For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict - sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families - enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments. In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, Prescott begins her survey by focusing on the earliest pioneer statues, which celebrated the strong white men who settled - and conquered - the West. By the 1930s, she explains, when gender roles began shifting, new monuments came forth to honor the Pioneer Mother. The angelic woman in a sunbonnet, armed with a rifle or a Bible as she carried civilization forward - an iconic figure - resonated particularly with Mormon audiences. While interest in these traditional monuments began to wane in the postwar period, according to Prescott, a new wave of pioneer monuments emerged in smaller communities during the late twentieth century. Inspired by rural nostalgia, these statues helped promote heritage tourism. In recent years, Americans have engaged in heated debates about Confederate Civil War monuments and their implicit racism. Should these statues be removed or reinterpreted? Far less attention, however, has been paid to pioneer monuments, which, Prescott argues, also enshrine white cultural superiority - as well as gender stereotypes. Only a few western communities have reexamined these values and erected statues with more inclusive imagery. Blending western history, visual culture, and memory studies, Prescott's pathbreaking analysis is enhanced by a rich selection of color and black-and-white photographs depicting the statues along with detailed maps that chronologically chart the emergence of pioneer monuments.

Born in Gyffin, near Conway, Wales, John Gibson (1790-1866) moved with his family to Liverpool, where he trained as a cabinet-maker and mason. The historian and banker William Roscoe whetted Gibson's appetite for classical statuary, and provided him with a scholarship and funds to visit Rome. Gibson arrived in the city in 1817 and entered the workshop of Europe's pre-eminent sculptor: Antonio Canova. Soon acclaimed in his own right, Gibson remained in the city until his death in 1866. Contact with artists and patrons on the Grand Tour ensured lasting links with Britain, and this publication highlights Gibson's sculptures in such collections as the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, Parliament and the Royal Collection. Gibson bequeathed to the Royal Academy drawings, plasters and sculptures, as well as correspondences, accounts and notebooks; some reproduced here for the first time.

Claudette Schreuders, who lives and works in South Africa, is known for her distinctive carved and painted wooden sculptures which, as Okwui Enwezor has observed, 'propose a new language resulting from a synthesis of African and European figural forms'. This major monograph brings together Schreuders' works of the last 17 years, tracing her investigations into self-identity, isolation and belonging through the rich narratives of her various groups of figures. The title includes beautiful reproductions of more than 70 sculptures alongside prints, drawings and pages from the artist's sketchbooks that provide insight into her references and working process. In accompanying essays, Rory Bester examines the interplay of autobiography and fiction in Schreuders' oeuvre, Faye Hirsch finds the presence of the sacred amidst the domesticity of her sculptures and prints, and Antjie Krog addresses the powerful emotions that resonate beneath the still surface of Schreuders' latest series of works.

A selection of Michael Craig-Martin's paintings, prints and sculptures, with an interview. This book is the result of a collaboration between The Gallery at Windsor, Florida, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Born in Ireland, the artist Michael Craig-Martin studied in America. On returning to the UK, he became a key figure in British conceptual art and an influential educator, linked in particular to the YBAs including Damien Hirst and Gary Hume. Craig-Martin's works transform recognisable objects - such as sneakers, headphones, watches and, most recently, Modernist buildings - with bold colour and simplified lines. He cites his 'rationalism' as the root of his practice. Craig-Martin is the latest subject of a three-year curatorial partnership between The Gallery at Windsor, Florida, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, initiated to celebrate the Academy's 250th anniversary. This lively book reproduces a selection of his paintings, prints and sculptures, with an insightful essay by the art critic Ben Luke and an interview between Tim Marlow and the artist. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Gallery at Windsor, Florida, 26 January - 26 April 2019. Ben Luke is the art critic at the London Evening Standard. Tim Marlow is artistic director at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Below images, left to right: Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA, Untitled (watch fragment yellow), 2017. Acrylic on aluminium, 90 x 90 cm. Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA, Double Take (iPhone), 2017. Acrylic on aluminium in two panels, 2018, 90 x 180 cm. Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA, Untitled (trainer fragment), 2017. Acrylic on aluminium, 60 x 60 cm. Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA, Untitled (lightbulb blue), 2017. Acrylic on aluminium, 90 x 90 cm. All images courtesy Gagosian. Photos Mike Bruce.

Kulango Figurines is designed to introduce various miniature works created by the Kulango in northeastern Cote d'Ivoire, who were formerly vassals of the two kingdoms that inhabited the country (Bouna and Gyaman). Their extraordinarily varied art, which can be both intriguing and disconcerting, is relatively unknown. Their metal sculptures in particular display a strikingly free expressiveness, breaking as they do with the iconographic codes that govern their works in wood. Doing away with immobile remoteness, bodies seem to reinvent movement, sometimes adopting almost choreographic gestures, an airy grace, sinuous lines. Or, in trembling tension, some display unexpected twists and provocative curves, while others stretch out impossibly or offer a chance for virtuoso foreshortening and stylised bodies. Still others are even stranger, like Siamese twins, inseparable triplets, headless figures or figures with one head on two torsos, with one leg or four, webbed feet, outsize arms and hooped bodies. Who are these enigmatic beings whose bulging eyes peer at the invisible? Is the sculpture confined to just these specimens? The range of styles is simply astonishing, the forms beyond imagination. The collection includes over 100 figurines, none of which is over 10cm tall: pendants, amulets, fortune tellers' statuettes or weights for gold. Introduced into our world through the metamorphosis of photography, transfigured by lighting and framing effects, these resurrected works have been revitalised, like apparitions from another world. Text in English and French.

Ann Christopher RA is a non-figurative sculptor who works primarily in cast bronze, stainless steel, silver and fabricated Corten steel; her output comprises both large and small sculptures and site-specific commissions. Christopher's elegant and understated works reveal connections with a vast spectrum of sources from across the globe, such as rock formations in Israel, fossils from the Cretaceous chalks of Hertfordshire, prehistoric standing stones in Avebury and early Aegean figurines. The marks Christopher makes on her works are suggestive both of natural processes, such as weathering, and the forms and tools of mechanised industry. Christopher has been exhibiting sculpture for over 45 years. During that period she has won many awards and prizes, including the Silver Medal for Sculpture of Outstanding Merit by the Royal Society of British Sculptors and the Otto Beit Medal of Sculpture of Outstanding Merit. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and was elected a Royal Academician in 1989. She lives and works near Bath.

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 as beholders 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.

The sculptures of Conrad Shawcross ra explore subjects that lie on the borders of geometry and philosophy, physics and metaphysics. For the 2015 Summer Exhibitions Annenberg Courtyard installation Shawcross created a large-scale, immersive work consisting of five cloud-like forms in steel. Made from thousands of tetrahedrons these stand at over six metres high and weigh five tonnes each. Shawcross explains: The Greeks considered the tetrahedron to represent the very essence of matter. In this huge work I have taken this form as my brick, growing these chaotic, diverging forms that will float above the heads of visitors. As well as photography of the works in situ, the publication contains working drawings, structural diagrams and a text by the architecture writer Patrick Sykes.

By taking simple ways of looking at sculpture, this book uncovers unexpected affinities between works of very different periods and types. From sundials to mirrors, from graves to way-markers, from fountains to contemporary art, a wide range of illustrated examples expands the definitions of sculpture and proposes that we understand this art as something more fundamental to the way we experience and construct our rites of passage. Penelope Curtis argues that there are some basic functions shared by many kinds of three-dimensional objects, be they more or less obviously sculptural. Even contemporary sculpture, with no apparent purpose, makes use of this deeply embedded vocabulary. Together, the qualities of vertical, horizontal, closed and open are consolidated in the ensemble, which places the viewer at its heart, on the threshold of sculpture and on the threshold of change. This book elides the usual notions of figurative and abstract to think instead about how sculpture works.

Known for his ephemeral, interconnected installations and monumental sculpture, Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas (b. 1980) transformed The Met Roof into an immersive banquet scene for the 2017 Roof Garden Commission. This book retraces the artist's process by illustrating his conversations and discoveries at The Met, which informed an installation that negotiates the museum as both a social space and a space for the display of art. Villar Rojas merges these institutional functions by framing art within the context of a party where viewers and artworks can directly interact. The publication, an integral part of Villar Rojas's installation, covers themes as diverse as museology, history, and the activation of art-offering a meditation on how museums as artifacts represent and historicize art.

This calendar is a stunning display of 12 drawings and sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, one of the most important artists of the 20th century. The works are taken from the collections of The Hepworth Wakefield, an award-winning art gallery in the heart of Yorkshire, who offer an impressive compendium of modern British art. Informative text accompanies each work and the datepad features previous and next month's views.

Camiel Van Breedam ( DegreesBoom 29/06/1936) made his first artworks in 1956: reliefs and small zinc sculptures. Later followed by assemblages, collages, objects, sculptures, environments - exhibited in many places in Belgium and abroad. Influences and inspiration come among others from: his father's plumber workshop, the region of the river Rupel and the brickyards, Paul Klee, ethnic art, Indians, Joseph Cornell, the Russian avant-garde, Chaim Soutine, Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus, De Stijl, dreams, nightmares and RED. His social involvement provides the red thread and the binding element.

Can we reconstruct Roman body language? Was it the same as ours? Does body language express and reinforce gender differences and the relative positions of men and women (dominant/subordinate) in society? Can analysis of the postures and gestures of Roman statues add to our understanding of gender in the Roman world? In this book, Glenys Davies explores these questions. Using studies on body language in modern Western societies, Roman literary sources, as well as her own analysis of statues of Roman men and women in an array of guises - nude, draped, standing, seated and represented together - she offers a nuanced and complex picture of gender relations. Her study shows that gender relations in the notoriously patriarchal society of Ancient Rome were not so different from what we experience today. Her book will be of interest to scholars of the classical world, gender history, art history, and body language in its social context.

In this collection of works by more than 25 contemporary ice artists, discover a fascinating art medium defined by its ephemeral nature. Merging creativity and engineering, today's ice artist can create incredibly complex artwork, featured here in more than 150 photos. Ice sculpting's history and impact are described by champion sculptor James Stugart, including events such as the ice festival in Harbin, China. Sculpting firm owner Justin Gordon explains the tools and techniques, and Dick Brickley, former chair of the BP World Ice Arts Championships held in Fairbanks, Alaska, relates the history of this largest international competition. As sculptor Ben Firth says, "Carving ice is a good reminder that no art lasts forever; that, in the end, art is not about creating a permanent object, but about changing people."

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.

First book to place the art of British sculptor Lynn Chadwick in its international context. Examines in particular the reception and promotion of Chadwick's sculpture in the United States. Richly illustrated. This is the first book to set the work of British sculptor Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) in its international context. Chadwick, a leading figure in modern British art and celebrated for his innovative steel and bronze sculptures of abstracted, expressive figures and animals, always felt that his work was better understood abroad than in his native country. In this richly illustrated monograph, distinguished British scholar and writer Michael Bird, and eminent American art historian and curator Marin R. Sullivan chart the different phases of Chadwick's long career. They vividly locate his art within the wider narrative of European and American post-war sculpture. They examine in particular the reception and promotion of Chadwick's sculpture in the United States, and how a collection of some 140 of his works at the Berman Museum in rural Pennsylvania came to be.

Here is a fresh look at Auguste Rodin, one of the greatest sculptors of all time, thanks not only to his ability to capture the emotional and psychological complexity of human beings, but also his having profoundly renewed the very language of sculpture. Rodin's unprecedented passion for the act of creation, rather than completion, changed the way the world thinks about sculpture. The ongoing interplay of accidents and chance in his work, his figures fragmented only to be reconstituted through his ingenious 'cobbling together', enabled him to interpolate his work in an endless flow of creation. The topic of metamorphosis is directly related to his work, without model or witness, in the privacy of his studio. Fragile plasters as well as bronzes, marble figures, drawings, watercolours, and photographs all attest to this creative ferment. But 'studio' must also be understood as the small art community that worked for and around the Master. It consisted of practitioners of specific trades to whom we owe the transformation of one material to another, one dimension to another, under his attentive guidance. This catalogue sheds light on the various processes of reprise and transformation, and takes stock of the sculptor's prodigious creativity.

Michelangelo's (1475-1564) "Taddei Tondo," in the collection of the Royal Academy in London, offers a fascinating insight into the master's technical and experimental skill. Joshua Reynolds, the Academy's first president, considered that Michelangelo represented everything that an artist should aspire to, combining technical brilliance with sublime poetical imagination, and the Tondo shows this in scintillating relief. Expertly researched and written by the renowned Renaissance art historian Alison Cole, this book moves through the life of the "Tondo," from Michelangelo's rivalry with Leonardo to the marble's arrival at the Royal Academy and its use in the RA Schools. Finishing with a fresh look at the Tondo's role in revealing Michelangelo's technical experimentalism, Cole explores the importance of finish and what constitutes a finished work of art. Lavishly illustrated and including new photos of the Tondo, this is an enriching exploration of a lesser-known side of the great Renaissance master's work.

Innovative and pioneering, French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) created an extensive and complex body of work over her five decade long career. Her work received international recognition as early as 1961 when her work was included in the important exhibition 'The Art and Assemblage' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since then Saint Phalle has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide. Her bright and joyful Nana sculptures have become known as her signature artwork. The artist and her oeuvre however, cannot be solely understood through this one body of work. This catalogue, accompanying the artist's first comprehensive retrospective in Belgium at Beaux-Arts Mons (BAM), explores Saint Phalle's multi-faceted practice, examining how the artist worked across a wide-range of media - painting, assemblage, sculpture, performance, public sculpture and architectural projects, film and theatre. Providing an overview of Saint Phalle's entire career, it seeks to demonstrate how the artist used her boundless imagination and unique vision of the world to transcend the space typically reserved for women to become one of the twentieth century's most important artists. The title - "Here Everything is Possible" - is a statement made by Saint Phalle about her monumental sculpture park: The Tarot Garden in Tuscany, Italy. It should however, be read as a testimony to the artist's attitude to her entire artistic process - one of limitless possibility. This extensive, fully illustrated, catalogue includes new scholarly texts by Catherine Francblin, Alison Gingeras, Denis Laoureux, Camille Morineau, Kyla McDonald and Xavier Roland. The essays are accompanied by interviews with Daniel Abadie and Marcelo Zitelli, who both worked closely with the artist during her lifetime, and an illustrated biography.

Ardmore ceramics are found in major collections in several European countries, the United States and South Africa and have been given as state gifts to, among others, Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Queen Elizabeth II and Empress Michiko of JapanGiraffe stretch out their necks and bat-eared foxes curl their tails to make handles for jugs, vases and tureens. Inquisitive monkeys peer over the edge of a planter, teasing the leopards below them. Magical creatures wear cloaks of flowers, spots and stripes; a turbanned Zulu figure sits astride a hippo Colorful, imaginative, vibrant, delicate and dramatic these are just some of the hallmarks of the artworks that have garnered international accolades for Ardmore Ceramic Art in rural KwaZulu-Natal. It is here, in South Africa s most successful ceramics studio set in the verdant Midlands, that exquisitely handcrafted and highly detailed figurative works and functional ware are created by more than fifty artists who draw on Zulu traditions and folklore, history, the natural world, and their own lives for inspiration.In turn, it is the lives of the sculptors and painters of Ardmore that fire the vision of the woman behind it all: Fee Halsted is an artist whose love of teaching and determination to fight poverty and AIDS have set others on the path of creative self-discovery and ultimately worldwide acclaim."Ardmore We Are Because of Others" tells the extraordinary story of this famous studio from its humble beginnings in a poverty-stricken corner of South Africa to its fame as a producer of exceptional and irresistible objets d art prized by collectors, galleries and museums throughout the world. It is also the story of the indomitable Fee Halsted who is the driving force behind the enterprise, and the artists whose inventive spirit and fearless creativity are at the heart of Ardmore."

The definitive account of the modern art made in St Ives between the 1930s and the 1960s, telling the story of this extraordinary artistic community and its legacy. For twenty-five years the small town of St Ives was one of the leading places in the world for the production of avant-garde art. The community there spanned three generations and included such international figures as Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, as well as a number of the foremost artists in post-war Britain, including Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Roger Hilton. They found themselves contributing to the international search for art in the post-war world and they established a modernist practice that continues to influence today. The story of St Ives and artists who lived and worked there has captured the imagination of art lovers since it began. This book is the product of decades of research by leading authority Chris Stephens, and will illuminate the period for dedicated fans and new readers alike.

Classic Beauties allows readers to follow in the footsteps of the 'Grand Tourists' and to trace the life stories of the leading Neoclassical artists. Together with the multitude of illustrations, the texts convey a vivid impression of an extraordinary era.