurelessness lies in the engagement with activist art. She interviews artists, art collectives, and writers such as Estonian artist Liina Siib, Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, and Azerbaijani writer Afanassy Mamedov who frame the post-Soviet condition through the experience and expression of community, space, temporality, gender, and negotiating the demands of the state and the market. In foregrounding the unfolding aesthesis and activism in the post-Soviet space, Tlostanova emphasizes the important role that decolonial art plays in providing the foundation upon which to build new modes of thought and a decolonial future.

Fugitive Testimony traces the long arc of the African American slave narrative from the eighteenth century to the present in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and postbellum literary slave narratives as well as contemporary visual art, Janet Neary brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre's central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of his or her own testimony. Taking works by current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, Neary employs their representational strategies to decode the visual work performed in nineteenth-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, Henry Box Brown, and others. She focuses on the textual visuality of these narratives to illustrate how their authors use the logic of the slave narrative against itself as a way to undermine the epistemology of the genre and to offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.

The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. Challenging these forces and representations, Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that something more must be added to the discussion in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art arises from several years of field research and curatorial activity in museums, universities, and cultural institutions of Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This book explores the ways in which Caribbean individuals and communities have recurred to art and visual creativity to create and sustain public spaces of discussion and social interaction. The book analyzes contemporary Caribbean art in relation to broader discussions of citizenship, cultural agency, critical geography, migration, and social justice. Covering a broad range of artistic projects, including curatorial practice, socially engaged art, institutional politics, public art, and performance, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share.

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.

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.

The new Cuban art grew up in the supercharged and conflicting currents of revolution, sometimes tracking to its optimism and at others scalded by it. But even more than that it was an art with extraordinary relation and relevance to the life of the country across social, domestic, cultural, and psychological registers: aggressive, protean, and perennially restless within an extraordinary conviction about the possibilities of art.-from the Introduction In 1981, Volumen Uno, an exhibition at a Havana gallery, inaugurated a new chapter in the rich history of Cuban art. Featuring an eclectic mix of works by eleven young artists filtered through a variety of styles-informalism, Pop, minimalism, conceptualism, performance, graffiti, and povera-the art was a sharp break with the past in both form and content. More of a phenomenon than a formal movement, the new Cuban art was both a reaction to the sovietization of Cuban culture in the 1970s and the dynamic entry of a generation of artists born around the Revolution and formed by its orthodoxies and its poetic idealism. In this spectacularly illustrated volume, Rachel Weiss offers the definitive critical history of the new Cuban art, exploring its remarkable artistic accomplishments and its role as catalyst for, and site of, public debate. Weiss draws on two decades of engagement with Cuban art and on the statements of the artists themselves to read individual artworks against the complex relationships between artists, their local and global audiences, and the Cuban state. Tracing the shift from the optimism of the early 1980s to the cultural cynicism that paralleled the near-collapse of Cuban society in the 1990s, To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art identifies a renewed idealism among the artists about the potential role of culture in Cuban society.