Inspired by Robert McCloskey's beloved children's book of the same name, the iconic bronze Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in Boston's Public Garden has come to serve as something of a record of the recent decades of life in the city itself. In a series of delightful photographs taken by members of the public, Ducks on Parade! chronicles many of the original, moving, humorous, and startling outfits that artistic Bostonians have dressed the ducks in. From summer hats to winter scarves, from the Women's March to Black Lives Matter, the ducks reflect the life of the city and our country. Featuring a text by sculptor Nancy Schoen, this book is a tribute to all Bostonians whose creativity and generosity have made this constant collaborative art possible. More than this, it is a revealing look at the lasting power of public art and how viewers can also be participants. Ducks on Parade! is perfect for whimsical readers of any age.

What does it mean to be called an "outsider"? Marion Scherr investigates structural inequalities and the myth of the Other in Western art history, examining the role of "Outsider Art" in contemporary art worlds in the UK. By shifting the focus from art world professionals to those labelled "Outsider Artists", she counteracts one-sided representations of them being otherworldly, raw, and uninfluenced. Instead, the artists are introduced as multi-faceted individuals in constant exchange with their social environment and as employing diverse strategies in dealing with their exclusion. The book reframes their voices and artworks as complex, serious and meaningful cultural contributions, and challenges their attested Otherness in favour for a more inclusive, all-encompassing understanding of art.

In this compelling publication, two masters come face-to-face when the works of Edvard Munch are juxtaposed against Gustave Flaubert's groundbreaking novel Madame Bovary. Munch's art is presented in stills taken from an elaborate video installation, Madame B (2014), created by Michelle Williams Gamaker and the internationally acclaimed cultural theorist, video artist, and curator Mieke Bal. Emma and Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic explores the filmic aspect of Munch's art by combining contemporary art theory with Bal's own idiosyncratic way of looking at art - directly and closely. The reader can reflect upon how we view each other in social situations and question what happens when we are denied visual dialogue. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Munch Museum, Oslo (02/04/17-04/17/17)

Since 1961 James Reeve has been exhibiting and selling his paintings, first in Florence, then in Madrid. From 1974 onwards he has travelled widely, often with subsequent London gallery exhibitions. Here he vividly describes and illustrates the characters he meets and the adventures which unfold in Haiti, Madagascar, India, Australia, Jordan, the Yemen and Mexico. As his cousin, the historian, Antonia Fraser remarks in a letter to him: 'Dearest James, When God gave you your great artistic talent She [sic] made a big mistake, contrary to what is generally thought.' 'This is because you are really meant to be a brilliant writer.' And so now, badgered by Antonia Fraser and other writer friends, James Reeve has at last put his talents together in a series of self-contained short stories recalling travels, anecdotes and encounters which he has illustrated with his vividly colourful vignettes. Always travelling with the purpose of work, in Italy James meets Harold Acton. In the Australian Outback he draws among other things dumps and decrepit dwellings, and there too is Madam Tongere catching a Wichetty grub. He meets Princess Elizabeth of Toro in Uganda and is captured by pygmies in the Congo forest. He paints the fearsome Mrs Gilbert Miller's portrait in Palm Beach and travels in Rajasthan with Diana Wordsworth, a last relic of the Raj. At last, weary of wandering, he discovers a distant cloud-forest village in Mexico, where Edward James, as the only other Englishman, had preceded him. There he built a house. Living in Mexico for 35 years, among his friends are Dona Olive, the retired prostitute, and the Dominican nuns of an enclosed order who let him in to teach them how to make marmalade.

The volume The Many Faces of Beauty joins the rich debate on beauty and aesthetic theory by presenting an ambitious, interdisciplinary examination of various facets of beauty in nature and human society. The contributors ask such questions as, Is there beauty in mathematical theories? What is the function of arts in the economy of cultures? What are the main steps in the historical evolution of aesthetic theories from ancient civilizations to the present? What is the function of the ugly in enhancing the expressivity of art? and What constitutes beauty in film? The sixteen essays, by eminent scientists, critics, scholars, and artists, are divided into five parts. In the first, a mathematician, physicist, and two philosophers address beauty in mathematics and nature. In the second, an anthropologist, psychologist, historian of law, and economist address the place of beauty in the human mind and in society. Explicit philosophical reflections on notoriously vexing issues, such as the historicity of aesthetics itself, interculturality, and the place of the ugly, are themes of the third part. In the fourth, practicing artists discuss beauty in painting, music, poetry, and film. The final essay, by a theologian, reflects on the relation between beauty and God. Contributors: Vittorio Hoesle, Robert P. Langlands, Mario Livio, Dieter Wandschneider, Christian Illies, Francesco Pellizzi, Bjarne Sode Funch, Peter Landau, Holger Bonus, Pradeep A. Dhillon, Mark W. Roche, Maxim Kantor, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Mary Kinzie, Dudley Andrew, and Cyril O'Regan.

Born in Italy and arriving here in 1951 aged 10, Australian artist and frequent traveller Bruno Leti re-visited Florence in 2019 and was captivated once again by the trio of ancient buildings clustered at the city-centre. His photographic details of the distinctive, geometrically patterned stonework of the Cathedral, Baptistry and Campanile have inspired a stunning series of twenty large abstract prints, produced in editions of five, which are featured in this publication. The book also includes a history of the buildings and sketchbook images made by Leti during his most recent visit to beautiful, historic Fiorenza.

This book, a collection of Alex Danchev's essays on the theme of art, war and terror, newly available in paperback, offers a sustained demonstration of the way in which works of art can help us to explore the most difficult ethical and political issues of our time: war, terror, extermination, torture and abuse. It takes seriously the idea of the artist as moral witness to this realm, considering war photography, for example, as a form of humanitarian intervention. War poetry, war films and war diaries are also considered in a broad view of art, and of war. Kafka is drawn upon to address torture and abuse in the war on terror; Homer is utilised to analyse current talk of 'barbarisation'. The paintings of Gerhard Richter are used to investigate the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, while the photographs of Don McCullin and the writings of Vassily Grossman and Primo Levi allow the author to propose an ethics of small acts of altruism. This book examines the nature of war over the last century, from the Great War to a particular focus on the current 'Global War on Terror'. It investigates what it means to be human in war, the cost it exacts and the ways of coping.Several of the essays therefore have a biographical focus.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) is best known as a media theorist-many consider him the founder of media studies-but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan's work directly influenced the art and artists of his time. Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan's entanglement with artists by carefully drawing out the connections among McLuhan, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. Kitnick masterfully weaves this history with McLuhan's own words and his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do, revealing McLuhan's influence on the avant-garde through the confluence of art and theory. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan's ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art. This final channeling of McLuhan is a swift and beautiful analysis, with a personal touch, of art's recent transgressions and what its future may hold.

Benedict Read died suddenly on 20 October 2016. His influence on art-history in the field of sculpture, and his ground-breaking authoritative volume, Victorian Sculpture (1982) were hugely important. He was instrumental in bringing about a sea-change in academic attitudes towards both the nineteenth century and to sculpture. This memorial Festschrift published by the PMSA of which Ben was a founder, former Chairman and trustee, celebrates his academic achievement, his considerable contribution to scholarship and the generosity of spirit with which he shared his knowledge. It is a powerful testament to the inspiration of a remarkable person. Sculpting Art History: Essays in Memory of Benedict Read contains 30 essays by friends, former students and colleagues - James Lomax, Marjorie Trusted, Julius Bryant, Rowan Bailey, Caroline Hedengren-Dillon, Jykri Suikonen, Joanna Barnes and Harriet Israel, Alison Inglis, Philip Ward-Jackson, Sandra Berresford, Ann Compton, Barbara Bryant, Claudine Mitchell, Alison Glew, Jane Winfrey, Andrew Jezzard, Juliette Peers, Mary Ann Steggles, Michael Paraskos, Sarah Crellin, Paula Murphy, Mark Stocker, Patrick Eyres, Katharine Eustace, Jonathan Black, Gerardine Mulcahy-Parker, Gillian Whiteley, Charles Avery and Jacqueline Banerjee together with 17 appreciations by Ben's family, friends and colleagues.

Through a series of rich photographs, Art of Captivity / Arte del Cautiverio tells a compelling story about the war on drugs in Central America. Entirely bilingual in both English and Spanish, the book focuses on the country of Guatemala, now the principle point of transit for the cocaine that is produced in the Andes and bound for the United States and Canada. Alongside a spike in the use of crack cocaine, Guatemala City has witnessed the proliferation of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. The centers are sites of abuse and torment, but also lifesaving institutions in a country that does not provide any other viable social service to those struggling with drug dependency. Art of Captivity / Arte del Cautiverio explores these centers as architectural forms, while also showcasing the cultural production that takes place inside them, including drawings and letters created by those held captive. This stunning work of visual ethnography humanizes those held inside these centers, breaks down stereotypes about drug use, and sets the conditions for a hemispheric conversation about prohibitionist practices - by revealing intimate portraits of a population held hostage by a war on drugs.

Virginia Dwan is one of the most influential figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Her eponymously named galleries, the first established in a Los Angeles storefront in 1959, followed by a second in New York in 1965, became a beacon for influential postwar American and European artists. She sponsored the debut show for Yves Klein in the United States, and she championed such artists as Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Sol LeWitt, and Ad Reinhardt. Her Los Angeles gallery featured abstract expressionism, neo-dada, and pop, while the New York branch became associated with the emerging movements of minimalism and conceptualism. At the same time, the gallery's influence expanded to remote locations in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, where Dwan sponsored such iconic earthworks as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field. Though Dwan was a major force in the art world of the sixties and seventies, her story and the history of her gallery have been largely unexplored until now. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art celebrating Dwan's gift to the Gallery of her extraordinary personal collection, From Los Angeles to New York: The Dwan Gallery, 1959 1971 explores her remarkable career. Alongside lush full-color images of one hundred leading artworks, the book deepens our understanding of the artistic exchanges Dwan facilitated during this age of mobility, when air travel and the interstate highway system linked the two coasts and transformed the making of art and the sites of its exhibition. James Meyer, the curator of the exhibition and the foremost authority on minimal art, contributes a essay that is a sophisticated and broad-ranging analysis of Dawn's legacy. Honoring Dwan's significant influence and impact on postwar art, From Los Angeles to New York is a rich and informative collection that will be treasured by fans of contemporary art.

This volume contains most of the papers given at a colloquium held at the Institute in 1997. It provides a study of the concept of composition in European art and art literature from the middle ages to the early 20th-century. Some authors are concerned to show the extent to which writers on art before 1880 would have been able to think of a work of art in the terms put forward by modernist theorists like Maurice Denis, Wassily Kandinsky and Clement Greenberg, as a flat surface, covered with colours, lines and forms arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. Other authors aim to show how artists and theorists conceived of composition before the modern period, by describing some of the implications and connotations of the concept within a broader field of political and religious meanings.

Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its "milieu," "atmosphere," or "environment." Christian explores how the artwork's external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke's observation that Rodin's sculpture "exhales an atmosphere" and that Cezanne's colors create "a calm, silken air" that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited. Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork's ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and "environments" that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.

As a woman wielding public authority, Elizabeth I embodied a paradox at the very center of sixteenth-century patriarchal English society. Louis Montrose's long-awaited book, "The Subject of Elizabeth, "illuminates the ways in which the Queen and her subjects variously exploited or obfuscated this contradiction.
Montrose offers a masterful account of the texts, pictures, and performances in which the Queen was represented to her people, to her court, to foreign powers, and to Elizabeth herself. Retrieving this "Elizabethan imaginary" in all its richness and fascination, Montrose presents a sweeping new account of Elizabethan political culture. Along the way, he explores the representation of Elizabeth within the traditions of Tudor dynastic portraiture; explains the symbolic manipulation of Elizabeth's body by both supporters and enemies of her regime; and considers how Elizabeth's advancing age provided new occasions for misogynistic subversions of her royal charisma.
This book, the remarkable product of two decades of study by one of our most respected Renaissance scholars, will be welcomed by all historians, literary scholars, and art historians of the period.

New versions of Shakespeare's history plays from director and translator Douglas Langworthy. In his three Henry VI plays, Shakespeare tackles the infamous Wars of the Roses and the fall of the House of Lancaster. In this translation of Henry VI, Part 3, Douglas Langworthy concludes the trilogy, tracking the final downfall of Henry VI and the rise of the House of York. Langworthy's translation takes a deep dive into the language of Shakespeare. With a fine-tooth comb, he updates passages that are archaic and difficult to the modern ear, and matches them with the syntax and lyricism of the rest of the play, essentially translating archaic Shakespeare to match contemporary Shakespeare. This translation of Henry VI, Part 3 was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

In 1585, the British painter and explorer John White created images of Carolina Algonquian Indians. These images were collected and engraved in 1590 by the Flemish publisher and printmaker Theodor de Bry and were reproduced widely, establishing the visual prototype of North American Indians for European and Euro-American readers.
In this innovative analysis, Michael Gaudio explains how popular engravings of Native American Indians defined the nature of Western civilization by producing an image of its "savage other." Going beyond the notion of the "savage" as an intellectual and ideological construct, Gaudio examines how the tools, materials, and techniques of copperplate engraving shaped Western responses to indigenous peoples. Engraving the Savage "demonstrates that the early visual critics of the engravings attempted-without complete success-to open a comfortable space between their own "civil" image-making practices and the "savage" practices of Native Americans-such as tattooing, bodily ornamentation, picture-writing, and idol worship. The real significance of these ethnographic engravings, he contends, lies in the traces they leave of a struggle to create meaning from the image of the American Indian.
The visual culture of engraving and what it shows, Gaudio reasons, is critical to grasping how America was first understood in the European imagination. His interpretations of de Bry's engravings describe a deeply ambivalent pictorial space in between" civil and savage-a space in which these two organizing concepts of Western culture are revealed in their making.
Michael Gaudio is assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota.

This collection of essays--the first major account of surrealism in Latin America that covers both literary and visual production--explores the role the movement played in the construction and recuperation of cultural identities and the ways artists and writers contested, embraced, and adapted surrealist ideas and practices. Surrealism in Latin America provides new Latin American-centric scholarship, not only about surrealism's impact on the region but also about the region's impact on surrealism. It reconsiders the relation between art and anthropology, casts new light on the aesthetics of "primitivism," and makes a strong case for Latin American artists and writers as the inheritors of a movement that effectively went underground after World War II. In so doing, it expands our understanding of important, fascinating figures who are less well known than their counterparts active in Europe and New York. Deriving from a conference held at the Getty Research Institute, the book is rich in new materials drawn from the GRI's diverse Mexican and South American surrealist collections, which include the archives of Vicente Huidobro, Enrique Gomez-Correa, Cesar Moro, Enrique Lihn, and Emilio Westphalen. This panoramic survey goes a step beyond other recent studies to consider surrealism's ongoing legacies, proposing that the surrealist movement in Latin America, like the vivisimo muerto (the living dead)--cannot be relegated to the past.

In his noteworthy theoretical essay "Experience," Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that humans by nature cannot fully grasp life as lived. If this is so, how capable are we of expressing our experiences in works of art? Despite this formidable challenge, for the past thirty years, scholarship in American art has assumed that works of art are coded and has analyzed them accordingly, often with constructive results. The fourth volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Experience considers the possibility of immediacy, or the idea that we can directly relate to the past by way of an artifact or work of art. Without discounting the matrix of codes involved in both the production and reception of art, contributors to Experience emphasize the sensibility of the interpreter; the techniques of art historical writing, including its affinity with fiction and its powers of description; the emotional charge the punctum that certain representations can deliver. These and other topics are examined through seven essays, addressing different periods in American art.