Photography became a dominant medium in cultural life starting in the late nineteenth century. As it happened, viewers increasingly used their reactions to photographs to comment on and debate public issues as vital as war, national identity, and citizenship. Cara A. Finnegan analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. From the portrait of a young Lincoln to images of child laborers and Depression-era hardship, Finnegan treats the photograph as a locus for viewer engagement and constructs a history of photography's viewers that shows how Americans used words about images to participate in the politics of their day. As she shows, encounters with photography helped viewers negotiate the emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life through not only persuasion but action, as well.

This short book introduces the reader to the key concepts in art from ancient times to the present day. Unlike many previous publications, in which non-Western art is a mere add-on to the great artists and movements of the Western canon, this tells the story of art from a fresh perspective, integrating previously marginalised aspects of artistic creation into the principal narrative. The text focuses on illustrated examples, ranging from the iconic to the unusual, providing a stimulating and throught-provoking introduction to a complex and challenging subject. Concise and informative, the book is written in a clear, jargonfree style. While it is ideal for first-year students of art, art history and related subjects, it will also be invaluable for general readers wanting to know and understand more about art and culture.

The advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and '30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. In "Impossible Heights," Adnan Morshed examines the aesthetics that emerged from this valorization of heights and their impact on the built environment.

The lofty vantage point from the sky ushered in a modernist impulse to cleanse crowded twentieth-century cities in anticipation of an ideal world of tomorrow. Inspired by great new heights, American architects became central to this endeavor and were regarded as heroic aviators. Combining close readings of a broad range of archival sources, Morshed offers new interpretations of works such as Hugh Ferriss's Metropolis drawings, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion houses, and Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Transformed by the populist imagination into "master builders," these designers helped produce a new form of visuality: the aesthetics of ascension.

By demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular "superman" discourses of the time, Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America's propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.

The Northwest Coast of North America has long been recognized as one of the world's canonical art zones. This volume records and scrutinizes the history of how and why this has come about. A work of critical historiography, it makes accessible for the first time in one place a broad selection of the 250 years of writing on Northwest Coast art. The contributors - leading scholars, writers, and artists - provide perspectives on the diverse intellectual traditions that have influenced, stimulated, and clashed with each other. In unsettling the conventions that have shaped the idea of Northwest Coast Native art, this book joins the lively, often heated, and now global, debates about what constitutes Native art and who should decide.

Grafton Tyler Brown--whose heritage was likely one-eighth African American--finessed his way through San Francisco society by passing for white. Working in an environment hostile to African American achievement, Brown became a successful commercial artist and businessman in the rough-and-tumble gold rush era and the years after the Civil War. Best known for his bird's-eye cityscapes, he also produced and published maps, charts, and business documents, and he illustrated books, sheet music, advertisements, and labels for cans and other packaging.

This biography by a distinguished California historian gives an underappreciated artist and his work recognition long overdue. Focusing on Grafton Tyler Brown's lithography and his life in nineteenth-century San Francisco, Robert J. Chandler offers a study equally fascinating as a business and cultural history and as an introduction to Brown the artist.

Chandler's contextualization of Brown's career goes beyond the issue of race. Showing how Brown survived and flourished as a businessman, Chandler offers unique insight into the growth of printing and publishing in California and the West. He examines the rise of lithography, its commercial and cultural importance, and the competition among lithographic companies. He also analyzes Brown's work and style, comparing it to the products of rival firms.

Brown was not respected as a fine artist until after his death. Collectors of western art and Americana now recognize the importance of Californiana and of Brown's work, some of which depicts Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and they will find Chandler's checklist, descriptions, and reproductions of Brown's ephemera--including billheads and maps--as uniquely valuable as Chandler's contribution to the cultural and commercial history of California. In an afterword, historian Shirley Ann Wilson Moore discusses the circumstances and significance of passing in nineteenth-century America.

Pepon Osorio is an internationally recognized artist whose richly detailed installations challenge the stereotypes and misconceptions that shape our view of social institutions and human relationships. Osorio's colorful, often riotous installations are constructed from found objects and things that he customizes or creates. With a wry sense of humor, he probes sober topics, including prison life, domestic violence, AIDS, and poverty.

Osorio's collaborative site-based works develop from his immersion into a community--residents of urban ethnic neighborhoods, employees who provide social services, children in foster care--and the discussions that result. As he addresses difficult themes such as race and gender, death and survival, and alienation and belonging, Osorio asks his audience to reconsider their assumptions and biases. In this book, Jennifer A. Gonzalez shows that although Osorio draws on his Puerto Rican background and the immigrant experience for inspiration, his artistic statements bridge geographical barriers and class divides.

Osorio's installations have been exhibited internationally, and his work is represented at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and other major museums. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999.

How did the average American learn about art in the mid-nineteenth century? With public art museums still in their infancy, and few cities and towns large enough to support art galleries or print shops, Americans relied on mass-circulated illustrated magazines. One group of magazines in particular, known collectively as the Philadelphia pictorials, circulated fine art engravings of paintings, some produced exclusively for circulation in these monthlies, to an eager middle-class reading audience. These magazines achieved print circulations far exceeding those of other print media (such as illustrated gift books, or catalogs from art-union membership organizations).

"Godey's," "Graham's," "Peterson's," "Miss Leslie's," and "Sartain's Union Magazine" included two to three fine art engravings monthly, "tipped in" to the fronts of the magazines, and designed for pull-out and display. Featuring the work of a fledgling group of American artists who chose American rather than European themes for their paintings, these magazines were crucial to the distribution of American art beyond the purview of the East Coast elite to a widespread middle-class audience. Contributions to these magazines enabled many an American artist and engraver to earn, for the first time in the young nation's history, a modest living through art.

Author Cynthia Lee Patterson examines the economics of artistic production, innovative engraving techniques, regional imitators, the textual "illustrations" accompanying engravings, and the principal artists and engravers contributing to these magazines.

At his untimely death in 1998, photographer Ricardo Valverde (b. 1946) had for almost three decades documented the various communities and social spaces of Los Angeles. Though he began this lifelong pursuit while still in college, capturing the streets of his South Central neighborhood and the urban landscape of downtown Los Angeles, it wasn't until the Watts Riots of 1965 that Valverde and his work became deeply political. But if his work became more political, it did so within an aesthetic that grew ever more critical of the tropes and institutions of documentary art. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, this book-in the landmark A Ver: Revisioning Art History series-records the unfolding of Valverde's vision, from his first photographs of L.A. streets as repositories of the city's social history, to his socially and politically acute portraiture, to his surrealist-inflected mixed-media work late in his career, to his role in the formation of the community-based arts groups Self-Help Graphics & Art, Ojos, and Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous. Ramon Garcia's essay offers a clear framework for understanding Valverde's art and life, along with a sense of the personal and social politics and history that influenced both so thoroughly.

American art history is a remarkably young, but rapidly growing, discipline. Membership in the Association of Historians of American Art, founded in 1979, now totals nearly 600. As a result of this growth, geographical and cultural borders no longer contain the field. American art history has become "internationalized," represented by scholars and exhibitions around the globe. While this international transmission and exchange of ideas will certainly prove to be valuable, it has been left largely unexamined. Internationalizing the History of American Art begins a critical examination of this exchange, showing how it has become part of the maturation of American art history.

In this volume, a distinguished group of scholars considers the shaping and dissemination of the history of American art domestically and internationally, past and present, theoretically and practically, from a variety of intellectual positions and experiences. To do so, they draw on a literature that, collectively, constitutes a bibliography for the future of the field. Three sections--"American Art and Art History," "Display and Exposition," and "Post-1945 Investments"--provide the structure in which the contributors examine the existing narrative framework for the history of American art. This examination indicates a direction for the field and a future historiography that is shaped by international dialogue.

Lines of Sight—the seventh volume in the Mechademia series, an annual forum devoted to Japanese anime and manga—explores the various ways in which anime, manga, digital media, fan culture, and Japanese art—from scroll paintings to superflat—challenge, undermine, or disregard the concept of Cartesian (or one-point) perspective, the dominant mode of visual culture in the West since the seventeenth century. More than just a visual mode or geometric system, Cartesianism has shaped nearly every aspect of modern rational thought, from mathematics and science to philosophy and history. Framed by Thomas Lamarre’s introduction, “Radical Perspectivalism,” the essays here approach Japanese popular culture as a visual mode that employs non-Cartesian formations, which by extension make possible new configurations of perception and knowledge. Whether by shattering the illusion of visual or narrative seamlessness through the use of multiple layers or irregular layouts, blurring the divide between viewer and creator, providing diverse perspectives within a single work of art, or rejecting dualism, causality, and other hallmarks of Cartesianism, anime and manga offer in their radicalization of perspective the potential for aesthetic and even political transformation. Contributors: David Beynon, Deakin U; Fujimoto Yukari, Meiji U; Yuriko Furuhata, McGill U; Craig Jackson, Ohio Wesleyan U; Reginald Jackson, U of Chicago; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Jinying Li; Waiyee Loh; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Stefan Riekeles; Atsuko Sakaki, U of Toronto; Miryam Sas, U of California, Berkeley; Timon Screech, U of London; Emily Somers; Marc Steinberg, Concordia U.

The art of the human body is arguably the most important and wide-ranging legacy bequeathed to us by Classical antiquity. Not only has it directed the course of western image-making, it has shaped our collective cultural imaginary - as ideal, antitype, and point of departure. This book is the first concerted attempt to grapple with that legacy: it explores the complex relationship between Graeco-Roman images of the body and subsequent western engagements with them, from the Byzantine icon to Venice Beach (and back again). Instead of approaching his material chronologically, Michael Squire faces up to its inherent modernity. Writing in a lively and accessible style, and supplementing his text with a rich array of pictures, he shows how Graeco-Roman images inhabit our world as if they were our own. The Art of the Body offers a series of comparative and thematic accounts, demonstrating the range of cultural ideas and anxieties that were explored through the figure of the body both in antiquity and in the various cultural landscapes that came afterwards. If we only strip down our aesthetic investment in the corpus of Graeco-Roman imagery, Squire argues, this material can shed light on both ancient and modern thinking. The result is a stimulating process of mutual illumination - and an exhilarating new approach to Classical art history.

Marcel Duchamp's 1919 readymade, "L.H.O.O.Q.," which he created by drawing a moustache and goatee on a commercial reproduction of the "Mona Lisa," precipitated a radical reevaluation of the meaning of art, the process of art making, and the role of the artist. In "Drawing on Art," Dalia Judovitz explores the central importance of appropriation, collaboration, influence, and play in Duchamp's work--and in Dada and Surrealist art more broadly--to show how the concept of art itself became the critical fuel and springboard for questioning art's fundamental premises. Judovitz argues that rather than simply negating art, Duchamp's readymades and later works, including films and conceptual pieces, demonstrate the impossibility of defining art in the first place. Through his readymades, for instance, Duchamp explicitly critiqued the commodification of art and inaugurated a profound shift from valuing art for its visual appearance to understanding the significance of its mode of public presentation. And if Duchamp literally drew on art, he also did so figuratively, thus raising questions of creativity and artistic influence. Equally destabilizing, Judovitz writes, was Duchamp's idea that viewers actively participate in the creation of the art they are viewing. In addition to close readings ranging across Duchamp's oeuvre, even his neglected works on chess, Judovitz provides interpretations of works by other figures who affected Duchamp's thinking and collaborated with him, notably Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Salvador Dali, as well as artists who later appropriated and redeployed these gestures, such as Enrico Baj, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Wilson. As Judovitz makes clear, these associations become paradigmatic of a new, collective way of thinking about artistic production that decisively overturns the myth of artistic genius.

It was none other than Langston Hughes who called Oliver Wendell Harrington America's greatest black cartoonist.

Yet largely because he chose to live as an expatriate far from the American mainstream, he has been almost entirely overlooked by contemporary historians and scholars of African American culture.

Born in 1912 and a graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, he was a prolific contributor of humorous and editorial cartoons to the black press in the 1930s and 1940s, but he achieved fame for his creation of a cartoon panel called "Dark Laughter," a satire of Harlem society and featuring Bootsie, a character in the tradition of the wise fool. Bootsie became widely known and loved wherever black newspapers appeared.

For airing strong anti-racist views, Harrington was targeted during the McCarthy era. And in 1951, he was self-exiled in Paris. In 1961, he found himself trapped behind the Berlin Wall. But, he chose to remain in East Germany. His powerful political cartoons were published in East German magazines and in the American Communist newspaper "The Daily World." He became a favorite among students and intellectuals in the Eastern Bloc. In America he was mainly forgotten.

Here, selected from the Walter O. Evans Collection of African-American Art, is an omnibus of Harrington's best cartoons from the past four decades. It highlights his exceptional talent, his potent impact with editorial comment and social criticism, and his deserving of acclaim in his native land.

This omnibus volume offers a unique look at a fascinating and evocative strain of art that originated chiefly in the rural American South and in the black cultural centers as blacks migrated across the continent.

Pictorial quilts, sculpture and carvings, basketry, pottery, forged metal, musical instruments, and dwellings---these are among the forms that express this appealingly quaint yet powerful presence in American art and African folk heritage from which this wonderful art springs.

Celebrating its African folk roots and the individual artists whose lives are so closely intertwined with their art, this illuminating introduction collects writings by sixteen notable scholars of this rich and varied treasury of folk culture.

Contributors include Marie Jeanne Adams, Elizabeth Adler, Simon Bronner, John Burrison, Gerald L. Davis, Dena Epstein, David Evans, William R. Ferris, Roland L. Freeman, Christopher Lornell, Brenda McCallum, Clarence Mohr, John Scully, Ellen Slack, Robert F. Thompson, Mary Twining, John Vlach, and Maude Wahlman.

This book describes in a unique and personal manner the art treasures of the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel, and the Basilica of Saint Peter. Professor Enrico Bruschini-an official guide of the Eternal City and formerly Fine Art Curator of the American Embassy in Rome - gives the fruit of his many years of experience in answering the questions of foreign art historians and curious tourists as they pass before the masterpieces of Rome.Professor Bruschini examines the paintings of the Pinacotheca, especially the pictures of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio. He pays particular attention to the Greek and Roman statues admired by Michelangelo and demonstrates the influence of these ancient works on his creation of the Sistine Ceiling. Two brief sections are dedicated to the most significant works of the Egyptian Museum and the Etruscan Museum. The frescoes of Raphael in his celebrated "Stanze Vaticane" are fully explained, and the powerful daily influence of the contemporary frescoes by Michelangelo are also celebrated.A large section of the book discusses the Sistine Chapel. After the recent cleaning, the masterpiece of Michelangelo has reappeared in all its splendid luminosity. The technique and narrative of the frescoes are explained in clear language. Professor Bruschini finishes with a description of the masterpieces and curiosities-many previously unpublished-of the Basilica of St. Peter and its Square. Black-and-white illustrations run throughout the text, and a 16-page color insert brings to life some of the most beautiful works. There are two maps by the author completing the work.

Richly illustrated with more than 160 full-color plates, Masterworks from the Indiana University Art Museum presents a selection of the finest works from one of the best university art museums in the world. Included are examples from the full range of world cultures collected by the museum: Africa, the Ancient Western World, Asia, Ancient America, the South Pacific, and Western Art before and after 1800. The entry accompanying each piece, by the curator of that collection, sketches the cultural context within which the object was created and used and describes the unique qualities that make it a masterpiece. In addition to showcasing the research of the museum's highly respected curatorial staff, this handsome volume highlights the remarkable photography of Michael Cavanagh and Kevin Montague, widely regarded as among the premier photographers of fine arts. For students, lovers, and collectors of art, Masterworks provides an inspiring and illuminating tour of the world's artistic traditions.

In Alma Lopez's digital print Lupe & Sirena in Love (1999), two icons-the Virgin of Guadalupe and the mermaid Sirena, who often appears on Mexican lottery cards-embrace one another, symbolically claiming a place for same-sex desire within Mexican and Chicano/a religious and popular cultures. Ester Hernandez's 1976 etching Libertad/Liberty depicts a female artist chiseling away at the Statue of Liberty, freeing from within it a regal Mayan woman and, in the process, creating a culturally composite Lady Liberty descended from indigenous and mixed bloodlines. In her painting Coyolxauhqui Last Seen in East Oakland (1993), Irene Perez reimagines as whole the body of the Aztec warrior goddess dismembered in myth. These pieces are part of the dynamic body of work presented in this pioneering, lavishly illustrated study, the first book primarily focused on Chicana visual arts.Creating an invaluable archive, Laura E. Perez examines the work of more than forty Chicana artists across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance, photography, film and video, comics, sound recording, interactive CD-ROM, altars and other installation forms, and fiction, poetry, and plays. While key works from the 1960s and 1970s are discussed, most of the pieces considered were produced between 1985 and 2001. Providing a rich interpretive framework, Perez describes how Chicana artists invoke a culturally hybrid spirituality to challenge racism, bigotry, patriarchy, and homophobia. They make use of, and often radically rework, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican and other non-Western notions of art and art-making, and they struggle to create liberating versions of familiar iconography such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Sacred Heart. Filled with representations of spirituality and allusions to non-Western visual and cultural traditions, the work of these Chicana artists is a vital contribution to a more inclusive canon of American arts.

Das in einem Nachdruck von 1261 vollstandig erhaltene Meihua xishen pu des Song Boren stellt kunstgeschichtlich und kulturhistorisch ein Zeitdokument hochsten Ranges dar. Es enthalt die in Holzdrucken reproduzierten einhundert Tuschzeichnungen, die den Lebenszyklus der Aprikose (meihua) vom ersten Knospen uber ihr Erbluhen bis hin zum Verwelken in acht Kapiteln nachzeichnen. Mit einhundert Bilduberschriften und begleitenden Kurzgedichten ist es die fruheste erhaltene illustrierte Abhandlung dieser Art in China. Seine Konzeption wurde fur Malanlei-tungsbucher spaterer Dynastien beispielgebend. Das Buch enthalt den chinesischen Originaltext mit samtlichen Illustrationen des Originals sowie weitere Abbildungen, ein Literaturverzeichnis und einen Index mit Schriftzeichen."

When the body is foregrounded in artwork - as in much contemporary performance, sculptural installation and video work - so is gendered and sexualised difference. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes looks to interactions between art history, theory, curation, and studio-based practices to theorise the phenomenological import of this embodied gender difference in contemporary art. The essays in this collection are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, including art-making, curating, and art history and criticism, with many of the authors combining roles of curator, artist and writer. This interdisciplinary approach enables the book to bridge the theory-practice divide and highlight new perspectives emerging from creative arts research. Fresh insights are offered on feminist aesthetics, women's embodied experience, curatorial and art historical method, art world equity, and intersectional concerns. It engages with epistemological assertions of 'how the body feels', how the land has creative agency in Indigenous art, and how the use of emotional or affective registers may form one's curatorial method. This anthology represents a significant contribution to a broader resurgence of feminist thought, methodology, and action in contemporary art, particularly in creative practice research. It will be of particular value to students and researchers in art history, visual culture, cultural studies, and gender studies, in addition to museum and gallery professionals specialising in contemporary art.

The story of a bittersweet, impromptu art exhibition for President and Mrs. Kennedy The events associated with John F. Kennedy's death are etched into our nation's memory. This fascinating book tells a less familiar part of the story, about a special art exhibition organized by a group of Fort Worth citizens. On November 21, 1963, the Kennedys arrived in Fort Worth around midnight, making their way to Suite 850 of the Hotel Texas. There, installed in their honor, was an intimate exhibition that included works by Monet, Van Gogh, Marin, Eakins, Feininger, and Picasso. Due to the late hour, it was not until the following morning that the couple viewed the exhibition and phoned one of the principal organizers, Ruth Carter Johnson, to offer thanks. Mrs. Kennedy indicated that she wished she could stay longer to admire the beautiful works. The couple was due to depart for Dallas, and the rest is history. This volume reunites the works in this exhibition for the first time and features some previously unpublished images of the hotel room. Essays examine this exhibition from several angles: anecdotal, analytical, cultural, and historical, and include discussions of what the local citizens wished to convey to their distinguished viewers. Distributed for the Dallas Museum of Art and Amon Carter Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Dallas Museum of Art (05/26/13-09/15/13) Amon Carter Museum of American Art (10/12/13-01/12/14)

Abundantly illustrated, this volume is a pioneering survey of the ancient art of the entire Caribbean region. While previous studies have focused on the Greater Antilles?Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica?this is the first book to also include the islands of the eastern Caribbean and their ties to pre-Columbian Venezuela. And while prior art historical research has overwhelmingly emphasized the colonial period on, this ambitious overview traces 4,000 years of the region's early Indigenous heritage before the Spanish conquest. Lawrence Waldron examines ceramics, ritual spaces, sculpture, and personal adornment from the very early Saladoid era to the later, better-known Taino period. Analyzing the symbolism, aesthetics, and cultural contexts of objects including ceremonial pots, rock art, stone effigy belts, and jewelry, he illuminates continuities and innovations in imagery and ideology across time and space. He draws attention to the legacies of Amerindian visual and material culture in the architecture and furniture of the present-day Caribbean, arguing that the region's ancient art history is rich and worthy of attention. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Books orient, intrigue, provoke and direct the reader while editing, interpreting, encapsulating, constructing and revealing architectural representation. Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice explores the role of the book form within the realm of architectural representation. It proposes the book itself as another three-dimensional, complementary architectural representation with a generational and propositional role within the design process. Artists' books in particular - that is, a book made as an original work of art, with an artist, designer or architect as author - have certain qualities and characteristics, quite different from the conventional presentation and documentation of architecture. Paginal sequentiality, the structure and objecthood of the book, and the act of reading create possibilities for the book as a site for architectural imagining and discourse. In this way, the form of the book affects how the architectural work is conceived, constructed and read. In five main sections, Binding Space examines the relationships between the drawing, the building and the book. It proposes thinking through the book as a form of spatial practice, one in which the book is cast as object, outcome, process and tool. Through the book, we read spatial practice anew.

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

First published in 2009. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.