The Art of the Dead showcases the vibrant, charismatic poster art that emerged from the streets of San Francisco in 1964 and 1966. It traces the cultural, political, and historical influences of posters as art back to Japanese wood blocks through Bell Epoque, on to the Beatniks, the Free Speech Movement, and the Acid Tests. Featuring interviews and profiles of the key artists, including Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse Miller, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, and Victor Moscoso.
The book uses Grateful Dead as the vehicle to tell the story of poster art as The Dead were the band that ultimately proved to be the most substantive and engaged partner for the artists and hence featured the best art of any rock 'n' roll band ever. The book will follow a chronological evolution of the art from the band's origination in 1965 through Jerry Garcia's death in 1995.
The book is in four-color throughout, featuring iconic and rare images as well as extensive process material, including sketches, original art, blue lines, film, and printing plates that show how the art was created. It will also include essays by Greil Marcus, Peter Coyote, and Victoria Binder, as well as essays on the elements of the printing process from the original art to the final poster.
Ultimately, the Art of the Dead makes the case that poster art is truly an original form of American fine art.

The Sketchbook of Loish offers readers a unique look into Loish's creative processes and idea generation, providing an insight into the role her sketches play in her extremely popular work. Peek inside Loish's sketchbook and discover how she explores gesture, stylization, and sketching for animation. Learn the different techniques she uses when sketching with traditional and digital tools, and follow the book's two detailed tutorials on character construction and sketching digitally to improve your own processes. The book also features handy quick tips for capturing movement, using different line weights, shading, and using textured brushes. Including an insight into Loish's character sketching, development sketches, landscape, and reference studies this book will show you how Loish captures the spirit of her finished artworks in her exquisite preliminary work. In addition to showcasing a comprehensive collection of Loish's sketches, this book features exclusive artwork, and a special chapter exploring Loish's personal concepts to give an in-depth look at how her initial ideas evolve through sketches to culminate in her accomplished concept designs. A truly inspiring and informative book with a high-quality finish and slipcase, The Sketchbook of Loish will have you itching to get sketching!

Born in Cotonou, Benin in 1961, Meschac Gaba moved to the Netherlands in 1996 to take up a residency at the Rijksakademie. It was there that he conceived The Museum of Contemporary African Art 1997-2002, an ambitious work, which took him five years to complete and which cemented his reputation as one of the most important African artists working today. Consisting of twelve sections - Draft Room, Architecture, Museum Shop, Summer Collection, Games Room, Art and Religion, Museum Restaurant, Music Room, Marriage Room, Library, Salon and Humanist Space - this work challenges preconceived notions of what African art is and provides a new discursive space for social and cultural interaction, critiquing the museum's value both as an institution, and as a symbol of cultural capital. The importance of this work, in the history of African art and in the lineage of critical reflections on the museum by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers, has been widely acknowledged in important exhibitions ranging from Documenta XI, Kassel in 2002 to Intense Proximity: La Triennale, Paris in 2012. Tate has now acquired this work. This book will be published on the occasion of the first presentation of Gaba's Museum of Contemporary African Art in its entirety in the UK. Contributions by leading scholars will place this important work in the context of the artist's oeuvre, art history and museology.

There are deep black nationalist roots for many of the images and ideologies of contemporary racial justice efforts. This collection reconsiders the Black Aesthetic and the revolutionary art of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), forging connections between the recent past and contemporary social justice activism. Focusing on black literary and visual art of the Black Arts Movement, this collection highlights artists whose work diverged from narrow definitions of the Black Aesthetic and black nationalism. Adding to the reanimation of discourses surrounding BAM, this collection comes at a time when today's racial justice efforts are mining earlier eras for their iconography, ideology, and implementation. As numerous contemporary activists ground their work in the legacies of mid-twentieth century activism and adopt many of the grassroots techniques it fostered, this collection remembers and re-envisions the art that both supported and shaped that earlier era. It furthers contemporary conversations by exploring BAM's implications for cultural and literary studies and its legacy for current social justice work and the multiple arts that support it.

This book looks to expand the definition of translation in line with Susan Bassnett and David Johnston's notion of the "outward turn", applying this perspective to contemporary art to broaden the scope of how we understand translation in today's global multisemiotic world. The book takes as its point of departure the idea that texts are comprised of not only words but other semiotic systems and therefore expanding our notions of both language and translation can better equip us to translate stories told via non-traditional means in novel ways. While the "outward turn" has been analyzed in literature, Vidal directs this spotlight to contemporary art, a field which has already engaged in disciplinary connections with Translation Studies. The volume highlights how the unpacking of such connections between disciplines encourages engagement with contemporary social issues, around identity, power, migration, and globalization, and in turn, new ways of thinking and bringing about wider cultural change. This innovative book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies and contemporary art.

The rapid advances currently being made in biomedical research are challenging the ways we view our bodies and the environment. "Perceptions of Promise" arose from a workshop that brought together internationally recognized artists and biomedical scholars and scientists to explore questions surrounding stem cell research, public perceptions of biotechnology, and the parallels and differences between creative and scientific practices.

"Perceptions of Promise" includes artworks created in response to the workshop coupled with articles by world-renowned scholars and medical researchers. It offers a compelling glimpse into a unique collaboration between scientists, scholars, and artists in a visually engaging publication that challenges the reader to consider the possibilities of biotechnology and stem cell research.

Sean Caulfield is professor and Canada Research Chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. Curtis Gillespie is the author of four books including the memoir "Playing Through" and the novel "Crown Shyness." Timothy Caulfield is research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. The contributors include Gail Geller, Jane Kaye, and Eric Meslin among others. The artists represented include Derek Besant, Shona McDonald, Marilene Oliver, and others.

This book addresses late-Soviet and post-Soviet art in Armenia in the context of turbulent transformations from the late 1980s to 2004. It explores the emergence of 'contemporary art' in Armenia from within and in opposition to the practices, aesthetics and institutions of Socialist Realism and National Modernism. This historical study outlines the politics (liberal democracy), aesthetics (autonomous art secured by the gesture of the individual artist), and ethics (ideals of absolute freedom and radical individualism) of contemporary art in Armenia and points towards its limitations. Through the historical investigation, a theory of post-Soviet art historiography is developed, one that is based on a dialectic of rupture and continuity in relation to the Soviet past. As the first English-language study on contemporary art in Armenia, the book is of prime interest for artists, scholars, curators and critics interested in post-Soviet art and culture and in global art historiography. -- .

Rewrites our understanding of the last 50 years of Chicana/o cultural production. Chicana/o Remix casts new light not only on artists-such as Sandra de la Loza, Judy Baca, and David Botello, among others-but on the exhibitions that feature their work, and the collectors, curators, critics, and advocates who engage it. Combining feminist theory, critical ethnic studies, art historical analysis, and extensive archival and field research, Karen Mary Davalos argues that narrow notions of identity, politics, and aesthetics limit our ability to understand the full capacities of Chicana/o art. She employs fresh vernacular concepts such as the "errata exhibit," or the staging of exhibits that critically question mainstream art museums, and the "remix," or the act of bringing new narratives and forgotten histories from the background and into the foreground. These concepts, which emerge out of art practice itself, drive her analysis and reinforce the rejection of familiar narratives that evaluate Chicana/o art in simplistic, traditional terms, such as political versus commercial, or realist versus conceptual. Throughout Chicana/o Remix, Davalos explores undocumented or previously ignored information about artists, their cultural production, and the exhibitions and collections that feature their work. Each chapter exposes and challenges conventions in art history and Chicana/o studies, documenting how Chicana artists were the first to critically challenge exhibitions of Chicana/o art, tracing the origins of the first Chicano arts organizations, and highlighting the influence of Europe and Asia on Chicana/o artists who traveled abroad. As a leading scholar in the study of Chicana/o artists, art spaces, and exhibition practices, Davalos presents her most ambitious project to date in this re-examination of fifty years of Chicana/o art production.

Frances Stark deftly deploys text, image and literary sources in her drawings, collages, paintings and video works that reflect on her roles as artist, mother, woman and teacher. Throughout her career she has experimented with alternative modes of expression, as in her critically acclaimed video, My Best Thing; her PowerPoint work Structures that fit my opening (and other parts considered in relation to their whole); and the performance Put a Song in Your Thing. Companion to an exhibition that documents Stark's 25-year long career, this book contains 125 works in which Stark employs words and images to create provocative and self-referential works that speak to the complexities of daily life. This book includes full-page detailed images that provide an insight into the highly tactile and complex nature of Stark's work. Also included are newly commissioned essays and a collection of brief reflections by a variety of prominent artists and writers whom Stark asked to revisit specific topics they've discussed or written about previously.Filled with high-quality reproductions and thoughtful commentary, this book is the definitive resource on Stark's accomplished, varied and affecting body of work. Published in association with Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance offers a unique discourse and an original aesthetic theory. It argues that fusing perspectives from the philosophy of Existentialism with insights from the 'universal science' of cybernetics provides a new analytical lens and deconstructive methodology to critique art. In this study, Steve Dixon examines how a range of artists' works reveal the ideas of Existentialist philosophers including Kierkegaard, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre on freedom, being and nothingness, eternal recurrence, the absurd, and being-for-others. Simultaneously, these artworks are shown to engage in complex explorations of concepts proposed by cyberneticians including Wiener, Shannon, and Bateson on information theory and 'noise', feedback loops, circularity, adaptive ecosystems, autopoiesis, and emergence. Dixon's groundbreaking book demonstrates how fusing insights and knowledge from these two fields can throw new light on pressing issues within contemporary arts and culture, including authenticity, angst and alienation, homeostasis, radical politics, and the human as system.

Drawing is not a crime! (TM) The bold and brash ARTtitude is back with another look at some of the most iconic and unusual artists of the moment. Representing countries as far-reaching and distinct as Colombia, Germany, Canada, Italy, France, and the U.S. (to name a few), the 36 international artists featured in this collection reveal the richness and diversity of contemporary graphic arts. The artists again pay tribute to the muses of their creativity, with appreciative nods to their predecessors and track lists of the music that inspires their work. ARTtitude 2 highlights some of the unique and diverse artists working today: Amanda Mocci, Jim Phillips, Conrad Roset, Cricket Press, Robert Proch, Ron Guyatt, T-Bone & Ajax, The Arcade Company, and many more.

The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterises lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the post-revolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, post-industrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.

Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception undertakes a unique critical survey and analysis of prevailing group exhibition-making practices in Europe, the UK and North America. Drawing on curatorial literature and two in-depth case studies of group exhibitions, Bertrand advocates for a mode of curatorial practice that secures the content of artworks, in contrast to prevailing open-ended, indeterminate approaches. Proposing a third exhibition type beyond the current binary exhibition ontology that opposes art historical narratives to curatorial installations or Gesamtkunstwerk, the book directly tackles the enduring critique of curating as a mediating activity that produces sameness in group-exhibition contexts by establishing artistic equivalences. The book relies on the principles of analytical philosophy to assess how different exhibition-making approaches fix reference and determine artistic reception, reintroducing a standard to evaluate exhibitions beyond personal taste and thematic coherence. Bertrand ultimately proposes an alternative conception of practice that affirms the renewed relevance of the institutional group show in the present context. Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception will be of interest to academics, researchers and students working in museum and curatorial studies, visual cultures, art theory and art history programmes. Art theorists and critics, as well as curators of contemporary art with a research-based practice, should also find much to interest them within the pages of the book.

Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print brings together established and emerging scholars of early modern print culture to explore the dynamic relationships between words and illustrations in a wide variety of popular cheap print from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. While ephemera was ubiquitous in the period, it is scarcely visible to us now, because only a handful of the thousands of examples once in existence have been preserved. Nonetheless, single-sheet printed works, as well as pamphlets and chapbooks, constituted a central part of visual and literary culture, and were eagerly consumed by rich and poor alike in Great Britain, North America, and on the Continent. Displayed in homes, posted in taverns and other public spaces, or visible in shop windows on city streets, ephemeral works used sensational means to address themes of great topicality. The English broadside ballad, of central concern in this volume, grew out of oral culture; the genre addressed issues of nationality, history, gender and sexuality, economics, and more. Richly illustrated and well researched, Studies in Ephemera offers interdisciplinary perspectives into how ephemeral works reached their audiences through visual and textual means. It also includes essays that describe how collections of ephemera are categorized in digital and conventional archives, and how our understanding of these works is shaped by their organization into collections. This timely and fascinating book will appeal to archivists, and students and scholars in many fields, including art history, comparative literature, social and economic history, and English literature. Contributors: Georgia Barnhill, Theodore Barrow, Tara Burk, Adam Fox, Alexandra Franklin, Patricia Fumerton, Paula McDowell, Kevin D. Murphy, Sally O'Driscoll, Ruth Perry

LAND ART IN GREAT BRITAIN

A new book on land art in Great Britain. There are chapters on land artists such as Chris Drury, Hamish Fulton, David Nash, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. All of the major practitioners of land and environmental art in the U.K. are discussed. The book also considers prehistoric art, stone circles, Romanticism, poetry, religion, women's art, contemporary art, and the impact of the British landscape on British land art.

Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861714022. 352 pages.

www.crmoon.com

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

One wonders whether Andy Goldsworthy would like to work in snow and ice more than in any other medium. In temperate snowlands one feels Goldsworthy is very much at home. Snow has all the right sorts of qualities Goldsworthy looks for in a material: it is malleable, it melts and changes, its whiteness makes for good, contrasty imagery photographically, and it seasonally alters the landscape, and later dissolves into it.

In Goldsworthy's snowworks one senses also the sheer fun working with snow. For people in most of Britain, snow is not a occurrence each year, as it is in, say, Northern Russia or Alaska. Snow can be an exciting event (but British adults usually gripe it). Snow was a perennial delight and 'shock' for Goldsworthy. In Midsummer Snowballs he wrote that 'even in winter each snowfall is a shock, unpredictable and unexpected.'

Goldsworthy retained the child-like enjoyment of snow falling in Britain throughout his life. While much of the U.K. grinds to a halt at the sight of a snowflake, Goldsworthy has the child's joy when it snows (school's cancelled, snowball fights, ice skating, sledging, and making snowmen and snowballs).

Andy Goldsworthy speaks in wonder and awe of 'the effect, the excitement' of the first snowfall. Some of this excitement comes across in Goldsworthy's snowworks. He has made, for example, patterns in the snow by rolling a snowball around a field, exactly as kids do when it snows (1982 and 1987).

Some of Goldsworthy's earliest works with snow were large snowballs. In some of these early snow pieces, Goldsworthy placed snowballs in areas such as woods and fields which didn't have any snow, so the snowballs stood out in the trees and grass (as in Ilkley, Yorkshire, 1981).

This book analyzes practices of collecting in European art museums from 1989 to the present, arguing that museums actualize absence both consciously and unconsciously, while misrepresentation is an outcome of the absent perspectives and voices of minority community members which are rarely considered in relation to contemporary art. Difficult knowledge is proposed as a way of dealing with absence productively. Drawing on social art history, museology, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, Margaret Tali analyzes the collections of four modern and contemporary art museums across Europe: the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, and the Kumu Museum in Tallinn.

Addiction to alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs is one of the major public health issues of our time. It accounts for one of every five deaths in the United States and costs approximately one-half trillion dollars per year in health care expenditures and lost productivity. Its human costs are untold and perhaps uncountable. "Addiction and Art" puts a human face on addiction through the creative work of individuals who have been touched by it.

The art included here presents unique stories about addiction. Many pieces are stark representations of life on the edge. Others are disturbing contemplations of life, meaning, and death. Some even reflect the allure of addiction and a fondness for substance abuse. A panel of addiction scientists, artists, and professionals from the art world selected the 61 pieces included here from more than 1,000 submissions. Accompanied by a written statement from the artist, each creation is emblematic of the destructive power of addiction and the regenerative power of recovery.

Stunning and occasionally unsettling, this unique portfolio reveals addiction art as a powerful complement to addiction science.

Taking inspiration from artists of the Renaissance to Rococo periods, contemporary artist Arabella Proffer has re-imagined the mannerist portrait with a pop surrealist twist. After researching fashion history, heraldry, and peerage protocol, she went on to create her own world parallel to that of old world Europe. Concocting a family legacy -- ancestors that could belong to anyone it has become an impulse and a passion the artist continues to explore, adding characters and stories to her ever-growing private empire of punks, goths, and nobility behaving badly. Included are over 40 portraits created between 2000 and 2011, their stories, family trees, map and more, as well as a foreword by Josh Geiser of Creep Machine and Paper Devil.

In contemporary society, 'the visual' becomes a traversing denominator passing through the most diverse articulations: from new media, branding, drone vision and robot culture to cityscapes, design and art. The transvisuality project in three volumes promotes the turn away from the predominance of a focus on representations in studies of visual culture. Volume 2 introduces visual organisation in-the-making as an effect of manifold traversing articulations and interconnected practices: how is the 'stuff' of visuality-an image like a photograph, an incident on TV, a cinematic oeuvre-intertwined in a range of cultural practices, transformed and transgressed by them in transvisuality. The aim of the book is to map how visual organizations are traversing culture as articulatory practices in situ. The resulting case studies take their departure in different materialities and agencies of empirical, embedded visuality-from canvas to drone camera-and illustrate how transvisuality evolves in and around publics and communities on the one hand and through bodies and media on the other. The visual articulations analysed in this volume span from cellphone videos to forensic images, from biomedia to robots, from bunker ruins to Kalighat pat paintings, from a Palestinian wedding dress to video footage of unknown strangers in a metro, from the Gorgon Stare to movies becoming art installations. While the first volume addresses the boundaries of the notion of visuality and creative openings that visual culture studies offer, the third volume maps visuality in contexts of design, creativity and brand management.

A groundbreaking and essential survey of the art of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, offering an in-depth discussion of the development of the artist and positioning her work within a wider history of portraiture. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night celebrates the work of one of the most significant and acclaimed figurative painters of her generation. Fact and fiction fuse in Yiadom-Boakye's paintings: they appear to be portraits, yet the people she depicts are not real but invented. Created from a composite of found images and her own imagination, her characters seem to exist outside of a specific time or place: they feel at once familiar yet mysterious. This ambiguity resonates again in the enigmatic titles she gives to her artworks. The artist is also a writer of poetry and prose, and for her, the two forms of creativity complement each other: 'The things I can't paint, I write, and the things I can't write, I paint.' This perceptive and engaging publication provides a comprehensive account of Yiadom-Boakye's practice over the past two decades. With contributions by the celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander and curators Andrea Schlieker and Isabella Maidment, alongside new writing by Yiadom-Boakye, Fly In League With The Night reflects the dual aspects of the artist's career as both a painter and a writer and offers an intimate insight into her creative process.

Originally a film by British avant-garde filmmaker Nichola Bruce, The Romance of Bricks is a portrait of the artist Liz Finch: a British painter, performer and poet. From her life-changing accident and rural solitude to the mad social whirl of 80s London anarchic performances and up to the present day, The Romance of Bricks sews together archival film over many years to produce an intriguing glimpse into the private world of the artist. Featuring commentary from Jools Holland, Christine Binnie, Jennifer Binnie, John Finch, Brian Clarke, Aubrey Fabing, Richard Strange, Nicola Bateman Bowery, Francesco Brusatin and Martin Harrison alongside an intimate dialogue with the artist herself.

The Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Art illuminates important artists, styles, and movements of the past 70 years. Beginning with the immediate post-World War II period, it encompasses earlier 20th century masters, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miro, Jean Dubuffet, Stuart Davis, Georgia O'Keeffe, and other well-known figures, who remained creatively productive, while also inspiring younger generations. The book covers subsequent developments, including abstract expressionism, happenings, pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, arte povera, feminist art, photorealism, neo-expressionism, and postmodernism, as well as the contributions of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Lucio Fontana, Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Joseph Beuys, Christo, Anselm Kiefer, Judy Chicago, Ai Weiwei, and Jeff Koons. Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Art contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography, including more than 900 cross-referenced entries on important artists, styles, terms, and movements.This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about contemporary art.