New Books In Art

Kevin Bubriski, a New Englander and internationally acclaimed photographer, was a freelance photojournalist when he first arrived in New Mexico in 1981 to study filmmaking in Santa Fe. Bubriski recalls, “Although I was working as a news photographer on my own, I was looking for images that I enjoyed for their own visual merit and innate curiosity.” Bubriski found himself in a new culture as distinct to him as any foreign country he would later photograph. He took his 35-millimeter camera and hand-cranked 16mm Bolex, and began to explore the environs, particularly the neighborhoods of native New Mexicans. Excited by the photographic opportunities, he says, “I went to every fiesta, every parade, every celebration and religious observance.”Look into My Eyes: Nuevomexicanos por Vida 81′-83‘ is a collection of images from that personal exploration, it is a photographic documentation of Hispanic New Mexicans, Nuevomexicanos, taken between 1981-1983 in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and several northern New Mexico villages.

The Hidden South–Come Home (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2016) is the result of an ongoing project that documents intimate stories of people who are often overlooked in society. Photographer and author Brent Walker traveled around the southern United States meeting and interacting with people of different backgrounds and experiences. Many of his subjects live with addiction and struggle daily with their survival. Started in September 2014, The Hidden South Come Home soon developed a large online presence and subsequent following, and in 2015, the project followers supported the funding the book. After almost a year in production, the book was published in early 2016. Since the release of the book, Brent spends his time speaking, teaching, and working on a second book, which he considers a second phase of the project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Could the Qur’an–understood, according to Muslims, as the verbatim word of God in Arabic–acquire a nationality? Specifically, could it be American? And written in English? Contemporary visual artist Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an (Liveright, 2015) raises these questions and many more. The groundbreaking and subversive project draws on multiple English translations, which Birk synthesizes to produce his own hand-written American graffiti-style translation. On top of that, every single page of the over-sized coffee table book contains meticulous illustrations of everyday American life, ranging from celebration to tragedy. As a commentary on both the Qur’an as well as American culture, moreover, the provocative visuals offer the reader a way to connect a book from 7th-century Arabia to 21st-century American cities, landscapes, challenges, and humanity. Given the herculean task that Birk accomplishes, it perhaps comes as no surprise that it took him nearly a decade to complete. Beyond the illustrations and transl

Nude Reagan (Spurl Editions, 2016) is John Brian King’s second book of photography. His first book, LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84, was published by Spurl Editions in 2015. For his most recent book, King photographed twenty-three nude female models with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 camera in an empty Palm Springs office space. Each model wore the same Ronald Reagan mask, striking any pose she liked. Deliberately unsettling, these photographs depict Reagan as a demon and specter haunting the modern world. Evoking the dead conservative president, the models wear the hideous dark-eyed mask anemic and wrinkled and morph into unerotic, freakish wraiths. The colors of the photographs accentuate these figures’ eerie qualities: the camera’s unpredictable flash turns the bland office backdrop alternately into a mold green, a muddy gray, a brilliant white, or a dense, all-encompassing black setting. The womens’ shadows are sometimes starkly present, and at other times disappear. King was influenced by such dispara

What’s Going On? 1969 -1974 (Lighted Square Media, 2015) is Ken Light‘s ninth book. Ken started his professional life as a photojournalist at his college newspaper in 1969 and has developed a career as a documentary photographer who tells stories about social and political life in the United States. Ken is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley and director for its Center for Photography. He was also the co-founder of Fotovision and the International Fund for Documentary photography. What’s Going On? 1969 -1974 is project born out of Ken’s observations that many of the significant politically based movements of our time have their roots, and are mirrored, in the social and cultural landscape of the early 1970s – from the Occupy movement of 2011 to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri and the many forms that Black Lives Matter has taken since the hashtag was first used in 2013. The book combines Ken’s photographs with personal memoir and a timelin

The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, combines a gorgeous facsimile of a late 15th-century illuminated haggadah with a Latin prologue written by a Dominican Friar! Mystery abounds as a Jewish Passover text, written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe, is found to include illustrations of Christian significance. Thanks to a special collaboration of multi-disciplinary experts from three continents and an element of serendipity, the manuscript of a haggadah from the 15th century, now at home in a state library in Munich, was discovered, translated, and its importance as a primary source for Christian Jewish relations during the late medieval and early modern period recognized.The prologue by fifteen-century Dominican Hebraist Erhard von Pappenheim includes the testimony of Jews tortured to testify to blood libel in 1475 in Trent. Recorded by von Pappenheim i

What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ultimately matters? Pamela D. Winfield‘s recent award-winning monograph, Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013), explores these major Japanese Buddhist figures artistic and textual productions in order to answer these questions. Bringing together her expertise in the fields of art history and Buddhist studies, Winfield guides the reader to more nuanced understandings of Kukai as a promoter of icons and Dogen’s seemingly iconoclastic stance. In addition, she offers a model for bridging textual studies and studies of material cultures that opens paths for further explorations of the relationship of practice, text, and image. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice

In “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016), Tahneer Oksman explores the graphic memoirs of seven female cartoonists, whose works grapple with issues of Jewish identity – from confronting stereotypes of Jewish women’s bodies and behaviors, to ambivalence over what it means to be a progressive Jew on a Birthright trip to Israel. Through visual and textual analysis, Oksman illustrates how her authors’ connections to Jewishness remain complicated, fluid, and intimately tied to perceptions of self and how others view them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Charlotte Eubanks, Jonathan E. Abel, and Tina Chen about Volume 1, Issue 2: Collecting Asias (Fall 2015), which includes – among several fascinating essays – a portfolio of Akamatsu Toshiko’s sketches of Micronesia, an interview about Mughal collections, an introduction to three wonderful digital projects, and a field trip to collaboratively-curated exhibition. In addition to exploring the particular contributions of this special issue, we talked about some of the features of the journal that really excitingly push the boundaries of what an academic journal can be, considering aspects of the innovative forms that are curated in the Convergence section of Verge and reflected in its essays. Highly recommended, both for reading and for teaching! Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History at the University of British

In her new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as “graphic novels.” Chute is particularly interested in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It, and Joe Sacco’s series Palestine, but she also introduces us to the long history of hand-drawn documentation of war-time trauma dating to Goya and Callot. Chute treats comics as a serious literary form that is especially efficacious for representing the act of witness-to-war and those who witness. It is through the power of graphic illustration combined with the written word–the comics-form–that the otherwise unspeakable atrocities of modern war can be conveyed. The book also serves as a primer to the language of comics–words like “gutter” and “tier”–and the craft of decoding comics as practiced by scholars such as Chute. In this interview Chute responded to questions about her path into comics as an academic pursuit, her thou

Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015) is a gorgeous book. It’s about light and the practices of self representation in diasporic and Caribbean communities. Krista A. Thompson looks carefully and sees in the glittery surfaces of contemporary art, photographic and video practices in proms and dancehalls, and the visual culture of hip-hop the generative power of alternative modalities of being. Taking us to New Orleans, Jamaica, the Bahamas and on the global hip-hop circuit, this book engages with the discourses of art history and dissolves its Eurocentric bearings.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her excellent new book The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (UNC Press, 2015), Kishwar Rizvi, Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, interrogates the interaction of history, memory, and architecture by exploring arguably the most important sacred space in Islam: the mosque. By combining the study of religion, history, and architecture in the most compelling of ways, Rizvi highlights the material and political significance of the mosque as a transnational symbol. While focused on the contexts of Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the theoretical insights of this richly textured book extend much beyond the contemporary Middle East. In our conversation, we talked about the concept of the transnational mosque, the historicist desires and assumptions that often undergird projects of mosque construction in Muslim societies, the transnational mosque, religious identity and international politics, and ways in which mobile networks

What is cultural taste? How is it formed, imagined and patterned? In Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), David Wright, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, explores the theories and practices framing cultural taste in contemporary society in order to account for the social role of cultural taste. The book explains how taste is made knowable, through quantification and measurement, moves through an explanation of differing cultural taste patterns, including the all important figure of the omnivore, and narrates the impact of technology on cultural taste. The book accounts for the governing and globalisation of cultural taste, thinking through the rise of cosmopolitan tastes, as well as engaging with ideas about taste and expertise. The book uses a range of examples, including detailed discussions of contemporary art works such as Greyson Perry’s The lovely consensus. Although grounded in sociology, the book speaks to debates, and thus to reade

George Cotkin is an emeritus professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. In his book Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, 2015) he has given us cultural criticism through a set of provocative portraits of creative Americans at mid-twentieth century who defied convention, pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and forged a new sensibility of personal liberation. From John Cage, who in 1952 explored the musical possibilities of silence in the composition 4′ 33″ to Chris Burden’s 1974 performance piece Trans-fixed nailing him to a Volkswagen; both challenged the standing categories of art and aesthetics. Two-dozen dramatic vignettes demonstrate the excess of violence, sex, and madness that blurred the boundaries between art, artist and audience. Creatives such as Marlon Brando, Lenny Bruce, Andy Warhol, and Anne Sexton populate his pages. The fascination with excess cut across diverse expressions taking art and audiences into uncharted territories

Today I’m talking with Lynn Gamwell about Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press, 2015). This book is a breathtaking combination of scholarship and beauty, tracing the interplay of mathematics and art throughout mankind’s history, East and West. Gamwell is a lecturer in the history of mathematics and science at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and thus she is uniquely positioned to write a book that brings together the two disparate cultures described by C.P. Snow in his 1959 essay. Snow would have appreciated how the author communicates the depth, passion, and beauty that characterize each culture, while describing how each inspires the other. The in-depth discussion is brought to life by 440 stunning artworks and 102 crystal-clear math diagrams. This is a big, beautifully produced book that you will want to place on your coffee table. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roberta Wue‘s new book brings readers into the world of late Qing Shanghai, a center of art, culture, and entertainment. As artists fled to the city after the Taiping Rebellion, they helped create new ways of being an artist that emerged from new kinds of relationships between them, their audiences, and their work. Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late 19th-Century Shanghai (University of Hawaii Press, 2014) focuses on Ren Bonian (1840-1895), a celebrated painter of the Shanghai School, and his circles and audiences. The chapters each use a particular medium or format to explore the changing landscape of the arts in Shanghai, from painted fans and fan shops, to advertisements and mass media (including an interesting account of art world activism around famine relief), to illustrated books and periodicals (including inserts accompanying the Dianshizhai huabao), to portraits of members of the art world (including a truly amazing image of a man about to butcher a dog). It is a fascinating and beauti

What are the alternatives to the current neo-liberal cultural settlement prevailing in much of the global north? In To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of The Cuban Revolution (PM Press, 2015), Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, from The Centre for Cultural Change, argues that this question can be addressed by learning from the cultural policy of the Cuban revolution. The book draws on a wealth of archival material, coupled with the theoretical framework of Marxist Humanism, to give a detailed picture of the revolutionary period on the island and chart the lessons from that era. The book introduces the key policy documents and events, along with examples from a variety of cultural forms, including a detailed engagement with the role of film and cinema in the revolutionary era. The book will be essential reading for cultural studies and cultural policy scholars, alongside anyone seeking an alternative vision of culture’s social role. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch

Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can be extrapolated from a close look at the associated graphic art?” Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W. W. Norton, 2015) treats the commercial and advertising art of the mid-twentieth century as an archive to explore the social and cultural engagement with electronics technologies during a particularly vibrant moment for the American graphic commercial arts. Incorporating text and image as sources to be read, Prelinger’s book moves from the beginnings of FM technology and vacuum tubes, to televisions and quartz crystals, to transistors and circuit boards, to digital computing and into space. Of special interest is the attention Prelinger pays to to the importance of graphic designers and staff artists at major labs and research centers. The book models an innovative and inspiring way to read graphic images as historical document

Ink landscape painting was distinctive to the Song dynasty, and the Northern Song period was a special time for the medium. By the tenth century, this kind of painting emerged as a “scholars’ category” whose “values were especially worthy of support” in critical scholarly discourse, according to Ping Foong‘s fascinating new book. Bringing together paintings, poems, colophons, texts about painting, and other sources, Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) looks carefully at the imperial establishment’s efforts “to cultivate the genre of ink landscape painting and its iconography as a dynastic project.” In a story that focuses on Shenzong’s favorite painter: Guo Xi (after 1000-ca. 1090), Part I of The Efficacious Landscape brings readers into the spaces of the Song imperial city and their political connotations, from a careful exploration of the political import of the paintings decorating the walls of the Hanlin Institute, to a re

How has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative platemaking. The multi-disciplinary approach allows Performing Policy to speak directly to the history of arts funding, in the context of the U.S.’s culture wars, as well as to the contemporary question of the role and purpose of the artist in society, along with how those artists might be educated. The book will be important reading for cultural policy and arts management students, as well as those in cultural studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices