A mother stitches a few lines of prayer into a bedcover for her son serving in the Union army during the Civil War. A formerly enslaved African American woman creates a quilt populated by Biblical figures alongside celestial events. A Diné women weaves a blanket for a U.S. Army soldier stationed in the Southwest. A quilted Lady Liberty, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln mark the resignation of Richard Nixon. These are just a few of the diverse and sometimes hidden stories of the American experience told by quilts and bedcovers from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Spanning more than four hundred years, the fifty-six works of textile art in this book express the personal narratives of their makers and owners and connect to broader stories of global trade, immigration, industry, marginalization, and territorial and cultural expansion. Made by Americans of European, African, Native, and Hispanic heritage, these engaging works of art range from family heirlooms to acts of political protest, each with its own story to tell.
Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name held at Tate Modern, London, July 12-October 22, 2017; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, February 3-April 23, 2018; and Brooklyn Museum, New York, September 7, 2018-February 3, 2019.
"Case studies explore the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, whose efforts to use art to create a Jewish nationality in Palestine raise important issues of national identity, and the discovery in 1932 of the third-century Synagogue of Dura Europos, a symbol for scholars struggling against the Third Reich. Among those who supported or challenged concepts of Jewish art, Margaret Olin considers the nineteenth-century rabbinical scholar David Kaufmann, the philosopher Martin Buber, the critic Clement Greenberg, and the filmmaker Chantal Akerman.
"For almost 300 years, an organisation has quietly tried to change almost every aspect of life in Britain. That organisation is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, often known simply as the Royal Society of Arts. It has acted as Britain's private national improvement agency, in every way imaginable - essentially, a society for the improvement of everything and anything. This book is its history. From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Society has tried to change Britain's art, industry, laws, music, environment, education, and even culture. It has sometimes even succeeded. It has been a prize-fund for innovations, a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, a convenor of disparate interest groups, and the focal point for social movements. There has never been an organisation quite like it, constantly having to reinvent itself to find something new to improve. The book rewrites many of the old official histories of the Society and updates them to the present day, incorporating over half a century of further research into the periods they covered, along with new insights into the organisation's evolution. The book reveals the hidden and often surprising history of how a few public-spirited people tried to make their country better, offering lessons from their triumphs and their failures for all would-be reformers today"--
A provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity, from the author of Class and The Story of My Purity Marcello, an editor and poet, is on the brink of his forties. Like everyone in his life, including his sister-in-law, he’s writing a novel. This novel. This novel will be about women. Love. Growing older. Maybe even taking responsibility. But unfortunately for Marcello, the women in his life resist definition. They flit and flicker constantly between archetype and actuality: sirens and saviors, subordinates and savants, vixens and villains. So Marcello cannot write plainly about love. Instead, he tries to write into the complexities of his many relationships: Eleonora, the junior editor, his former protegeé and sometime lover; Barbara, his claustrophobic girlfriend; his estranged gay sister; his elegant mother. Fresh, frank, and painfully cool, Francesco Pacifico’s The Women I Love dives nakedly into gender, sex, and power. Set in a vivid and alcoholic Italy, it acknowledges and subverts the narrow ways canonical male writers gaze at, and somehow fail to see, women—illuminating the possibility of equity between people in love, in bed, in work, and in life.
Two American ex-pats obsessed with the Amanda Knox trial find themselves at the nexus of murder and celebrity in glittering late-aughts Berlin in this “hugely entertaining” (The New York Times) debut with a wicked sense of humor. “Darkly funny, psychologically rich and utterly addictive... [a] harrowing tale of twisty female friendships, slippery identity and furtive secrets.” —Megan Abbott, best-selling author of The Turnout Hoping to escape the pain of the recent murder of her best friend, art student Zoe Beech finds herself studying abroad in the bohemian capital of Europe—Berlin. Rudderless, Zoe relies on the arrangements of fellow exchange student Hailey Mader, who idolizes Warhol and Britney Spears and wants nothing more than to be an art star. When Hailey stumbles on a posting for a high-ceilinged, prewar sublet by well-known thriller writer Beatrice Becks, the girls snap it up. They soon spend their nights twisting through Berlin’s club scene and their days hungover. But are they being watched? Convinced that Beatrice intends to use their lives as inspiration for her next novel, Hailey vows to craft main-character-worthy personas. They begin hosting a decadent weekly nightclub in the apartment, finally gaining the notoriety they’ve been craving. Everyone wants an invitation to “Beatrice’s.” As the year unravels and events spiral out of control, they begin to wonder whose story they are living—and how it will end. Other People’s Clothes brilliantly illuminates the sometimes dangerous intensity of female friendships, as well as offering an unforgettable window into millennial life and the lengths people will go to in order to eradicate emotional pain.
"Fifty-Nine Parks collaborated with some of the world's foremost contemporary artists and designers to create original posters that celebrate the unique beauty of the U.S. National Park system. Each poster is a contemporary take on the W.P.A. posters of the 1930s, resulting in a one-of-a-kind tribute to the majesty of the national parks"--
A comprehensive compendium of artists and writers confronting questions of Black identity, activism and social responsibility in the age of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, based on the landmark traveling exhibition What is "Black art"? This question was posed and answered time and time again between 1960 and 1980 by artists, curators and critics deeply affected by this turbulent period of radical social and political upheaval in America. Rather than answering in one way, they argued for radically different ideas of what "Black art" meant. Across newspapers and magazines, catalogs, pamphlets, interviews, public talks and panel discussions, a lively debate emerged between artists and others to address profound questions of how Black artists should or should not deal with politics, about what audiences they should address and inspire, where they should try to exhibit, how their work should be curated, and whether there was or was not such a category as "Black art" in the first place. Conceived as a reader connected to the landmark exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which shone a light on the vital contributions made by Black artists over two decades, this anthology collects over 150 texts from the artists, critics, curators and others who sought to shape and define the art of their time. Exhaustively researched and edited by exhibition curator Mark Godfrey, who provides the substantial introduction, and Allie Biswas, included are rare and out-of-print texts from artists and writers, as well as texts published for the first time ever. Contributors include: Lawrence Alloway, Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Tomei Arai, Ralph Arnold, Dore Ashton, Malcolm Bailey, Amiri Baraka, Romare Beardon, Fred Beauford, Cleveland Bellow, LeGrace G. Benson, Dawoud Bey, Camille Billops, Lula Mae Blocton, Gloria Bohanon, Claude Booker, Frank Bowling, David Bradford, Peter Bradley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kay Brown, Milton Brown, Vivian Browne, Linda G. Bryant, Margaret G. Burroughs, Debbie Butterfield, Steve Cannon, Yvonne Parks Catchings, Elizabeth Catlett, Dana Chandler, Claudia Chapline, Charles Childs, A.D. Coleman, Dan Concholar, John Coplans, Hugh M. Davies, Douglas Davis, Bing Davis, Alonzo Davis, Dale Davis, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Robert Doty, Emory Douglas, John Dowell, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Tony Eaton, Eugene Eda, Melvin Edwards, Ray Elkins, Ralph Ellison, Elton Fax, Elsa Honig Fine, Frederick Fisk, Babatunde Folayemi, Clebert Ford, Edmund Barry Gaither, Addison Gayle, Henri Ghent, Ray Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Robert H. Glauber, Lynda Goode-Bryant, Allan M. Gordon, Earl G. Graves, Carroll Greene, Abdul Hakimu ibn Halkalimat, David Hammons, David Henderson, Napoleon Henderson, M.J. Hewitt, Richard Hunt, Sam Hunter, Josine Ianco-Starrels, Nigel Jackson, Jay Jacobs, Joseph Jacobs, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Marie Johnson, Walter Jones, Lois Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Cliff Joseph, Paul Keene, Martin Kilson, Wee Kim, April Kingsley, Hilton Kramer, Jacob Lawrence, Carolyn Lawrence, Don L. Lee, Hughie Lee-Smith, Samella Lewis, Tom Lloyd, Al Loving, Howard Mallory, Earl Roger Mandle, Jan van der Marck, Phillip Mason, James Mellow, Paul Mills, Evangeline J. Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Keith Morrison, Lawrence Neal, Cindy Nemser, Robert Newman, Lorraine O''Grady, Ademola Olugebefola, John Outterbridge, Joe Overstreet, Marion Perkins, Marcy S. Philips, Howardena Pindell, Mimi Poser, Helaine Posner, Noah Purifoy, Ishmael Reed, Gary Rickson, Clayton Riley, Faith Ringgold, Mark Rogovin, Barbara Rose, Joseph Ross, Bayard Rustin, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Robert Sengstacke, David Shapiro, Jeanne Siegel, Thomas Sills, Lowery Stokes Sims, Steve Smith, Beuford Smith, Frank Smith, Val Spalding, Edward Spriggs, Nelson Stevens, James Stewart, Simone Swan, Edward K. Taylor, Alma Thomas, Ruth Waddy, William Walker, Francis and Val Gray Ward, Timothy Washington, Burton Wasserman, Diane Weathers, John Weber, JoAnn Whatley, Charles White, Selena Whitefeather, Jack Whitten, Roy Wilkins, William T. Williams, Gerald Williams, Randy Williams, William Wilson, Hale Woodruff and Cherilyn C. Wright.
