There's "western", and then there's "Western" - and where history becomes myth is an evocative question, one of several questions posed by Josh Garrett-Davis in What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination. Part cultural criticism, part history, and wholly entertaining, this series of essays on specific films, books, music, and other cultural texts brings a fresh perspective to long-studied topics. Under Garrett-Davis's careful observation, cultural objects such as films and literature, art and artifacts, and icons and oddities occupy the terrain of where the West as region meets the Western genre. One crucial through line in the collection is the relationship of regional "western" works to genre "Western" works, and the ways those two categories cannot be cleanly distinguished - most work about the West is tinted by the Western genre, and Westerns depend on the region for their status and power. Garrett-Davis also seeks to answer the question "What is a Western now?" To do so, he brings the Western into dialogue with other frameworks of the "imagined West" such as Indigenous perspectives, the borderlands, and environmental thinking. The book's mosaic of subject matter includes new perspectives on the classic musical film Oklahoma!, a consideration of Native activism at Standing Rock, and surprises like Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. The book is influenced by the borderlands theory of Gloria Anzaldua and the work of the indie rock band Calexico, as well as the author's own discipline of western cultural history. Richly illustrated, primarily from the collection of the Autry Museum of the American West, Josh Garrett-Davis's work is as visually interesting as it is enlightening, asking readers to consider the American West in new ways.

Shuvinai Ashoona (born 1961) is a third-generation Inuit artist based in Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada. Best known for her highly personal and imaginative iconography, Shuvinai's imagery ranges from closely observed naturalistic scenes of her Arctic home to monstrous and fantastical visions. Her drawings imagine the past and present fused into a prophetic future. Existing somewhere between dystopic and utopic, Shuvinai's brightly coloured drawings teem with life. Her earthly and extraterrestrial worlds exist within a kind intergalactic future. The book provides insight into Shuvinai's practice, with essays from Canadian and international authors, reflections on specific drawings, a select exhibition history and large-format illustrations, including installation images from The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada.

Richard Hambleton (1954 2017) was a Canadian artist known for his pioneering street art. He was a surviving member of a group that emerged from the New York City art scene during the booming art market of the 1980s, which also included his close friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. As a conceptual artist, Hambleton s early work instal-lations titled Image Mass Murder from 1976 1979 were secretly placed onto streets in over 15 cities, depicting chalk-body outlines and blood-splattered crime scenes of what appeared to be victims. This theme of a prevailing violence, fear, and morbid curiosity elicited surprise and anxiety from its unsuspecting viewers. In the early 1980s, Hambleton created his most iconic Shadow Man works artfully splattered ominous shadowy figures on unexpected street corners, walls, and alleys that startled viewers into a visceral awareness that the city was still a dangerous place. This book features over 200 images including his early Shadow Man canvas paintings, as well as photographs of his in situ street work, a selection of his Marlboro rodeo horse silhouettes, and his Beautiful Paintings series of landscapes and seascapes, alongside other works on paper; behind-the-scenes studio shots; personal, unseen photographs of the artist; and inspirational imagery. Hambleton was renowned for influencing artists such as Banksy, Blek le Rat, and Shepard Fairey. This arresting, one-of-a-kind book will appeal to those interested in visual arts, street art, graffiti, and art history.

Written in the wake of the widely publicised attacks by Hindu nationalist activists on the late M. F. Husain, India's most famous artist and a prominent Muslim, The Art of Secularism addresses the entanglement of visual art with political secularism. The crisis in secularism in India, commonly associated with the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1980s, transformed the meaning of art. It challenged the relation- ships between modernism, national culture, secularism and modernity that had been built since India's independence in 1947. The Art of Secularism describes how four renowned artists - M. F. Husain, K. G. Subramanyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Bhupen Khakhar - developed their practice in an era when secular nationalism grappled with the recent re-enchantment of signs. Com- bining close readings of these artists' work with ethnography of the art worlds of Mumbai and Vadodara, Karin Zitzewitz describes both the everyday forms of cosmopolitanism in the Indian art world and the increasing vulnerability of art world spaces to cultural regulation. She also presents the shifting conditions of the production and exhibition of art within the particularly urgent, varied, and sophisticated public debates about secularism in India, in which artists have been increasingly prominent interlocutors.

The Japanese artist Koho Mori-Newton is a master when it comes to handling silk, which he places in an exciting dialogue with architecture. In this way he creates cult-like spaces which interact with light in a fasci nating way. In addition to the works in silk, this volume also shows various graphic work groups from the last 35 years as well as the Path of Silk, created especially for no intention. Koho Mori-Newton (*1951) is a master of intentional lack of intention. His works appear simple, but the aesthetic which lies behind them is complex. Time and again he investigates the basis of art itself, questions the concept of the originality of the artistic creative process and explores the boundaries of artworks. His oeuvre lures us into a world that exists beyond the obvious. Path of Silk, a labyrinthine installation of room-high panels of silk, worked in China ink by Mori-Newton, presents a fragile interplay of space and light, of heaviness and lightness. Further areas of focus in his creative work are repetition and copy, from which his graphic works derive their own special charm.

The National Gallery's second Artist in Residence is Ali Cherri (b. 1976), a Lebanon-born artist based in Beirut and Paris. Known for his sculptures, films and installations, Cherri is interested in the aesthetics, practices and politics associated with the museum classification and collecting of objects, animals, images, and their narratives. Cherri was recently awarded the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The first survey of Cherri's work in English, this book will give an overview of the artist's archaeological approach to the heritage of objects by investigating their relationships to history, society and nature. It will introduce Cherri to a broad audience and document his journey from the beginning of his residency to the production and display of the final work at the National Gallery in the autumn of 2021, followed by the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in spring 2022. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

Contemporary art can be baffling and beautiful, provocative and disturbing. This pioneering book presents a new look at the controversial period between 1945 and 2015, when art and its traditional forms were called into question. It focuses on the relationship between American and European art, and challenges previously held views about the origins of some of the most innovative ideas in art of this time. Major artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Shiran Neshat are all discussed, as is the art world of the last fifty years. Important trends are also covered including Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Postmodernism, and Performance Art. This revised and updated second edition includes a new chapter exploring art since 2000 and how globalization has caused shifts in the art world, an updated Bibliography, and 16 new, colour illustrations.

This is the first monograph on contemporary Belgian artist Stefaan De Croock (b.1982), alias Strook. He became well known for his 'heads' made of scrap wood. The key theme of his layered collages, sculptures and installations is, in a word, time, and is visible in every piece of the rough, patinated raw material he chooses to compose his works. Most frequently this is wood. "Old, weathered materials have something magical for me. They emanate a certain spontaneity that is impossible to recreate. The colours, the paint, the relief... they form an imprint of everything the material ever experienced. You can truly see time." - Strook As part of the Mind the Artist project by Musea Brugge, work by Strook will be on show from 30 October 2021 to 6 March 2022 at various historic locations throughout the city. Text in English and Dutch.

If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, "it is the function of artistic form.to make historical content into a philosophical truth" then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that truth. Never has this been more necessary or more difficult than with respect to contemporary art. Contemporary art is a point of condensation of a vast array of social and historical forces, economic and political forms and technologies of image production. Contemporary art expresses this condition, Osborne maintains, through its distinctively postconceptual form. These essays-extending the scope and arguments of Osborne's Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art-move from philosophical consideration of the changing temporal conditions of capitalist modernity, via problems of formalism, the politics of art and the changing shape of art institutions, to interpretation and analysis of particular works by Akram Zataari, Xavier Le Roy and Ilya Kabakov, and the postconceptual situation of a crisis-ridden New Music.

Gallery 1988's annual Crazy 4 Cult art show has quickly become a phenomenon, with huge crowds and high profile buyers like Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon snapping up work by the cream of the underground/urban scene. Following 2011's critically acclaimed first volume, here's the eagerly awaited second selection of surprising, beautiful and just plain cool cult movie-inspired artwork.