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"Bill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949) is regarded today as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. A black man born into slavery in Alabama, he was an eyewitness to history--the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the steady rise of African American urban culture in the South. Traylor would not live to see the civil rights movement, but he was among those who laid its foundation. Starting around 1939, Traylor--by then in his late eighties and living on the streets of Montgomery--took up pencil and paintbrush to attest to his existence and point of view. In keeping with this radical step, the paintings and drawings he ma...
Floods are a fundamental part of Dutch history. Indeed, having ‘tamed’ the threats associated with living below sea level is part of Dutch national identity. In the cultural depictions of these devastating events, however, national pride at a certain collective resilience goes hand-in-hand with the collective trauma of exposed vulnerability. All too often, the Dutch were the losers in these battles against the elements. In a time of rising global sea levels, cultural scholar Lotte Jensen dives into the stories and images of the past to unpack this paradox for today. Over the centuries, large parts of the Netherlands have been progressively reclaimed from its river delta home. Throughout ...
"An innovative new history of how the migration of designers in the 20th century shaped modernist art and architecture"--
An account of the life and work of a once-famous self-taught American artist of the 1940s, and a study of how artists go missing from public memory. The exhibition “Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered” at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, curated by the author and developed as an extension of the book, is on view from September 22, 2022 to January 27, 2023. A garment worker and slipper manufacturer with no training in art, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Against all odds, his wildly stylized paintings of female figures, often nude, animals, and landscapes became internationally known in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the French surre...
Painter, fisherman, pseudo-hermaphrodite—Forrest Bess lived his life in obscurity at an isolated bait camp off the east coast of Texas. From 1949 through 1967, Bess showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, alongside superstar artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Rediscovered after his death in 1977, Bess's small visionary paintings are now prized by museums and collectors for their primal beauty, and can fetch over $200,000 apiece. Bess's treasured canvases were only part of a grander theory—based on alchemy, Jungian philosophy, and aboriginal rituals—that proposed that hermaphrodism was the key to immortality. As an artist, Bess could never equivocate, and in ...
Paul Laffoley is a Visionary artist who lives and works in a tiny space in Boston he calls "the Boston Visionary Cell." A trained architect, Laffoley produces brilliantly colored mandala paintings filled with symbols and texts. Each painting is accompanied by a tex called a "thought-form," which serves as commentary on the painting's content. The paintings--many of them large (73 x 73 inches)--have titles that range from the paranormal and arcane ("The Ectoplasmic Man," "The Sexuality of Robots") to the erudite: "De Rerum Natura," referring to the poet Lucretius. Laffoley is interested in "the mechanics of mysticism," time and space, dreams, magic, and consciousness. In addition to painting,...
Since the mid-twentieth century, conspiracy has pervaded our collective worldview, shaped by events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, and 9/11. Everything Is Connected examines how artists from the 1960s to the present have explored both the covert operations of power and the mutual suspicion between governments and their citizens. Featured are works by some thirty artists—including Sarah Charlesworth, Emory Douglas, Hans Haacke, Rachel Harrison, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Mark Lombardi, Cady Noland, Trevor Paglen, Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw, and Sue Williams—in media ranging from painting, drawing, and photography to video and installation art. Whether they uncover webs of deceit hidden in the public record or dive headlong into paranoid fever dreams, these artists use their work to take a powerful and proactive stance against the political corruption, consumerism, bureaucracy, and media manipulation that are hallmarks of contemporary life. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
Reveals how the artist recorded his memories of the American railroad and the traveling circus as landscapes.
"The End Is Near!" maps the millennial fervor that haunts our consciousness and gathers the most provocative collection of visionary art ever assembled--from artists who dwell on the shadowy fringes of society. 160 color and 40 duotone illustrations.
"This book uncovers a largely overlooked strand of American modernism in Cornell's work that engaged with current issues through the metaphysical aspects of vernacular objects and experiences"--