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Fine Art and History of Art

Print books

Pile of booksTo find the location of printed books use Explore, the library catalogue.

In the UCL Main Library you will find the Art collection, covering the areas of Fine Art, History of Art, art theory and criticism, film, performance, and photography as is divided into sections as follows:

ART A: historiography, museums, curating and the art market
ART B: philosophy, aesthetics, criticism and cultural studies
ART C - M: specific periods in art history, from pre-history to the 21st century
ART P: applied and performing arts, graphic design, costume, music and sound, theatre
ART Q: film studies, history of cinema
ART R: photography
ART T: techniques, colour, materials, fine art conservation

Other relevant print collections

  • Ancient History: concentrates especially on Greek & Roman history of the early & classical periods, history of the Ancient Near East and the early Christian Church.
  • History: sections on medieval, early modern and modern history, with particular strengths in British, European, London, American and Latin American history. 
  • English Language and Literature: books on literary topics not specific to any one language, literary theory and literature translated into English.
  • Philosophy: ancient and modern philosophy and aesthetics.

The Bartlett Library: includes books and periodicals relating to architecture, planning, development planning, construction and project management, sustainable heritage, energy, sustainable resources and environmental design and engineering.

The Institute of Archaeology Library: collections of pre-Medieval art and archaeology and museum studies.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) library: includes books on the art and design of Central and Eastern Europe and Russia.

Institute of Education Library: includes books on media studies

New books in Art

Hew Locke: what have we here?

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.

Electric Dreams: art and technology before the Internet

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.

Yoko Ono

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 Dragonfly's Eye: my virtual camera (AI)

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.

Stinkhorn how nature's most foul smelling mushroom can change the way we listen

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?

Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa

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.

Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art

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 and Film: A Second of Eternity

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.

Steve Mcqueen: Bass

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

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.

Bodies of Sound: becoming a feminist ear

'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.

Islands and Contemporary Art

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.

Folklore Rising: an artist's journey through the British ritual year

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: American sublime

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.

Mickalene Thomas : All about love

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 : Keep walking

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.

Spirit House: hauntings in contemporary art of the Asian diaspora

Contemporary artists of the Asian diaspora challenge the boundary between life and death through art Copublished with the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, this book accompanies Spirit House, a significant exhibition related to the museum's Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI). A thematic exploration of the work of 33 Asian American and Asian diasporic artists, Spirit House asks the question, what does it mean to speak to ghosts, inhabit haunted spaces or enter different dimensions? Inspired by spirit houses, small devotional structures found throughout Thailand that provide shelter to the supernatural, this book considers how art can collapse the distance between the past and present, as well as between this world and the next.

Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust

Virtuosic, large-scale figurative paintings that capture contemporary anxieties in harsh relief Published to accompany a major site-specific installation in Venice, Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust offers an in-depth examination of the work of one of China's foremost living artists, renowned internationally for her virtuosic large-scale figurative paintings. Yu Hong's (born 1966) practice centers on humane depictions of contemporary life that are both deeply personal and astute in their observations of larger societal realities. Featuring beautiful installation photography of Venice's Chiesetta della Misericordia, this book presents a new cycle of works painted on gold ground that depict the arc of human experience while referencing aspects of Buddhist narrative painting, Byzantine icons and the Italian Baroque.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A-Z

Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflects on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind a single, expansive body of work at a pivotal moment in his career. Paul Mpagi Sepuya's photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to studio practice and portraiture. This volume unpacks his Dark Room series (2016-21), offering a deep dive into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that Sepuya has interwoven throughout the images. The excavation and mapping of intellectual and artistic data points across the artist's work is presented through three distinct "voices," allowing for a comprehensive cross-referencing of conceptual categories.

Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L. A. : Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation

Alien worlds, alter-egos, and Pleasure Domes-Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation explores the overlooked importance of science fiction fandom and the occult to US queer history. Science fiction and occult communities helped pave the way for the LGBTQ+ movement by providing a place for individuals to meet, imagine, and create a life less restricted by societal norms. Focusing on Los Angeles from the late 1930s through the 1950s, this book follows the lives of artists, writers, publishers, early sci-fi enthusiasts, and progressive communities, from Kenneth Anger, Lisa Ben, and Jack Parsons to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), and Ordo Templi Orientis at the Agape Lodge (O.T.O.).

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive

The first monograph by the New Black Vanguard's Arielle Bobb-Willis is a vivid statement about color, gesture, and style. Keep the Kid Alive, Arielle Bobb-Willis's first book, invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist's own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaus, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. "I love the idea of seeing Black people represented in an abstract way," Bobb-Willis says. "It's important to me to continue to reject the notion that Black expression is limited--or limiting."

Tina Barney: Family Ties

Tina Barney's keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with sixty large-format works imbued with a spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common. In the late 1970s, Tina Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class, of which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Developing her portraiture further in the 1980s, she began directing her subjects, giving an intimate scale to her large-format photographs.

The Imaginary Institution of India: art 1975-1999

Featuring the work of around 30 artists in a wide array of mediums, this exhibition catalog captures a unique moment in modern Indian art, one marked by immense creativity and innovation. The period between 1975 and 1998 was a tumultuous time in India, as the country witnessed significant political, economic, and social upheavals, shaping the nation's trajectory for decades to come. It was also a time of artistic audacity highlighted by a shift away from traditional themes and styles. This richly illustrated volume explores the myriad ways Indian artists responded to and engaged with this period of change. Thematic chapters look at issues such as the urban transformation of the 1970s and '80s; the institutionalization of indigenous and vernacular art practices; photography and street theater; and installation-based work.

Phyllida Barlow: Fifty Years of Drawing

Inside Phyllida Barlow's abundant archive of drawings, from her days as an art student to her later works. Reproducing over 200 works on paper spanning 50 years, from 1963 to 2013, this publication presents a crucial part of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow's (1944-2023) oeuvre. Although Barlow destroyed many of her sculptures during her career, she amassed a prolific archive of drawings dating back to the 1960s, when she was a student at Chelsea College of Art in London. While these works on paper range in style, they demonstrate a consistency in color and form and in their exploration of ideas related to structures, architectural interiors and urban surroundings.

Women Pioneers of the Arts and Crafts Movement

Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement is a celebration of the work and ambition of the women who were at the heart of the most influential art and design movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shines a light on the vital contribution of figures such as May Morris, Gertrude Jekyll, Annie Garnett, and many others, and describes the Arts and Crafts Movement from the perspective of these women who worked against the odds as artists, makers, teachers, authors, and entrepreneurs. Women of the era took part in, and often led, the founding of exhibitions, societies, art schools, and small craft industries. Some were activists and social disruptors while using their skills and talents to make a living.

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael

Three Renaissance masters converge in 1504 Florence In a single year at the turn of the 16th century, three titans of the Italian Renaissance briefly crossed paths while competing for the attention of the most powerful patrons in Republican Florence. In 1504, the city's prominent artists came together to advise on an appropriate location for Michelangelo's sculpture David. Among them was Leonardo da Vinci, who--like Michelangelo--had only recently returned to his native Florence. David was placed outside the Palazzo Vecchio, inside which da Vinci was planning a painting of the Battle of Anghiari for a council chamber wall. In short order, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Cascina on the opposite side of the room, creating a showdown between the city's celebrated sons. Although neither painting ultimately came to fruition, this flurry of conspicuous commissions was witnessed by a promising young painter: none other than Raphael.

Grime, Glitter, and Glass

In Grime, Glitter, and Glass, Nikki A. Greene examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture. Focusing on the multimedia art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual's sonic possibilities with the Black body's physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She employs her concept of "visual aesthetic musicality" to interpret Black visual art by examining the musical genres of jazz and rap, along with the often-overlooked innovations of funk and rumba, within art historiography.

Calling the Shots: a queer history of photography

Drawing on one of the oldest and largest photography collections in the world, Calling the Shots offers an unprecedented view of photographic history through a queer lens. It includes a broad range of global LGBTQIA+ representation from the mid-nineteenth century to now, presenting images from pioneering LGBTQIA+ photographers and subjects alongside work documenting activism and hard-won legal battles, over a century of performance, nightlife, and diverse queer communities, collectives, and subcultures. Following an introductory essay by Zorian Clayton, images are presented in six thematic chapters: Icons, Staged, Body, Liberty, Making a Scene, and Beyond the Frame. Each chapter opens with a short introductory essay, followed by an extended plate section. Expanded captions highlight key images, and "artist in focus" inserts draw on the work of selected photographers to illuminate particularly rich moments in LGBTQIA+ history.

Korean Feminist Artists: confront and deconstruct

Explore the vibrant history and profound cultural resonance of feminist art from Korea and the diaspora Renowned curator and scholar Dr. Kim Hong-hee's book is the first to delve into Korean feminist artists' impact on the East Asian cultural landscape. This unprecedented visual survey celebrates the work of 42 contemporary artists, from rising stars to globally recognized names, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kyungah Ham, Kimsooja, Lee Bul, Mire Lee, Minouk Lim, Haegue Yang, and Yun Suknam. Organized by themes including queer politics, ecofeminism, the diaspora, and abstraction, Korean Feminist Artistsfeatures artworks across painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, handicrafts, and performance.

Vital Signs: Artists and the Body

Vital Signs looks closely at how abstraction is often intimately tied with expansive, fluid ideas of the bodily. Bringing together seemingly unalike categories-masculine/feminine, figurative/abstract, self/other, exotic/banal-into newly fused configurations, the publication shows how artists have often conceived of these categories as inextricably intertwined. With a focus on artists working in the 1960s and 70s who, with a few exceptions, identified as women, the catalogue is divided into three thematic sections. 'Mirror' explores the ways artists have honed in on the forms of the face and head as a distorted mirror; 'Matter' looks at how artists draw on the metaphorical resonances of the body in ways that suggest mutable morphologies, especially in relation to socially constructed definitions of gender, race, and sexuality; and 'Metamorphosis' examines how artists have used abstraction as a means to transform the human body into different modes of being: new identities, other animals, and spiritual or cosmological entities.

Tee A. Corinne : a forest fire between us

An ambitious publication uncovering Tee Corrine's radical photographic practice and its intersections with her work as a lesbian sex activist, featuring unseen photographs, contact sheets, ephemera, and an extensive chronology.

Power, Politics and the Street: contemporary art in Southeast Asia after 1970

Providing a recent history of Southeast Asian art linked to the social and political contexts in which the illustrated work emerged, this groundbreaking book reveals the innovative creative strategies, often covertly encroaching on public space, developed by regional artists to ensure the communication of sometimes provocative, even rebellious, ideas to a general audience. Surveying work created by Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean and Filipino artists, the publication's broad regional spread provides valuable insights for a global audience perhaps unfamiliar with the pioneering utilisation of the street, public locales, and techniques of audience co-opting that have made Southeast Asia, and continue to make it, a region instrumental in facilitating social change through art.

Mark: Sonya Kelliher-Combs

Sonya Kelliher-Combs offers a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity in the Alaskan context. Her combination of shared iconography with intensely personal imagery demonstrates the generative power that each vocabulary has over the other. Similarly, her use of synthetic, organic, traditional and modern materials moves beyond oppositions between Western/Native culture, self/other and man/nature, to examine their interrelationships and interdependence while also questioning accepted notions of beauty. Kelliher-Combs' process dialogues the relationship of her work to skin, the surface by which an individual is mediated in culture. Through her mixed media painting and sculpture, Kelliher-Combs offers a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity in the Alaskan context.

Tracey Emin: Paintings

The first serious study on the paintings of the female icon and one of the most celebrated British artists, Tracey Emin Dame Tracey Emin DBE is known for her frank, confessional style and for transforming her inner world into intimate works of art. She has become one of the most celebrated artists in the world, a household name, and part of the Art establishment. Her practice includes painting, drawing, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, and neon, but in recent years she has focused on painting. Inspired by artists Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch, her paintings are provocative, confrontational, and vulnerable.

A World of Our Own: women artists against the odds

Women have always practiced as artists, but for centuries the art world considered them mere dilettantes. Their work was derided as second-rate, and they were considered intruders in a male profession. This study examines how, against the odds, they overcame these difficulties and shifts the focus away from women artists as "victims" to give an account of how they actually practiced their art. This stirring account documents the centuries- long struggle of gifted women who confronted the exclusionary tactics of a male-dominated art establishment but pressed ahead undaunted to gain acceptance as sought-after professionals. Art historian Frances Borzello takes readers deep into the restricted world of women artists of the past, showing how diligently they trained themselves, set up studios, and pursued sympathetic patrons.

Now We Have Seen: women and art in 1970s Italy

This edited volume examines the relationship between women and art in 1970s Italy. Drawing inspiration from a phrase in the Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile (1970) - "we have been looking for 4000 years: now we have seen!" - it investigates how women artists became increasingly aware of a need to accelerate the pace of change, as declared through the verbs "to look" and "to see" - verbs that connote a shift from the passive to the active. The topic of female emancipation in the 1970s is addressed here in its privileged connection to the visual arts through the exploration of several macro-topics leading to a critical and historical analysis of the tools and paradigms of emancipation itself.

Digital Art

A new history of digital art from the 1960s to the present day, with decade-by-decade essays exploring evolving digital art practices, alongside interviews with artists, gallerists, museum curators, and collectors. This new, image-led history of global digital art from the 1960s to the present day draws on the V&A's rich collection while linking the digital art scene to wider art and design histories, and to their social, political, and technological contexts. Decade-by-decade essays by leading authorities explore evolving digital art practices, and a series of interviews and discussions with prominent artists, gallerists, museum curators, and collectors from the world of digital art offer fascinating insights into the subject.

The African Gaze

The African Gaze is a comprehensive exploration of postcolonial and contemporary photography and cinema from Africa. Drawing from archival imagery and documents, interviews with the photographers and filmmakers (in some cases family members/close associates if the artist is deceased), and contributions from writers, scholars, and curators, it maps a comprehensive introduction to African moving and still imagery. This is a hugely important and timely publication--engagement with Black and African histories is stronger than ever before (and long overdue). The major names of African photography, such as Malick Sidibé, Sanlé Sory, and Seydou Keïta, have become highly collectible in the art market, while African cinema, pioneered by filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène in 1960s Senegal, is now recognized for its creative innovation and storytelling. For anyone drawn to African photography and film, this book will provide an exciting and accessible overview. Featuring interviews with Samuel Fosso and Souleymane Cissé.

Poor artists

Why make art? Faced with a capitalist system that has turned art into artwork and creative expression into cut-throat competition, why do so many artists try anyway? In this eye-opening journey through the bizarre world of contemporary art, criticism duo The White Pube tell the story of art like never before. Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar through childhood obsessions, art school lessons and her professional debut. In surreal encounters with other artists, Quest learns profound truths about money and power, and must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself.

E-books

Use Explore to search for individual e-books, or browse one of these full text e-book collections.

How can you tell if a book is available online?

On UCL Explore, you can look at the results of your search to quickly discover if a book is available in print or/and online: View Online means that the book is available electronically, while Available means that the book is available in print. In some cases a book is available both in print and online.

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General reference works, encyclopeadias and dictionaries

Consult introductory material or general reference works for a broad overview of your issue or topic, and to identify key concepts, theories and researchers in the field.

These are some examples of introductory material available for Art History in the Library. The list is not extensive, and you should perform your own searches to see what else is available.