New Books In Art

Seeking to fill the gap in scholarship focused on African American artisans in the American South, Catherine W. Bishir uses the very specific location of New Bern, North Carolina to “dig a deep hole” and produce a longitudinal study of black artisans that moves chronologically from the colonial period, through the early national period to the period following the Civil War. Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) looks at how artisans, enslaved and free, negotiated a complex social landscape that relied on their skills but circumscribed their lives. Specifically, Bishir examines the broader American artisan-citizen identity, the hallmarks of which are independence, mastery and self-determination and how the racial mores of the South made the enactment of this identity a problematic proposition for black artisans in New Bern despite its relatively lenient racial laws. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic

Lara Netting’s new book explores the life, career, and work of one man as a window into the history and associated practices of “Chinese art” during a period of massive transformation in the China of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While reading A Perpetual Fire: John C. Ferguson and His Quest for Chinese Art and Culture (Hong Kong University Press, 2013), we journey along with John C. Ferguson as he navigates through a complex and fascinating world of government officials, art dealers, scholars, and museums in China and the US. Ferguson gradually became embedded in a social web whose connections made it possible for him to transform from a minister’s son in rural Ontario to a world-class collector, dealer, and scholar of Chinese art while the very notion of “Chinese art” was still emerging and being debated. Netting’s book charts the early development of Ferguson’s relationships with key figures in the political and social landscape of Qing and Republican China, tracing the ways that these

It is a rare event when a dissertation focused on a single work yields a rich and fruitful account of an entire period. James Nisbet‘s new book, which began as a study of Walter De Maria’s 1977 Land Art work TheLightning Field, does just this by ranging freely across a wide variety of art works, practices, and attitudes from the formative decades of the environmental movement and of postwar American art. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (MIT Press, 2014) traces the shifts in ecological thinking and artistic practice during this period, and makes a convincing case for an ecological reading of many of its landmark works. What makes this book particularly fun, though, is the sheer strangeness of the works Nisbet discusses, many of them only briefly considered in the critical literature. From Allan Kaprow’s Yard (a gallery environment filled with tires), to psychedelic happenings, Peter Hutchinson’s bread scatter on the edge of a volcano, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Robert Barr

Craig Clunas‘s new book explores the significance of members of the imperial clan, or “kings” in Ming China. A king was established in a “state” (guo), and mapping the Ming in terms of guo‘s is a way of mapping Ming space in units that had centers, but not boundaries. (In having many guo‘s, the Ming thus had many centers.) A wonderfully and productively revisionist account of Ming history and its artifacts, Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China (University of Hawaii Press and Reaktion Books, 2013) explores this poly-centric kingly landscape as evidenced by documentary and archaeological traces of material production, while paying special attention to the history of practices that did not leave abundant traces. In doing so, Clunas shifts our attention in several ways. In addition to reorienting our focus to kingly figures in the Ming (an often-overlooked but deeply significant historical group), Screen of Kings also moves us away from the oft-trod historiographical territory of the Jiangnan region

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. Observing by Hand treats not just published images, but also argues for the centrality of “working images” to the histories of science and observation, paying special attention to personal drawings in private notebooks as instruments of individual and collective observation. Nasim’s approach blends the history and philosophy of science in a study that informs the histories of astronomy, images, and paperwork, and that emphasizes the importance of the philosophy of mind and its history in shaping this heavenly narrative. His transdisciplinary a

The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) maps the visual traces of drawing, collecting, and building practices between 1650 and 1720 to narrate the emergence of a particular kind of intelligence that was formed by visualization techniques. Hunter’s book pays close attention to the work of Robert Hooke while situating Hooke within a community of painters, architects, writers, customs brokers, telescope makers, and other fashioners of early modern experiments of all sorts. A significant contribution to both the histories of science and of art, Wicked Intelligence pays equal attention to the flat spaces of the imaged page and the built spaces of the museum, the city, and the “laboratory of the mind.” It is

Beautiful Geometry (Princeton UP, 2014), by the mathematician prof. Eli Maor and the noted artist Eugen Jost.  It’s a fascinating collaboration which helps to bridge the gap deplored by C. P. Snow in his classic The Two Cultures.  If you’re a lover of geometry, you’ll find some of your favorites depicted here – as well as a number of theorems that will undoubtedly be new to many readers (including the interviewer).  Each result is accompanied by an original work of art by Eugen Jost.  It’s fascinating not only to read about some of the more piquant results in a field (geometry) that is more than 2,500 years old, but just as delightful to see how these results inspire the creativity of an artist.  If you come for the geometry, you’ll certainly stay for the artwork – and if your interest is in art, you’ll be intrigued by how a presumably dry subject such as geometrical theorems can give birth to works of exquisite beauty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the field of children’s programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, but most famous for his creation of the Muppets. And yet, he’s remained an enigmatic figure in the years since his death. People remember the Muppets and they remember Jim, but they don’t know much about him. Jim Henson: The Biography (Ballantine Books, 2013), by Brian Jay Jones is thus an effort to correct that and to pin down the puppeteer: as a man, a husband, a father, and an innovator. For, with the passage of time, we’ve come to take the Muppets and their maker rather for granted. They’ve been around for over fifty years so it’s easy to forget they had to be invented. It’s equally easy to forget how ground-breaking an invention- along with Henson’s other innovations- they were. As Jerry Juhl, the first official employee of Muppet’s Inc., reminds us in Jim Henson: “This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and

The "primitivist idea" has played an important role in art and culture from at least the late nineteenth century. From Paul Gauguin to Pablo Picasso, to the more recent Musée du Quai Branly (opened in 2006), a variety of individuals and institutions have engaged with so-called "primitive" peoples; collected their artifacts; displayed, represented, and mimicked their cultural forms and practices. Daniel Sherman's French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975 (University of Chicago Press, 2011) examines the postwar history of primitivism as one inflected throughout by the colonial past and present. Offering readers a perspective on the trente glorieuses ("thirty glorious years") following the Second World War, Sherman challenges oversimplified narratives of economic recovery and prosperity, reminding us that the period was one of deep cultural and political cleavages that cannot be understood without reference to the history and legacies of French imperialism. The book looks at the visual arts, of cours

This cat has a complicated history. In addition to filling stationery stores across the globe with cute objects festooned with little whiskers and bowties, Hello Kitty has inspired tributes from Lisa Loeb and Lady Gaga, and artistic renderings from Hello Kitty Nativity to Hello (Sex) Kitty: Mad Asian Bitch on Wheels. In Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific (Duke University Press, 2013), Christine Yano offers a fascinating study of Hello Kitty as a global commodity and “world idol.” Focusing on the period from 1998-present, the book considers the iconic spread and transformation of Sanrio’s character in the context of marketing strategies based on creating an ideal of “happiness” sustained through gift-mediated sociality and the production of nostalgia. Yano considers the Hello Kitty phenomenon as a process of “pink globalization” in which Kitty becomes a cultural “wink,” an invitation to play, a friend, a mediator of the realms of childhood and adult desire. The narrative is grounded in a

Pauline Turner Strong‘s new book American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries (Paradigm Publishers, 2012) traces the representations of Native Americans across various public spheres of the American imaginary. Based on historical and ethnographic research, she documents how representations of Native Americans have circulated through time and into ever-widening cultural domains. In the first section of the book, Strong begins by defining a theory of representational practices that employs an ethnographic approach. She then traces particular forms of representing Native Americans by exploring the concepts of  “tribe” and “Indian blood.” The third section of the book focuses on narratives of captivity on the indigenous/settler frontier, highlighting the significance of captivity narratives to American national identity. The following section features a critical analysis of “playing Indian” as racial mimesis and cultural appropriation, highlighting the ways in which Am

Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China  (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) is a study of domestically produced, portable decorative arts in early modern China. Decorative objects connect us, visually and physically, to the world around us. In many ways they think with us, and an experience of pleasure emerges from this mutual relationship. This was as true in late Ming and early-to-mid Qing China as it is today, and Jonathan Hay‘s careful study of decorative objects functions as a toolkit for experiencing the surfaces of decorative Ming-Qing objects and understanding the pleasures of a relationship with those surfaces. Part I introduces the context of production and consumption of Ming-Qing decorative objects and argues for the importance of sensuous surface to the experience of them. It also sets out a history of the transformations of urban taste in early modern China, and offers some methodological tools for helping us think about the relationships of objects, movement, and bodies

Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siecle Vienna, where wealthy Jewish patrons supported the work of ground-breaking artists, lived in grand homes on the famous Ringstrasse, and thought life was good and they were valued as Austrians. With O’Connor’s background in art and her skills of investigative reporting, we come to know the people who turn the art world upside down during the last years of the Empire. Klimt, rock star artist of his era, is in great demand. Her family treasured his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Austrians came to regard it as their Mona Lisa. Adele Bloch-Bauer, as O’Connor explains, was different. This wealthy Jewish woman hosted “Red Saturdays” at home, salons in which she voiced her opinions on the issues of the day, eager to implement reforms to improve workers’ lives. O’Connor characterizes her as “an unfinished woman,” for she died at 43. Wishing to immortalize Klimt, she direct

The title says it all: Diana Vreeland was, in fact, that Empress of Fashion, reigning over Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute for half a century. As a result, her life story stretches the conventions of biography, which so often presents mid-century women’s lives merely as a series of relationships. Amanda MacKenzie Stuart‘s Empress of Fashion: Diana Vreeland, A Life (Thames & Hudson, 2013) provides a stunning alternative: the work narrative. Vreeland’s is the story of an individual who, through sheer will, became the person she wanted to be. Today, we often read biography for inspiration and Vreeland herself searched for such in the lives she encountered and read, as Stuart writes: “At this point Diana wobbled back toward the idea of finding a great person on whom to model herself: ‘then by that I can become great.'” And yet she came up short, writing in her diary, “You know for years I am and always have been looking out for girls to idolize because they are thin

It’s rare that a person’s name comes to represent an object, but such is the case with Lilly Pulitzer. Just say ‘Lilly’ and it conjures images of simple sheath dresses in vivid colors. But what of Lilly Pulitzer herself? As Kathryn Livingston’s Lilly: Palm Beach, Tropical Glamour, and the Birth of a Fashion Legend (Wiley, 2012) reveals, the woman was just as vivid as the dresses her name came to evoke. Born and married into privilege, Lilly Pulitzer wasn’t your typical debutante. She walked around Palm Beach barefoot and had a pet monkey. Boasting a similar background Jackie Kennedy and an extra shot of joie de vivre, she seems, from Livingston’s portrait, like a woman who would make excellent company at cocktail hour. She was also a bit of an entrepreneurial genius. Hoping to break out of a post-partum depression, Pulitzer opened an orange juice stand on Worth Avenue, selling juice to tourists and the Palm Beach hoi polloi, including the Kennedys. Ultimately, she would build an entire empire based solely

Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was prosecuted in the 1960s for producing work that imitated money. His single-sided, monochrome prints of the 1,000 yen note generated a wide-ranging set of debates over the nature of obscenity, the definition of counterfeiting, and the freedom of artists amid significant transformations in Japanese state, society, and politics. In Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013), William Marotti situates Akasegawa’s work within an ecology of the everyday in a wonderfully transdisciplinary study of avant-garde artistic production in postwar Japan. Marotti’s narrative combines close readings of literary, visual, and performative works with a careful political history of Occupation Japan, opening up a conversation about the politics of art in the global 1960s. Readers will find fascinating examples of experimental artistic production in these pages, in media ranging from collages to exhibitions to train trips to musical improvisati

You may come for the Astro Boy or Afro Samurai, but you’ll stay for the innovative ways that Ian Condry‘s new book brings together analyses of transmedia practice, collaboration, and materialities of democracy. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Duke University Press, 2013) is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a range of spaces of anime production that include studios, toy factories, fan conventions, and online communities. What results is a fascinating exploration of how the social aspects of media generate successful anime tv programs and films, forms of labor, and ways of thinking about masculinity, love, and modern life. Condry argues that collaborative creativity has been central to producing the social energy necessary for the global success of Japanese anime. For Condry, it also helps explain a broader “globalization from below” whereby new forms of media emerge from local and grassroots efforts to appeal to and impact a diverse range of audiences. Through a s

Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) charts a path through the widely-circulating visual tropes that comprised the intermedia landscape of the earthquake’s aftermath. Along the way, images of firestorms and catfish guide us though a genealogy of the belief in the moral connections between human action and disaster in Japan. Photographs, seismograms, and maps introduce us to a “visual lexicon of disaster” in which these images were simultaneously wielded as markers of authority and instruments for masking some important moments of invisibility in the aftermath of the earthquake. A decapitated building, the “ultimate modern ruin,” asks us to contemplate the relationship between the individual, the nation, and modernity in the context of a massive spectacle of destruction. Images of refugee

The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women Natalie Barney, orPerle Mesta)- with an extraordinary power to shape cultural tastes and contemporary art. In the early 20th century, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salons in Florence and New York drew astonishing talents to her doorstep. Her gift for bringing artists together so they might collaborate and draw inspiration from one another played out even more grandly at the art colony she and her third husband founded in Taos, New Mexico. Over the years, they would play host to such luminaries as D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Though she’s remembered more for her gift for building artistic communities, Luhan was an artist in her own right. Her book Winter in Taos is considered a classic of New Mexican literature and her four-volume memoir vividly explores the changes in Victorian sexuality, politics, art, and culture as the moder

Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts.  Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern period. Inspired by the archaeology of Foucault but using an approach that spans the history of science, art history, and visual studies, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) identifies a “specimen logic” through which images of insects were removed from their habitats, decontextualized, and mobilized into networks of regional and global exchange and circulation. Part I of the book traces the emergence of insects as subject matter for artistic representation, looking in turn at the work of Joris Hoefnagel, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Thomas Moffet, a