An examination of women as mothers in medieval French sculpture. What can medieval sculptural representations of women tell us about medieval women's experiences of motherhood? Presumably the work of male sculptors, working for clerical patrons, these sculptures are unlikely to have been shaped by women's maternal experiences during their production. Once produced, however, their beholders would have included women who were mothers and potential mothers, thus opening a space between the sculptures' intended meanings and other meanings liable to be produced by these women as they brought their own interests and concerns to these works of art. Building on theories of reception and response, this book focuses on interactions between women asbeholders and a range of sculptures made in France in the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, aiming to provide insight into women's experiences of motherhood; particular sculptures considered include the Annunciation and Visitation from Reims cathedral, the femme-aux-serpents from Moissac, the transi of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendome, the Eve from Autun, and a number of French Gothic Virgin and Child sculptures. Marian Bleeke is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Cleveland State University.

A beautifully presented, practical gift guide to the age-old art of whittling. There are 50 projects featured in the book, ranging from quick makes to more elaborate projects, and even a chapter on creating things from cork. The 8 main themes are: Quick Things - including a doorstop, a bookmark and a gift-box book; Into The Woods - including a willow whistle, walking stick, fish hook and slingshot; Around The House - including chopsticks, coat and crochet hooks; Cork Creations - including a succulent pot, stamp, and earphones spool; Ornamental Carving - including a boat, a deer and a spinning top; Kitchen Carving - including a carrot flute, apple candle and onion flower; The Natural World - including a bird feeder and instructions to prepare a fish for cooking, a graft an apple tree. The projects cater for a range of skill levels and the instructions are complemented by smart step-by-step illustrations, which highlight the tactile quality of the material in hand. The book also includes an introduction with advice on selecting a penknife, maintaining your blade, choosing your caving material, and carving techniques. Featuring the ultimate crossover of cool craftsmanship and savvy survival-skill projects, this book is the perfect gift for creative adventurers.

For nearly seven decades the ebullient art of Joan Miro (1893-1983), Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramist and mythmaker, has intrigued and enchanted art lovers worldwide. This collection of his writings presents a portrait of the artist in his own words. Miro's notebooks, letters, and interviews reveal the work and life of a brilliant artist revered for his uncanny expression of the subconscious. "Joan Miro" centres on Paris during the vibrant era between the wars, when Miro became the intimate of almost everyone in that scene - boxing with young Hemingway, working with Max Ernst on the Ballets Russes, drinking, painting and arguing with Picasso, Braque, Dubuffet, Matisse, Breton and many others. Miro engagingly recounts all of this, as well as stories of his exile during World War II. Miro's virtuosity encompassed drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, poetry, stage sets, costumes, murals and tapestries; he vividly describes the creation of these artworks in these pages.

Painter, draftsman and engraver, Pierre Lesieur (1922-2011) was one of the most influential French artists of the second half of the 20th century. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris - where he took lessons from Andre Lhote - and at the Academie de Montmartre, he had his first exhibition in 1952. Lesieur's paintings of the 1950s are characterised by the use of brightly coloured areas, in line with the work of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. In the 1960s, this research bordered on abstraction, particularly in still lifes and representations of objects. From the 1970s onwards, through his paintings and drawings, Lesieur took a particular interest in interiors, as well as in portraits and female nudes. Early in his career, Pierre Lesieur was recognised as an important artist. After his first personal exhibition in 1952, his work was regularly shown at the Coard Gallery in Paris. From the 1990s, Lesieur's notoriety became international, resulting in further exhibitions in Japan and the United States. Some of his works are now housed in major museums such as the Center Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hiroshima Museum. Text in English and French.

Reading African art's impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The "Black Art" Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde "discovery" of African sculpture-known then as art negre, or "black art"-eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, "black art" evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the Ecole de Dakar, African sculpture's influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history's alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The "Black Art" Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

In spring 2009, Dumbarton Oaks inaugurated an occasional series of contemporary art installations intended to provide unexpected experiences and fresh interpretations of its gardens and collections. The first artist selected was the American sculptor Charles Simonds, who is well known for clay sculptures that document the wanderings of a fantastical civilization of Little People whose landscapes, architectures, and rituals have been imagined by the artist since the early 1970s. The outcome was a project that spanned the whole institution. A wide range of his current sculptures--some architectural, some figural, and some evocative of landscape, most preexisting but one made especially for the exhibition--was installed between May and October 2009 in various spaces at Dumbarton Oaks.

"Landscape Body Dwelling" documents and reflects on the installation. Essays by Ann Reynolds and Germano Celant situate it within the broader context of Simond's artistic career, while essays by John Beardsley and Joanne Pillsbury detail the often surprising connections between the exhibited works, the garden elements, and the permanent collections at Dumbarton Oaks. Richly illustrated with photographs of the installation, this volume demonstrates how contemporary culture connects us with the past, reinvigorating historical tropes while enlivening the institutions that continue to speak them.

Colour is at the core of our perception, the very essence of how we see and understand the world, but the question to ask is: how does one interpret it? Six well-known British artists - David Batchelor, Ian Davenport, Lothar Goetz, Jim Lambie, Annie Morris, Fiona Rae - have interpreted in different ways, the relationship of colour within space. Colour is the main protagonist of their works: it can be found in Batchelor's sculptures assembled with found objects, in the coloured trails of Davenport's paintings, in Fiona Rae's delicate, floating marks on white surfaces, and in Annie Morris' sculptures that powerfully define the environment. Finally, the colour comes out of the paintings to invade the walls and the floor of the Gallery itself, with two site-specific creations: an entire wall painted by Lothar Goetz, and Zobop, the floor made of vinyl by Jim Lambie. Text in English and Italian.

Italian-born American artist Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was one of the most prolific, innovative artists of the post-war period. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met future colleagues and collaborators Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, he went on to make one-of-a kind jewellery, design iconic chairs, create thousands of unique sculptures including large-scale commissions for significant buildings, and advance the use of sound as sculptural material. His work speaks to the confluence of numerous fields of endeavour, but is united throughout by a sculptural approach to making and an experimental embrace of metal. Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life accompanies the first U.S. museum retrospective of the artist's career to examine the full scope of his broad, interdisciplinary practice, and feature important examples of his furniture, jewellery, monotypes, and diverse sculptural output. Lavishly illustrated, the book offers new scholarly essays as well as a catalogue of the artists numerous large-scale commissions. It questions how and why we distinguish between a chair, a necklace, a screen, and a freestanding sculpture and what Bertoia's sculptural things, when taken together, say about the fluidity of visual language across culture, both at mid-century and now.

An exploration of Francophone African literary imaginations and expressions through the lens of Afrofuturism Generally attributed to the Western imagination, science fiction is a literary genre that has expressed projected technological progress since the Industrial Revolution. However, certain fantastical elements in African literary expressions lend themselves to science fiction interpretations, both utopian and dystopian. When the concept of science is divorced from its Western, rationalist, materialist, positivist underpinnings, science fiction represents a broad imaginative space that supersedes the limits of this world. Whether it be on the moon, under the sea, or elsewhere within the imaginative universe, Afrofuturist readings of select films, novels, short stories, plays, and poems reveal a similarly emancipatory African future that is firmly rooted in its own cultural mythologies, cosmologies, and philosophies. Isaac Joslin identifies the contours and modalities of a speculative, futurist science fiction rooted in the sociocultural and geopolitical context of continental African imaginaries. Constructing an arc that begins with gender identity and cultural plurality as the bases for an inherently multicultural society, this project traces the essential role of language and narrativity in processing traumas that stem from the violence of colonial and neocolonial interventions in African societies. Joslin then outlines the influential role of discursive media that construct divisions and create illusions about societal success, belonging, and exclusion, while also identifying alternative critical existential mythologies that promote commonality and social solidarity. The trajectory proceeds with a critical analysis of the role of education in affirming collective identity in the era of globalization; the book also assesses the market-driven violence that undermines efforts to instill and promote cultural and social autonomy. Last, this work proposes an egalitarian and ecological ethos of communal engagement with and respect for the diversity of the human and natural worlds.

In this book, Dan Adler addresses recent tendencies in contemporary art toward assemblage sculpture and how these works incorporate tainted materials - often things left on the side of the road, according to the logic and progress of the capitalist machine - and combine them in ways that allow each element to retain a degree of empirical specificity. Adler develops a range of aesthetic models through which these practices can be understood to function critically. Each chapter focuses on a single exhibition: Isa Genzken's "OIL" (German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007), Geoffrey Farmer's midcareer survey (Musee d'art contemporain, Montreal, 2008), Rachel Harrison's "Consider the Lobster" (CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, 2009), and Liz Magor's "The Mouth and Other Storage Facilities" (Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2008).

***SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL CHRISTOPHER BLAND PRIZE 2023*** 'I read the book in one go. I laughed and cried like a baby, and was transported back to a time of innocence, clouded by the enormity of the harsh reality . . . Just amazing' CATHERINE ZETA JONES 'As it happens, I was also a Jill in the eighties - but not half as good a Jill as real Jill' DAWN FRENCH 'Jill met the crisis head on . . . She held the hands of so many men. She lost them, and remembered them, and somehow kept going' RUSSELL T DAVIES A heartbreaking, life-affirming memoir of love, loss and cabaret through the AIDS crisis, from IT'S A SIN's Jill Nalder When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends - of which many were young, talented gay men with big dreams of their own - she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs she could get. But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the 'gay flu', and Jill and her friends now found their formerly carefree existence under threat. In this moving memoir, IT'S A SIN's Jill Nalder tells the true story of her and her friends' lives during the AIDS crisis -- juggling a busy West End career while campaigning for AIDS awareness and research, educating herself and caring for the sick. Most of all, she shines a light on those who were stigmatised and shamed, and remembers those brave and beautiful boys who were lost too soon. 'Thank God for people like [Jill] . . . I cannot recommend this book highly enough' MICHAEL BALL 'An engaging, moving account' TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW 'Simultaneously devastating and uplifting' GRAZIA 'Engrossing, heart-breaking and inspiring' MATT CAIN

For seven years, photographer and artist Lena Herzog followed the evolution of a new kinetic species. Intricate as insects but with bursts of equine energy, the "Strandbeests," or "beach creatures," are the creation of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, who has been working for nearly two decades to generate these new life-forms that move, and even survive, on their own. Set to roam the beaches of Holland, the Strandbeests pick up the wind in their gossamer wings and spring, as if by metamorphosis, into action. As if it were blood, not the breeze, running through their delicate forms, they quiver, cavort, and trot against the sun and sea, pausing to change direction if they sense loose sand or water that might destabilize their movement. Coinciding with a traveling exhibition, Herzog's photographic tribute captures Jansen's menagerie in a meditative black and white, showcasing Jansen's imaginative vision, as well as the compelling intersection of animate and inanimate in his creatures. The result is a work of art in its own right and a mesmerizing encounter not only with a very surrealist brand of marvelous, but also with whole new ideas of existence.

A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making In this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of construction—in which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted black—have been little studied. Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelson’s own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelson’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelson’s art. The author also approaches Nevelson’s sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelson’s assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artist’s proclamation of allegiance to blackness.

Employing superb, clear draughtsmanship this book illustrates each and every detail of the rigging of typical period fore-and-aft vessels. The rigging of period ship models is arguably the most complex task that any modeller has to accomplish; the intricacies can be daunting and visual references limited. The author's first book, Rigging Period Ship Models, was a triumph of clarity for those needing to decipher the complexities of square rig and has now sold in multiple editions. This book does the same for fore-and-aft craft and deploys three typical eighteenth-century types - an English cutter, a three-masted French lugger and an American schooner. Some 200 diagrams show clearly where each separate item of standing and running rigging is fitted, led and belayed. Whatever the requirements of the modelmaker, all the information is here. This new PB edition brings a visual clarity to the complexities of period rigging and will delight anyone with an interest in the rigging of traditional fore-and-aft craft.

Inspired by radical Italian designer Enzo Mari, this practical book with step-by-step DIY projects for hand built, beautiful furniture is a tribute to his simple ideas that challenged the consumerism of the furniture industry. Many interpreted Enzo Mari's book Autoprogettazione? as a manifesto of nostalgic longing for a pre-capitalist society where people built what they needed themselves, but Mari's goal wasn't to make people cease consuming. Mari wanted people to consider the more basic aspects of the objects we surround ourselves with and what it is that makes a piece of furniture, beautiful, comfortable and functional. Taking Enzo Mari and his book as his influence, Erik Eje Almqvist unpacks the practical aspects of the Autoprogettazione? theory, offering simple designs for handbuilt, beautiful furniture. Using just a hammer, nails and boards cut to standard dimensions, Hammer & Nail explores only a few techniques but arms the reader with skills and inspiration for life. With easy-to-follow instructions and diagrams, there are basic methods for making furniture joints, and includes tips on how to avoid cracking boards as you go, making clean cuts with a saw, and ideas on surface treatments. Projects include: Sheep chair, Tilting Shaker chair, Pinstol/Windsor chair, Garden chair, Arts & Crafts chair, Ski chair, Mirror stool, Stackable stool, Beer table, Kitchen bench, Park bench, Sofa, Top and tail bed, Dining table, Worktable, Cabinet, Gun Kessle's shelf and Giraffe lamp.

Sculpture Journal provides an international forum for writers and scholars in the field of post-classical sculpture and public commemorative monuments in the Western tradition. Sculpture Journal offers a keen critical overview and a sound historical base and is Britain's foremost scholarly journal devoted to sculpture in all its aspects. Periods covered extend to public and private commissions for present-day sculptors. While being academic and traditional, the journal encourages contributions of fresh research from new names in the field.

Isaac Cordal ...is a sculpture artist from London. His sculptures take the form of little people sculpted from concrete in 'real' situations. Cordal manages to capture a lot of emotion in his vignettes, in spite of their lack of detail or colour. He is sympathetic toward his little people and we empathise with their situations, their leisure time, their waiting for buses and their more tragic moments such as accidental death, suicide or family funerals. His sculptures can be found in gutters, on top of buildings and bus shelters - in many unusual and unlikely places in the capital. This book is the first time his images have been shown in together in one book dedicated to his work, many images never seen before. Cordal's concrete sculptures are like little magical gifts to the public that only a few lucky people will see and love but so many more will have missed. Left to their own devices throughout London, what really makes these pieces magical is their placement. They bring new meaning to little corners of the urban environment. They express something vulnerable but deeply engaging.

Diamond jewelry has long been symbolic of political power and authority in Europe. This book focuses on the individuals who commissioned and wore extraordinarily precious diamond ornaments from the mid-14th century until the ‘democratization’ of diamonds that followed the opening of mines in South Africa in 1867. This enthralling story covers seven centuries of history, showing the way in which rulers such as Charles V of France, Queen Elizabeth I of Great Britain, Louis XIV of France and Catherine II of Russia used diamond jewelry to reinforce their power and authority. As works of art, these precious creations mirror the successive styles of each period – late Gothic naturalism, the culture of the Renaissance, Baroque splendour, Rococo elegance and the Imperial grandeur of the First and Second Napoleonic Empires. The recurring themes – religion, sentiment, heraldry, military glory, miniatures and cameo portraiture – are reinterpreted by each generation of jewelers. Like royal dress, diamond jewelry was worn to dazzle and impress – at weddings, coronations, christenings and state visits – and was presented as gifts reflecting princely generosity. Over the centuries, these displays proved remarkably successful as instruments of government, symbolizing the pride and glory of a nation. Arranged chronologically, Diamond Jewelry includes some legendary masterpieces of diamond jewelry. Written by an acknowledged expert, it offers an intriguing overview of one of the world’s most precious gems.

Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954) is one of the leading figures of modern art. His unparalleled cut-outs are among the most significant of any artist's late works. When ill health first prevented Matisse from painting, he began to cut into painted paper with scissors as his primary technique to make maquettes for a number of commissions, from books and stained glass window designs to tapestries and ceramics. Taking the form of a 'studio diary', the catalogue re-examines the cut-outs in terms of the methods and materials that Matisse used, and looks at the tensions in the works between finish and process; fine art and decoration; contemplation and utility; and drawing and colour.

The V&A's collection of ivory carvings from the period 1200 to 1550 is one of the most important in the world, and this is the first catalogue of it to be published since 1929. Together with the earlier volume, Medieval Ivory Carvings: Early Christian to Romanesque (V&A, 2010), the books make available over 400 pieces of the ivory carver's art, discussing in detail many of the most celebrated ivories of the Middle Ages. Included here are masterpieces from the most important centres of ivory carving in the Gothic era. Among them are the Salting Leaf and Soissons Diptych from thirteenthcentury France; the early-fourteenth-century Salting Diptych from England; Giovanni Pisano's Crucified Christ and the Aldobrandini Crozier from Italy; and the unique Wingfield-Digby Crozier from fourteenth-century Norway. Additionally, important groups of Virgin and Child statuettes, tabernacle polyptychs, diptychs, triptychs, writing tablets, croziers, mirror backs, caskets and the products of the Florentine and Venetian Embriachi workshops are catalogued. Appendices include a small group of post- Byzantine and Russian ivories and the results of radiocarbon-dating of selected works. Each entry provides a comprehensive physical and scholarly discussion that incorporates much new research; also included are carvings of dubious authenticity, which are discussed as fully as the genuine pieces. Beautifully illustrated with new colour photography, Medieval Ivory Carvings 1200 - 1550 is the authoritative guide to the V&A's collection and an accessible survey of the subject.