Permutation and portraiture: serial paintings of moons, stripes and the birds of Maine by Ann Craven Birds We Know is the catalog for an exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist Ann Craven (born 1967). This large survey at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art is the artist's first exhibition in Maine, where she has been living part-time and painting since the early 1990s. It was at her farm house in Lincolnville, Maine, inspired by the colors of the natural environment, that Craven completed her very first moon painting in 1995; she says her time in Lincolnville "gave me my subject matter." The new exhibition and catalog include the imagery that Craven is renowned for including her lushly colored, mesmerizing moon and stripe paintings, but here the birds dominate as the primary subject, including work made between 1997 and 2019. The book includes an essay by Christopher B. Crosman, formerly of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Farnsworth Art Museum.
A panorama of painterly motifs, combined and reprised Ann Craven (born 1972) superimposes source photographs, historical works and her own paintings, creating mediated images that feature layer upon layer of referentiality--a collage of her most treasured curios. Peacocks showcase their plumage; birds perch on a branch; a trio of horses pose "just so." Through these acts of creation and recreation, Craven becomes both master and copyist, citing herself in her own art historical lineage. Animals, birds, flowers, moons: Craven's motifs are in themselves an incantation--a wish to repeat, reencounter, relive. In keeping with this process of revisitation, Craven's paintings are repeated in threes throughout this fully illustrated catalog, mimicking the tripartite structure of her Animals Birds Flowers Moonsexhibition. The book is divided into three parts, each paired with one of three texts: two newly commissioned essays by Durga Chew-Bose and Keith Mayerson, and a 2021 interview between Craven and Lois Dodd.
Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive and baffling animals on the planet. But how well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal offers a radical take on what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal. Tracing the history of this thinking through to its far-reaching effects on our lives, and drawing on a range of disciplines, Challenger proposes that being an animal is a process, beautiful and unpredictable, and that we have a chance to tell ourselves a new story; to realise that if we matter, so does everything else.
“A first-rate fantasy for middle-grade readers,” declares Booklist in a starred review, comparing Gabriel Finley to Harry Potter, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and The Mysterious Benedict Society. A tangle of ingenious riddles, a malevolent necklace called a torc, and flocks of menacing birds: these are just some of the obstacles that stand between Gabriel and his father, Adam Finley, who has vanished from their Brooklyn brownstone. When Gabriel rescues an orphaned baby raven named Paladin, he discovers a family secret: Finleys can bond with ravens in extraordinary ways. Along with Paladin and three valiant friends, Gabriel sets out to bring his father home. They soon discover that Adam is being held captive by the evil demon Corax—half man, half raven, and Adam’s very own disgraced brother—in a foreboding netherworld of birds called Aviopolis. With help from his army of ghoulish minions, the valravens, Corax is plotting to take over the land above, and now only Gabriel stands in his way. “A vivid, compelling fantasy that sends you off to a world you will not soon forget.” —Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth “A great read for fantasy lovers who have worn out their copies of Harry Potter.” —School Library Journal, Starred “Brimful of antic energy and inventive flair, like the best middle-grade fantasies; readers, like baby birds, will devour it and clamor for future installments.” —Kirkus Reviews
This generously illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911–60). Best known as the founder of Bay Area Figurative art, Park moved from Boston to California at the age of seventeen and spent most of his adult life in and around San Francisco. In the immediate postwar years, like many avant-garde American artists, he engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in 1949, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and return to the human figure, in so doing marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement. The astonishingly powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers, and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color. In 1958–59 Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums when he could no longer work on canvas. In the last months of his life, bedridden, he produced an extraordinary thirty-foot-long felt-tip-pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches. Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Park’s work in more than thirty years, David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist’s career, from his early social realist and cubist-inspired efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper. An overview of Park’s full body of work by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will be joined by approximately ninety full-color plates of paintings and works on paper; an essay by Tara McDowell on the figure drawing sessions held by Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and others in their studios starting in 1953; short essays on Park’s scroll, his gouaches, and the portraits that Imogen Cunningham and Park made of each other; and an illustrated chronology. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition schedule: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: June 2–September 8, 2019 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: December 21, 2019–March 15, 2020 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: April 11–September 7, 2020
Soon to be a feature film from the creators of Downton Abbey starring Elizabeth McGovern, The Chaperone is a New York Times-bestselling novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in the 1920s and the summer that would change them both. Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she’s in for. Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever. For Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might answer the question at the core of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place she embarks on a mission of her own. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, she is liberated in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of Cora’s relationship with Louise, her eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive. Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s, ’30s, and beyond—from the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new opportunities for women—Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion and hemlines to values and attitudes, was changing at this time and what a vast difference it all made for Louise Brooks, Cora Carlisle, and others like them.
Scholarly essays on the achievements of female artists working in and inspired by the American South Looking back at her lengthy career just four years before her death, modernist painter Nell Blaine said, "Art is central to my life. Not being able to make or see art would be a major deprivation." The Virginia native's creative path began early, and, during the course of her life, she overcame significant barriers in her quest to make and even see art, including serious vision problems, polio, and paralysis. And then there was her gender. In 1957 Blaine was hailed by Life magazine as someone to watch, profiled alongside four other emerging painters whom the journalist praised "not as notable women artists but as notable artists who happen to be women." In Central to Their Lives, twenty-six noted art historians offer scholarly insight into the achievements of female artists working in and inspired by the American South. Spanning the decades between the late 1890s and early 1960s, this volume examines the complex challenges these artists faced in a traditionally conservative region during a period in which women's social, cultural, and political roles were being redefined and reinterpreted. The presentation—and its companion exhibition—features artists from all of the Southern states, including Dusti Bongé, Anne Goldthwaite, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Ida Kohlmeyer, Loïs Mailou Jones, Alma Thomas, and Helen Turner. These essays examine how the variables of historical gender norms, educational barriers, race, regionalism, sisterhood, suffrage, and modernism mitigated and motivated these women who were seeking expression on canvas or in clay. Whether working from studio space, in spare rooms at home, or on the world stage, these artists made remarkable contributions to the art world while fostering future generations of artists through instruction, incorporating new aesthetics into the fine arts, and challenging the status quo. Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provides a foreword to the volume. Contributors: Sara C. Arnold Daniel Belasco Lynne Blackman Carolyn J. Brown Erin R. Corrales-Diaz John A. Cuthbert Juilee Decker Nancy M. Doll Jane W. Faquin Elizabeth C. Hamilton Elizabeth S. Hawley Maia Jalenak Karen Towers Klacsmann Sandy McCain Dwight McInvaill Courtney A. McNeil Christopher C. Oliver Julie Pierotti Deborah C. Pollack Robin R. Salmon Mary Louise Soldo Schultz Martha R. Severens Evie Torrono Stephen C. Wicks Kristen Miller Zohn
The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal has been published annually since 1974. It contains scholarly articles and shorter notes pertaining to objects in the Museum’s seven curatorial departments: Antiquities, Manuscripts, Paintings, Drawings, Decorative Arts, Sculpture and Works of Art, and Photographs. The Journal includes an illustrated checklist of the Museum’s acquisitions for the precious year, a staff listing, and a statement by the Museum’s director outlining the year’s most important activities. Volume 20 of the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal contains an index to volumes 1 to 20 and includes articles by John Walsh, Carl Brandon Strehlke, Barbara Bohen, Kelly Pask, Suzanne Lewis, Elizabeth Pilliod, Anne Ratzki-Kraatz, Sharon K. Shore, Linda A. Strauss, Brian Considine, Arie Wallert, Richard Rand, And Jacky De Veer-Langezaal.
“A perfect book”—and basis for the Maggie Smith film—about a teacher who makes a lasting impression on her female students in the years before World War II (Chicago Tribune). “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.
