Collaboration in the arts is no longer a conscious choice to make a deliberate artistic statement, but instead a necessity of artistic survival. In today's hybrid world of virtual mobility, collaboration decentralizes creative strategies, enabling artists to carve new territories and maintain practice-based autonomy in an increasingly commercial and saturated art world. Collaboration now transforms not only artistic practices but also the development of cultural institutions, communities and personal lifestyles. This book explores why collaboration has become so integrated into a greater understanding of creative artistic practice. It draws on an emerging generation of contributors-from the arts, art history, sociology, political science, and philosophy-to engage directly with the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of collaborative practice of the future.

The final installment in the critically-acclaimed trilogy on globalization and art explores the growing dominance of Asian centers of art This book takes readers on a fascinating journey around five Asian centers of contemporary art and its myriad institutions, agents, forms, materials, and languages, while posing vital questions about the political economy of culture and the power of visual art in a multi-polar world. He analyzes the financial powerhouse of Art Basel Hong Kong, new media art in South Korea, the place of the Kochi Biennale within contemporary art in India, transnational art and art education in China, and the geo-politics of art patronage in Palestine, and he develops a highly original synthesis of theoretical perspectives and empirical research. Drawing on detailed case studies and personal insights gained from his extensive experience of the contemporary art scene in Asia, Professor Harris examines the evolving relationship between the western centers of art practice, collection, and validation and the emerging "peripheries" of Asian Tiger societies with burgeoning art centers. And he arrives at the somewhat controversial conclusion that dominance of the art world is rapidly slipping away from Europe and North America. The Global Contemporary Art World is essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduate students in modern and contemporary art, art history, art theory and criticism, cultural studies, the sociology of culture, and globalization studies. It is also a vital resource for research students, academics, and professionals in the art world.

An extensive retrospective dedicated to Roger Raveel (1921-2013), one of the most important Belgian painters of the second half of the 20th century Commemorating the centenary of the artist's birth in 2021, the Centre for Fine Arts - BOZAR will present an extensive retrospective dedicated to Roger Raveel (1921-2013), considered one of the most important Belgian painters of the second half of the twentieth century. While belonging to the generation of artists that emerged following the Second World War, flanked by Magritte and Panamarenko, Raveel radically defended his own independence from the values commonly associated with this generation, notably the supposed superiority of internationality over all forms of local anchorage. In today's context of globalized art and its associated stereotypes, Raveel's choice to draw inspiration from his immediate, intimate surroundings-while always being very well informed about trends in the international art scene-now seems revolutionary, even prophetic. Showcasing some 120 artworks from public and private collections, this catalogue seeks to demonstrate the singularity of Raveel's pictorial language as it took form over time. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (February 10-July 04, 2021)

Barbara Nicholls: Sedimentary Flow is the first substantial publication on the British artist Barbara Nicholls, who has been producing work for over 30 years. The title focusing on Nicholls monumental watercolour works.These paintings emerged by manipulating the behaviour of pigment in ever-increasing quantities of water. As such their production remains consistent with Nicholls' approach to art production over the years, when she has stitched, drawn, covered, cut, built and otherwise extracted her media from sites of chaos. The book includes a specially commissioned essay by Martin Holman, whose writing on contemporary and modern visual art has appeared in leading art press outlets since 1979. He is a regular contributor to international media outlets such as Cura, Freize, Art Review and Art Monthly. His essays analyse Nicholls' watercolour works as well as the history of her practice prior to their creation. Holman's previously work about Nicholls appeared in the catalogue for Et in Arcadia Ego-Weltchaos & Idylle, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany 2015. Barbara Nicholls lives and works in London."

British-Iranian photographer and filmmaker Mitra Tabrizian creates an unsettling imagery out of ordinary daily life. Atmospherically, she evokes almost unreal scenes, which push reality and its inhabitants into the sublime realm of a fathomless emotional interior. She addresses the incidental and mundane, yet her agenda reaches deeper. With a unique perspective, she inquires the complex social roles of the individual. By revealing too often unnoticed phenomena of contemporary living she challenges our established conceptions of the world. The book presents all of her works since 2012.

In the resistance to the violence of gender-based oppression, vibrant - but often ignored - worlds have emerged, full of nuance, humour, and beauty. Correcting an absence of writing about contemporary feminist work by Canadian artists, Desire Change considers the resurgence of feminist art, thought, and practice in the past decade by examining artworks that respond to themes of diversity and desire. Essays by historians, artists, and curators present an overview of a range of artistic practices including performance, installation, video, textiles, and photography. Contributors address the desire for change through three central frames: how feminist art has significantly contributed to the complex understanding of gender as it intersects with sexuality and race; the necessary critique of patriarchy and institutions as they relate to colonization within the Canadian nation-state; and the ways in which contemporary critiques are formed and expressed. Heavily illustrated with representative works, Desire Change raises both the stakes and the concerns of contemporary feminist art, with an understanding that feminism is always and necessarily plural.

Teary, big-eyed orphans and a multitude of trashy knockoffs epitomized American kitsch art as they clogged thrift stores for decades.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane--the credited artist of the weepy waifs, for a "San Diego Reader" cover story in 1992--he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a con man than an artist, and that he forced his wife Margaret to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result, those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

Parfrey's story was reprinted in "Juxtapoz" magazine and inspired a Margaret Keane exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. And now director Tim Burton is filming a movie about the Keanes called "Big Eyes," and it's scheduled for release in 2014. Burton's "Ed Wood," starring Johnny Depp, was based upon the Feral House book edited and published by Parfrey about the angora sweater-wearing B-film director.

"Citizen Keane" is a book-length expansion of Parfrey's original article, providing fascinating biographical and sociological details, photographs, color reproductions, and appendices with legal documents and pseudonymous essays by Tom Wolfe inflating big eye art to those painted by the great masters.

Having travelled extensively throughout his life, Grant has drawn inspiration from landscapes from Antarctica to the tropics, While attracted to northerly territories (he has lived in Norway since 1996), the subject matter of Grant's bold images varies from marine volcanoes and rainforests to icebergs and glaciers. Dynamic and vital, elemental palettes conjure up abstracted fiery drama to figurative icy stillness. Seen collectively, the work reveals a creative energy that finds many forms of expression. This translates into an original visual language that questions and probes how we see the world around us. Much more than images, Grant's remarkable artistic contribution not only provides paintings that capture the world's beauty, but also extend our understanding of the environment, climate and the fundamental importance of nature. 

"The written word is the most basic element of human culture. To touch the written word is to touch the essence of culture." - Xu Bing Book from the Sky certainly seemed to have fallen from the heavens: the text of this installation piece was written in a new language that resembled traditional Chinese. No matter who scours Xu Bing's book for 'meaning', they will only discover a semblance of it: mutated characters that resist interpretation. Carving out approximately four thousand wood blocks by hand, Xu Bing spent four years, from 1987 to 1991, making (in his own words) "something that said nothing". After creating a book no one could read, it only made sense for Xu Bing to develop his next project: a book that transcended barriers of language: Book from the Ground. Composed entirely of pictographs, Book from the Ground is a groundbreaking study into the concept of universal communication. Whether his goal is total comprehension or confusion, Xu Bing's masterful exploration of language challenges the way we think about the written word.

The artist Kubra Khademi (b. 1989) lives in Paris and focuses in her work on her life as a woman and a person with direct experience as a refugee. This makes it both political and highly topical. Multi-faceted themes pervade her art, including her function as mouthpiece and as an element in the fight for the fundamental rights of women, as well as artistic work in exile and in a Muslim society. In paintings and more recently with the use of photographic techniques and embroidery, Khademi presents tranquil nude female figures that – depending on the angle – can nonetheless be interpreted as provocative. They are juxtaposed with impressive performances that draw on the artist’s own physical experiences as a subject. Khademi focuses her attention on the male-dominated society in countries like her native Afghanistan and the socio-political situation there, linking together motifs from mythology, art history and politics. Kubra Khademi has received many awards for her work, and this overview publication presents her oeuvre in all its complexity.

Architecture is a constant presence in the study of human interaction-acting as both the ground on which human social behavior is performed and a means of shaping subjectivity itself. Proxemics was an attempt to visualize and instrumentalize these dynamics, appealing to both the social sciences and the emerging field of environmental design. Founded by anthropologist Edward T. Hall and taking shape between the departments of architecture and anthropology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, proxemics developed amidst cold war political tensions and intense social and civil unrest. Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction presents selections from Hall's extensive archive of visual materials alongside a critical analysis that traces transformations in the fields of design and science. Together these materials illuminate a moment in American history when new spatial practices arose to challenge the environmental conditions of cultural, political, and racial identity.

Damien Hirst grew up in Leeds and studied at Goldsmiths College, London. Most notable amongst the exhibitions he curated whilst at college was Freeze, in 1988, in which he exhibited his work and that of his contemporaries. This book was produced for an exhibition held at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong, in 2011.

From the fan-favorite Pop Surrealist painter and graphic artist, this coloring book features stunningly beautiful black-and-white images of mermaids and other legendary beasts of the ocean drawn in Camilla d'Errico's signature manga-inspired style. Following the success of her first coloring book, Pop Manga Coloring Book, artist Camilla d'Errico takes fans beneath the waves with 70 black-and-white images of beloved characters from undersea fairy tales and myths in this stunning coloring book. Along with beautiful and haunting images of mermaids, d'Errico also includes many-tentacled krakens, giant seahorses, narwhals, and more in pieces that you'll want to start coloring as soon as you open the book. Select pieces include designed, patterned backgrounds to keep colorists working away hour after hour in this underwater kingdom of cute.

Award-winning author, curator, and activist Lucy R. Lippard is one of America's most influential writers on contemporary art, a pioneer in the fields of cultural geography, conceptualism, and feminist art. Hailed for "the breadth of her reading and the comprehensiveness with which she considers the things that define place" ("The New York Times"), Lippard now turns her keen eye to the politics of land use and art in an evolving New West.
Working from her own lived experience in a New Mexico village and inspired by gravel pits in the landscape, Lippard weaves a number of fascinating themes--among them fracking, mining, land art, adobe buildings, ruins, Indian land rights, the Old West, tourism, photography, and water--into a tapestry that illuminates the relationship between culture and the land. From threatened Native American sacred sites to the history of uranium mining, she offers a skeptical examination of the "subterranean economy."
Featuring more than two hundred gorgeous color images, "Undermining" is a must-read for anyone eager to explore a new way of understanding the relationship between art and place in a rapidly shifting society.

The work of seminal contemporary artist Chris Burden, insightfully contextualized around major themes, illuminates a practice that is as unique as it is influential. For four decades, Chris Burden's work has redefined the boundaries of the sculptural field. Whether subjecting himself to extremes of physical suffering or reconfiguring forgotten urban objects and toy models to create potent signifiers of a time and place, the brute force of Burden's work in the physical realm reverberates through the psychic one. On the occasion of the New Museum's focused survey of Burden's work, this book provides new perspectives on his art. Organized around themes like the Myth of the American West, the Institution, Gender Roles, and Model Making, the book reexamines preoccupations that span the artist's long career.

After the example of Noah, who saved the animal species in his ark for posterity, this volume, an "Illustrated Animal Bible by Artists from all over the World," aspires to rescue and house the animals among us today. Recruiting over 200 artists, illustrators and designers from every corner of the globe, each of whom was invited to select a creature (animal or species) to represent their birthplace, and add it to the Ark, the project has resulted in an amazing illustration bible that mixes styles and techniques, showing how astonishing nature is and why we should take better care of the planet and the species on it. At once fun, graphically charming and ecologically intelligent, "Ark "wil immediately appeal to children and design audiences. The final parade of animals is astonishing: the burrowing owl for Canada, the capybara for Uruguay, the Carey turtle for Colombia, the Caribean manatee for Puerto Rico, the nene goose for Maui, the spectacled bear for Peru... "Ark "also supplies a section of "Nature Facts," an illustrated tale of Noah and a list of all the artists involved--among them Allan Deas, Gustav Dejert, Drew Funk, Chris Garbutt, Kronk, Cecy Meade, Meomi, Noper, Shen Plum and Roland Tamayo.

From the first organisational forays within the creative partnership of David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin culminating in the Nosepaint events of the early 90s, this book then follows their journey from Nosepaint to the formal opening of Beaconsfield in September 1995 to the present, profiling how each project and initiative was approached with the same ethic and ethos throughout a collective 'Chronic Epoch'. The significance of the book's story is as much an important record as it is an inspiration to any burgeoning artist or curator. To look at the self-created etymology behind the name says as much; Beaconsfield: to offer a space for artists and audiences to experience high quality (hence 'beacon'), challenging, new artworks in a wide range (hence 'field') of contemporary visual art media through commissions, group exhibitions, performances, publications and events.Published in partnership with the organisation, with generous image sections and contributions from those involved in Beaconsfield's programme over the years, such as Bob and Roberta Smith, Gustav Metzger, Paul Hobson, and Julian Stallabrass, Chronic Epoch relays the story of a space constructed with a desire to "fill a niche between the institution, the commercial and the 'alternative'". The book shows how Beaconsfield has sustained its own ethical and artistic standards throughout and fostered a fresh take on contemporary art in the process.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, questions of identity have dominated the culture not only of Russia, but of all the countries of the former Soviet bloc. This timely collection examines the ways in which cultural activities such as fiction, TV, cinema, architecture and exhibitions have addressed these questions and also describes other cultural flashpoints, from attitudes to language to the use of passports. It discusses definitions of political and cultural nationalism, as well as the myths, institutions and practices that moulded and expressed national identity. From post-Soviet recollections of food shortages to the attempts by officials to control popular religion, it analyses a variety of unexpected and compelling topics to offer fresh insights about this key area of world culture. Illustrated with numerous photographs, it presents the results of recent research in an accessible and lively way.

In this book, contributors identify and explore a range of iconic works - "Mistress-Pieces" - that have been made by feminists and gender activists since the 1970s. The first volume for which the defining of iconic feminist art is the raison d'etre, its contributors interpret a "Mistress-Piece" as a work that has proved influential in a particular context because of its distinctiveness and relevance. Reinterpreting iconic art by Alice Neel, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, the authors also offer important insights about works that may be less well known - those by Natalia LL, Tanja Ostojic, Swoon, Clara Meneres, Diane Victor, Usha Seejarim, Ilse Fuskova, Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Tracey Moffatt, among others. While in some instances revealing cross influences between artists working in different frameworks, the publication simultaneously makes evident how social and political factors specific to particular countries had significant impact on the making and reception of art focused on gender. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies and gender studies.

This career-spanning publication features conceptual, political, formal, and technical perspectives on the work of contemporary sculptor Charles Ray For Charles Ray (born 1953), sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media-from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, wood, and steel. Charles Ray: Figure Ground spans the whole of the artist's fifty-year career, from his early photographs and performances through his intriguing, often unsettling sculptures, some of which are published here for the first time. The essays foreground Ray's engagement with preexisting traditions, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality (notably expressed through his explorations of Mark Twain's 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and investigate the modalities of touch that run through his work. In addition, a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further insights into his multifaceted practice. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (January 31-June 5, 2022)

Whether your character is jumping for joy or grappling with an opponent, this book provides all the essential techniques to draw more lifelike action figures in the classic Japanese manga style. The comprehensive introduction first shows the reader the physical anatomy of male vs. female figures and gives important tips on proportions, perspective and small but often-overlooked details such as the relative differences between male and female hands, fingers and feet. Five subsequent chapters cover over 40 action poses in the following categories: Chapter 1: Action (e.g. running and jumping) Chapter 2: Martial Arts (e.g. punching and kicking) Chapter 3: Interacting (e.g. judo holds and high fives) Chapter 4: Weapons (e.g. swords and knives) Chapter 5: Reacting (e.g. dodging a punch or taking a punch) Each pose and movement is illustrated with a rough sketch outline followed by a highlighted manga drawing containing detailed annotations by the author. After studying the sketches, you practice the drawing techniques in a tracing section at the end of each chapter. Each chapter also provides professional tips on the use of color and shading for greater realism. Special sections contain information and tips on particular topics of interest, such as how to draw clothes, hair and facial expressions or how to create special effects. At the end of the book, an actual 6-page comic strip gives readers the opportunity to practice what they have learned by filling in the missing elements.