A prolific artist with a prodigious gift for stimulating the creativity of others, James Surls is one of the most important sculptors working in America today. His art blends natural forms created of wood, steel, and bronze with sophisticated, sometimes edgy imagery and content to explore fundamental dualities and paradoxes—male and female, joyous optimism and anxious foreboding, conscious rationality and unconscious intuition. Fusing personalized folk idioms with the aesthetics of high modernism, Surls's sculptures are clearly self-expressive, yet freighted with universal meaning. This beautifully illustrated book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, captures an extraordinarily creative period in Surls's career—the two decades he lived and worked in Splendora, Texas. During this time, Surls established a home and artists' colony in the East Texas pineywoods, where he produced an astonishing body of work while encouraging the creativity of other visual and performing artists. Magnificent color and black-and-white images illustrate the key sculptures and works on paper that Surls created in Splendora. Accompanying the images are essays and interviews that offer fascinating insights into Surls's artistic breakthrough in Splendora. Terrie Sultan introduces Surls's work and provides a concise biography of the artist. Eleanor Heartney places Surls's Splendora works within the larger contexts of American and international art. Artists and gallery owners John Alexander, Joseph Havel, The Art Guys, Hiram Butler, and Sharon and Gus Kopriva, as well as curator Jim Harithas and architect Peter Zweig, share lively memories of Splendora as an artist colony and of Surls's pivotal role as artistic mentor and arts impresario for the whole Houston-area arts community. James Surls and his wife Charmaine Locke add a personal signature to the book by describing how their love and their work blossomed in an atmosphere of total freedom to experiment and create. This publication of James Surls's Splendora works clearly establishes that no other artist of Surls's generation has had a greater impact upon the development of Texas as a center of vibrant creativity. At the same time, it confirms Surls's standing within the contemporary international art world as a revolutionary who has expanded the boundaries of traditional sculpture while maintaining a high degree of aesthetic and intellectual quality.
Hoarding is a serious, time-consuming, and expensive problem for virtually every community across the United States. First responders often encounter hoarding unexpectedly and are confused about how to resolve the wide range of problems, from public health and fire safety violations, to housing violations, to concern for the welfare of children, elders and animals. Sometimes solutions must be coordinated across several human service disciplines. The first of its kind, this handy guide is a nuts and bolts resource filled with case studies, tips and strategies, and easy-to-use suggestions for professionals responding to hoarding situations. Organized around the common ways hoarding captures the attention of social service providers, this user-friendly guide provides tools to assess the problem, to coordinate and delegate tasks among helping professionals, and to work directly with reluctant hoarders and those affected by the hoarding. Chapters give hands-on guidance and decision trees for who should be involved and what strategies are needed for each case. This book is compassionate and comprehensive, an invaluable reference for social workers and human service providers in a broad range of fields.
Since its inception as an institutionalized discipline in the United States during the 1980s, performance studies has focused on the interdisciplinary analysis of a broad spectrum of cultural behaviours including theatre, dance, folklore, popular entertainments, performance art, protests, cultural rituals, and the performance of self in everyday life. Performance Studies in Canada brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the national emergence of performance studies as a field in Canada. To date, no systematic attempts has been made to consider how this methodology is being taught, applied, and rethought in Canadian contexts, and Canadian performance studies scholarship remains largely unacknowledged within international discussions about the discipline. This collection fills this gap by identifying multiple origins of performance studies scholarship in the country and highlighting significant works of performance theory and history that are rooted in Canadian culture. Essays illustrate how specific institutional conditions and cultural investments – Indigenous, francophone, multicultural, and more – produce alternative articulations of “performance” and reveal national identity as a performative construct. A state-of-the-art work on the state of the field, Performance Studies in Canada foregrounds national and global performance knowledge to invigorate the discipline around the world.
National Indie Excellence Awards, first prize in the Parenting and Family category Arguing that adolescence is an unnecessary period of life that people are better off without, this groundbreaking study shows that teen confusion and hardships are caused by outmoded systems that were designed to destroy the continuum between childhood and adulthood. Documenting how teens are isolated from adults and are forced to look to their media-dominated peers for knowledge, this discussion contends that by infantilizing young people, society does irrevocable harm to their development and well-being. Instead, parents, teachers, employers, and others must rediscover the adults in young people by giving them authority and responsibility as soon as they exhibit readiness. Teens are highly capable--in some ways more than adults--and this landmark discussion offers paths for reaching and enhancing the competence in America's youth.
This volume contains the most important lecture notes by experts from condensed matter, particle physics and cosmology and is a MUST for young researchers and graduate students.While covering frontier developments in condensed matter physics, particle physics and cosmology, this school aims to bring out their interdisciplinary nature by emphasizing certain topics such as spontaneous symmetry breaking and renormalization group through a pedagogical set of lectures. In the condensed matter area, the school covered, in the first two weeks, experimental aspects of high temperature superconductivity and its possible applications.
As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.