In recent years the intersections between art history and archaeology have become the focus of critical analysis by both disciplines. Contemporary sculpture has played a key role in this dialogue. The essays in this volume, by art historians, archaeologists and artists, take the intersection between sculpture and archaeology as the prelude for analysis, examining the metaphorical and conceptual role of archaeology as subject matter for sculptors, and the significance of sculpture as a three-dimensional medium for exploring historical attitudes to archaeology.

The late Renaissance sculptor Leone Leoni (1509-1590) came from modest beginnings, but died as a nobleman and knight. His remarkable leap in status from his humble birth to a stonemason's family, to his time as a galley slave, to living as a nobleman and courtier in Milan provide a specific case study of an artist's struggle and triumph over existing social structures that marginalized the Renaissance artist. Based on a wealth of discoveries in archival documents, correspondence, and contemporary literature, the author examines the strategies Leoni employed to achieve his high social position, such as the friendships he formed, the type of education he sought out, the artistic imagery he employed, and the aristocratic trappings he donned. Leoni's multiple roles (imperial sculptor, aristocrat, man of erudition, and criminal), the visual manifestations of these roles in his house, collection, and tomb, the form and meaning of the artistic commissions he undertook, and the particular successes he enjoyed are here situated within the complex political, social and economic contexts of northern Italy and the Spanish court in the sixteenth century.

The first book to be dedicated to the topic, Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture reappraises the creative and intellectual roles of sculptor and patron. The volume surveys artistic production from the Trecento to the Cinquecento in Rome, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, and Venice. Using a broad range of approaches, the essayists question the traditional concept of authorship in Italian Renaissance sculpture, setting each work of art firmly into a complex socio-historical context. Emphasizing the role of the patron, the collection re-assesses the artistic production of such luminaries as Michelangelo, Donatello, and Giambologna, as well as lesser-known sculptors. Contributors shed new light on the collaborations that shaped Renaissance sculpture and its reception.

A reassessment of self-taught artist William Edmondson, exploring the enduring relevance of his work This richly illustrated volume reintroduces readers to American sculptor William Edmondson (1874–1951) more than 80 years after his historic solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Edmondson began carving at the onset of the Depression in Tennessee. Initially creating tombstones for his community, over time he expanded his practice to include biblical subjects, the natural world, and recognizable figures including nurses and preachers. This book features new essays that explore Edmondson’s life in the South and his reception on the East Coast in the 1930s. Reading the artist through lenses of African American experience, the authors draw parallels between then and now, highlighting the complex relationship between Black cultural production and the American museum. Countering existing narratives that have viewed Edmondson as a passive actor in an unfolding drama—a self-taught sculptor “discovered� by White patrons and institutions—this book considers how the artist’s identity and position within history influenced his life and work. Distributed for the Barnes Foundation  Exhibition Schedule: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (June 25–September 10, 2023)  

The Drosten stone - one of Scotland's premier monuments - came to light during restoration work at St Vigeans church, near Arbroath, in the 1870s. A rare example of Pictish writing, the Drosten stone is just one in an astounding collection of exquisitely preserved Pictish sculptures discovered in and around the church. The carvings on these stones revel in Pictish inventiveness, teeming with lively naturalistic animals and innovative compositions of monsters and people, as well as both Pictish symbols and everyday objects. The sculptures' iconography also draws on a deep knowledge of Christian and classical literature, witness to a highly literate and cosmopolitan society. This definitive study of St Vigeans' Pictish stones, generously illustrated with plates of the full collection, begins in the recent past, when the sculptures began to emerge as a remarkable historic entity. It then explores the history of the sculptures, including an analysis of the carvings, the geology of the stones and attempts to extract meaning and context for this unique stone collection as part of a powerful ecclesiastical landscape.

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

Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is far more than just the creator of the iconic fur teacup. In the course of her career she produced a complex, wide-ranging, and enigmatic body of work that has no parallel in modern art. Like an x-ray beam, this book scans Oppenheim’s artistic oeuvre, bringing its variety, playfulness, and poetry to the fore. Instead of simply answering the riddles posed by these intriguing works, it maps out the paths that will lead us to still more clues. Simon Baur is a leading expert in the life and art of Meret Oppenheim. The nine new essays featured in this volume are at once scholarly and easy to read. In them, Baur shares the many fascinating insights and interpretations that he has gleaned from his decades-long engagement with Oppenheim’s work. The result is an anthology that combines both biographical and thematic aspects and takes us on an exciting journey into the poetic cosmos of a truly great female artist.

Handbuilding with clay offers a unique opportunity to experiment, requiring few tools, and allowing intuition and imagination to come to the fore. In this overview of a fast-developing practice, artist Claire Loder explains time-honoured methods of handbuilding, as well as introducing the fascinating new approaches of contemporary ceramicists.

The basic techniques, from coiling and pinching to working with slabs, are explained with practical instructions and helpful accompanying images. Equipment, clay bodies and studio advice are thoroughly covered. Through the work of today's makers, the book then looks at new methods of building by hand, including mixed media work, sculptural methods, vessels and surface decoration, illuminating a wide variety of forms and styles.

Sculpting and Handbuilding is an essential guide for any ceramic artist or student wishing to learn the basics of handbuilding, or seeking inspiration to integrate and adapt conventional methods.

Challenging the hegemony of museums and yearning to communicate with a larger diverse audience, trailblazing conceptual artists and land artists found support in newly developed and expanded programs of the NEA and the GSA. This book foregrounds critical questions about public art, the policies that govern it, and the processes that realise it. What makes art public? What makes good public art? Why is there so much bad public art? How can the overall standard of public art be improved? What professional practices sponsor the best art for architecture and the environment? How can the artist selection process ensure that only superior artists are commissioned? Aesthetic judgments are implicit in museums exhibitions and acquisitions. Why should art in public places be held to a lesser standard? How can myriad interests of the community and individuals be harnessed to the higher goal of choosing the best artists for a project. It is a central contention of the book that despite the numerous constraints encountered in any commission, the most excellent public art expresses and even accentuates the personal, innovative vision of the artist. Approaches that compromise that vision, especially those that try to be all things to all people, inevitably diminish the dynamism and uniqueness of the final work. In the best public art, imagination, originality, passion, and even impulsiveness characterises the work of those artists who, while reaching out to a broader public, paradoxically search for new ideas often antithetical to the rules, materialistic culture, and social practices of the community. Many projects have demonstrated that art that seems different, difficult, and provocative can, in time, become familiar and comprehensible in a public setting and resonate more effectively than conventional solutions.

A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO SCULPTING THE HUMAN FIGURE IN CLAY
In "Sculpting the Figure in Clay, "acclaimed portrait bust sculptor and author Peter Rubino teaches a master class in the essentials of figurative sculpture. In this intensive, all-inclusive guide, he introduces students to a natural, straightforward geometry that will help them become masters at forming figures in clay. Rubino's unique approach utilizes a geometric system consisting of blocks, simple shapes, and guidelines that instruct students in a new and instinctive sculptural style. With these easy-to-follow instructions and informative concepts, students will see figures as the basic shapes beneath the form as well as learn vital approaches such as BLT: Bend, Lean, and Turn, to create evocative expression, and the Three Ps: Position, Proportion, and Planes, for accurate representation. This unparalleled resource is the definitive guide to figurative sculpture.
TOPICS INCLUDE:
- The Fundamentals of the Clay Torso
- Observing the Model
- Essential Materials and Tools
- Sculpting the Female Torso from the Live Model
- Sculpting the Reclining Figure from the Live Model
- Sculpting the Hand, Foot, and Lower Arm
- Plus Many Photographic Reference Poses for continued Study

An urgent and fractious debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? And who gets to decide which ones should stay up and which should come down? Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political and social issues involved in such battles brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She traces the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, starting with the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom atop the US Capitol and explores the surprising motivations behind such contemporary flashpoints as the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol. Written with great verve and thoroughly researched, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental question: Whose voices must be heard and whose pain must remain private?

The sculptor Louise Bourgeois is best known for her monumental abstract sculptures, one of the most striking of which is the installation "Spider" (1997). Too vast in scale to be viewed all at once, this elusive structure resists simple narration. It fits both no genre and all of them--architecture, sculpture, installation. Its contents and associations evoke social issues without being reducible to any one of them. Here, literary critic and theorist Mieke Bal presents the work as a theoretical object, one that can teach us how to think, speak, and write about art.
Known for her commentary on the issue of temporality in art, Bal argues that art must be understood in relationship to the present time of viewing as opposed to the less-immediate contexts of what has preceded the viewing, such as the historical past of influences and art movements, biography and interpretation. In ten short chapters, or "takes," Bal demonstrates that the closer the engagement with the work of art, the more adequate the result of the analysis. She also confronts issues of biography and autobiography--key themes in Bourgeois's work--and evaluates the consequences of "ahistorical" experiences for art criticism, drawing on diverse sources such as Bernini and Benjamin, Homer and Eisenstein.
This short, beautiful book offers both a theoretical model for analyzing art "out of context" and a meditation on a key work by one of the most engaging artists of our era.

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)

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.

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

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.

Winner of the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association The Benue River Valley is the source of some of the most abstract, dramatic, and inventive sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa. A vast region, the Valley extends from the heart of present-day Nigeria eastward to its border with Cameroon, and is home to a large number of ethnic and linguistic groups, all of whom have produced sculptures that are remarkable for their variety. This book brings together figurative wood sculptures and ceramic vessels, masks, and elaborate bronze and iron regalia drawn from public and private collections in Europe and the United States, selected to exemplify important typologies within the region, along with many historical photographs. The 18 contributors demonstrate that the stylistic tendencies were constantly evolving due to cultural exchanges, mutual influences, and other points of contact in an area that like the Benue River itself was historically in a state of flux. These objects speak to us not only through their superb formal qualities but also through the circumstances of their being rooted in a turbulent past, situated between war and colonization.

This book presents the first full length study in English of monumental bronzes in the Middle Ages. Taking as its point of departure the common medieval reception of bronze sculpture as living or animated, the study closely analyzes the practice of lost wax casting (cire perdue) in western Europe and explores the cultural responses to large scale bronzes in the Middle Ages. Starting with mining, smelting, and the production of alloys, and ending with automata, water clocks and fountains, the book uncovers networks of meaning around which bronze sculptures were produced and consumed. The book is a path-breaking contribution to the study of metalwork in the Middle Ages and to the re-evaluation of medieval art more broadly, presenting an understudied body of work to reconsider what the materials and techniques embodied in public monuments meant to the medieval spectator.