This creative guide to fashioning a hand-carved wooden nativity scene includes 15 patterns for every character present in the traditional Christmas story from the holy family and the three kings to shepherds and barnyard animals. An overview of tools, sharpening techniques, wood selection, and basic carving cuts is provided. The figurines of Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus are included with step-by-step instructions from the first to the final cut.

South African beadwork has a rich and diverse history and is abundantly represented in the beaded art pieces in the Wits Art Museum (WAM) collection. Some works date back to the 4th century CE but most date from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Currently numbering over 9 000 items, the three major collecting areas of classical, historical and contemporary African artworks are broad in their geographical range and deep in some local areas of specialisation. Paying homage to this collection, Beadwork, art and the body is a compilation of essays by scholars who have researched and written about the traditions, practices and aesthetic forms of beadwork in southern Africa. The book covers an expansive history of beadwork in South Africa from the 19th century to the contemporary moment. The artists and the beadwork featured range from Sotho-, Tsonga-, Xhosa- and Zulu-speakers, ending with a focus on fashion designer Laduma Ngxokolo, whose work has been inspired by Xhosa beadwork. Questions of ethnic affiliation and beadwork patterns are explored in relation to the different aesthetic forms of beadwork and its use as a marker of identity and status within and beyond communities.

The native American face has long fascinated artists in every medium. Its strong features and deep character present a challenge and an opportunity for visual expression. In this new book, Terry Kramer offers the wood carver a method for creating realistic native American faces in wood. From layout to finish, Terry takes the carver step-by-step through the process. Each step is illustrated in full color and clearly described. A gallery of several carved faces gives the reader an idea of the variations that are possible, as well as guidelines for future carving projects.

A catalogue of 108 portrait bronzes of great masters of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions. It presents a history of these teaching lineages. The sculptures span the most productive period in the history of Tibetan Buddhist art, illustrating Tibetan portraiture's long and varied history. This is a catalogue of 108 portrait bronzes of great masters of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, it presents a history of these teaching lineages based on and illustrated by the collection. Ranging in date from the 12th to 18th century, the sculptures span the most productive period in the

A study of two exhibitions that took place five years apart in the same building in Brussels city-centre Full House explores two exhibitions that took place five years apart in the same building in Brussels and featured over 300 contemporary art works from the renowned collection of Frederic de Goldschmidt. The first show, Not Really Really, was organized in 2016 in a building that had only been vacated a few months before by a mental health clinic. The works were mostly sculptures made with everyday objects and played with the ambiguity of what the last occupants could have left and what the artists purposefully created. The building then underwent a long renovation, with photos included illustrating this process. The second show, Inaspettatamente (Unexpectedly), then engaged with themes such as order and disorder, time, classification, the artist's process or his/her position in world conflicts using the prism of the famous Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti. Curatorial texts and images of the works both in context and in studio allow the reader to discover and appreciate both exhibitions. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Cloud Seven , Quai du commerce 7 (November 11, 2021-January 30, 2022)

You will be amazed by what you can create with polymer and air-dry clay. These affordable, easy-to-find clays present endless possibilities for artisan-quality home decor and gifts. Francesca Stone, creator of the decor blog Fall For DIY, presents simple step-by-step techniques for shaping and decorating clay with just a few household tools. All final pieces can be air-dried or baked in a standard home oven. Featuring a gorgeous, modern palette of natural colours, these projects are deceptively easy and effortlessly chic. Personalize your home with practical and beautiful items like the Terra-Cotta Jewellery Dish, Hanging Herb Garden Planter and Salt-and-Pepper Pinch Pot. Get creative with colour and geometric shapes in home accents such as the Colour-Block Photo Holder and Abstract Floral Block Platter. This book is the perfect primer to start making beautiful clay pieces at home and get that handmade ceramic look without the expenses and challenges of traditional pottery.

"In 1957, Don Featherstone sculptured the first three-dimensional pink plastic flamingo, thereby making affordable bad taste accessible to the American public"--from Pink Flamingos. This is the tale of a wonderful bird, named by his creator phoenicopteris ruber plasticus; a new avian species, now known to all as "Pink Plastic Flamingo." The more than one hundred pictures and the text in this volume are the result of Featherstone's request that adoring owners of the pink birds send original photographs that demonstrate their affection for phoenicopteris on its 40th birthday in 1997. An overwhelming response included such masterpieces as: "Biker Birds," "What a Pear," "The Wedding Party," "Anyone for Bridge," "Purple Passion," "Beachcombers," and the sweetly romantic "Flamingo Honeymoon." If you're a believer, or even an skeptic, take a look, see for yourself. This book is one of a kind, the documentation of American genius, homage to an icon, or, perhaps, a rare opportunity to observe a culturally tolerated symbol of taste gone awry. It's great fun!

This volume is a continuation of the first instalment of the editorial project Canova | In Four Tempos, ISBN 9788874399215, born in co-edition with the Pallavicino Foundation in Genoa with the goal of collecting in a refined publication the photographic research of Luigi Spina focused on the plaster models by Antonio Canova almost entirely preserved at the plaster cast gallery in Possagno. This project accompanying the four-year Canovian celebrations (2019-2022) is structured in four publications, each focused on a specific nucleus of plaster models. Its aim is to give new dignity to Antonio Canova's creative process while highlighting the fundamental role of the bronze nails (reperes) that made the metamorphoses from plaster model to marble sculpture possible. The first volume is devoted to the dialogue of Myth and Faith, illustrated by Spina with photographs of Cupid and Psyche, Paolina Borghese Bonaparte, Venus and Mars, the Lying Magdalen, Peace, and the Lamentation of Christ, while this, the second volume, revolves mainly around Myth. The sculptures on which the visual narrative focuses are: Dancer with Finger on Chin, Dedalus and Icarus, Theseus Defeats the Centaur, Naiad, Pius VII Praying, Venus and Adonis, and Sleeping Nymph.

This detailed and fascinating text explores the twentieth century ceramic arts of R. Guy Cowan. Amply illustrated with over 1120 images in color and black and white, the book includes glaze and shape guides which assist the reader in identifying Cowan's pottery. Invaluable details are provided about Cowan's pottery and ceramic sculptural art, his professional history as a potter and a teacher, the various artists who worked closely with him and their pottery, the history of Cowan's potting firm, and his influence on the ceramic arts and upon Cleveland's artistic heritage. Additional information includes a study of Cowan's pottery marks and their dating, a 1929 price list of Cowan's pottery, museum holdings of interest to Cowan collectors, and a general price guide to Cowan pottery. An extensive bibliography and an index of proper names make the book invaluable for collectors and historians alike.

Makin's Clay is simple and convenient and is easily adhered to other materials as it is an air-dry clay. The applications are endless and the finished product is stunning.

How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was-shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance. Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by Black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film-and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors. Beautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary Black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.

This book restores the fountains of Roman Byzantium, Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Istanbul, reviving the sounds, shapes, smells and sights of past water cultures. Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, is surrounded on three sides by sea, and has no major river to deliver clean, potable water. However, the cultures that thrived in this remarkable waterscape through millennia have developed and sustained diverse water cultures and a water delivery system that has supported countless fountains, some of which survive today. Scholars address the delivery system that conveyed and stored water, and the fountains, large and small, from which it gushed. Papers consider spring water, rainwater and seawater; water suitable for drinking, bathing and baptism; and fountains real, imagined and symbolic. Experts in the history of art and culture, archaeology and theology, and poetry and prose, offer reflections on water and fountains across two millennia in one location.

This inspiring book provides a wealth of fascinating projects for woodturners. It will extend their skills and give them a chance to try more unusual, challenging pieces. The book reflects the author's fascination with complex geometrical shapes, puzzles and mathematical curiosities. It gives woodturners the chance to try their hand at making twisted polygons, gravity-defying clocks and much more. A wealth of close-up photographs guide the reader through each project and a gallery section provides further inspiration, showing how a range of artists have decorated the author's work. David Springett's interest in woodturning began when he was a woodwork teacher - by reading each of the few books available, experimenting and persevering, he improved his skills. Since leaving teaching nearly 20 years ago, he has earned his living doing what he enjoys most. David and his wife Christine live in Rugby, Warwickshire.

Here Barbara Freitag examines all the literature on the subject since their discovery 160 years ago, highlighting the inconsistencies of the various interpretations in regard to origin, function and name. By considering the Sheela-na-gigs in their medieval social context, she suggests that they were folk deities with particular responsibility for assistance in childbirth.

This fascinating survey sheds new light on a controversial phenomenon, and also contains a complete catalogue of all known Sheela-na-gigs, including hitherto unrecorded or unpublished figures.

Krzysztof Wodiczko's artistic projects stage a dynamic and vivid encounter between aesthetics, ethics and technology. For almost 40 years, the artist's powerful and extensive body of work has deployed contemporary technologies to engage with the problematics of alterity, social responsibility and urban experience. Believing that 'public art' should perform an ethical interruption of existing social processes and their ideological underpinnings, Wodiczko's critical interventions in the urban environment have addressed issues of urban violence, homelessness, alienation and wartime trauma. Since the 1980s, he has produced large-scale slide and video projections, transforming the facades of official buildings and historical monuments into temporary spaces for critical reflection and public protest. The Public Projections series include: The Grand Army Plaza Memorial Arch, Brooklyn, NY (1983), The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (1988), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989), Bunker Hill Monument, Boston (1998), A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima (1999) and El Centro Cultural, Tijuana, Mexico (2001). By nature, Wodiczko's work is often controversial and the book looks at his development of a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless and immigrant operators that function as implements for survival, communication, empowerment, and healing. The Homeless Vehicle project in New York City, equips nomadic 'evicts' with tools for self-articulation, whilst the elaborate Xenology instruments are designed to empower the 'immigrant' by providing access to speech and figuration in the public realm. Like much of his work, his interrogative designs and portable instruments are animated by a desire to bring the socially opaque into the public sphere of appearances, to restore voice and visibility to those rendered mute within the parameters of the public domain. Krzysztof Wodiczko is the first full-scale study of the artist's work, its ethico-political imperatives, and the diverse interpretive lenses which accompany its theorization. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, and bringing together an array of essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, the book represents the most significant and sustained engagement with the artist's practice to date.

Carve lifelike animal-handled canes and walking sticks with power tools. Over 180 clear color photos and concise, informative text take the reader through all the tools, techniques, and individual steps, from carving the blank and setting the eyes to texturing the fur and painting the finished handle. Patterns are provided for fifteen projects to make handles that depict an elephant, bear, sheep, bison, chimpanzee, horse, dog, groundhog, cobra, lion, rabbit, squirrel, tiger, and walrus. Instructions are given for procuring, sizing, and fastening shafts. This book will challenge and delight the novice and inspire a seasoned wood carver.

Little is known about Walter Leblanc (1932-1986), one of the key representatives of kinetic and optical art in the mid-20th century. This comprehensive monograph, the first on this artist for an international audience, includes unpublished materials, which provide insight not only into the art of LeBlanc, but also into the ZERO artist movement to which he was connected and with which he was in close dialogue beginning in the 1950s. Walter Leblanc is based on extensive studies of the artist's work: with about 150 images of his paintings and sculptures, comparative works, historical photos and documents, it includes a selection of Leblanc's writings, an iconographic mapping of selected works in museums around the world, and a bio-bibliographical appendix. Demonstrating the wealth of his creative output, the book reaffirms the enduring role Leblanc played in the development of modern and contemporary art on a global scale. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Despite the profusion of knightly effigies created between c. 1240 and c. 1330 for tombs throughout the British Isles, these commemorative figures are relatively unknown to art historians and medievalists. Until now, their rich visual impact and significance has been relatively unexplored by scholars. In this study, Rachel Dressler examines this category of sculpture, illustrating how English military figures employ a visual language of pose, costume, and attributes to construct a masculine ideal that privileges fighting prowess, elite status, and sexual virility. Like military figures on the Continent, English effigies represent knights wearing chain mail and surcoats, and bearing shields and swords; unique to the British examples, however, is the display of an aggressive sword handling pose and dynamically crossed legs. Outwardly hyper masculine, the carved figures partake in artistic subterfuge: the lives of those memorialized did not always match proffered images, testifying to the changing function of the knight in England during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This study traces the development of English military figures, and analyzes in detail three fourteenth-century examples-those commemorating Robert I De Vere in Hatfield Broad Oak (Essex), Richard Gyvernay at Limington (Somerset), and Henry Allard in Winchelsea (Sussex). Similar in appearance, these three sculptures represent persons of distinctly different social levels: De Vere belonged to the highest aristocratic rank, where Gyvernay was a lesser county knight, and Allard was from a merchant family, raising questions about his knightly standing. Ultimately, Dressler's analysis of English knight effigies demonstrates that the masculine warrior during the late Middle Ages was frequently a constructed ideal rather than a lived experience.

Bestselling true-crime master Harold Schechter explores the real-life headline-making psychos, serial murderers, thrill-hungry couples, and lady-killers who inspired a century of classic films. The necktie murders in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy; Chicago’s Jazz Age crime of passion; the fatal hookup in Looking for Mr. Goodbar; the high school horrors committed by the costumed slasher in Scream. These and other cinematic crimes have become part of pop-culture history. And each found inspiration in true events that provided the raw material for our greatest blockbusters, indie art films, black comedies, Hollywood classics, and grindhouse horrors. So what’s the reality behind Psycho, Badlands, The Hills Have Eyes, A Place in the Sun, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Dirty Harry? How did such tabloid-ready killers as Bonnie and Clyde, body snatchers Burke and Hare, Texas sniper Charles Whitman Jr., nurse-slayer Richard Speck, and Leopold and Loeb exert their power on the public imagination and become the stuff of movie lore? In this collection of revelatory essays, true-crime historian Harold Schechter takes a fascinating trip down the crossroads of fact and fiction to reveal the sensational real-life stories that are more shocking, taboo, and fantastic than even the most imaginative screenwriter can dream up.

Master the old-fashioned craft of whittling with this easy-to-learn beginner's guide. Even if you've never carved a piece of wood before, Old Time Whittling will show you how to create iconic whittling classics like the wooden chain, ball-in-a-cage, arrow-through-the-heart and more. Woodcarving instructor and author Keith Randich takes you step-by-step through 10 projects, with concise instructions and more than 50 photographs and diagrams.

For the internationally renowned artist and wood turner Ernst Gamperl, the dialogue with the exceptionally vital material of wood is a source of creative inspiration. He works it with a technique bordering on magic and embraces its natural drying-out process in the design of his pieces, giving rise to impressive, powerful forms. Ernst Gamperl's most extensive work in wood to date was created from a 230-year-old oak tree uprooted by a hurricane. In an ongoing process lasting 10 years - the Lebensbaum (Tree of Life) project - he transformed this mighty tree into a unique ensemble of 97 differently formed vessels and objects, one of which was awarded the famous LOEWE Craft Prize in 2017. The publication is an impressive documentation of the artisanal-artistic work process as well as the Lebensbaum project in its entirety. Text in English and German.