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How artists challenged a military dictatorship through mass print technologies in 1970s and 1980s São Paulo. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, during Brazil's military dictatorship, artists shifted their practices to critique the government and its sanitized images of Brazil, its use of torture, and its targeted persecutions. Mari Rodríguez Binnie's The São Paulo Neo-Avant-Garde examines these artworks and their engagement with politics and mainstream art institutions and practices. As Binnie skillfully shows, artists appropriated processes like photocopy, offset lithography, and thermal and heliographic printing, making newly available technologies of mass production foundational ...
"Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, in the wake of the installation of Brazil's military dictatorship, artists and art collectives in Brazil used their work to critique the government and its sanitized images of Brazil, its use of torture, and its targeted persecutions. Mari Rodríguez Binnie's The São Paulo Neo-Avant Garde studies this art and its engagement with politics and mainstream institutions and traditions. During this period São Paulo was home to a growing number of high-rise office buildings, and many of the artists studied here held day jobs that gave them after-hours access to new technologies of mass production that became foundational to their work. As the author write...
Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for South Asian Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. This book situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic intellectual and religious histories. Central to this story are the Mughal siblings, Jahanara Begum and Dara Shikoh, and their Sufi guide Mulla Shah. Through detailed art historical analysis supported by new translations, this study contextualizes artworks made for Indo-Muslim patrons by putting them into direct dialogue with written testimonies.
A major rethinking of twentieth-century abstract art mobilized by the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark What would it mean to treat an interval of space as a line, thus drawing an empty void into a constellation of art and meaning-laden things? In this book, Irene Small elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements that Clark called “the organic line.” For much of the history of art, Clark’s discovery, much like the organic line, has escaped legibility. Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge. A spatial cavity th...
"Beginning with the oil blowout in 1922 that is considered the moment that marked Venezuela's entry into a 'modern' era, Refined Material explores the integral relationship between Venezuelan oil industry and artistic production. In this groundbreaking study, Sean Nesselrode Moncada examines Venezuela's mid-century art and architecture in an argument that reinforces the inextricability of the rise of a capitalist and centralized state from life, activism, and art. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. Looking at five different but interrelated case studies--a print magazine, a planned housing community, a luxury hotel, a kinetic museum installation, and a documentary film--this book brings forth a novel reading to the renowned Venezuelan modernist canon and reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another"--
This volume examines the emergence of alternative spaces and architectural landscapes of Islamic practice in contemporary Africa through the lens of the masjid, whose definition as a “place of prostration” has enabled Muslim populations across the continent to navigate the murky waters of the contemporary condition through a purposeful renovation of spiritual space. Drawing from multiple disciplines and utilizing a series of diverse case studies, Michelle Apotsos reflects on the shifting realities of Islamic communities as they engage in processes of socio-political and cultural transformation. Illustrated through the growth of forward-thinking and in flexible environments that highlight how Muslim communities have developed unique solutions to the problem of performing identity within diverse contexts across the continent, she re-imagines the major themes surrounding definitions of Islamic architectural space in the contemporary period in Africa and the nature of the “modernity” as it has unfolded across diverse contexts on the continent.
Essays on 20th Century Latin American Art provides a broad synthesis of the subject through short chapters illustrated with reproductions of iconic works by artists who have made significant contributions to art and society. Designed as a teaching tool for non-art historians, the book's purpose is to introduce these important artists within a new scholarly context and recognize their accomplishments with those of others beyond the Americas and the Caribbean. The publication provides an in-depth analysis of topics such as political issues in Latin American art and art and popular culture, introducing views on artists and art-related issues that have rarely been addressed. Organized both regio...
In Surface Relations Vivian L. Huang traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Following inscrutability in literature, visual culture, and performance art since 1965, Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability—such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding—to express Asian American life. Through analyses of diverse works by performance artists (Tehching Hsieh, Baseera Khan, Emma Sulkowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi), writers (Kim Fu, Kai Cheng Thom, Monique Truong), and video, multimedia, and conceptual artists (Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Mika Tajima), Huang challenges neoliberal narratives of assimilation that erase Asianness. By using sound, touch, and affect, these artists and writers create new frameworks for affirming Asianness as a source of political and social critique and innovative forms of life and creativity. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
The most comprehensive exhibition catalog dedicated to the work of Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), a pioneering figure in Latin American modernism. The focus of the exhibition is the popular, or the vernacular, a notion as complex in Brazil as it is contested, and which Tarsila explored in different ways throughout her career. The popular is associated with debates on national art or identity and the invention or construction of brasilidade, Brazilianness. In Tarsila, the popular is manifested in landscapes of the countryside or the suburbs, the farm or the favela, populated by people of indigenous or African descent, characters from Brazilian folklore, full of animals and pl...
"Theories of the Nonobject investigates the crisis of the sculptural and painterly object in the concrete, neoconcrete, and constructivist practices of artists in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, with case studies of specific movements, artists, and critics. Amor traces their role in the significant reconceptualization of the artwork that Brazilian critic and poet Ferreira Gullar heralded in 'Theory of the Nonobject' in 1959, with specific attention to a group of major art figures including Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Gego, whose work proposed engaged forms of spectatorship that dismissed medium-based understandings of art. Exploring the philosophical, economic, and political underpinnings of geometric abstraction in post-World War II South America, Amor highlights the overlapping inquiries of artists and critics who, working on the periphery of European and US modernism, contributed to a sophisticated conversation about the nature of the art object"--Provided by publisher.