Bridges to me are a connection, not just joining two landmasses, but an emotional state, one that acts as an invisible thread binding the past and future.
--Antonio Masi
In New York's Golden Age of Bridges, artist Antonio Masi teams up with writer and New York City historian Joan Marans Dim to offer a multidimensional exploration of New York City's nine major bridges, their artistic and cultural underpinnings, and their impact worldwide.
The tale of New York City's bridges begins in 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge rose majestically over the East River, signaling the start of America's "Golden Age" of bridge building. The Williamsburg followed in 1903, the Queensboro (renamed the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge) and the Manhattan in 1909, the George Washington in 1931, the Triborough (renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) in 1936, the Bronx-Whitestone in 1939, the Throgs Neck in 1961, and the Verrazano-Narrows in 1964. Each of these classic bridges has its own story, and the book's paintings show the majesty and artistry, while theessays fill in the fascinating details of its social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental history.
America's great bridges, built almost entirely by immigrant engineers, architects, and laborers, have come to symbolize not only labor and ingenuity but also bravery and sacrifice. The building of each bridge took a human toll. The Brooklyn Bridge's designer and chief engineer, John A. Roebling, himself died in the service of bridge
building. But beyond those stories is another narrative--one that encompasses the dreams and ambitions of a city, and eventually a nation.
At this moment in Asia and Europe many modern large-scale, long-span suspension bridges are being built. They are the progeny of New York City's Golden Age bridges. This book comes along at the perfect moment to place these great public projects into their historical and artistic contexts, to inform and delight artists, engineers, historians, architects, and city planners. In addition to the historical and artistic perspectives, New York's Golden Age of Bridges explores the inestimable connections that bridges foster, and reveals the extraordinary impact of the nine Golden Age bridges on thecity, the nation, and the world.

Along with the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, hot rods and custom cars are powerful symbols of resistance, rebellion, and the high-octane lifestyle. Since the 1950s, these flashy restyled automobiles have occupied a unique place in American popular mythology.

"Cool Cars, High Art: The Rise of Kustom Kulture" checks out this particularly male subculture with an up-close look at customized car art and the artists who create it. Through amazing technical mastery, coupled with a uniquely American imagination, these motorheads transform mass-produced products of industry into unique hand-crafted pieces of art called "rods" and "customs."

This first full-length study to focus on the practice of hot rodding and car customizing argues not only that this "kustom kulture" deserves consideration as a source of legitimate art forms but also that the rise of American car customizing reflects the attitudes and ideas of the teen culture that emerged in the 1950s. While tracing the evolution of styles, this book examines specific cars and the progression of car culture through the 1990s.

"Cool Cars, High Art: The Rise of Kustom Kulture" argues moreover that in this car art the theories of modernism meld with popular culture. In their beauty, in the sophistication of their designs, and in their formal play, these transformed, re-imagined cars parallel the ideas, techniques, and achievement of high-art modernists. And as high art progresses into postmodernism, so too does customized car culture.

Despite the longevity and the magnitude of Kustom Kulture, this far-reaching contribution to American art has largely been ignored by mainstream critics. While postulating the cause of this anomaly, this book questions what is meant by art and how preconceived notions of gender, race, and class often prevent the recognition of creativity in places where imagination is not anticipated.

John F. DeWitt, an associate professor of English and the acting director of the liberal arts program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, is the author of several books of poetry. He has been published in "The New American Review" and "New Geography of American Poets."

"Benos-Amos opens for the reader richly detailed adn nuanced vistas into the intellectual and cultural history of one of the major kingdoms of precolonial West Africa." African Studies Review

"The wealth of historiographic resources, the command of relevant literature, the ethnographic research and prudent use of oral traditions give this work a high degree of... intellectual excitement.... a landmark in the field." Warren d Azevedo

Making use of archival and oral resources in this extensively researched book, Paula Girshick Ben-Amos questions to what extent art operates as political strategy. How do objects acquire political meaning? How does the use of art enhance and embody power and authority?"

In this fascinating work, J. Leonard Benson describes the spiritual and esoteric nature of color in relation to the four elements -- fire, earth, air and water. Based on insights provided by Rudolf Steiner and a deep knowledge of classical cosmology and color theory, this book shows how an understanding of the inner nature of color leads to a completely different view of the world and evolution than is current in our present civilization -- one completely at odds with the ruling neo-Darwinian paradigm. The Inner Nature of Color will be of interest to artists, art historians, spiritual seekers and anyone who has ever been struck by the remarkable beauty of our colored world and wondered what it means.

For two decades, Swiss photographer Serge Fruehauf has documented fascinating architectural details cast in concrete. But his focus lies not only in the beauty of the built environment, but also in the surprising and sometimes absurd puzzles created by later interventions: stairways that lead to dead ends, disfigured garden walls that have long outlived their purpose. With Serge Fruehauf - Extra Normal, Joerg Bader has selected the best and most interesting of more than one thousand images in Fruehauf's most recent series. Taken throughout Paris, Geneva, Grenoble, and Lyon, Fruehauf's photographs form a critical reflection on architectural modernity mitigated by the photographer's love of the spaces he has photographed, and his deep sympathy for the architects and planners who were drawn to concrete as a versatile and multifaceted building material in the latter part of the twentieth century. Despite its promise, the buildings or clusters of buildings that have come out of the modern methods of construction with concrete appear today as bland monstrosities or grotesque hybrids of traditional and modern architecture. Fruehauf's photographs are joined by a preface by scholar and curator Martino Stierli, which offers an insightful discussion of how Fruehauf's work highlights these structures as allegories of the current cultural situation.

David Gentleman has lived in London for almost seventy years, most of it on the same street. This book is a record of a lifetime spent observing, drawing and getting to know the city, bringing together work from across his whole career, from his earliest sketches to watercolours painted just a few months ago. Here is London as it was, and as it is today: the Thames, Hampstead Heath; the streets, canals, markets and people of his home of Camden Town; and at the heart of it all, his studio and the tools of his work. Accompanied by reflections on the process of drawing and personal thoughts on the ever-changing city, this is a celebration of London, and the joy of noticing, looking and capturing the world. 'David has spent a lifetime depicting with wit and affection a London he has made his own' Alan Bennett 'He delivers a poetry of exultant concentration ... The surface fusion of the sensuous and the sharply modern is echoed by Gentleman's imagery' Guardian 'The artist and illustrator has been responsible for some of the most-seen public artworks in this country' The Times 'Perhaps the last of the great polymath designer-painters' Camden New Journal

This illustrated modern history of the connections between science and art reveals a new perspective on what that relationship has contributed to the world around us, based on the landmark Radio 4 series, and Science Museum exhibition.

Throughout history, artists and scientists have been driven by curiosity and the desire to experiment. Both have wanted to make sense of the world around them, often to change it, sometimes working closely together, certainly taking inspiration from each other’s disciplines. The relationship between the two has traditionally been perceived as one of love and hate, fascination and revulsion, symbiotic but antagonistic. But art is crucial to helping us understand our science legacy and science is well served by applying an artistic lens. How exactly has the ingenuity of science and technology been incorporated into artistic expression? And how has creative practice, in turn, stimulated innovation and technological change?

The Art of Innovation is a history of the past 250 years viewed through the disciplines of art and science. Through fascinating stories that explore the sometimes unexpected relationships between famous artworks and significant scientific and technological objects – from Constable’s cloudscapes and the chemist who first measured changes in air pressure, to the introduction of photography and the representation of natural history in print – it offers a new way of seeing, studying and interpreting the extraordinary world around us.

An important resource for scholars of contemporary art and architecture, this volume considers contemporary art that takes architecture as its subject. Concentrated on works made since 1990, Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility is the first to take up this topic in a sustained and explicit manner and the first to advance the idea that contemporary art functions as a form of architectural history, theory, and analysis. Over the course of fourteen essays by both emerging and established scholars, this volume examines a diverse group of artists in conjunction with the vernacular, canonical, and fantastical structures engaged by their work. Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Matthew Barney, Monika Sosnowska, Pipo Nguyen-duy, and Paul Pfeiffer are among those considered, as are the compelling questions of architecture's relationship to photography, the evolving legacy of Mies van der Rohe, the notion of an architectural unconscious, and the provocative concepts of the unbuilt and the unbuildable. Through a rigorous investigation of these issues, Contemporary Art About Architecture calls attention to the fact that art is now a vital form of architectural discourse. Indeed, this phenomenon is both pervasive and, in its individual incarnations, compelling - a reason to think again about the entangled histories of architecture and art.

On Reflection: Moments, Flight and Nothing New attempts to grapple with the complexities of our present moment. Personal and imagined stories appear as fragments of everyday scenes forming a narrative of self-discovery. Vignettes accompanied by photography explore life's contradictions, trauma, and the ways in which we navigate the fluidity of cities. The poems move back and forth in time and across Europe, highlighting a range of experiences and perspectives of our modern society as a series of snapshots. In each, we catch a glimpse of ourselves, demonstrating how such moments and characters influence our journeys. Written from the consciousness of a British Ghanaian, the collection is a love letter to the lived and shared experience of those struggling and learning about the various intersections of their identity. Through the voice of Akos and other characters, Wiredu reaches to understand the significance of history, its effect on an evolving African diaspora in Europe, and finds hope in the present as she proposes an optimistic dialogue about the future.

Maritime prints, drawings and watercolours a re discussed, and a historical survey of the development of marine art is given, by a former Head of Painting at the Nat ional Maritime Museum in Greenwich. '

Since 2011, photographer Marie-Jeanne van Hoevell tot Westerflier has been working on a series of portraits in which a century-old white blouse plays a leading role. Over 75 people of all ages and both sexes have accepted her invitation to pose for a photo shoot with the antique garment. This book presents the results of her project, preceded by an account of the photographer's work and career. It contains white blouse portraits not only of Dutch celebrities like Jenny Arean, Jort Kelder, Alexandra Radius, Toer van Schayk and Daan Schuurmans, but also of lesser-known people and some children. Text in English and Dutch.

The bridge was a popular feature in painting throughout the period from 1700 to 1920, but why did so many artists choose to portray the structures? This study traces the history of the bridge in painting and printmaking through a range of works, including William Etty's "The Bridge of Sighs", Claude Monet's "The Railway Bridge", Wassily Kandinsky's "Composition IV" and C.R.W. Nevinson's "Looking Through Brooklyn Bridge", revealing its complex role as both symbol and metaphor, and as a place of vantage, meeting and separation.