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Essays by Olga M. Viso, Guy Brett, Julia P. Herzberg, Chrissie Iles and Laura Roulet.
"A Broken Beauty examines recent ideas about beauty and the human image in light of the Western Classical and Christian traditions of the human figure. The book's five essays trace the historical fusion of Classical and Christian ideas about beauty, as well as their rejection by much modern art, provocatively suggesting that the difficulties encountered by the beautiful in modernity may be related to a loss of faith." "This volume culminates in a look at fifteen postmodern North American artists whose haunting pieces unite brokenness and beauty in a way that is uncommon within contemporary art. These artists, like the book's essayists, find significance in beauty that is cultivated amidst the perennial human struggle for goodness, meaning, and dignity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
"Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) produced some of the most compelling images of body- and identity-oriented art of the 1970s. The tracks made by the artist dragging her blood-covered arms down a wall; the pigment-filled void of her silhouette pressed into a sandy beach, consumed by advancing waves; her bodily outline drawn by ignited gunpowder on the earth or set alight with fireworks against the night sky; and fetishistic goddess shapes molded in soil, adorned with flowers, resound in the histories of feminist art, performance and land art, and late twentieth-century Latin American art." "Despite major survey exhibitions by museums in the United States, Europe, and Latin America over the last deca...
What roles do queer and transgender people play in the African diasporic religions? Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Participation in African-Inspired Traditions in the Americas is a groundbreaking scholarly exploration of this long-neglected subject. It offers clear insight into the complex dynamics of gender and sexual orientation, humans and deities, and race and ethnicity, within these richly nuanced spiritual practices. Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions explores the ways in which gender complexity and same-sex intimacy are integral to the primary beliefs and practices of these faiths. It begins with a comprehensive overview of Vodou, Sante...
Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics makes the case for a feminist aesthetics in photography by analysing key works of twenty-two women photographers, including cis- and trans-woman photographers. Claire Raymond provides close readings of key photographs spanning the history of photography, from nineteenth-century Europe to twenty-first century Africa and Asia. She offers original interpretations of well-known photographers such as Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, and Carrie Mae Weems, analysing their work in relation to gender, class, and race. The book also pays close attention to the way in which indigenous North Americans have been represented through photography and the ways in which contemporary Native American women photographers respond to this history. Developing the argument that through aesthetic force emerges the truly political, the book moves beyond polarization of the aesthetic and the cultural. Instead, photographic works are read for their subversive political and cultural force, as it emerges through the aesthetics of the image. This book is ideal for students of Photography, Art History, Art and Visual Culture, and Gender.
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological ontology engages deeply with visual art, and this aspect of his work remains significant not only to philosophers, but also to artists, art theorists, and critics. Until recently, scholarly attention has been focused on the artists he himself was inspired by and wrote about, chiefly Cézanne, Klee, Matisse, and Rodin. Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery expands and shifts the focus to address a range of artists (Giorgio Morandi, Kiki Smith, Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Ellsworth Kelly) whose work came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century and thus primarily after the philosopher's death. Véronique M. Fóti does not confine her analyses to Merleau-Ponty's texts (which now importantly include his late lecture courses), but also engages directly with the art. Of particular concern to her is the art's ethical bearing, especially as related to animal and vegetal life. The book's concluding chapter addresses the still-widespread rejection of beauty as an aesthetic value.
This selection of essays examines the future of art in a changing world. In particular, contributors discuss the agency of art in conditions of ecological threats to the natural world, to climate change and the effects of globalisation, neoliberal economics and mass tourism. Following the lead of Chicago-based Frances Whitehead, whose essay is a key text, some contributors take positions on working with local government agencies to embed art-thinking within development projects, going back to the art-thinking at the centre of Kazimir Malevich’s work in Vitebsk one hundred years ago in Russia. Other papers highlight small-scale art interventions that bring ecological issues to public notice and suggest positive responses, whilst others discuss large-scale problems brought about by the social, economic and laissez-faire history of the emerging Anthropocene with possible dystopic outcomes.
Attempting to bridge the gap between specialised scholarship in the humanistic disciplines and an interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis, Mieke Bal has written an intellectual travel guide that charts the course 'beyond' cultural studies. As with any guide, it can be used in a number of ways and the reader can follow or willfully ignore any of the paths it maps or signposts. Bal's focus for this book is the idea that interdisciplinarity in the humanities - necessary, exciting, serious - must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than its methods. Concepts are not grids to put over an object. The counterpart of any given concept is the cultural text or work or...
This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, organized by Lynn Lukkas and Howard Oransky for the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota.
This magnificent volume marks the fiftieth anniversary of this museum and art school housed in buildings designed by world-renowned architects Eliel Saarinen, I.M. Pei, and Richard Meier. Illustrated essays cover the history of the Center and its distinguished architecture. Colorplates and commentary present more than 100 masterpieces of 20th-century art and tribal arts.