The most important public art program in the United States

Max Liebermann (1847-1935)-a co-founder of the Berlin Secession and President of the Akademie der Kunste for many years-was one of the most important artists of his generation. In addition to his impressive painting oeuvre, Liebermann's graphic prints also assume an important role: over 600 motifs as etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts are found today in museum and private collections around the world. This catalogue provides an introduction to Liebermann's graphic prints based on selected works from the collection of the Max Liebermann Society Berlin. It also presents common printmaking techniques and provides a detailed examination of the development of the graphic prints by the most signifi cant representative of Impressionism. The focus is thus on the history of the collecting and exhibiting of his print graphic works as well as the research on these works.

Zeichnen und Schreiben: In dem vorliegenden Buch greifen zwei Ausdrucksformen ineinander. Ein Zyklus von Bleistiftzeichnungen bildet die Grundlage: karge Landschaftsfragmente, feine Portrats, grob umrissene, tanzerische Figuren. Daruber hinaus sind handschriftliche Notizen eng mit dem Gezeichneten verwoben. Oft markiert das Schreiben die erste Beruhrung des Zeichenstifts mit dem Papier. Vieles bleibt unleserlich, ist uberzeichnet. Aber der Betrachter moechte wissen, was da steht, wie die Verschmelzung von Schrift und Zeichnung zu verstehen ist. Gegliedert in autarke Kapitel werden die ratselhaften Texte zu einer eigenen, unverzichtbaren Ebene des Gesamtprojekts. Die Bilder illustrieren nicht, sie erweitern die Sprache, und diese erklart nicht, sondern bietet eine Moeglichkeit, den Vorgang des Zeichnens nachzuvollziehen

In The Politics of the Superficial: Visual Rhetoric and the Protocol of Display, Brett Ommen explores the increasing reliance on images as a mode of communication in contemporary life. He shows that graphic design is a layered experience of images and space. Before images, viewers engage in the personal experience of aesthetics and individual identity. In space, viewers engage in the negotiation of meaning and collective belonging. Graphic design, then, fits the consumerist present precisely because it prompts viewers to differentiate between our collective commitments and individual sense of self. Ommen argues, for example, that on viewing a billboard, a driver isn't merely being exposed to a set of commercial messages or exhortations, but rather responding in a self-aware way that differentiates her from her collective associations like Democrat, Republican, rich, poor, Catholic, or Jewish. By examining graphic design-as a profession, practice, and academic field-as the nexus for understanding visual display in public culture, The Politics of the Superficial develops two arguments about contemporary visual communication practices: first, that the study of visual communication privileges visual content at the expense of other dynamics, such as context; and second, that interpretations focusing on content conceal the most persuasive and subversive dimensions of the visual. Wide-ranging and stimulating, The Politics of the Superficial ultimately posits that, far from serving as a communal oasis for public imagination, contemporary visual culture offers the possibility for politically engaged communication and persuasion while simultaneously threatening the health of public discourse by atomizing its constituent parts. It will serve as a vital contribution to the field of visual rhetoric.

Scholars from science, art, and humanities explore the meaning of our new image worlds and offer new strategies for visual analysis. We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's information explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual. Imagery in the 21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the image in our time. The contributors explore and discuss new critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neuroscience to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis.

Close readings of ostensibly "blank" works-from unprinted pages to silent music-that point to a new understanding of media. In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object. Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau's Orphee to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston's erased copy of Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston's marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage's 4'33", Dworkin links Cage's composition to Rauschenberg's White Paintings, Ken Friedman's Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a "guide to further listening" that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of "silent" music. Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.

How does mourning emerge to reshape Japanese visual culture? Textures of Mourning addresses this question by examining engrossing literary and visual portrayals of death and its aftermath from The Tale of Genji and its adaptations. Contending that the work of mourning unfolds through interwoven practices of reading, writing, painting, and public exhibition, Reginald Jackson charts how mourning spurs artistic composition, triggers visceral responses, and seduces spectators in both premodern and contemporary Japan. Textures of Mourning delineates the intimate relationship between mourning and reading at three historical tipping points: the height of imperial power in the early eleventh century, when the literary masterwork The Tale of Genji (1008) was written; the collapse of imperial hegemony in the late-twelfth century, when Genji's most famous handscroll adaptation was composed (1150); and the post-bubble recessionary context in which those handscrolls were refashioned as the "Resurrected Genji Handscrolls" (2006). As material objects wrought at comparable moments of social upheaval, these texts become vehicles through which to mourn perished ideals of vitality, prosperity, and belonging. Textures of Mourning is the first full-length manuscript in English to investigate these texts' complex relationship across eras. By analyzing dozens of sumptuous images, the book pursues mortality's progression over four sections-"Dying," "Decomposing," "Mourning," and "Resurrecting"-each of which contextualizes factual and fictional accounts of reckoning with death to discern the mechanics of mourning's labor. A major intervention of the book is to theorize how the riveting opacity, coarse materiality, and skewed temporality of premodern forms trouble modern regimes of looking, feeling, and knowing. Drawing upon scholarship in premodern Japanese literary studies, art history, and performance studies, the book's innovative trans-disciplinary readings reorient psychoanalytic criticism and performance theory to map the fluctuating topography of calligraphic gestures.

The Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia began in 1984 as a summer youth program with modest support from city government. Under the guidance of Jane Golden, however, it gradually grew into one of the largest and most successful public art organizations in the country, garnering support from local corporations, foundations, and individuals to extend the reach and effectiveness of its innovative programs.    Now three decades later, the Mural Arts Program has created more than 3,800 murals and public art projects that have made lasting imprints in every Philadelphia neighborhood. In the process, Mural Arts has engaged thousands of people of all ages from across the city, helped hundreds of ex-offenders train for new jobs, transformed the face of struggling commercial corridors, and developed funding partners in both public and private sectors.     While the Mural Arts Program has significantly changed the appearance of the city, it has also demonstrated how participatory public art can empower individuals and promote communal healing around difficult issues. Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30 is a celebration of and guide to the program's success. Unlike Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell and its sequel, More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell, Philadelphia Murals @ 30 showcases the results of 21 projects completed since 2009 and features essays by policy makers, curators, scholars, and educators that offer valuable lessons for artists, activists, and communities to emulate.   Philadelphia Mural Arts @ 30 traces the program's history and evolution, acknowledging the challenges and rewards of growth and change while maintaining a core commitment to social, personal, and community transformation.     Contributors include: Dr. Arthur C. Evans, Jr., Arlene Goldbard, Thora Jacobson, Rick Lowe, Dr. Samantha L. Matlin, Paulette Moore, Jeremy Nowak, Maureen H. O'Connell, Elisabeth Perez Luna, Robin Rice, Dr. Jacob Kraemer Tebes, Elizabeth Thomas, Cynthia Weiss, Howard Zehr, and the editors.  

Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist's Book is a portrait of the space between things, whether those things be neurons, quotations, comic-book frames, or fragments in a collage. This twenty-year project is an artist's book composed by juxtaposing quotes and images with the author's thoughts in between. The book is structured to show analogies between disparate texts and images.There have always been gaps, but a focus on the space between things is virtually synonymous with modernity. Modernity itself is a story of gaps, as it is often characterized as a break. Around 1900, many independent strands of gap thought and experience interacted and interwove more intricately. Atoms, theories, women, Jewish people, collage, poetry, patchwork, and jazz figure prominently in these strands. The gap is a phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of neuroscience, rabbinic thinking, modern literary criticism, the structure of matter, art, and popular culture. This book explores many subjects, but it is ultimately a work of art.