In Collective Situations scholars, artists, and art collectives present a range of socially engaged art practices that emerged in Latin America during the Pink Tide period, between 1995 and 2010. This volume's essays, interviews, and artist's statements-many of which are appearing in English for the first time-demonstrate the complex relationship between moments of political transformation and artistic production. Whether addressing human rights in Colombia, the politics of urban spaces in Brazil, the violent legacy of military dictatorships in the region, or art's intersection with public policy, health, and the environment, the contributors outline the region's long-standing tradition of challenging ideas about art and the social sphere through experimentation. Introducing English-language readers to some of the most dynamic and innovative contemporary art in Latin America, Collective Situations documents new possibilities for artistic practice, collaboration, and creativity in ways that have the capacity to foster vibrant forms of democratic citizenship. Contributors Gavin Adams, Mariola V. Alvarez, Gustavo Buntinx, Maria Fernanda Cartagena, David Gutierrez Castaneda, Fabian Cereijido, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Kency Cornejo, Raquel de Anda, Bill Kelley Jr., Grant H. Kester, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Longoni, Rodrigo Marti, Elize Mazadiego, Annie Mendoza, Alberto Muenala, Prerana Reddy, Maria Reyes Franco, Pilar Riano-Alcala, Juan Carlos Rodriguez

In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government pursued rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. Despite their utilitarian intentions, however, most avant-gardists rarely created works regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists' fusion of technology and aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold's theater, Tatlin's and Khlebnikov's architectural designs, Mayakovsky's writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.

Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors of traumatic memories of World War II. Rather, she locates the motivation for this violence in the history of the medium of painting and in the economic history of postwar Italy. Reconfiguring the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Mansoor illuminates how the monochrome's reemergence reflected Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni's aesthetic and political critique of the Marshall Plan's economic warfare and growing American hegemony. It also anticipated the struggles in Italy's factories, classrooms, and streets that gave rise to Autonomia in the 1960s. Marshall Plan Modernism refigures our understanding of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics of postwar reconstruction during the Italian Miracle.

An exciting guide to, and celebration of, the Whitney Museum and its outstanding collection of American art This all-new handbook, a fresh look at the Whitney Museum of American Art's collection, highlights the museum's extraordinary holdings and its fascinating history. Featuring iconic pieces by artists such as Calder, Hopper, Johns, O'Keeffe, and Warhol-as well as numerous works by under-recognized individuals-this is not only a guide to the Whitney's collection, but also a remarkable primer on modern and contemporary American art. Beautifully illustrated with abundant new photography, the book pairs scholarly entries on 350 artists with images of some of their most significant works. The museum's history and the evolution of its collection, including the Whitney's important distinction as one of the few American museums founded by an artist, and the notion of "American" in relation to the collection, are covered in two short essays. Published to coincide with the Whitney's highly anticipated move to a new facility in downtown New York in the spring of 2015, this book celebrates the museum's storied past and vibrant present as it looks ahead to its future. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art

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.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is famously migratory, traversing continents and crossing and recrossing oceans. Guadalupe's earliest cult originated in medieval Iberia, where Our Lady of Guadalupe from Extremadura, Spain, played a significant role in the reconquista and garnered royal backing. The Spanish Guadalupe accompanied the conquistadors as part of the spiritual arsenal used to Christianize the Americas, where new images of the Virgin acted as catalysts to implant her devotion within multiethnic constituencies. This masterful study by Jeanette Favrot Peterson traces the transmission of Guadalupe as la Virgen de ida y vuelta from Spain to the Americas and back again, analyzing how the Spanish and Mexican titular images, and a selection of the copies they inspired, operated within the overlapping spheres of religion and politics. Peterson explores two central paradoxes: that only through a material object can a divine and invisible presence be authenticated and that Guadalupe's images were made to work for enacting revolutionary change while preserving the colonial status quo. She examines the artists who created images of Guadalupe, their patrons, and the diverse viewing audiences for whom those images were intended. This exegesis reveals that visual evidence functioned on a par with written texts (treatises, chronicles, and sermons of ecclesiastical officialdom) in measuring popular beliefs and political strategies.

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.

- Showcases the wealth of Spanish art in American collections, ranging from medieval to renaissance to contemporary art- Highlights the collections of seventeen museums across the country, including the Hispanic Society of America, the Meadows Museum in Dallas, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others The American passion for collecting Spanish art has resulted in superb collections in a wide number of museums from the east to the west coast. This beautifully photographed, oversized book discusses each collection in separate chapters, exploring the background to the collections and how they were acquired. The text addresses the economic as well as cultural frameworks for acquisitions, which expanded significantly in the second half of the 19th century with the increasing wealth of industrial America. Works in these collections include outstanding paintings by the great Golden Age masters, including Zurbaran, Murillo, Velazquez, El Greco, and Goya, and 20th century masterpieces by Dali, Miro, Picasso, Gris, Zuloaga, and Sorolla. Curators from the collections and independent scholars contributed the text, expanding our understanding of the artists, their works, and the cultural richness they represent.

John Heskett wants to transform the way we think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal, and the car we drive to work in, to the medical equipment used to save lives. Design combines 'need' and 'desire' in the form of a practical object that can also reflect the user's identity and aspirations through its form and decoration. This concise guide to contemporary design goes beyond style and taste to look at how different cultures and individuals personalize objects. Heskett also reveals how simple objects, such as a toothpick, can have their design modified to suit the specific cultural behaviour in different countries. There are also fascinating insights into how major companies such as Nokia, Ford, and Sony approach design. Finally, the author gives us an exciting vision of what design can offer us in the future, showing in particular how it can humanize new technology. 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.

This is the latest volume in the acclaimed series that depicts medicine as depicted in art throughout history. This sumptuously illustrated volume offers a visual history of the depiction of illness and healing in Western culture, ranging from Egyptian wall carvings to medieval manuscripts and from paintings and sculpture by the great masters of the Renaissance to 20th century artists such as Matisse & Magritte. Thematic chapters cover the examination of patients and their maladies, healing and medical treatments, and the sufferings and hopes of patients awaiting cure and recovery. Psychological anguish, represented by Masaccio's The Expulsion of Adam and Eve, and Munch's The Scream, are also treated along with more obvious physical manifestations.

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

One of the great conceptual artists of the twenty-first century, Terry Adkins (1953-2014) was renowned for his pioneering work across mediums, from sculpture, drawing, and site-specific installation to photography, video, and performance. Terry Adkins: Infinity is Always Less Than One accompanies the first institutional posthumous exhibition of Adkins's sculptural production. While Adkins is often recognized for his musical and performative practice, this exhibition focuses on his complex memorials and monuments to historical figures. The exhibition showcases four of his major series, dedicated to four distinct figures: Bessie Smith, John Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jimi Hendrix. These series are presented alongside a group of early sculptures to reveal the development of the Adkins's mature practice. The exhibition highlights Adkins's crucial contributions to sculpture and to cultural protest, featuring major works that have not been viewed in decades. It explores significant periods and influences in Adkins's career, beginning with transitional hand-wrought sculptures and continuing with his major immersive installations. His often elegiac and always resonant objects challenge dominant historical narratives and prompt a rethinking of ways of being and moving in the world that are shaped by the legacies of displacement and the sociability and community that happen despite it. Adkins's work also enlarges the historical legacies of the postwar avant-garde while reminding us of the immaterial legacies that are passed on through ritual and sound. Contributors. Alex Gartenfeld, Kobena Mercer, Gean Moreno, Nizan Shaked, and Greg Tate A Publication of ICA Miami Distributed by Duke University Press

Kant, Art, and Art History is the first systematic study of Kant's reception of and influence on the visual arts and art history. Arguing against Kant's transcendental approach to aesthetic judgement, Cheetham examines five 'moments' of his influence, including the use of Kant's political writings among German-speaking artists and critics in Rome around 1800; the canonized patterns of Kant's reception in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art history, particularly in the work of Woelfflin and Panofsky; and the Kantian language in the criticism of Cubism. He also reassesses Clement Greenberg's famous reliance on Kant. The final chapter focuses on Kant's 'image', both in contemporary and posthumous portraits, with respect to his status as the image of philosophy within a disciplinary hierarchy. In Cheetham's reading, Kant emerges as a figure who has constantly erected and crossed the borders among art, its history, and philosophy.

The Bauhaus school in Germany has long been understood through the writings of its founding director, Walter Gropius, and well-known artists who taught there such as Wassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts by women in the school's weaving workshop. In "Bauhaus Weaving Theory, " T'ai Smith uncovers new significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers.

From colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of soundproofing and light-reflective fabric, the workshop's innovative creations influenced a modernist theory of weaving. In the first careful examination of the writings of Bauhaus weavers, including Anni Albers, Gunta Stozl, and Otti Berger, Smith details how these women challenged assumptions about the feminine nature of their craft. As they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines like painting, architecture, and photography, Smith argues, the weavers resisted modernist thinking about distinct media. In parsing texts about tapestries and functional textiles, the vital role these women played in debates about medium in the twentieth century and a nuanced history of the Bauhaus comes to light.

"Bauhaus Weaving Theory" deftly reframes the Bauhaus weaving workshop as central to theoretical inquiry at the school. Putting questions of how value and legitimacy are established in the art world into dialogue with the limits of modernism, Smith confronts the belief that the crafts are manual and technical but never intellectual arts.

Museums are frequently sites of struggle and negotiation. They are key cultural institutions that occupy an oftentimes uncomfortable place at the crossroads of the arts, culture, various levels of government, corporate ventures, and the public. Because of this, museums are targeted by political action but can also provide support for contentious politics. Though protests at museums are understudied, they are far from anomalous. Tear Gas Epiphanies traces the as-yet-untold story of political action at museums in Canada from the early twentieth century to the present. The book looks at how museums do or do not archive protest ephemera, examining a range of responses to actions taking place at their thresholds, from active encouragement to belligerent dismissal. Drawing together extensive primary-source research and analysis, Robertson questions widespread perceptions of museums, strongly arguing for a reconsideration of their role in contemporary society that takes into account political conflict and protest as key ingredients in museum life. The sheer number of protest actions Robertson uncovers is compelling. Ambitious and wide-ranging, Tear Gas Epiphanies provides a thorough and conscientious survey of key points of intersection between museums and protest - a valuable resource for university students and scholars, as well as arts professionals working at and with museums.

'Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right'. This extraordinary collection of 100 artists' manifestos from across the globe over the last 100 years brings together activists, post-colonialists, surrealists, socialists, nihilists and a host of other voices. From the Negritude movement in Africa and Martinique to Brazil's Mud/Meat Sewer Manifesto, from Iraqi modernism to Australia's Cyberfeminist Manifesto, they are by turns personal, political, utopian, angry, sublime and revolutionary. Some have not been published in English before; some were written in climates of censorship and brutality; some contain visions of a future still on the horizon. What unites them is the belief that art can change the world.

Donald Kuspit argues here that art is over because it has lost its aesthetic import. Art has been replaced by "postart," a term invented by Alan Kaprow, as a new visual category that elevates the banal over the enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred, cleverness over creativity. Tracing the demise of aesthetic experience to the works and theory of Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman, Kuspit argues that devaluation is inseparable from the entropic character of modern art, and that anti-aesthetic postmodern art is in its final state. In contrast to modern art, which expressed the universal human unconscious, postmodern art degenerates into an expression of narrow ideological interests. In reaction to the emptiness and stagnancy of postart, Kuspit signals the aesthetic and human future that lies with the old masters. The End of Art points the way to the future for the visual arts. Donald Kuspit is Professor of Art History at SUNY Stony Brook. A winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, Professor Kuspit is a Contributing Editor at Artforum, Sculpture and New Art Examiner. His most recent book is The Cult of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 1994).

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.

Conceptual art consisted of a loose collection of related practices that emerged worldwide during the 1960s and 1970s. This collection of essays offers readers a wealth of new research on the earliest international exhibitions of Conceptual art; new interpretations of some of its most important practitioners; and a reconsideration of the relationship between Conceptual art and the intellectual and social context of the 1960s and 1970s. Of special note are the contributions that focus on the explicitly social and political aspirations of this influential avant-garde artistic practice.

In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones. Black Models and White Myths examines the tendentious racial assumptions behind representations of Africans that emphasized the contrast between "civilization" and "savagery" and the development of so-called scientific and ethnographic racism. These works often depicted Africans within a context of sexuality and exoticism, representing their allegedly natural behavior as a counterpoint to inhibited European conduct.

A sweeping painterly chronicle of the war, and a vital part of Australia's heritage.Richard Travers, the author of Diggers in France: Australian Soldiers on the Western Front, now turns his attention to the Australians who painted the Great War. In To Paint A War he follows artists such as Tom Roberts, Grace Cossington Smith, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Arthur Streeton and George Coates - detailing how they left Australia in search of inspiration and fame in London and Paris and lived enviable lives suddenly interrupted by the outbreak of war.To Paint A War is the story of their response to the crisis. Their work, in all its richness and variety, is a sweeping painterly chronicle of the war, and a vital part of Australia's heritage.

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.