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Explaining Creativity is a comprehensive and authoritative overview of scientific studies on creativity and innovation. Sawyer discusses not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, business innovation, and creativity in everyday life. Sawyer's approach is interdisciplinary. In addition to examining psychological studies on creativity, he draws on anthropologists' research on creativity in non-Western cultures, sociologists' research on the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity, and cognitive neuroscientists' studies of the brain.
Recently interest has surged in what Jean Dubuffet called Art Brut, “raw art” produced by persons operating outside cultural norms, reflecting inner need rather than any “official” artistic attitude. Of the known practitioners of Art Brut, one of the most gifted was the Swiss peasant Adolf Wölfli. From 1895, when he was thirty-one, until his death in 1930, Wölfli was incarcerated in Waldau hospital, severely afflicted with rage and depression. Supplied with colored pencils and paper by his primary physician, Walter Morgenthaler, he began to draw. Morgenthaler’s pathbreaking study of Wölfli and his art, published in 1921, aimed at the center of contemporary debates about the relationships between creativity, madness, and art. This first English-language edition includes twenty-four color reproductions of Wölfli’s art and Wölfli’s brief account of his own life.
"Genius. Invention. Talent. And, of course, creativity. These words describe the highest levels of human performance. When we're engaged in the act of being creative, we feel we are performing at the peak of our abilities. Creative works give us insight and enrich our lives. Creativity is part of what makes us human. Our nearest relatives, chimpanzees and other primates, are often quite intelligent but never reach these high levels of performance"--
This full-colour art book enters into the studio, process and inner world of California artist Miriam Wosk. The featured collages are highly patterned, ornamental and colourful. Her recurring theme is the marvellous abundance of life in all its forms, whether human or animal, biological or botanical. The dazzling large scale, thickly encrusted paintings depict a unique world reflecting Wosk's visions, dreams and metaphysical imagination. Introduction by Milton Glaser.
Martín Ramírez, a Mexican migrant worker and psychiatric patient without formal artistic training, has been hailed by leading New York art critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. His work has been exhibited alongside masters such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró. A landmark exhibition of Ramírez’s work at the American Folk Art Museum in 2007 broke attendance records and garnered praise from major media, including the New York Times, New Yorker, and Village Voice. Martín Ramírez offers the first sustained look at the life and critical reception of this acclaimed artist. Víctor Espinosa ...
The third in a series that examines the state of the arts in America, this analysis shows, in addition to lines around the block for special exhibits, well-paid superstar artists, flourishing university visual arts programs, and a global expansion of collectors, developments in the visual arts also tell a story of rapid, even seismic change, systemic imbalances, and dislocation.
Art Brut, also termed Outsider Art, has long been suppressed from most art historical writing. Why this rejection? The hyperbolic expressions of Romanticism and Symbolism nourished a desire for derangement and dissociation that inspired both Expressionism and Surrealism. Simulated delirium became the object of the new art — experimental, avant-garde, modernist — which arose from the fragmented codes, the shattered forms of everyday communication. But what of those artists whose works, and often whose deliria, are the manifestations of sheer eccentricity, of social isolation and marginalization, or of madness? In this book Weiss investigates the origins of the unrestricted contemporary ar...
"Featuring 30 color and 188 black-and-white photographs, the book is organized geographically into eastern, central, western, and northern regions of the state. Each regional division begins with a descriptive tour of the land, the life, and the art that characterize the richness of Wisconsin's cultural landscape. Each section also includes artists' narratives, twenty-six in all, transcribed from interviews Krug and Parker conducted in their travels. Here the artists speak for themselves, relating how they began making art, and how, through art, their interests, values, and personal fulfillment are all interwoven."--BOOK JACKET.
Edited by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna. Essays by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna and Stephen Fredman.
A richly illustrated history of self-taught artists and how they changed American art Artists without formal training, who learned from family, community, and personal journeys, have long been a presence in American art. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, with the help of trailblazing advocates, that the collective force of their creative vision and bold self-definition permanently changed the mainstream art world. In We Are Made of Stories, Leslie Umberger traces the rise of self-taught artists in the twentieth century and examines how, despite wide-ranging societal, racial, and gender-based obstacles, they redefined who could be rightfully seen as an artist and revealed a much more diverse c...