Armed with speakers, turntables, light systems, and records, Filipino American mobile DJ crews, such as Ultimate Creations, Spintronix, and Images, Inc., rocked dance floors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. In Legions of Boom noted music and pop culture writer and scholar Oliver Wang chronicles this remarkable scene that eventually became the cradle for turntablism. These crews, which were instrumental in helping to create and unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave young men opportunities to assert their masculinity and gain social status. While crews regularly spun records for school dances, weddings, birthdays, or garage parties, the scene's centerpieces were showcases-or multi-crew performances-which drew crowds of hundreds, or even thousands. By the mid-1990s the scene was in decline, as single DJs became popular, recruitment to crews fell off, and aspiring scratch DJs branched off into their own scene. As the training ground for a generation of DJs, including DJ Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Mix Master Mike, the mobile scene left an indelible mark on its community that eventually grew to have a global impact.

Volume 3 in this series on Pre-Columbian figurines concentrates on pottery figurines from the south coast, the highlands and the 'Selva' (tropical rain forests) of Peru. It details a collection of 784 figurines: 536 from the South Coast, 230 from the Sierra and 18 from the Selva. The main aim of this work has been to record the figurines and to classify them into iconographically and stylistically meaningful groups, thus providing a user-friendly Corpus. For each geographic area the figurine groups are presented in chronological order. Each figurine is listed on a Table, containing all the relevant data (collection, site provenance, sex, measurements, surface colour, manufacturing technique, special features and reference to publications) and is illustrated on a Plate. The analytical part lists the group characteristics and discusses special features, links with other groups, context, geographic distribution and chronology of each group or sub-group. Volume 1 (The Pottery Figurines of the North Coast of Peru has already appeared as BAR S1941 (2009).

Popular art is a masculine and working-class genre, associated with Panama's black population. Its practitioners are self-taught, commercial painters, whose high-toned designs, vibrant portraits, and landscapes appear in cantinas, barbershops, and restaurants. The red devil buses are popular art's most visible manifestation. The old school buses are imported from the United States and provide public transportation in Colon and Panama City. Their owners hire the artists to attract customers with eye-catching depictions of singers and actors, brassy phrases, and vivid representations of both local and exotic panoramas. The red devils boast powerful stereo systems and dominate the urban environment with their blasting reggae, screeching brakes, horns, sirens, whistles, and roaring mufflers. Wolf Tracks analyzes the origins of these practices, tying them to rebellious, Afro-American festival traditions, and to the rumba craze of the mid-twentieth century. During World War II, thousands of U.S. soldiers were stationed in Panama, and elaborately decorated cabarets opened to cater to their presence. These venues often featured touring Afro-Cuban musicians. Painters such as Luis ""The Wolf"" Evans exploited such moments of modernization to challenge the elite and its older conception of Panama as a country with little connection to Africa. While the intellectual class fled from modernization and asserted a romantic and mestizo (European-indigenous) vision of the republic, popular artists enthusiastically embraced the new influences to project a powerful sense of blackness. Wolf Tracks includes biographies of dozens of painters, as well as detailed discussions of mestizo nationalism, soccer, reggae, and other markers of Afro-Panamanian identity.

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.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Japanese avant-garde filmmakers intensely explored the shifting role of the image in political activism and media events. Known as the "season of politics," the era was filled with widely covered dramatic events from hijackings and hostage crises to student protests. This season of politics was, Yuriko Furuhata argues, the season of "image" politics. Well-known directors, including Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Wakamatsu Kōji, and Adachi Masao, appropriated the sensationalized media coverage of current events, turning news stories into material for timely critique and intermedial experimentation. "Cinema of Actuality" analyzes Japanese avant-garde filmmakers' struggle to radicalize cinema in light of the intensifying politics of spectacle and a rapidly changing media environment, one that was increasingly dominated by television. Furuhata demonstrates how avant-garde filmmaking intersected with media history, and how sophisticated debates about film theory emerged out of dialogues with photography, television, and other visual arts.

Tony C. Brown examines "the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothing" in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considers-including the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoe-turn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage. In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in one's ability to understand the human's relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidence-what Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological security-traces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the human's place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to "exotic" examples from the New World-such as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practice-making them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.

The representation of prophets and saints in Islam is erroneously considered nonexistent by many scholars of Islam, Muslims, and the general public. The issue is often dealt with superficially without attention to its deep roots in piety and religiosity. Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shiism offers new understanding of Islamic iconography and Muslim perspectives on the use of imageries in ritual contexts and devotional life. Combining iconographic and ethnographic approaches, Ingvild Flaskerud introduces and analyzes imageries (tile-paintings, posters and wall-hangings), ritual contexts and interviews with male and female local viewers to discuss the representation, reception and function of imageries in contemporary Iranian Shia environments. This book presents the argument that images and decorative programmes have stimulating qualities to mentally evoke the saints in the minds of devotees and inspire their recollection, transforming emotions and stimulating cultic behaviours. Visualization and seeing are significant to the dissemination of religious knowledge, the understanding of spiritual and ethical values, the promotion of personal piety, and functions as modes of venerating God and the saints.

In "American Pietas," Ruby C. Tapia reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes's suturing of race, death, and the maternal in "Camera Lucida," Tapia contends that the contradictory essence of the photograph is both as a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection.
Tapia explores the implications of this argument for racialized productions of death and the maternal in the context of specific cultural moments: the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison's and Hollywood's "Beloved"; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California's Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the "Widows of 9/11" in print and televisual journalism.
Taken together, these various visual media texts function in "American Pietas" as cultural artifacts and as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized productions of maternal bodies in contexts of national death and remembering. To engage this network is to ask how and toward what end the racial project of the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for dead. In the spaces between these different maternities, says Tapia, U.S. citizen-subjects are born--and reborn.

Evaporating Suns explores myths from the Arabian Gulf through contemporary art. Based on the concept that the mythical and the factual are like two sides of the same coin, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition shows that myths do not simply convey fictions, but that they are instead capable of presenting truth much more vividly than statistics and facts ever could. The publication showcases the work of 13 contemporary artists from the Arabian peninsula, who explore the folklore and popular myths of their homelands, and use cynicism, satire and fiction to build their universes and rewrite the parallel history of their contemporary societies. Completed by essays by authors from the region, myths are being seen as an opportunity to offer a new approach to negotiate current issues such as the environment, gender, and social structures of power.

The latest book in the successful 50 series, this introduction to the icons of Jewish art celebrates the religion and its culture while addressing fundamental issues about creative expression and the Judaic tradition. Readers will find much to learn and explore in this beautiful collection of images from the most prominent Jewish artists of the past two centuries. Presented in chronological order, each entry features magnificent reproductions of major and lesser-known works, as well as a brief biography of the artist, compelling stories about his or her work, and relevant historical details. The range of artists includes those from across Europe, North America, and Israel: icons of ineteenth-century art such as David Oppenheim, Solomon Hart, and Maricy Gottlieb; renowned modernists such as Pissarro, Modigliani, and Chagall; and photographers from Man Ray to Nan Goldin. This wonderfully illustrated book introduces readers to the world's most important Jewish artists.

From the fundamental rights proclaimed in the American and French declarations of independence to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Hannah Arendt's furious critiques, the definition of what it means to be human has been hotly debated. But the history of human rights--and their abuses--is also a richly illustrated one. Following this picture trail, "Human Rights In Camera" takes an innovative approach by examining the visual images that have accompanied human rights struggles and the passionate responses people have had to them.Sharon Sliwinski considers a series of historical events, including the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Holocaust, to illustrate that universal human rights have come to be imagined through aesthetic experience. The circulation of images of distant events, she argues, forms a virtual community between spectators and generates a sense of shared humanity. Joining a growing body of scholarship about the cultural forces at work in the construction of human rights, "Human Rights In Camera" is a novel take on this potent political ideal.

This work is the first thorough analysis of the creative oeuvre of the Quay Brothers. Known for their animation shorts that rely on puppetry, miniatures, and stop-motion techniques, their fiercely idiosyncratic films are fertile fields for Suzanne Buchan's engaging descriptions and provocative insights into the Quays' art-and into the art of independent puppet animation.
Buchan's aesthetic investigation stems from extensive access to the Quay Brothers' artistic practices and work, which spans animation and live-action film, stage design and illustration. She also draws on a long acquaintance with them and on interviews with collaborators essential to their productions, as well as archival sources. Discussions of their films' literary origins, space, puppets, montage, and the often-overlooked world of sound and music in animation shed new light on the expressive world that the Quay Brothers generate out of their materials to create the poetic alchemy of their films.
At once a biography of the Quays' artistic trajectory and a detailed examination of one of their best-known films, "Street of Crocodiles," this book goes further and provides interdisciplinary methodologies and tools for the analysis of animation.

Across the globe there are scores of beautiful and unusual works of art that are largely unseen or fail to receive the critical acclaim they deserve. "The Best Art You've Never Seen" is your essential companion to this hidden world of artistic treasures. Travelling from Peru to Papua New Guinea, "The Best Art You've Never Seen" restores to view 101 wonderful treasures -- uncovering neglected artistic wonders from off-beat corners of the world to store rooms in the world's great museums.

Written by art expert and former museum director Julian Spalding, "The Best Art You've Never Seen" takes you into a world of beautiful and arresting artifacts and reveals their amazing stories. It unveils a surprising and unfamiliar alternative canon of works to offer a fresh and controversial take on the world of art.

Mythology has inspired countless generations of humanity for millennia, from the parent culture of a myth to cultures fairly removed in time, space and language. Poets, artists, historians and philosophers have interpreted the stories in many ways, and Greek and Roman myths in particular are rich in paradox and narrative wisdom that artists have also visually illustrated, often depicting the crux or dramatic climax of a story in close detail. Biblical material also provides a wealth of material for similar reinterpretations for artists or writers. Whether in language with figures like similes and metaphors, or in visual imagery from sculptures, mosaics, wall-paintings and other ancient media, retelling of mythology in parallel versions often borrow from each other and influence each other. For example, a wide range of artists including Durer, Cranach, Rembrandt, Dore, Klimt, Waterhouse or anonymous ancient vase painters, mosaicists and sculptors reinterpret seminal texts of poets and thinkers such as Homer, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, Dante or biblical material. Whether ancient or modern in its applications, Ekphrasis is an ancient Greek word that essentially has to do with literary versions inspiring visual artistic versions, or vice versa. Visual literacy can be as important as verbal literacy, and tracing these symbiotic influences and looking at their backgrounds are some of the primary foci of Myth and Art in Ekphrasis.

Outsider art is work produced outside the mainstream of modern art by self-taught visionaries, spiritualists, eccentrics, recluses, psychiatric patients, criminals and others beyond the perceived margins of society. Coined in 1972 the term is derived from art brut', which the artist Jean Dubuffet began promoting just after the Second World War. Both focus on the idea of a raw', untaught creativity, which is still a contentious and much-debated issue. Is this a natural phenomenon, requiring only the right circumstances (isolation or alienation) to be revealed; or is it more like a mirage projected by the very culture it is supposed to be escaping from? Behind the polemic and the commercial hype lies a cluster of assumptions about creative drives, the expression of inner worlds, radical originality and the artist's social or psychological eccentricity. Although Outsider art is often presented as a recent discovery, these ideas belong to a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, when the modern image of the artist began to take shape. If Outsiders are in some way outside' the conventional art world, what happens to them, and to the works they create, when they are introduced to it? David Maclagan has been writing on Outsider art for over twenty-five years, and this book sets out to challenge many of the received ideas in the field. This book will be of interest to the growing number of people interested in the field of Outsider art, and all those studying concepts of artistic creativity and their cultural background.

The paintings have the purpose of attracting the deity's presence during the celebrations in his or her honor and a blessing on the family members of the house where they are painted.

An introduction to the key Christian themes, signs, and symbols found in art, from the devotional works of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, to the co-existence, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of the deliberately controversial and the consciously devotional.

Flowers have been a popular motif in art for centuries. As the epitome of natural beauty and earthly mortality since the Baroque era, flowers have lost none of their fascination for artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. Why does modern and contemporary art turn so frequently to this multi-faceted subject?

The designs in this magnificent collection of beautifully engraved frames, scrollwork, and other motifs originate from an extremely rare mid-19th century source. Featuring a lavish selection of ornaments (decorated with flowers, mythological creatures, and other fanciful touches) this treasury of copyright-free art also includes striking designs incorporating classical columns, a rich selection of heraldic designs, and a variety of charming calligraphic alphabets. A priceless resource for artists and designers.

The Art of Eastern India, 300-800 was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Though scholars have extensive knowledge of the art that flourished during Pala rule in Eastern India (ca. 800-1200), little is known about Eastern Indian art during the preceding 500 years. This half-millennium includes the period of the Gupta dynasty and the two centuries that bridge Gupta and Pala rule, when no single dynasty long maintained control of Eastern India. In this study, Frederick M. Asher challenges arthistorical assumptions about Pala art - that it is a new school virtually without links to earlier art 00 by demonstrating that sculpture during the Gupta period and the subsequent three centuries evolved along lines that connect it with Pala art. In so doing, he draws attention to important sculptures, most of them never previously studied, that tell us not only about an unexplored period in Indian art but also about broader aspects of the cultural history and geography of Eastern India. Asher's work is based on field research in Bihar, West Bengal, and Bangladesh. There he gave special attention to the sites of once-flourishing Buddhist monasteries and to Hindu images still worshipped in village India. The author's photographs of the bronze, terra cotta, and stone sculptures, and his detailed text, provide a virtual catalogue raisonne of the known works of the period. Asher's analyses of the images and his attributions of dates to them are based upon close attention to artistic style and iconography, and the study of dynastic and social history, contemporary travelers' reports, and religious history. Drawing together these diverse strands of information, he describes the evolution of art forms over a long period in which there was little apparent historic unity. John M. Rosenfield, professor of art history at Harvard University and author of The Art of the Kushans, says, of The Art of Eastern India,"The scholarship is scrupulously detailed and careful . . . [The book] is in the finest tradition of classical scholarship, and will be consulted or several generations."

The widespread assumption that Jewish religious tradition is mediated through words, not pictures, has left Jewish art with no significant role to play in Jewish theology and ethics. Judaism and the Visual Image argues for a Jewish theology of image that, among other things, helps us re-read the creation story in Genesis 1 and to question why images of Jewish women as religious subjects appear to be doubly suppressed by the Second Commandment, when images of observant male Jews have become legitimate, even iconic, representations of Jewish holiness. Raphael further suggests that 'devout beholding' of images of the Holocaust is a corrective to post-Holocaust theologies of divine absence from suffering that are infused by a sub-theological aesthetic of the sublime. Raphael concludes by proposing that the relationship between God and Israel composes itself into a unitary dance or moving image by which each generation participates in a processive revelation that is itself the ultimate work of Jewish art.