Frances Stark deftly deploys text, image and literary sources in her drawings, collages, paintings and video works that reflect on her roles as artist, mother, woman and teacher. Throughout her career she has experimented with alternative modes of expression, as in her critically acclaimed video, My Best Thing; her PowerPoint work Structures that fit my opening (and other parts considered in relation to their whole); and the performance Put a Song in Your Thing. Companion to an exhibition that documents Stark's 25-year long career, this book contains 125 works in which Stark employs words and images to create provocative and self-referential works that speak to the complexities of daily life. This book includes full-page detailed images that provide an insight into the highly tactile and complex nature of Stark's work. Also included are newly commissioned essays and a collection of brief reflections by a variety of prominent artists and writers whom Stark asked to revisit specific topics they've discussed or written about previously.Filled with high-quality reproductions and thoughtful commentary, this book is the definitive resource on Stark's accomplished, varied and affecting body of work. Published in association with Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

This book examines the career of New York-based artist Sherrie Levine, whose 1981 series of photographs "after Walker Evans" - taken not from life but from Evans's famous depression-era documents of rural Alabama - became central examples in theorizing postmodernism in the visual arts in the 1980s. For the first in-depth examination of Levine, Howard Singerman surveys a wide variety of sources, both historical and theoretical, to assess an artist whose work was understood from the outset to challenge both the label "artist" and the idea of oeuvre - and who has over the past three decades crafted a significant oeuvre of her own. Singerman addresses Levine's work after Evans, Brancusi, Malevich, and others as an experimental art historical practice - material reenactments of the way the work of art history is always doubled in and structured by language, and of the ways the art itself resists.

Nearly every artist under the age of 50 in the United States in the late-20th century has a Master of Fine Arts degee. This study places that degree in its proper historical framework and ideological context. Arguing that where artists are trained makes a difference in the forms and meanings they produce, he shows how the university, with its disciplined organization of knowledge and demand for language, played a critical role in the production of modernism in the visual arts. Now it is shaping what we call postmodernism - like postmodernist art, the graduate university stresses theory and research over manual skills and traditional techniques of representation. The text begins by examining the first campus-based art schools in the 1870s and goes on to consider the structuring role of women art educators and women students; the shift from the "fine arts" to the "visual arts"; the fundamental grammar of art laid down in the schoolroom; and the development of professional art training in the American university. The book reveals the ways we have conceived of art in the past hundred years and have institutionalized that conception as atelier activity, as craft, and finally as theory a

The essays in "The Hand and the Soul" explore the question of how ethical ideas guiding the design process--a concern for the environment or for social justice--relate to the beauty of our buildings, cities, and artworks. The book presents a range of viewpoints and does not ignore the perils of an easy association of ethics and aesthetics. Yet the majority of contributors, among them historians, theorists, as well practicing designers and artists, argue passionately in defense of the idea that the good and the beautiful can and should be able to find a common ground in the design disciplines.

The book begins with an exploration of recent difficulties in pairing ethics and aesthetics. Can one effect a philosophical convergence of these elements, or is it dangerous to conflate moral and aesthetic terms? The discussion continues with considerations of the overlap that occurs between the fine arts and the design disciplines, the intersection of aesthetic theory and practice with sustainability and environmental science, and the concept of "open works"--projects whose design processes are flexible, nonhierarchical, and attuned to the unique features of a particular place or cultural situation. The book concludes with a look at several contrasting ideas developed in the essays and examines ethics as a desire for community, as well as a sense of responsibility, an obligation to contemplate not only what buildings offer us but also what they may take away.

In juxtaposing the work of historians and theorists with that of practicing designers and artists, "The Hand and the Soul, " whose title is drawn from an essay by American artist Philip Guston, seeks to bridge the divide between theory and practice, between abstract ethical or aesthetic concepts and practical ways of making tangible artifacts. In a field dominated by esoteric studies and, at the other extreme, primarily illustrated works, "The Hand and the Soul" offers a vital discussion that is at once theoretically rigorous and grounded in the practice of art, architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

Contributors

Richard Shusterman * Joan Ockman * Howard Singerman * Robin Dripps * Nathaniel Coleman * Thomas Berding * Steven A. Moore * William Sherman * Timothy Beatley * Elissa Rosenberg * Phoebe Crisman * Sanda Iliescu * W. G. Clark

Nearly every artist under the age of 50 in the United States in the late-20th century has a Master of Fine Arts degee. This study places that degree in its proper historical framework and ideological context. Arguing that where artists are trained makes a difference in the forms and meanings they produce, he shows how the university, with its disciplined organization of knowledge and demand for language, played a critical role in the production of modernism in the visual arts. Now it is shaping what we call postmodernism - like postmodernist art, the graduate university stresses theory and research over manual skills and traditional techniques of representation.;The text begins by examining the first campus-based art schools in the 1870s and goes on to consider the structuring role of women art educators and women students; the shift from the "fine arts" to the "visual arts"; the fundamental grammar of art laid down in the schoolroom; and the development of professional art training in the American university. The book reveals the ways we have conceived of art in the past hundred years and have institutionalized that conception as atelier activity, as craft, and finally as theory and performance.