New Books In Art

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our

In The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple University Press, 2021), Timothy K. August centers Southeast Asian American writers and artists to develop a theory of refugee aesthetics as a way of considering how aesthetic forms are created and contested by refugees, nonrefugees, and institutions alike. On this episode of New Books in Asian American Studies, Timothy K. August discusses the contradictions in how refugee stories are read as arising from exceptional circumstances even as the ever-increasing number of refugees renders refugeeness a remarkably everyday experience; the importance of aesthetics as a means by which refugees are able to contest—and reimagine—the refugee narratives that have been created through institutional and bureaucratic definitions of refugees; how refugee writers reconcile demands that they explain their experiences or perform their humanity within their own art and writing; and more. The Refugee Aesthetic examines a range of literary and artistic works by

In The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader (University of California Press, 2021), Jordana Moore Saggese provides the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpubl

From his home in Connecticut, Ran Oron observed and drew a pair of ospreys, a couple of birds of prey that return each year to the same nest. With a delicate line, in a series of drawings, in a narrative that straddles poetry and prose, he wrote and echoed the construction of his own family nest, its dismantling, and the departure of the children from the home, while reflecting deeply on the dynamics between the pair of birds. He Could See a Bird Outside if He Looked Through His Window (In Hebrew; Persimmon Books, 2023) is a lyrical and tranquil book about partnership, parenthood, and children. About the changing seasons of nature and the soul, a parable of pain and optimism. A story that bridges art and poetry about the intimate space of each and every one of us. A beautifully crafted book that is both inspirational and a gift. Ran Oron was a helicopter navigator prior to studying architecture at the Cooper Union. In 1996 he founded ROART, an architecture studio in New York City. For two decades he was a des

Body art, especially tattoos and piercings, has enjoyed an explosion of interest in recent years. However, the response of many health professionals and researchers to this phenomenon is often negative, as body art continues to be associated with issues ranging from ill mental health to offending behaviors. Arguing for a reappraisal of the diverse range of practices that fall under this heading, Brian Brown and Virginia (Ginger) Kuulei Berndt reconsider body art as an underappreciated yet accessible source for mental and physical wellbeing. How, they ask, does body art open up new sources of community, sociality, and aesthetics? How is it used for the reclamation of one’s body, as a marker of success or accomplishment, or for building friendships? How does participation in these practices impact the health and wellbeing of body artists themselves? Providing a radical rethink that integrates tattoos and other body modifications within health, wellbeing, and positive psychology, Body Art (Emerald Publishing, 20

Today I talked to Nettrice R. Gaskins about Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom (MIT Press, 2021). The growing maker movement in education has become an integral part of both STEM and STEAM learning, tapping into the natural DIY inclinations of creative people as well as the educational power of inventing or making things. And yet African American, Latino/a American, and Indigenous people are underrepresented in maker culture and education. In this book, Nettrice Gaskins proposes a novel approach to STEAM learning that engages students from historically marginalized communities in culturally relevant and inclusive maker education. Techno-vernacular creativity (TVC) connects technical literacy, equity, and culture, encompassing creative innovations produced by ethnic groups that are often overlooked. TVC uses three main modes of activity: reappropriation, remixing, and improvisation. Gaskins looks at each of the three modes in turn, guidin

Race is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings – featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scenes – to represent these theories as reality. She also shares the strange challenges of curating these paintings in the present, when the paintings’ insidious ideologies have been debunked, but when mixed-race viewers also appreciate images that testify to their presence in the past. Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Christopher Nygren, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh Featured Scholar: Ilona Katzew, Curator and Head of Latin American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Special thanks: Elise Lonich Ryan, Nayeli Riano, Jennifer Josten For transcript, teaching a

Dr. Paul Fisher Davies' book Comics As Communication: A Functional Approach (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) explores how comics function to make meanings in the manner of a language. It outlines a framework for describing the resources and practices of comics creation and readership, using an approach that is compatible with similar descriptions of linguistic and multimodal communication. The approach is based largely on the work of Michael Halliday, drawing also on the pragmatics of Paul Grice, the Text World Theory of Paul Werth and Joanna Gavins, and ideas from art theory, psychology and narratology. This brings a broad Hallidayan framework of multimodal analysis to comics scholarship, and plays a part in extending that tradition of multimodal linguistics to graphic narrative. Dr. Paul Fisher Davies gained his Ph.D. in 2017 at the University of Sussex, where he has also been an associate lecturer and student mentor. He has published in Studies in Comics, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, The Comics Grid

Dr. Amy Matthewson's Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era (Routledge, 2022) explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841 to 1901. Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and shaping notions and attitudes towards China at a tumultuous time in Sino-British history. A close reading of both the visual and textual satires in Punch reveals how a section of British society visualised and negotiated with China as well as Britain’s position in the global community. By contextualising Punch’s cartoons within the broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and political discourse, the Dr. Matthewson engages in a critical enquiry of popular culture and its engagements with race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness. This book will interest scholars and researchers of cultural studies, pol

The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity—industrialization, racialization, and capitalism—were quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism (NYU Press, 2023) slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itself—and so the history of racial capitalism—up. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership. The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed (or denied) in precedent-setting cour

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanisation that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealisation or outright erasure of enslaved life. In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture (University of Arkansas Press, 2023), Dr. Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives. Dr. Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealised and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of ensl

Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto (Yale UP, 2023) puts forward an account of contemporary art’s political ambitions and potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems. Simoniti systematises the perspectives of contemporary art as a force for political and social change. At its best, he argues, contemporary art allows us to imagine utopias and presents us with hard truths, which mainstream political discourse cannot yet articulate. Covering subjects such as climate change, social justice, and global inequality, Artists Remake the World offers a philosophy of contemporary art as an experimental branch of politics. Vid Simoniti is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the University of Liverpool. He is the co-editor, with James Fox, of Art and knowledge after 1900. Ryan Trecartin, P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009. My conversation with Fuller

Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like “pandemic,” a Freudian state of mind like the “Oedipus complex,” or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of our lives. Ever since the first Roman imitators, we have been continually falling under the Greeks’ spell. But how did ancient Greece spread its influence so far and wide? And how has this influence changed us? In What the Greeks Did for Us (Yale UP, 2023), Tony Spawforth explores our classical heritage, wherever it’s to be found. He reveals its legacy in everything from religion to popular culture, and unearths the darker side of Greek influence—from the Nazis’ obsession with Spartan “racial purity” to the elitism of classical education. Paying attention to the huge breadth and variety of Hellenic influence, this book paints an essential portrait of the ancient world’s living legacy—considering to whom it matters, and why. Tony Spawforth is emeritus professor of ancient history a

Peter Bellerby is the founder of Bellerby & Co. Globemakers, the world's only truly bespoke makers of globes. His team of skilled craftspeople make exquisite terrestrial, celestial and planetary globes for customers around the world. In The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft (Bloomsbury, 2023), he introduces us to this world. The story began after his attempt to find a special globe for his father's 80th birthday. Failing to find anything suitable, he decided to make one himself which took him on an extraordinary journey of rediscovering this forgotten craft. The chapters of The Globemakers take us through the journey of how to build a globe, or 'earth apples' as they were first known, and include fascinating vignettes on history, art history, astronomy and physics, as well as the day-to-day craftsmanship at the workshop itself. This beautiful book uses illustration, photography and narrative to tell the story of our globe and many different globes it has inspired. This interview was conducted

Should governments fund the arts? In The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Michael Rushton, Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Affairs and a Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, explores a variety of frameworks for thinking about this question, from liberal and egalitarian justifications, through to communitarian, conservative, and multiculturalist ideas. The book outlines the economic method for thinking about the arts, and uses this as a starting point to understand what various political philosophies might tell policymakers and the public today. A rich and deep intervention on a pressing social and governmental question, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in arts and cultural policy. Prof Rushton blogs at both Substack and Artsjournal and you can read open access papers covering some of the key ideas in the book here and here. Dav

Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technology in Qing China (University of Washington Press; 2023) looks at the history of court-sponsored porcelain production in Qing China through the work and career of the Manchu polymath Tang Ying (1682-1756). Viewing him as a technocrat — an official who combined technological specialization and managerial expertise — Kai Jun Chen uses Tang to explore how porcelain manufacture was carried out in the Qing, how technological innovations were created and passed on, and how technocrats learned their skills. At the same time, the book shows how technocrats imposed and extended imperial order over local society, and how essential technocrats were to the operation and success of Qing cultural policies. Lucidly written and complete with truly striking images, Porcelain for the Emperor is a beautiful combination of the study of material culture, literature, art history, and technology. This book should be of interest not only to historians of the Qing and the early modern

W. H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s quote has been used for so many purposes, it might be worth remembering what he meant. Auden’s line is importantly from a poem memorializing W.B. Yeats, a politician and a poet. Auden meant that despite Yeats’s poetry, “Ireland [still] has her madness and her weather still.” Yeats’s poetry didn’t stop suffering. But Auden acknowledges that poetry is a “way of happening” that survives and persists. Today’s guest, Caroline Levine, has written a brilliant new book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton UP, 2023). As I read the book, I began asking myself in the manner of Auden: “Does literary criticism make nothing happen? What kind of something might attention to social forms within aesthetic criticism make happen?” I am excited to talk to Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University. Previously, she was Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the

Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2023) appears as Russia’s imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on. The stakes could not be higher. It follows that grappling with Russia’s imperial history is inescapable. After all, “[s]elective, exaggerated or patently false reimaginings” of the past “have been central to Russia’s justification of its claims on its neighbor to the southwest,” write today’s guests in the introduction to his new edited volume. Picturing Russian Empire offers an rich, sweeping overview of the history of Russia from the tenth century to the present through the connections between empire and visuality. Using thought provoking images, Picturing Russian Empire presents readers with a visual tour of the lands and peoples that constituted the Russian Empire and those that confronted it, defied it, accommodated to it, and shaped it at various times in more than a millennium of history. Bringing together scholars and experts from across the world and from various disciplines, Pictur

Peter Nelson's book Computer Games As Landscape Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) proposes that computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary landscape and offers a synthesis of art history, geography, game studies and play. Like paint on canvas, the game engine is taken as the underlying medium, and using the Valve Source Engine as the primary case study, it analyses landscapes according to the technical, economic and cultural features this medium affords. It presents the single-player first-person shooter (Half-Life 2) as a Promethean safari, examines how the economics of gambling and product placement shaped the eSports landscapes of Counter-Strike and reveals how sandboxes such as Garry’s Mod visualise the radical landscape of Web 2.0. This book explores how our relationship to the environment is changing, how we express this through computer games and how we can move beyond examining artistic influences on games to examining how historical connections flow through games and the history of landsca

Ineffable, invisible, inscrutable--angels are enduring creatures across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and human experiences of the divine as mediated by spiritual emissaries are an aspect of almost every religious tradition. In popular culture, angels are often reduced to the most gauzy, sentimental, and saccharine of images: fat babies with wings and guardians with robes, halos, and harps. By contrast, in scripture whenever one of the heavenly choirs appears before a prophet or patriarch, they first declare "Fear not!" for terror would be the most appropriate initial reaction to these otherworldly beings. Angels are often not what we'd expect, but it's precisely in that transcendent encounter that something of the strangeness of existence can be conveyed.  Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology (Cernunnos, 2023) is a follow-up volume to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, and like the earlier title, this book offers an account of the angelic hierarchies as they've been understood across centuri