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A survey of spectacular breadth, covering the history of decorative arts and design worldwide over the past six hundred years
All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.
"This book explores the life, professional activities, artistic production and collecting practices of Georges Hoentschel through the objects he collected and created. Essays by the editors, joined by Amy F. Ogata, associate professor at Bard Graduate Center and Christine E. Brennan, senior research associate in Medieval Art as the Metropolitan Museum, address his biography, business contacts, and clients, as well as the arrival of the collection in New York, its lavish four-volume illustrated catalogue, and the medieval collections. Also discussed is Hoentschel's involvement with contemporary art, including his intriguing stoneware creations and designs for a pavilion and interiors at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Fully illustrated catalogue entries explore the astonishing range of objects he collected. Throughout the book, new documentary material from archives and newspapers illuminates this little-explored chapter in the history of collecting decorative arts between France and America at the dawn of the twentieth century."--book jacket.
More than eighty designs--iconic, archaic, quotidian, and taboo--that have defined the arc of human reproduction. While birth often brings great joy, making babies is a knotty enterprise. The designed objects that surround us when it comes to menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. This smart, image-rich, fashion-forward, and design-driven book explores more than eighty designs--iconic, conceptual, archaic, titillating, emotionally charged, or just plain strange--that have defined the relationships between people and babies during the past century. Each object tells a story. In s...
This text examines the small woven and wrought works artist Sheila Hicks has produced over years. Focusing on 100 Hicks miniatures from many public and private collections, it includes three informative essays as well as illustrations of the artist's related drawings, photographs and chronology.
"This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place, held at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery from September 14, 2018 through January 6, 2019"--Colophon.
In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles--both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ash...
The first comprehensive study of the most important ceramic innovation of the 19th century Colorful, wildly imaginative, and technically innovative, majolica was functional and aesthetic ceramic ware. Its subject matter reflects a range of 19th-century preoccupations, from botany and zoology to popular humor and the macabre. Majolica Mania examines the medium’s considerable impact, from wares used in domestic settings to monumental pieces at the World’s Fairs. Essays by international experts address the extensive output of the originators and manufacturers in England—including Minton, Wedgwood, and George Jones—and the migration of English craftsmen to the U.S. New research including information on important American makers in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia is also featured. Fully illustrated, the book is enlivened by new photography of pieces from major museums and private collections in the U.S. and Great Britain.
A history of design that is often overlooked—until we need it Have you ever hit the big blue button to activate automatic doors? Have you ever used an ergonomic kitchen tool? Have you ever used curb cuts to roll a stroller across an intersection? If you have, then you’ve benefited from accessible design—design for people with physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities. These ubiquitous touchstones of modern life were once anything but. Disability advocates fought tirelessly to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities became a standard part of public design thinking. That fight took many forms worldwide, but in the United States it became a civil rights issue; activists used...
Entangled Objects threatens to dislodge the cornerstone of Western anthropology by rendering permanently problematic the idea of reciprocity. All traffic, and commerce, whether economic or intellectual, between Western anthropologists and the rest of the world, is predicated upon the possibility of establishing reciprocal relations between the West and the indigenous peoples it has colonized for centuries.