A 20th anniversary edition of the art classic that celebrates the intersection of creative expression and spirituality—from one of the greatest living artists of our time Twenty years after the original publication of The Mission of Art, Alex Grey’s inspirational message affirming art’s power for personal catharsis and spiritual awakening is stronger than ever. In this special anniversary edition, Grey—visionary painter, spiritual leader, and best-selling author—combines his extensive knowledge of art history with his own experiences in creating art at the boundaries of consciousness. Grey examines the roles of conscience and intention in the creative process, including practical techniques and exercises useful in exploring the spiritual dimensions of art. Challenging and thought-provoking, The Mission of Art will be appreciated by everyone who has ever contemplated the deeper purpose of creative expression.
It rises suddenly out of the Sonoran Desert landscape, towering over the tallest tree or cactus, a commanding building with a sensuous dome, elliptical vaults, and sturdy bell towers. There is nothing else like it around, nor does it seem there should be. This incongruity of setting is what strikes first-time visitors to Mission San Xavier del Bac. This great church is of another place and another time, while its beauty is universal and timeless. Mission San Xavier del Bac is a two-century-old Spanish church in southern Arizona located just a few miles from downtown Tucson, a metropolis of more than half a million people in the American Southwest. A National Historic Landmark since 1963, the mission’s graceful baroque art and architecture have drawn visitors from all over the world. Now Bernard Fontana—the leading expert on San Xavier—and award-winning photographer Edward McCain team up to bring us a comprehensive view of the mission as we’ve never seen it before. With 200 stunning full-color photographs and incisive text illuminating the religious, historical, and motivational context of these images, A Gift of Angels is a must-have for tourists, scholars, and other visitors to San Xavier. From its glorious architecture all the way down to the finest details of its art, Mission San Xavier del Bac is indeed a gift of angels.
People communicate by speaking words in over seven thousand languages around the world. They also sing, dance, paint, preach, dramatize, and design communication that enlivens heart, soul, mind, and strength. God gave every community unique gifts of artistic expression to enable its members to proclaim the Truth and to bring healing, hope, and joy to others in the fallen world in which we live. Community Arts for God's Purposes highlights the CLAT (Creating Local Arts Together) method, a seven-step process that inspires artistic creativity and collaboration with local musicians, dancers, storytellers, actors, and visual artists. In this manual, the arts are treated as special kinds of communication systems, connected to specific times, places, and social contexts. As local communities use the creative gifts developed in their particular culture to worship God and extend his kingdom, a beautiful example of the Lord’s complex artistry emerges. This book helps communities draw on examples and insights from over two thousand years of church history to understand and improve the present. It motivates people by painting a vivid picture of a better future: the kingdom of Heaven. Contributors also apply expertise from multiple academic disciplines, such as ethnomusicology, performance studies, anthropology, biblical studies, and missiology. Experiment with this manual. Adapt it to your setting. Let it be an aid in creating astounding bits of artistry on earth that you’ll recognize in Heaven.
With 600 stunning photographs, this comprehensive book showcases more than three decades of street art in San Francisco's legendary Mission District. Beginning in the early 1970s, a provocative street-art movement combining elements of Mexican mural painting, surrealism, pop art, urban punk, eco-warrior, cartoon, and graffiti has flourished in this dynamic, multicultural community. Rigo, Las Mujeres Muralistas, Gronk, Barry McGee (Twist), R. Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, the Billboard Liberation Front, Swoon, Sam Flores, Neckface, Shepard Fairey, Juana Alicia, Os Gemeos, Reminesce, and Andrew Schoultz are among the many artists who have made the streets of the Mission their public gallery. Essays and commentaries by insiders involved with the movement document the artistic, social, and political forces that have shaped Mission Muralismo.
An examination of Lee Lozano's greatest experiment in art and endurance—a major work of art that might not exist at all. The artist Lee Lozano (1930–1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano's Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave. And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozano's most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artist's entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano's act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of Dropout Piece in the context of the artist's practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.
Since 1961, our country has launched men and women into the hostile vacuum of space. For the adventures on which they were about to embark, astronauts, associates and designers commemorated each mission by creating a unique insignia that the crew could wear with pride on their spacesuits. Space Mission Art collects every one of these iconic designs, plus sticker sheets, to celebrate the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Space Shuttle programs. They are presented in full color and glorious detail alongside the stories behind their design. There are also crew photos, mission facts and trivia that reveal the human face of space exploration, capturing the comedy, tragedy, bravery and beauty of these extraordinary adventures into the unknown.
Once upon a time, people knew their neighbors. They talked to them, had cook-outs with them, and went to church with them. In our time of unprecedented mobility and increasing isolationism, it's hard to make lasting connections with those who live right outside our front door. We have hundreds of "friends" through online social networking, but we often don't even know the full name of the person who lives right next door. This unique and inspiring book asks the question: What is the most loving thing I can do for the people who live on my street or in my apartment building? Through compelling true stories of lives impacted, the authors show readers how to create genuine friendships with the people who live in closest proximity to them. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter make this book perfect for small groups or individual study.
Artist Alex Grey is creating some of the most beautifully refined paintings in the world today and his work is exhibited worldwide, including the New Museum and Stux Gallery in New York, the Grand Palais in Paris, the São Paulo Biennial, and ARK exhibition space in Tokyo. His art is also featured in venues as diverse as album covers for the Beastie Boys, Nirvana, and Tool, Newsweek magazine, and the Discovery Channel. This is a limited collector’s edition which contains: • One hardcover copy of Sacred Mirrors • One hardcover copy of Transfigurations • Portfolio of six new paintings suitable for framing • The protective case acts as an altar • Contains over 250 color paintings
"While putting a copy of this book on your nightstand would be a sign of good taste, who cares about good taste? Are you willing to be seen reading a book titled Censorship Now!! in public? If so, your skin might burn with funny glances from squares, scolds and looky-loos. But on the inside, you'll feel your brain throbbing as it swells to accommodate some hilarious, absurd and radical new strategies on how to live in our ridiculous world." --Washington Post "Svenonius' new book is Censorship Now!!, and the title alone shows just how provocative the author can be. A collection of essays previously published by Vice, Jacobin, and others, it sets up numerous enemies--both real and straw--for Svenonius to knock down....It's all couched in a style that's part anarchist tirade, part postmodern critique, and part punk-rock snottiness--yet it's addictively ridiculous." --NPR "Censor it all. Film, TV, music, politics, books, news, art--censor all of it. That's the guiding principle of local radical punk Ian Svenonius' latest essay collection, Censorship Now!!" --Washington City Paper, Critics' Pick Named a Favorite Book of 2015 by Jason Diamond at Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Gonzo ecstasy for those who have come to know Svenonius's self-aware political meditations....And though the essays Svenonius writes are not themselves unclear, the process of talking about what he's written involves discussions that some might find uncomfortable. His books make more sense the more you dissect them. So keep them in your back pocket and read them, one word at a time." --Los Angeles Review of Books "A new collection of essays by everyone's favorite supercilious rock theorist...Svenonius has always been the smartest kid in the room....In print, Svenonius is like that curmudgeonly pal that you adore because, even while his insight quivers between humor, paranoia, and antisocial ire, he never dispels your fascination in how he gets there." --SF Weekly "Ian Svenonius is best known as the frontman of bands like the Make-Up and Nation of Ulysses, but he's also a brilliant cultural critic with a talent for coming up with the hottest takes you'll ever read. In this collection, Svenonius makes compelling arguments in favor of censorship and hoarding books and records, amid polemics against Apple and Ikea, the yuppification of indie rock, and the shaving of pubic hair." --Buzzfeed "The essays in Censorship Now!! are equally packed with modest proposals and mock-revolutionary rhetoric, but there are grains of truth in pieces like 'The Historic Role Of Sugar In Empire Building' and 'Heathers Revisited: The Nerd's Fight For Niceness'--they're just buried somewhere between tongue and cheek." --The A.V. Club "Censorship Now!! simultaneously deals in the heated rhetoric of insurgent calls to action, the seductive broad strokes of propaganda, and the clever winking of surrealist humor. Often when I'm really convinced Svenonius has gone off a paranoid deep end, the next sentence hits back with knowingly-hilarious exaggeration or profoundly spot-on analysis, realigning my perspective and making me wonder again....It's fitting that a book whose intentions are ambiguous begins with a call to censor art and ends by letting art do the talking." --Pitchfork Ian F. Svenonius's new collection of sixteen essays and stories, entitled Censorship Now!!, is reorganizing people's ideas about censorship, Ikea, documentary filmmaking, the Berlin Wall, the film Heathers, the twist, the frug, the mashed potato, shaving one's body, Apple, Inc., Nordic functionalism, the supposed benevolence of the Wikipedia, hoarding, college rock, the origins of the Internet, and more. It's an underground smash which has been met with a horrified gasp in all respectable quarters and gog-eyed enthusiasm in artist garrets the world over.
