Fascinated with the sock monkey since childhood Bonnie Kraus Connelly, a 30 year professional graphic artist, illustrator and business owner, has spent the last decade developing a catalog of childrens stories, illustrations, graphics, and products built around this time-worn folk art toy. Motivated to find artists with like interest and to discover all the sock monkey products available for a dream store/art gallery she wants to build, the idea for book Everythings Coming Up Sock Monkeys was born.Everythings Coming Up Sock Monkeys is a new publication from the art studio of In My Own Dream Publishing. It is a coffee table art book cataloging the Art, History and Business of the American Sock Monkey, Volume 1. As a true celebration of creativity, it features over 80 contributors artists, photographers, collectors, museum and gallery exhibits, vintage and non-typical monkey makers, published books, comics, craft magazines, businesses and more of the humbly famed sock monkey. Enhancing the sock monkeys creative collective life, this is a Good for All book if ever there was.
The success of internet auction sites like eBay and the cult status of public television's Antiques Roadshow attest to the continued popularity of collecting in American culture. Acts of Possession investigates the ways cultural meanings of collections have evolved and yet remained surprisingly unchanged throughout American history. Drawing upon the body of theoretical work on collecting and focusing on individual as opposed to museum collections, the contributors investigate how, what, and why Americans have collected and explore the inherent meanings behind systems of organization and display. Essays consider the meanings of Thomas Jefferson's Indian Hall at Monticello; the pedagogical theories behind nineteenth-century children's curiosity cabinets; collections of Native American artifacts; and the ability of the owners of doll houses to construct meaning within the context of traditional ideals of domesticity. The authors also consider some darker aspects of collecting-hoarding, fetishism, and compulsive behavior-scrutinizing collections of racist memorabilia and fascist propaganda. The final essay posits the serial killer as a collector, an investigation into the dangerous objectification of humans themselves. By bringing fresh, interdisciplinary critical perspectives to bear on these questions, Dilworth and her coauthors weave a fascinating cultural history of collecting in America.
"This publication accompanies the first survey of Willie Cole's work from the late 1980s to the present. Cole was born and raised in New Jersey and has resided in the state his entire life. The exhibition and catalogue focus on Cole's mixed media sculptural works made from salvaged irons, blow dryers, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, lawn jockeys, and bicycle parts; paintings and drawings made of iron scorch marks, and prints. Cole's consumer and domestic objects assume the appearance of objects from another time, culture, or place, transformed into powerful cultural and spiritual evocations referencing African and global culture. His art is solidly based in studious appreciation rather than humorous imitation or ironic appropriation." "The exhibition was organized by Patterson Sims. In this catalogue, Sims offers a broad introduction to Cole and detailed descriptions of the works included in the show. The text traces Cole's thinking, process, and evolution and the influence of his life-long residency in New Jersey. This catalogue also includes an insightful interview between the artist and Leslie King-Hammond, Dean of Graduate Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art; a short essay by Lowery Stokes Sims, President of the Studio Museum in Harlem, related to Cole's pivotal 1988-89 artist residency there; and an extensive chronology and professional history of the artist."--BOOK JACKET.
Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist’s Book is a portrait of the space between things, whether they be neurons, quotations, comic-book frames, or fragments in a collage. This twenty-year project is an artist’s book that juxtaposes quotations and images from hundreds of artists and writers with the author’s own thoughts. Using Adobe InDesign® for composition and layout, the author has structured the book to show analogies among disparate texts and images. There have always been gaps, but a focus on the space between things is virtually synonymous with modernity. Often characterized as a break, modernity is a story of gaps. Around 1900, many independent strands of gap thought and experience interacted and interwove more intricately. Atoms, textiles, theories, women, Jews, collage, poetry, patchwork, and music figure prominently in these strands. The gap is a ubiquitous phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of neuroscience, rabbinic thinking, modern literary criticism, art, popular culture, and the structure of matter. This book explores many subjects, but it is ultimately a work of art.
Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary sources, in dialogue with artists' writings, this anthology traces the historic origins of these debates in different versions of modernism and surveys the relationship between art, value and price; the evolution and influence of patronage; the actors and institutions of the art market; and the diversity of artistic practices that either criticise or embrace the condition of the contemporary market.
A major contribution to Grass scholarship that looks at his career as a whole and identifies four phases or stages of his writing in terms of communicative strategy and style.
