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This guide provides information on resources in the Fine Art and History of Art subject areas.
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Image: Jitterbugs (II), William H. Johnson, ca. 1941. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Douglas E. Younger
A comprehensive and beautiful survey of South African photography. From colonialism to democracy, Life Itself offers a comprehensive overview of South Africa's photographic history. Featuring images from the heyday of Drum magazine and Black emergence to Peter Magubane's Soweto uprising pictures, David Goldblatt's In Boksburg to the photographers' collective Afrapix and the struggles for freedom, this book concludes with post-apartheid documentary and art photography in the work of Andrew Tshabangu, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, and others. Life Itself helps to fill a gap in our understanding of the role of the camera in South African society.
Open-source tools and ideas for creating, activating and experiencing art Based on an idea by Hélio Oiticica and brought to life by Lieven De Boeck, Breaking Free offers a dynamic fusion of artmaking tools, including stitching, painting and performing, to explore queer identity.
Buhlungu's installation creates a porous space where both water and scientific knowledge can move freely Delving into microbiology through the disciplines of art, science, geography and history, Simnikiwe Buhlungu (born 1995) uses the ubiquitous water puddle as the basis for her mixed-media installation hygrosummons, exploring encounters with scientific knowledge.
Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger's incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American-, Latinx-, Asian American-, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift celebrates The Face’s most iconic portraits from 1980–2004. It explores the magazine’s role in the evolution of style photography and its international and enduring impact on visual culture. The Face is the original, definitive, style bible – a ground-breaking magazine that has radically disrupted youth culture in Britain and beyond since its launch in 1980. Known for its striking design, bold, inclusive content and innovative photography, the magazine has launched the careers of many leading photographers, writers, designers, stylists and models.
Major survey of the artistic provocateur and trailblazer Linder (b.1954, Liverpool). Offers an illuminating overview of the past 50 years of this iconic artist's career, exploring the full range of Linder's thought-provoking work and underscoring the experimental and feminist impulses of her practice. Linder first emerged in the late 1970s as a prominent figure within the dynamic landscapes of punk and post-punk music; her photomontage on the cover of Buzzcocks' single 'Orgasm Addict' in 1977 became an iconic image of the punk scene. Following her punk period, Linder went on to become an internationally recognised artist renowned for her multifaceted practice. Her journey has been one of relentless exploration, venturing into realms as varied as fashion, music, performance, perfume, textiles, and film.
New monograph on Derek Jarman, due Autumn 2023.Gathering together newly commissioned essays by international art critics and scholars devoted to specific--and sometimes lesser-known--aspects of the artist's life and work and extensive portfolios spanning his successive bodies of works, this monograph offers an accessible overview of Derek Jarman, one of the legendary cultural figures of the second half of the 20th century.Born in London in 1942, Jarman died in 1994, after having been an artist, filmmaker, musician, and gay activist who powerfully marked contemporary British culture, from his first feature film 'Sebastiane' in 1976 to the video clips made for the Pet Shop Boys and Marianne Faithfull in the 1980s, through his public militancy during the AIDS crisis and his testamentary cult film 'Blue' (1993).
Spanning six decades, three continents, and multiple mediums, this exhibition catalog explores one of the most significant and influential artistic movements of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, painting underwent a profound transformation. Artists no longer wanted to depict the visible; they aspired to a new visual language that reduced artistic expression to an interplay of colors, lines, and shapes; reflected the modern world; and transcended national boundaries. A central figure of this art movement was Wassily Kandinsky, who laid the theoretical foundations with his work Point and Line to Plane. This lushly illustrated and highly researched volume showcases how Geometric Abstraction found radical expression in all its variations in Europe, the USA and beyond.
A spectacular overview of Korean art since the 1960s. This book showcases a collection of the most visually captivating, intriguing, and often overlooked examples of Korean art. Mina Kim highlights the artistic output of the 1960s and '70s through today, providing crucial aesthetic and political context for understanding the work. Key ideas that structure the book include performance, gender, identity, internationalism, and the evolution of multimedia. By placing artistic expression at the core of Korean culture and society, this book sheds new light on the role of Korea's contributions to global visual culture.
Soft Power celebrates the ability of textiles to store and communicate a multiplicity of (hi)stories that act as a disruptive force against dominant social and cultural narratives. The political entanglements inherent to the medium demonstrate the power of textile art to move people, things, stories, and ideas in and out of visibility. Soft Power does not focus solely on textiles as hand-crafted or industrially-fabricated objects, but understands them as being a part of systems. This includes the webs of production and trade that continue to connect textiles and people across the globe as well as the histories, cartographies, cosmologies and rituals that unfold around fabrics.
Explores the complex relationship between museums, empire, and cultural heritage, using his art to question how historical narratives are constructed and interpreted. Hew Locke is interested in dissecting the messy and complex ways in which museums are implicated in histories of empire. 'This project has enabled me to engage with the museum's collections in a much deeper way than ever before, and in a way few artists have had the privilege of doing. I have always been interested in the way objects are interpreted through display in museums. What story has been distilled and is being told or implied about the past? How does it relate to the present? How can this telling be questioned, disrupted, or complicated?'Throughout his career, Locke has had an intense fascination with objects and the stories they tell.
Tate Modern exhibition: 28 November 2024 - 1 June 2025 Discover how artists used machines and algorithms to create mesmerising and mind-bending art between the 1950s and the early 1990s. From collaged punch cards to early experiments with virtual reality, artists have found inspiration in technology to invent new forms and new ways to engage the senses. Bringing together works by groundbreaking artists from across Asia, Europe and the Americas, Electric Dreams celebrates the innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who imagined the visual languages of the future through immersive, responsive and automatically generated works. Their circuits of connections and creativity, of new thinking and tinkering are illuminated here through the perspectives of artists, curators and art historians.
The definitive monograph on the work of celebrated visual artist, musician and peace activist Yoko Ono Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono is one of the most important living artists working today. In a career that spans over six decades, Ono has experimented with a broad variety of media, including music, performance art, and film. Mostly known for her early involvement with the Fluxus art movement in the late 1950s and her professional and personal association with Beatles frontman John Lennon, Ono's ground-breaking work has been influential to generations of artists as well as her incessant campaigning for World peace.
The figurehead of New German Cinema meditates on the next leap forward in visual aesthetics In The Dragonfly's Eye, author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge (born 1932) tests out the cooperative capacities of the Stable Diffusion model, which uses AI to process images. As a filmmaker, he has years of experience dealing with the camera and its ways of seeing. As a result, he is particularly curious about the different images that AI can generate. Here, Kluge reflects on the idiosyncrasies of these new types of images, in which chance factors and errors create subjective forms, resulting in open images that are hard to place. He establishes rules for using the "virtual camera" and thus contributes to a debate on how AI should be handled.
A meditation on sound, inviting us to listen through the nose and open the mind to the musical potential in unpleasant odors. The stinkhorn mushroom is one of the weirdest wonders of the fungal world, certainly the smelliest. Ever since it was described by a Dutch doctor in a sixteenth-century pamphlet, the stinkhorn has been reported to emit odors resembling damp earth, dung, rotting cheese, decaying flesh, and even semen. It also happens to look like a phallus, bursting out of a subterranean egg to poke above the ground, where it lures insects towards its slimy, fetid cap. In Stinkhorn, artist, musician, and writer Si n Parkinson asks- What can the pervasive stench of this mushroom and the droning noise of the flies compelled towards it reveal about how sounds and smells are combined in the imagination?
New perspectives on queer visual culture in the SWANA region. With contributions from scholars and artists, this volume demonstrates that queer visual culture in Southwest Asia and the North Africa region is entering an era of exciting growth in its versatility and consciousness. The volume focuses on artworks produced in the contemporary era while recognizing historical and contextual connections to Islamic art and culture within localities and regions from the pre-modern and modern eras.
An investigation of the absurd as a condition of, a tactic for, and a subject in the contemporary. The absurd is a lens on the disturbances of our moment and a challenge to the propositions about and solutions for the world. The absurd shakes off the paralysis that what we know must be the only thing we (re)produce. Those willing to recognize that truth and confront it, rather than flee from it, are thereby introduced to the political writ large. Critical art allows the absurd a space within which audiences can observe their own tendencies and assumptions. The absurd in art reveals our inculcation into hegemonic belief structures and the necessity to question the systems to which we subscribe.
Marcel Broodthaers, one of the key figures of the postwar avant-garde, has been recognized and extensively studied as a poet who became a visual artist in 1964. However, years before creating his first sculptural objects and installations, Broodthaers made his debut as a filmmaker in 1957 with La Clef de l'horloge, embarking on a prolific cinema practice that yielded more than fifty films shot on 35mm and 16mm. Cinema, both as a medium and principle, was crucial to his artistry. Broodthaers' writings and visual works are interspersed with allusions to cinema, its history and its technology. Covering both well-known titles such as Le Corbeau et le renard (1967), La Pluie (1969), and Une Seconde d'éternité (1970) as well as many lesser-known Broodthaers films, the essays in this book discuss his films as inseparable from his entire oeuvre while situating them in the larger history of experimental film.
A deep dive into the video artist's latest installation fusing color, light and sound to upend our perception of space and time The subject of this volume is the colossal traveling immersive installation conceived by British film director and video artist Steve McQueen (born 1969). Under his direction, the 30,000-square-foot ground-level gallery at Dia Beacon is transformed into an installation comprising 60 lightboxes, in concert with a sonic component performed by world-renowned bassists. The accompanying publication features an introduction by Dia curator Donna De Salvo, who embeds the work in the context of McQueen's oeuvre to date, along with five essays by leading experts in musicology, cultural studies and Black studies as well as a narrative reflection by an esteemed poet.
Narrative Wisdom and African Arts explores how historical and contemporary African arts make visible narratives rooted in collective and individual memory and knowledge. Historical works made by artists across sub-Saharan Africa during the thirteenth to twentieth centuries dialogue with contemporary works by African artists working around the globe. This is the first book to offer a comparative examination of intersections between African arts and narrative across expansive genres, cultures, periods, and contexts of patronage. More than two hundred color images explore an extensive array of media including sculpture in wood, ivory, metal, textiles, works on paper, photography, painting, and time-based media works.
'I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,' wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms - from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir - speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.
A profound journey through diverse representations of islands in contemporary art. In this groundbreaking exploration, Gill Perry looks at the vital role that islands play in contemporary visual arts. Responding to the urgency of migration, climate change, and colonialism, artists create compelling and provocative works that resonate across colonized archipelagos. Perry navigates the British Isles, Ireland, the Caribbean, Pacific Oceania, and the Galápagos and illuminates the role of islands in installation, multimedia, and film projects by renowned artists such as Robert Smithson, Lisa Reihana, Roni Horn, Rodney Graham, Tacita Dean, Cornelia Parker, and others from the 1970s to today.
Ben Edge is a rising star of both the art world and the current folk renaissance. This first trade book of Edge's art, featuring over 200 artworks, is a unique insight into his creative process as well as the first mainstream book to explore the amazing and wildly popular folk customs of the British ritual year. 'In his deeply squirrelly, edgy, almost mystic paintings, Ben Edge tries to ask where we all come from and why we tell ourselves the stories we tell ourselves.' - Jerry Saltz 'It's time to rediscover the real and this book tells you where to find it. Indispensable.' -Jarvis Cocker Ben Edge has travelled the length and breadth of Britain recording the weird and wonderful folk customs alive in communities all over the country. In this book, the first trade edition of his art, he shares over 200 paintings and photographs, along with real-life stories, anecdotes and legends.
Amy Sherald's work, life, and significance for American art, as revealed in her powerful figurative paintings of Black subjects Bringing together nearly all of her artwork to date, this lavishly illustrated volume situates the work of Amy Sherald (b. 1973) within the context of American realist and figurative painting. Encompassing the full arc of her career, from her poetic early works to the distinctive figure paintings and portraits that have become her hallmark, Amy Sherald: American Sublime unfolds her method of selecting individuals she meets on the street and using facial expression, body language, and clothing choices to create paintings that transcend portraiture and expand the canon of American art. Essays by curators Sarah Roberts and Rhea Combs; poet and writer Elizabeth Alexander; artist Dario Calmese; and renowned scholar Deborah Willis contextualize and illuminate Sherald's creation of a new form of imaginative portraiture.
Major survey chronicling superstar US artist Mickalene Thomas and her vibrant, rhinestone-adorned paintings, collages and photographs. New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas’ critically acclaimed and extensive body of work spans painting, collage, print, photography, video and immersive installations. With influences ranging from 19th-century painting to popular culture, Thomas’ art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood while expanding on and subverting common definitions of beauty, sexuality, celebrity and politics.
Mark Bradford’s expansive artistic practice is firmly rooted in the dynamics of movement within the prism of racial identity. It embodies an unyielding quest for liberation, where the ceaseless rhythms of bodies become both a testament to oppression and an assertion of resilience. Through textured canvases, satirical videos, and sculptural installations imbued with layers of history and social critique, Bradford disrupts established narratives, urging contemplation on the intricate interplay of identity and societal frameworks. Emerging from the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles, his art transcends aesthetics to probe deeply into the socio-political terrain, fostering a profound dialogue on the complexities inherent in contemporary society.
You can access a wide variety of print and electronic books to support your research. Find your module reading list to see what key readings you can access electronically or search Explore to find more books and e-books.
We subscribe to a number of subject focused and interdisciplinary databases that will be relevant when researching the History of Art and Fine Art practice. Use the databases to find a range of material including journal articles, films for streaming and more.
Full-text archive of art and architecture magazines, dating from the late-nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Subjects covered include fine art, decorative arts, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and photography. Accessibility statement for Art & Architecture Archive, 1895-2015.
This collection includes the specialist indexes ARTbibliographies Modern (covering modern and contemporary art), Design and Applied Arts Index (for all aspects of design and crafts) and the International Bibliography of Art (covering scholarship on Western art history), together with a complementary collection of current full-text journals, Arts and Humanities database.
Access for UCL students and staff only. Access to BoB is only permitted within the United Kingdom. Requires login with UCL username and password. BoB is Learning on Screen’s on demand TV and radio service for education allowing users to record programmes from over 75 free-to-air channels, access over 2.2 million broadcasts dating back to the 1970s, create playlists, clips and clip compilations; search programme transcripts and subtitles; embed content in VLEs and share on social media
Archive of important scholarly journals. Core resource. Accessibility statement for JSTOR.
Best streamed on Chrome, Safari, or Edge. Providing video streaming to over 26,000 films including thousands of award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases. The collection includes a number of leading producers, such as the Criterion Collection, PBS, Kino Lorber, New Day Films, The Great Courses, California Newsreel, BBC and hundreds more. Accessibility statement for Kanopy.
For training and support with Library resources and research, book an appointment using my live bookings calendar.
Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly being used as source of information, translation tool, text editor and much more. The information in this box provides links to guidance on using GenAI for academic research, including strengths and limitations.
Other UCL resources include:
Get involved and help us expand the library's Latin American Art collection! Fill in this form to share your ideas.
LAAR (Latin American Art Resources) is an initiative supported by UCL ChangeMakers that aims to promote and expand Latin American Art resources within the print and electronic collections of UCL Libraries.
See the LAAR reading list for an overview of and an introduction to Latin American art via resources in UCL libraries, with sections covering topics such as political resistance, Colonial Latin America, identities and ideologies, and rethinking Modernism(s).
If you have any questions for the LAAR team please contact us:
Júlia Couto (UCL Slade School of Fine Art) julia.ferreira.19@ucl.ac.uk
Daen Palma Huse (UCL History of Art) daen.huse.20@ucl.ac.uk
Manuela Portales Sanfuentes (UCL History of Art) manuela.portales.20@ucl.ac.uk
Elizabeth Lawes (UCL Library Services) e.lawes@ucl.ac.uk
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