Canyon Collective Artists
Canyon Collective Artists

Author: Ekin Pinar

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1961, filmmakers Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand, Larry Jordan, and film critic Ernest Callenbach founded Canyon Cinema for weekly film screenings of a diverse selection of avant-garde, experimental and art-house films, newsreels, cartoons and animations as well as commercial Hollywood movies. Canyon screenings took place on locations expanding from San Francisco into Oakland, San Jose, and Berkeley as many as three times a week. This gravitation toward mobility, variation and flexibility also showed itself in the prolific film production of the members of the collective. Through use of methods such as appropriation, fragmentation, and reflexivity, Canyon filmmakers developed more intimate (memory), immediate (experience), and imaginative (fantasy) ways of engaging with the past. At the same time, their search for historic and ethnographic "realities" constantly question the conventional methods, genres, and medium-specific elements of filmmaking. In my dissertation, I re-evaluate the ways in which Canyon filmmakers approached the ethical, political, and cultural issues inherent in the representation of culture and history through the help of three concepts: performance in Strand's ethnographies and found footage films, allegory in Baillie's newsreels, and indexicality in Jordan's animations. In the first chapter, I focus on the evocation of issues of sexuality, minority politics, and history in Bruce Baillie's films. Reflecting on Baillie's approaches to representation of race, culture, and gender, I consider how and what type of minority movement allegories transpired in Baillie's cinema. My second chapter concentrates on Chick Strand's films in its entirety comprising both found footage and documentary works. I analyze Strand's citational, reflexive, and performative uses of pleasure, desire, and humor as productive strategies of bridging the then-wide gap between experimental and feminist cinemas. Larry Jordan's animations and live-action films, which explore the dynamic tensions between still and moving imagery, visual and tactile sensations, and surrealist, lyrical and ethnographic modes of filmic expression, constitute the focus of the third chapter. Considering the notions of repetition, transformation, layering, and materiality that dominates Jordan's films, I question how his films resist linear narratives by revealing alternative paths, multiple voices, and cyclical repetitions of histories.

Canyon Cinema
Canyon Cinema

Author: Scott MacDonald

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-01-02

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 052094061X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bringing alive a remarkable moment in American cultural history, Scott MacDonald tells the colorful story of how a small, backyard organization in the San Francisco Bay Area emerged in the 1960s and evolved to become a major force in the development of independent cinema. Drawing from extensive conversations with men and women crucial to Canyon Cinema, from its newsletter Canyon Cinemanews, and from other key sources, MacDonald offers a lively chronicle of the life and times of this influential, idiosyncratic film exhibition and distribution collective. His book features many primary documents that are as engaging and relevant now as they were when originally published, including essays, poetry, experimental writing, and drawings.

Canyon of Dreams
Canyon of Dreams

Author: Harvey Kubernik

Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9781402765896

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Traces the musical legacy of the California neighborhood, and the artists who lived there

Sun Patterns-Dark Canyon: the Paintings and Aquatints of Doel Reed (1894-1985)
Sun Patterns-Dark Canyon: the Paintings and Aquatints of Doel Reed (1894-1985)

Author: Rebecca Brienen

Publisher:

Published: 2021-04

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 9780989549967

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sun Patterns - Dark Canyon explores the art and career of the highly successful twentieth-century American printmaker and painter Doel Reed (1894-1985). Reed is best known today as a Southwestern artist and "master of the aquatint;" his conservative yet modernist approach to the New Mexican landscape found a ready audience among curators and collectors during his lifetime. Reed began summering in the Taos artists' colony starting in the 1940s and permanently moved to New Mexico in 1959. The mountainous topography, geology, and history of New Mexico were an endless source of inspiration to Reed. Despite the fact that Reed was a nationally recognized artist and educator, whose paintings and especially prints are in the collections of major museums throughout the United States and Europe, no scholarly studies exist on the artist. This catalog will not only bring attention to Reed's art and career, but it will also contribute to knowledge about the development of American art and the embrace of printmaking by leading artists throughout the country. Printmaking started to receive attention as fine art in the United States during Reed's lifetime and was only slowly incorporated into university and art academy curricula. Reed was an acknowledged leader in the United States with respect to the technique of aquatint, which reflects his close study of Goya's masterful graphic work. By focusing on Reed, we also gain insight into the vibrant community of artists throughout the American Southwest and Midwest in the 1930s-1970s and how they responded to and adapted modernist approaches for their own purposes and audiences. His close friends and students included artists as diverse as Birger Sandzén, Ernst Blumenshein, William (Bill) Dickerson, J. Jay McVicker, and Howard Cook, among many others.Reed exhibited widely throughout his lifetime, won numerous awards, and was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1952. In 1984, when Reed was 90 years old, his prints were included in no fewer than five national exhibitions in New York City.

Art for a New Understanding
Art for a New Understanding

Author: Mindy N. Besaw

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1682260801

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Art for a New Understanding, an exhibition from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art that opened in October 2018, seeks to radically expand and reposition the narrative of American art since 1950 by charting a history of the development of contemporary Indigenous art from the United States and Canada, beginning when artists moved from more regionally-based conversations and practices to national and international contemporary art contexts. This fully illustrated volume includes essays by art historians and historians and reflections by the artists included in the collection. Also included are key contemporary writings—from the 1950s onward—by artists, scholars, and critics, investigating the themes of transculturalism and pan-Indian identity, traditional practices conducted in radically new ways, displacement, forced migration, shadow histories, the role of personal mythologies as a means to reimagine the future, and much more. As both a survey of the development of Indigenous art from the 1950s to the present and a consideration of Native artists within contemporary art more broadly, Art for a New Understanding expands the definition of American art and sets the tone for future considerations of the subject. It is an essential publication for any institution or individual with an interest in contemporary Native American art, and an invaluable resource in ongoing scholarly considerations of the American contemporary art landscape at large.

Laurel Canyon
Laurel Canyon

Author: Michael Walker

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2010-05-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1429932937

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Michael Walker’s Laurel Canyon presents the inside story of the once hottest rock and roll neighborhood in LA. In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had before them. Thirty years later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world. During the canyon's golden era, the musicians who lived and worked there scored dozens of landmark hits, from "California Dreamin'" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" to "It's Too Late," selling tens of millions of records and resetting the thermostat of pop culture. In Laurel Canyon, veteran journalist Michael Walker tells the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the baby boomer's leading musical lights—including Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a few—who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed.

Rock Art of the Grand Canyon Region
Rock Art of the Grand Canyon Region

Author: Don D. Christensen

Publisher: Sunbelt Publications

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780932653093

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The rich photography and narrative in this book presents an overview of approximately 5,000 years of Native American rock art painted and engraved on the canyon walls and boulders within the greater Grand Canyon region, an area stretching south from the Arizona-Utah border to the Mogollon Rim. The authors and their associates have recorded and documented more than 450 rock art sites within the region over the past 25 years in cooperation with the Kaibab National Forest, Grand Canyon National Park, Bureau of Land Management/Arizona Strip, and the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument. Their work presents a preliminary classification of this rock art within a chronological framework and associated cultural affiliations. These enigmatic images are placed within their environmental and archaeological context, essential in deriving potential clues as to their function and significance. Several interpretation theories exist in the literature and these are carefully examined in light of this current research. Importantly, rock art is an endangered cultural heritage and the question of its protection, preservation, and conservation also receives attention. While rock art offers a view into one aspect of the prehistoric cultural landscape, the religious and social importance of these images continues to have relevance to contemporary Native American peoples as well as representing an engaging cultural legacy for all humanity.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Author: Carolyn Kastner

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 0826353908

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first full-length critical analysis of the paintings of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, this book focuses on Smith’s role as a modernist in addition to her status as a wellknown Native American artist. With close readings of Smith’s work, Carolyn Kastner shows how Smith simultaneously contributes to and critiques American art and its history. Smith has distinguished herself as a modernist both in her pursuit of abstraction and her expressive technique, but too often her identity as a Native American artist has overshadowed these aspects of her work. Addressing specific themes in Smith’s career, Kastner situates Smith within specific historical and cultural moments of American art, comparing her work to the abstractions of Kandinsky and Miró, as well as to the pop art of Rauschenberg and Johns. She discusses Smith’s appropriation of pop culture icons like the Barbie doll, reimagined by the artist as Barbie Plenty Horses. As Kastner considers how Smith constructs each new series of artworks within the artistic, social, and political discourse of its time, she defines her contribution to American modernism and its history. Discussing the ways in which Smith draws upon her cultural heritage—both Native and non-Native—Kastner demonstrates how Smith has expanded the definitions of “American” and “modernist” art.