This volume is an anthology of current groundbreaking research on social practice art. Contributing scholars provide a variety of assessments of recent projects as well as earlier precedents, define approaches to art production, and provide crucial political context. The topics and art projects covered, many of which the authors have experienced firsthand, represent the work of innovative artists whose creative practice is utilized to engage audience members as active participants in effecting social and political change. Chapters are divided into four parts that cover history, specific examples, global perspectives, and critical analysis.

The essential five-volume resource on the painting and sculpture of one of the world's foremost contemporary artists For more than 60 years, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has remained a singular figure in contemporary art. His most widely influential work-depictions of everyday objects and signs such as flags, targets, flashlights, and lightbulbs-helped change the face of the art world in the 1950s by introducing subject matter that stood in contrast to the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism. In subsequent decades, Johns's art has increasingly engaged issues of memory and mortality, often incorporating references to admired artistic predecessors. This definitive 5-volume catalogue raisonne documents the entire body of painting and sculpture made by Johns from 1954 through 2014, encompassing 355 paintings and 86 sculptures. Each work is illustrated with a full-page reproduction, nearly all of which were commissioned expressly for this publication. A decade of research underpins the project, with thorough documentation of each object and an overarching monograph that represents the most comprehensive study of the artist's work to date. All facets of the catalogue reflect the input of the artist, who worked closely with the author at all stages.

Volumes that are massive yet lightweight, the sculptures of British artist Anthony Cragg firmly take hold of the space without seeming static. They are dynamic objects that bear trace of the process that created them: starting from in many cases figurative drawings to encountering the artist s chosen material, guided by inner force. Cragg s sculptures reveal the infinite possibilities of form. They seem to obey the laws of nature that govern living organisms, evolving from one another and growing upon themselves. This new book features new work by Anthony Cragg shown in a recent exhibition at Museo Nivola in Orani, Sardinia. Illustrated in color throughout, it offers also an essay exploring Cragg s art by British scholar and curator Mark Gisbourne. Text in English and Italian.

Ann Morris has become a priestess of sorts, investing her mind and spirit into an ambitious oeuvre of figurative bronzes that speak with a singular and meditative voice. In a comprehensive and insightful essay, Ted Lindberg traces the arc of Morris's artistic development from her beginnings as a mother, philosophy student, and Pasadena printmaker, to her reclusion on the wind-swept bluffs of Lummi Island in north Puget Sound. There Morris has created an extraordinary bronze park that she calls Sculpture Woods, a 15-acre sanctuary of stately forest and highbank waterfront that is home to her studio and to a winding path populated by 16 sculptural tableaus seen through a Jungian lens. Monumental figures emerge from the forest, as if stepping through a rift in time from the mists of classical and Celtic antiquities, to tell their archetypal tales. In a second essay, Jake Seniuk muses on how Morris moved from such overtly mythological themes to a kind of talismanic naturalism when she turned to an ongoing series of more intimately scaled bronzes that trace an ongoing Bone Journey. Unfolding her own creation myth through her work, Morris remains true to the marriage of the Platonic and the aboriginal, where a clear-eyed awareness of mortality is liberating and transcendent.

"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface; it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."--Johann Gottfried Herder
Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's "Plastik" (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought with a wide range of sources--from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible--to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture.
Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, "Sculpture" is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory.
Jason Gaiger's translation of "Sculpture" includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text.

Frank Bowling (b.1934, Bartica, Guyana) is attracting ever-growing international recognition as an abstract painter. This is the first publication to examine Bowling's art and ideas in relation to sculpture. Lavishly illustrated, it features an extended essay by curator Sam Cornish charting Bowling's interactions with sculpture since the 1960s. The book asks how seeing Bowling's sculpture, and thinking about sculpture more broadly, may extend our understanding of his pictorial language. Considering this relationship also highlights the importance of sculpture to High Modernism, from within which Bowling's mature art emerged. Also included are an in-conversation between Allie Biswas and sculptor Thomas J. Price, and a poem dedicated to Bowling by sculptor and author Barbara Chase-Riboud.

This generously illustrated book provides a complete overview of current knowledge about the sculptures of the Parthenon and suggests new interpretations of the ancient temple's sculptural creations. Margaretha Lagerlof steps back from viewing the fragments of the sculptures that remain today to focus more clearly on their meanings in the light of classical Athenian knowledge and society. She considers what the sculptures reveal about the Greek sense of democracy and how they characterize women's lives in a warrior culture. Using Plato's philosophy and the visually oriented similes of his myths, Lagerlof offers a new decoding of the aesthetic structure of the Parthenon's entire sculptural ensembles.

The book compares the sculptures of the pediments to those of the metopes and the frieze, uncovering subtle differences in both the nature and the content of the images. Whereas the pediments represent divine elements, for example, the frieze is seen as the domain of human beings, representing events and also the stage of history when humans no longer have direct access to the presence of the gods. The frieze can be interpreted as an invocation of this presence, a means of regaining closeness with the gods. Using a multifaceted and imaginative approach to the sculptures of the Parthenon, Lagerlof finds powerful new meaning in them as well as an enhanced appreciation of their Athenian creators.

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) was, with Calder, Noguchi and David Smith, one of the great American sculptors of the 20th century. She created extraordinary work, from room-size installations composed of boxes to gnarled and majestic steel structures. Her life story is no less interesting. She was born in czarist Russia, but her family emigrated to the States and she grew up in Maine. Nevelson endured a repressive marriage to a New York millionaire, whom she escaped to pursue the life of an artist. She gained recognition as an abstract sculptor at the age of 59, and spent the next 30 years taking the art world by storm, becoming a colourful New York personality and minor celebrity. Laurie Wilson, who knew Nevelson personally, draws extensively on her own research in this crisp new biography. She conducted interviews not just with Nevelson but with her siblings, son, and gallery owner Arne Glimcher. Wilson has also had complete access to Glimcher's archives, Nevelson's personal assistant, Diana Mackown, and Lippincott studios, where much of Nevelson's work was cast, among others

Statues of important Romans frequently represented them nude. Men were portrayed naked holding weapons. The naked emperor might wield the thunderbolt of Jupiter, while Roman women assumed the guide of the nude love-goddess, Venus. When faced with these strange images, modern viewers are usually unsympathetic, finding them incongruous, even tasteless. They are mostly written off as just another example of Roman `bad taste'. This book offers a new approach. Comprehensively illustrated with black and white photographs of its subjects, it investigates how this tradition arose, and how the nudity of these portraits was meant to be understood by contemporary viewers. And, since the Romans also employed a range of costumes for their statues (toga, armour, Greek philosopher's cloak), it asks, `What could the nude images express that other costumes could not?' It is Christopher Hallett's claim that - looked at in this way - these `Roman nudes' turn out to be documents of the first importance for the cultural historian.

Luisa Lambri's art revolves around the human condition and its relationship with space, touching on areas such as the politics of representation, architecture, the history of abstract photography, modernism, feminism, identity and memory. The title of the exhibition presented at PAC, in Milan, is a tribute to Carla Lonzi who, in 1969, published "Autoritratto", a collection of interviews with avant-garde artists that revealed their private sides. In the same way, Lambri constructs personal and intimate readings of the subjects of her photographs and encourages a dialogue between the observer, the work of art and the space. Light, time and movement play an important role in her work, where slight differences reflect the artist's movement within the space. Lambri uses architecture to create her images, rather than images to document architecture, revealing negligible details of modernist architecture or iconic minimalist sculptures. At PAC, her works relate to the unique qualities of the architecture designed by Ignazio Gardella, for which the exhibition was specifically developed. Text in English and Italian.

Although originally trained as a painter, Shingu became interested in sculpture when he saw one of his shaped canvases turning softly in the wind. The work that followed relied on natural forces to make it move or make sound, and he began using more sophisticated materials for outdoor works. By the time of Expo '70 in Osaka, Shingu had been commissioned to create a piece for the plaza. It contained many of the elements he would use later: parts of it were moved by both wind and water, in some ways harnessing their power but also buffeted by it. His work walks the fine line between complementing nature and being an integral part of it. The pieces, though large, colorful, and usually made of modern materials, adopt nature's rhythms in their movement. Shingu's sculpture is found around the world, from Japan to France, Italy, and the United States. In addition to creating sculptures, he has written and illustrated several children's books and designed several theater pieces that integrate his sculptures and installations with dramatic stories. All of these endeavors are collected here - along with the artist's comments on many of the sculptures, essays by Pierre Restany and Renzo Piano, and an interview with Joseph Giovannini - in a monograph that provides a complete portrait of Shingu's diverse career.

The work of the Japanese sculptor Toshimasa Kikuchi (born in 1979) is somehow bewilderingly obvious. Trained in the restoration of Buddhist statues, mastering to perfection the techniques of classical Japanese statuary, he carves pure forms in wood - geometric, hydrodynamic or figurative. His scientific repertory is of all time (mathematics, engineering, natural history), but his preferred materials and techniques are firmly grounded in tradition (Japanese hinoki cypress, urushi lacquer, kinpaku gold leaf). The installation he presents for his Carte Blanche at the musee Guimet in Paris, brings together a series of slender sculptures in lacquered wood of mathematical objects, in the tradition of the celebrated photographs that Man Ray took of them. These abstract forms, hanging from the ceiling like mobiles or laid on the floor like devotional objects, take shape through a virtuosity and craftsmanship seldom found in contemporary art. The book is lavishly illustrated by the Japanese photographer Tadayuki Minamoto, who was able to capture the magnificence of the mathematical abstraction of the works of Kikuchi; by photographs and paintings by Man Ray; and with fascinating mathematical objects from the Institut Henri Poincare, Paris, photographed by the French photographer Bertrand Michau. It is essential reading for lovers of surrealism and of the early years of twentieth-century abstraction as well as for all who are intrigued by the close relationship between art and mathematics.

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

In this volume, Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper investigates the impact of Greek art on the miniature figure sculptures produced in Babylonia after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia were used as agents of social change, by visually expressing and negotiating cultural differences. The scaled-down quality of figurines encouraged both visual and tactile engagement, enabling them to effectively work as non-threatening instruments of cultural blending. Reconstructing the embodied experience of miniaturization in detailed case studies, Langin-Hooper illuminates the dynamic process of combining Greek and Babylonian sculpture forms, social customs, and viewing habits into new, hybrid works of art. Her innovative focus on figurines as instruments of both personal encounter and global cultural shifts has important implications for the study of tiny objects in art history, anthropology, classics, and other disciplines.

Considerations about size and scale have always played a central role within Greek and Roman visual culture, deeply affecting sculptural production. Both Greeks and Romans, in particular, had a clear notion of “colossality” and were able to fully exploit its implications with sculpture in many different areas of social, cultural and religious life. Instead, despite their ubiquitous presence, an equal and contrary categorization for small size statues does not seem to have existed in Greek and Roman culture, leading one to wonder what were the ancient ways of conceptualizing sculptural representations in a format markedly smaller than “life-size.” Even in the context of modern scholarship on Classical Art, few notions appear to be as elusive as that of “small sculpture”, often treated with a certain degree of diffidence well summarized in the formula Klein, aber Kunst? In fact, a large and heterogeneous variety of objects corresponds to this definition: all kinds of small sculpture, from statuettes to miniatures, in a variety of materials including stone, bronze, and terracotta, associated with a great array of functions and contexts, and with extremely different levels of manufacture and patronage. It would be a major misunderstanding to think of these small sculptures in general as nothing more than a cheap and simplified alternative to larger scale statues. Compared with those, their peculiar format allowed for a wider range of choices, in terms, for example, of use of either cheap or extremely valuable materials (not only marble and bronze, but also gold and silver, ivory, hard stones, among others), methods of production (combining seriality and variation), modes of fruition (such as involving a degree of intimacy with the beholder, rather than staging an illusion of “presence”). Furthermore, their pervasive presence in both private and public spaces at many levels of Greek and Roman society presents us with a privileged point of view on the visual literacy of a large and varied public. Although very different in many respects, small-sized sculptures entertained often a rather ambivalent relationship with their larger counterparts, drawing from them at the same time schemes, forms and iconographies. By offering a fresh, new analysis of archaeological evidence and literary sources, through a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume helps to illuminate this rather complex dynamic and aims to contribute to a better understanding of the status of Greek and Roman small size sculpture within the general development of ancient art.

This comprehensive sourcebook is destined to become a lasting and definitive resource on the art and aesthetic philosophy of the American artist David Smith (1906-1965). A pioneer of twentieth-century modernism, Smith was renowned for the expansive formal and conceptual ambitions of his broadly diverse and inventive welded-steel abstractions. His groundbreaking achievements drew freely on cubism, surrealism, and constructivism, profoundly influencing later movements such as minimalism and environmental art. By radically challenging older conventions of monolithic figuration and refuting arbitrary distinctions between painters and sculptors, Smith asserted sculpture's equal role in advancing modern art. A compilation of Smith's poems, sketchbook notes, essays, lectures, letters to the editor, reviews, and interviews, these previously unpublished texts underscore the varied ways in which his writing functioned as a means to examine and articulate his private identity and to promote the social ideals that made him a key participant in contemporary discourses surrounding modernism, art and politics, and sculptural aesthetics. All the documents in David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews have been newly corrected against the original manuscripts, typescripts, and audiotapes. Each text in this collection is annotated with historical and contextual information that reflects Smith's own process of continually reviewing and revising his writings in response to his evolving aspirations as a visual artist.

Aesthetic seduction, superb workmanship, and historical interest are the three central themes in the collection of Fondation Gandur pour l'Art (Geneva), created in 2010 and still expanding. The aim of this first volume is to catalogue the works in the collection, whose decorative aspects are every bit as important as their narrative content. The works are for the most part sculptures - statuettes and ornamental reliefs - although two-dimensional decorations depicting figurative scenes associated with classical antiquity or Christianity are no less important. The periods represented by the sculptural works discussed in this book reflect the scope of the whole collection, which ranges from the 12th to the 18th century. And since the goal of the collection is to document centuries of cultural exchange between France and neighbouring countries, all the works included in the book come from these latter regions. The hybrid styles are closely linked, and this is an aspect of considerable importance, as is the originality certain pieces display and, last but not least, their aesthetic quality. The book is arranged by topic, which brings out the great originality and extraordinary richness of the collection, as well as the extremely varied nature of the subjects, narrative episodes, and figures portrayed. More specifically, the topics are divided into five sections: ancient gods and heroes; biblical and allegorical figures; scenes from the life of the Virgin; episodes from the life of Christ; and saints and intercessors. Each work has its own entry that describes the historical and geographical context in which it was made, analyses its iconographic content, and includes a bibliography and a list of the exhibitions where the work was exhibited.

This book demonstrates that copper-alloy casting was widespread in southern Nigeria and has been practiced for at least a millennium. Philip M. Peek's research provides a critical context for the better-known casting traditions of Igbo-Ukwu, Ife, and Benin. Both the necessary ores and casting skills were widely available, contrary to previous scholarly assumptions. The majority of the Lower Niger Bronzes, which we know number in the thousands, are of subjects not found elsewhere, such as leopard skull replicas, grotesque bell heads, ritual objects, and humanoid figures. Important puzzle pieces are now in place to permit a more complete reconstruction of southern Nigerian history. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, African studies, African history, and anthropology.

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.

A beautiful book on the famed Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas The Chinati Foundation, a world-famous destination for large-scale contemporary art, was founded by Donald Judd (1928-1994) to preserve and present a select number of permanent installations that were inextricably linked to the surrounding landscape in Marfa, Texas. This handsome publication, first published in 2010 and now available with a new chapter devoted to the permanent installation by Robert Irwin that was inaugurated in 2016 and a new foreword by Jenny Moore, director of the Chinati Foundation, describes how Judd developed his ideas of the role of art and museums from the early 1960s onward, culminating in the creation of Chinati. The individual installations featured here include work by John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, David Rabinowitch, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Ingolfur Arnarsson, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, and John Wesley, as well as by Judd himself. The book also features a complete catalogue of the collection and writings by Judd relating to Chinati and Marfa. Published in association with the Chinati Foundation/La Fundacion Chinati