Not since 1964 has a book been written on New Jersey art history. This ground-breaking volume features many of the entire state's painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers, illustrators, and cartoonists, and celebrates New Jersey's 350th anniversary, 2014. Although many artists are gone now, their legacies are still vibrant; the ones who are working and exhibiting here are providing the important legacies of the future in this comprehensive overview of a wealth of artwork. How exciting that many of these artists are known nationally and internationally! You will get to know them, discover more about them, and you will be delighted to know that New Jersey's art world stands tall and most proudly between New York and Philadelphia. Readers of all ages finally have a treasury and inspiration that promises to keep New Jersey brimming with art for years to come.
Water and light have seduced artists through the years and the quality of these elements at the New Jersey Shore continues to attract artists to this day. Between the late 1800s and 1940, an inspired group of painters were drawn to the New Jersey coastline, forming communities of artists. Jersey Shore Impressionists breaks new ground in the history of American art by recognizing the distinct influence of New Jersey and its Shore on impressionist era American painters. This book establishes ¿ for the first time ¿ a category of impressionist American painters who focused on, or were profoundly influenced by, the landscapes and seascapes of this Shore ¿ from Sandy Hook and Highlands to the Barnegat Bay region to Cape May. ¿Not since 1964, nearly 50 years ago, and only once before that in 1938 has there been published a book on painters in New Jersey,¿ says the book¿s author, Roy Pedersen. ¿Never until now has there appeared a survey of the regional impressionist painters of New Jersey.¿ Jersey Shore Impressionists is produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the Morven Museum & Garden in Princeton, NJ., which seeks to examine how the New Jersey shore was home to artist colonies whose output rivaled that of the better-known colonies of Old Lyme and Cos Cob, Connecticut, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In a Foreword, Richard J. Boyle, former director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, describes the foundation of art colonies, and how they traveled from origins in mid-nineteenth century France to the plein-air attraction of the Jersey Shore's ¿special light.¿ The first art colony ¿ at Manasquan ¿ forms around 1880 as young artists fresh from European training in Germany, France and Italy begin to arrive, and the book includes work from these artists ¿ Will Hicok Low, Theodore Robinson, Albert Grantley Reinhart, Charles Freeman and Caroline Coventry Haynes. The next generation ¿ Edward Boulton, Ida Wells Stroud, Julius Golz ¿ trained in America, join and form new colonies to paint the unique light as well as the activities of the Shore. The passionate work created by these artists stands as an important, but unsung, chapter of American Impressionism and is celebrated in this book, establishing the important contribution to American art in general, and New Jersey¿s cultural heritage in particular.
New Jersey Fan Club is an eclectic anthology featuring personal essays, interviews, photographs, and comics from a diverse group of writers and artists. An exploration of how the same locale can shape people in different ways, it will inspire readers to look at the Garden State with fresh eyes.
An examination of the interplay between cultural context and artistic practice in the work of Robert Smithson. Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and thoroughly than any time before or since. In Robert Smithson, Ann Reynolds elucidates the complexity of Smithson's work and thought by placing them in their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival materials that Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1987. The archive provides Reynolds with the remnants of Smithson's working life—magazines, postcards from other artists, notebooks, and perhaps most important, his library—from which she reconstructs the physical and conceptual world that Smithson inhabited. Reynolds explores the relation of Smithson's art-making, thinking about art-making, writing, and interaction with other artists to the articulated ideology and discreet assumptions that determined the parameters of artistic practice of the time. A central focus of Reynolds's analysis is Smithson's fascination with the blind spots at the center of established ways of seeing and thinking about culture. For Smithson, New Jersey was such a blind spot, and he returned there again and again—alone and with fellow artists—to make art that, through its location alone, undermined assumptions about what and, more important, where, art should be. For those who guarded the integrity of the established art world, New Jersey was "elsewhere"; but for Smithson, "elsewheres" were the defining, if often forgotten, locations on the map of contemporary culture.
"Between 1950 and 1975, some of the postwar era's most innovative artists flocked to a very unexpected place: New Jersey. Appreciating what others tended to ignore or mock, they gravitated to the state's most desolate peripheries: its industrial wastescapes, crumbling cities, crowded highways, and banal suburbs. There they produced some of the most important work of their careers. The breakthroughs in land, conceptual, performance, and site-specific art that New Jersey helped catalyze are the subject of New Jersey as Non-Site, whose title evokes the mixed-media sculptures that Robert Smithson began to create in 1968 while driving the state's highways with Nancy Holt. This catalogue examines more than 100 works by sixteen artists, including Amiri Baraka, George Brecht, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Gordon Matta-Clark, and George Segal. Organized around three themes--ruin, cooperation, and displacement--Kelly Baum's essay considers their work in relationship to seismic shifts in the world of art and equally dramatic changes to New Jersey's economy, infrastructure, landscape, demography, and social stability."--
The illustrator of the "Goosebumps" series' covers provides an inside look at his life, from his childhood and earliest attempts at drawing to his rise to stardom.
Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey’s rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. The book includes chapters on the beginnings of musical recording in Thomas Edison’s factories in West Orange; early recording and the invention of the Victrola at Victor Records’ Camden complex; Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studios (for Blue Note, Prestige, and other jazz labels) in Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs; Zacherley and the afterschool dance television show Disc-o-Teen, broadcast from Newark in the 1960s; Bruce Springsteen’s early years on the Jersey Shore at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park; and, the 1980s indie rock scene centered at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Concluding with a foray into the thriving local music scenes of today, the book examines the sounds, sights and textures of the locales where New Jerseyans have gathered to rock, bop, and boogie.
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir of one woman's later in life career change is “a smart, funny and compelling case for going after your heart's desires, no matter your age” (Essence). Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school––in her sixties––to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference? Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this "glorious achievement––bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives" (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage).
Everything you've ever wanted to know about the Garden State can now be found in one place. This encyclopaedia contains a wealth of information from New Jersey's prehistory to the present covering architecture, arts, biographies, commerce, arts, municipalities and much more.
Los Angeles rock generally conjures memories of surf music, The Doors, or Laurel Canyon folkies. But punk? L.A.'s punk scene, while not as notorious as that of New York City, emerged full-throated in 1977 and boasted bands like The Germs, X, and Black Flag. This book explores how, in the land of the Beach Boys, punk rock took hold. As a teenager, Dewar MacLeod witnessed firsthand the emergence of the punk subculture in Southern California. As a scholar, he here reveals the origins of an as-yet-uncharted revolution. Having combed countless fanzines and interviewed key participants, he shows how a marginal scene became a "mass subculture" that democratized performance art, and he captures the excitement and creativity of a neglected episode in rock history. Kids of the Black Hole tells how L.A. punk developed, fueled by youth unemployment and alienation, social conservatism, and the spare landscape of suburban sprawl communities; how it responded to the wider cultural influences of Southern California life, from freeways to architecture to getting high; and how L.A. punks borrowed from their New York and London forebears to create their own distinctive subculture. Along the way, MacLeod not only teases out the differences between the New York and L.A. scenes but also distinguishes between local styles, from Hollywood's avant-garde to Orange County's hardcore. With an intimate knowledge of bands, venues, and zines, MacLeod cuts to the heart of L.A. punk as no one has before. Told in lively prose that will satisfy fans, Kids of the Black Hole will also enlighten historians of American suburbia and of youth and popular culture.
