Gorges that plummet into serpentine shadows ... Cloaks of white that drape the rocky crags of snowy mountains ... In this magnificent celebration of country, Bronwyn Bancroft uses colours, shapes, patterns and words to explore the awe-inspiring beauty of the Australian continent, and to express the depth of her feelings for it. The Art in Country: A Treasury for Children is an essential addition to any young Australian's library, and a perfect introduction to the many wonders that this country has to offer. This is a treasury to be cherished by all who love this land.
The canonical work of cultural criticism by the “profoundly influential critic” (Artnet), in a beautiful thirtieth-anniversary edition, featuring a new foreword by esteemed visual artist Mickalene Thomas Called “one of the country’s most influential feminist thinkers” by Artforum, bell hooks and her work have enjoyed a huge resurgence of popularity since her passing in 2021. Her 2018 book All About Love has sold upwards of 700,000 copies, and posthumous tributes have credited her with being “instrumental in cracking open the white, western canon for Black artists” (Artnet). To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of her groundbreaking essay collection Art on My Mind, The New Press will publish a handsome, celebratory edition, featuring a new foreword by Tony-nominated producer and all-around creative phenom Mickalene Thomas and a new cover featuring original photos of bell hooks shot by African American photojournalist Eli Reed. This classic work, which, as the New York Times wrote, “examines the way race, sex and class shape who makes art, how it sells and who values it,” includes what Artforum calls “incisive essays” on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Isaac Julien, Carrie Mae Weems, and Romare Bearden, among others. Her essays on Black vernacular architecture, representation of the Black male body, and the creative process of women artists, are complemented by conversations with Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, Margo Humphrey, and LaVerne Wells-Bowie, which Kirkus Reviews calls “excellent indeed,” and “a real contribution to our understanding of the situation of black women artists.”
The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.
Introduction: Dolly mythology -- "Backwoods Barbie": Dolly Parton's gender performance -- My Tennessee mountain home: early Parton and authenticity narratives -- Parton's crossover and film stardom: the "hillbilly Mae West"--Hungry again: reclaiming country authenticity narratives -- "Digital Dolly" and new media fandoms -- Conclusion: brand evolution and Dollywood
Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is a first-ever survey exploring the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian Ancestry active in the United States before 1970, and features ten essays by leading scholars, biographies of more than 150 artists, and more than 400 reproductions of artwork and photographs of artists, together creating compelling narratives of this heretofore forgotten American art history.
Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries. The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.
" Art & Place is an extraordinary collection of site–specific art in the Americas. Featuring hundreds of powerful art works in 60 cities – from Albuquerque to Boston and Baja to Rio de Janeiro – the book is both an informative guide and a virtual bucket list of outstanding art destinations. Conceived and developed by Phaidon editors, Art & Place covers carving, painting, murals, frescos, earthworks, land art, and more. Each of the works has a dedicated entry pairing gorgeous, large‐format images with in‐depth descriptions. Maps pinpoint the sites’ locations while specially commissioned plans reveal some of the more complex layouts. The book is organized geographically, offering fresh juxtapositions among familiar art works, such as Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, alongside lesser-known revelations, such as Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea in Brazil. Whether in the mountains, at the heart of a city, or on a remote island, the works in Art & Place are all inextricably linked with their environment. This is art to experience in an immersive way, presented together in a single book for the first time. "
