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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

Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid!

From revolutionizing portraiture to redefining the nude, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) is rightly known among the foremost American figurative painters of the late 20th century. Yet his six-decade artistic oeuvre encompasses not only large-scale canvases of distinctively dressed (or undressed) individuals, but also includes evocative landscapes, hard-edged geometric abstractions, lush watercolors on paper and singular photographs informed by his studies with Walker Evans. This definitive volume spans all aspects of the artist's practice--probing his photographic experimentation as a forbear to contemporary street photography; celebrating his great sensitivity as a colorist whose unique expertise seamlessly combines oil-based and water-based pigments to evoke time and place; highlighting the observational genuineness in his provocative and personal interpretations of women, of unapologetically visible queer identities, and of his own beloved black communities across the African Diaspora.

Yoko Ono: Everything in the Universe Is Unfinished

This new edition of a landmark publication by avant-garde artist and cultural icon Yoko Ono combines never-before-published texts and invitation pieces written in 2016-2018 with drawings from the 'Franklin Summer' series she started in 1994.Embodying her visionary philosophy, Yoko Ono's latest artist's book is a companion for life.For Yoko Ono, words, artworks, and books still have the power to change the world we live in for the better. Thus, she continuously shares with us her vision of and philosophy on life--one that is made of pivotal experiences, unstoppable optimism, and a love for the other. Published on occasion of the exhibition 'Yoko Ono', 15 Feb - 1st Sep 2024, Tate Modern, London.

Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc 1960s-1980s

A massive panorama of Eastern Europe's postwar avant-gardes, featuring both canonical and lesser-known artists. Multiple Realities offers a sweeping survey of experimental art made in six Central Eastern European nations--GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia--during the 1960s to 1980s. Despite their geographical proximity, artists working during this time encountered different conditions for daily life and art-making, confronting varying degrees of control and pressure exerted by state authorities. Embracing conceptual or formal innovation and a spirit of adventurousness, Multiple Realities sheds light on ways that artists refused, circumvented, eluded and subverted official systems, in the process creating works often riddled with wit, humor or irony. While it presents select canonical figures from the region, the exhibition foregrounds lesser-known practitioners, particularly women artists, artist collectives and those exploring embodiment through an LGBTQ+ lens.

The Time Is Always Now

The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure edited by Ekow Eshun celebrates flourishing Black artists whose work illuminates the richness, beauty and complexity of Black life. The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure assembles contemporary African diasporic artists working in the UK and US whose practice foregrounds the Black figure. Edited and with texts by Ekow Eshun, and original essays by Bernardine Evaristo, Esi Edugyan and Dorothy Price. Published to coincide with the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, this publication explores and celebrates contemporary Black artists internationally who work within Black figuration.

An Anarchitectural Body of Work

This is the first book on the boundary-pushing practice of the artist, dancer, and educator Suzanne Harris (1940-1979). Harris was a protagonist in key avant-garde projects of the downtown New York City artists' community in the 1970s (the Anarchitecture group, 112 Greene Street, FOOD, The Natural History of the American Dancer, Heresies); yet her own oeuvre fell into abeyance. Harris' postminimalist work broke the mold of art categories, (feminist) art practices, art spaces, and the common notion of space. By transcending sculpture and dance, she created ephemeral, site-specific installations,which she conceived as body-oriented choreographic situations.

Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940

On the centennial anniversary of André Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto, Surrealism and Us shines new light on how Surrealism was consumed and transformed in the Caribbean and the United States. It brings together more than 50 works from the 1940s to the present that convey how Caribbean and African diasporic artists reclaimed a European avant-garde for their own purposes. Since its inception, the Surrealist movement--and many other European art movements of the early 20th century--embraced and transformed African art, poetry and music traditions. Concurrently, artists in the Americas proposed subsets of Surrealism more closely tied to African diasporic culture. In Martinique, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire proposed a Caribbean Surrealism that challenged principles of order and reason and embraced African spiritualities. Meanwhile, artists in the United States such as Romare Bearden and Ted Joans engaged deeply with Surrealist ideas. These trends lasted far beyond those of their European counterparts. Indeed, the term "Afro-surrealism" was created by poet Amiri Baraka in 1974; today the movement still flourishes in tandem with Afrofuturism.

Soulscapes

In 2024, Dulwich Picture Gallery will present Soulscapes, a major exhibition of landscape art that will expand and redefine the genre. Published to coincide with this revelatory exhibition, this book features over 30 contemporary artworks, spanning painting, photography, film, tapestry and collage from leading artists including Hurvin Anderson, Phoebe Boswell, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Kimathi Donkor, Isaac Julien, Marcia Michael, Mónica de Miranda and Alberta Whittle, as well as some of the most important emerging voices working today. Soulscapes explores our connection with the world around us through the eyes of artists from the African Diaspora and considers the power of landscape art through the themes of belonging, memory, joy and transformation.

When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture

Energetic sculptures that ooze, blossom and sprawl: all exploring the concept of movement Encompassing over 50 years of contemporary sculpture, When Forms Come Alive highlights the ways in which artists have been inspired by movement, flux and organic growth: from a dancer's gesture to the breaking of a wave, or from a flow of molten metal to the interlacing of a spider's web. The richly illustrated publication features a range of dynamic sculptural forms that seem to trickle, undulate, ripple and erupt across gallery spaces. Texts on each of the 21 international artists situate the artists' works within the context of postminimalism and explore formal and material innovation in sculpture across the past half century.

Bad taste: or the politics of ugliness

This book is not a taste, nor an anti-taste, manual.

This is an interrogation of the importance we place on seemingly objective ideas of taste in a culture that is saturated by imagery, and the dangerous impact this has on our identities, communities and politics. This book is dedicated to understanding the industries of taste. From the food we eat to the way we spend our free time, Olah exposes the shallow waters of 'good' and 'bad' taste and the rigid hierarchies that uphold this age-old dichotomy.

Riso Art: a creative's guide to mastering risography

A practical guide for anyone who wants to be inspired by the wide variety of possibilities offered by this easy-to-use technique including an overview of the work of print shops, design studios and artists from all over the world. In recent years risography has captured the attention of printers and artists, especially in independent and self-publishing circles, given the technical and visual qualities it offers. Varied and vivid spot colors, the warmth of the finishes, and occasional imperfections in uniformity and register are just some of these attractive features. The book begins by giving readers a brief history of the Risograph while outlining the basic principles of the printing process, including the equipment, tools and materials needed to get started. Designed mainly for high-volume photocopying and printing, Risographs are far less expensive than conventional photocopy machines and laser or ink printers. Rich in illustrations, pictures, detailed instructions and infographics, this practical guide to Risograph printing will teach readers how to set up a Risograph, how to prepare files to print, how to make overprints and knockouts, how to choose paper, how to handle freshly printed works, what ink to use and about any additional equipment they will need to become a Riso master. 

Unravel: the power and politics of textiles in art

The transformative power of contemporary textiles is the subject of this exhibition catalog that examines how and why textile has been a fertile medium for artists to question regimes of power and hierarchies of value. Bringing together more than 100 works by a diverse range of international practitioners, this eye-opening volume explores how textile art can be as discomforting as it is beautiful, and how age-old materials and processes are being reimagined with boundary-smashing innovations. From intimate hand-crafted works to large-scale sculptural installations, this book celebrates the legacies of artists such as Pacita Abad, the arpilleristas, and José Leonilson. Also featured here are works by living artists such as Igshaan Adams, Tracey Emin, and Cecilia Vicuña. Featuring new essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Miguel A. Lopez and Denise Ferriera da Silva, and texts by Michelle Adler, Diego Chocano, Wells Fray-Smith, Lotte Johnson and Amanda Pinatih, this beautifully produced book features a collection of renowned artists from around the world and reveals the extraordinary potential of textiles to confront fixed notions of history, race, gender, sexual expressions, and class--and how, ultimately, it can be a powerful force for both resistance and repair.

Motherhood

Tate Modern curator of international art Ann Coxon presents a captivating visual exploration of Motherhood, as seen through the eyes of artists over the last 150 years. Depictions of motherhood are ever present in Western art, yet are rarely questioned or challenged. Perhaps we may shy away from a subject that could be seen as sentimental or overly associated with idealistic constructs of femininity, nurture, and care. Whether we are mothers ourselves or we bring--or nurture--life in a wider sense, we all have some understanding of motherhood. We are all born of a woman's body. We are formed from the messy, challenging, self-denying, and transformative experiences of motherhood.

Ed Ruscha / Now Then

Published to accompany the most comprehensive presentation of Ed Ruscha's work to date, co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), this catalogue spans 65 years of the artist's remarkable career and mirrors his own cross-disciplinary approach. Spanning 65 years of Ed Ruscha's remarkable career and mirroring his own cross-disciplinary approach, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN features over 250 works, produced from 1958 to the present, in various mediums-including painting, drawing, prints, film, photography, artist's books, and Installation.

I'll Be Your Mirror: art and the digital screen

Artists from Nam June Paik to Arthur Jafa show how modern digital technologies have shaped the art and themes of our time Surveying some 50 years of groundbreaking art related to digital technology and the screen, I'll Be Your Mirror examines how technologies such as home computers, smartphones and TV have affected art and life over the past five decades. It traces a trajectory stretching back to the late 1960s, a watershed moment in the rise of the screen in the home. Today, accelerated by the pandemic, our daily life is mediated through screens for work, entertainment and sociality.

Shining lights : Black women photographers in 1980s-'90s Britain

Shining Lights is the first critical anthology to bring together the ground-breaking work of Black women photographers active in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s, providing a richly illustrated overview of a signif-icant and overlooked chapter of photographic history. Seen through the lens of Britain?s sociopolitical and cultural contexts, the publication draws on both lived experience and historical investigation to explore the communities, experiments, collaborations, and complexities that defined the decades. The innovative and diverse work created during this period spanned documentary and conceptual practices, including the experimental use of photomontage, self-portraiture, staged imagery, and photography in dialogue with other media.

Atlas of Performing Culture

Through examining more than 120 organizations on a global scale, this work shows how almost every human expression involves performing culture. Atlas of Performing Culture is an illustrated voyage across five continents--Asia, Africa, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas--involving the study of venues and events related to performance, the dynamic and unrepeatable mode of artistic activity capable of uniting the audience--who becomes the protagonist--with artists and works of art, architecture, and nature. The volume is organized around five thematic sections related to the physical spaces, venues, and typologies of events.

Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s

A pioneering survey of Korea's dynamic postwar avant-garde, with new translations of manifestos, articles and primary sources The 1960s and 1970s marked a period of exceptional change in Korea, propelled by rapid urbanization and modernization, and influenced by an authoritarian state at home and a globalizing world beyond. Young artists of the era were not immune to these unprecedented socioeconomic, political and material conditions, responding with a groundbreaking and genre-defying body of avant-garde art known broadly as Experimental art (silheom misul). Both as individuals and in collectives, these artists broke definitively with their predecessors, redefining the boundaries of traditional painting and sculpture while embracing innovative--and often provocative--approaches to materials and process through performance, installation, photography and video.

About Face: Stonewall, revolt, and new queer art

A unique survey of 350 artworks by a global and diverse array of LGBTQ+ artists - many underrecognized and overlooked - from the last 50 years Though the Stonewall Riots might now be shorthand for the start of the gay rights movement, so much of art and culture has been 'queer' since the beginning of time. In About Face, art historian and curator Jonathan D. Katz explores this concept head-on, curating a tapestry of works that connect historical threads and reveal how gender and sexual identity have been interwoven by artists contemporaneous to and since Stonewall. With more than 350 artworks by over 40 LGBTQ+ artists across nationalities and generations, and original texts by artists and scholars, About Faceis as stunning as it is important.

Going Dark: the Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility

From Dawoud Bey and Lorna Simpson to Sondra Perry and Kerry James Marshall, a multiethnic group of artists explores what it means to be seen, not seen or erased in the world through formal experimentations with the figure Going Dark brings together a multigenerational group of contemporary artists who engage the "semi-visible" figure--representations that are partially (or fully) obscured, including, in some cases, literally darkened--and suggests that the concept of going dark is a tool that has been used by artists for decades to probe enduring questions surrounding both the potential and the discontents of social visibility. Across mediums--painting, photography, sculpture, video and installation--Going Dark names, charts and makes meaning of the semi-visible figure, arguing for its significance in contemporary art as a genre of unique conceptual and formal power.

Barkley L. Hendricks: portraits at the Frick

American artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) revolutionized contemporary portraiture with his vivid depictions of Black subjects beginning in the late 1960s. This book contextualizes Hendricks's portraits at different stages of the country's history and places him in the pantheon of innovative twentieth-century artists. Hendricks developed his signature style at a time of significant social and cultural change in the United States, especially with regard to Black artists, and amid a perceived bifurcation between abstraction and representation. He produced portraits from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.

Oceans

OCEANS attends to the inextricable human and nonhuman agencies that affect and are affected by the sea and its running currents within contemporary art and visual culture. Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface, dividing and connecting humans, who carry saltwater in their blood, sweat, and tears. They also represent a powerful nonhuman force, rising, flooding, heating and raging in unprecedented ways as the climate crisis unfolds. Artists have envisioned the sea as a sublime wilderness, home to mythical creatures and bizarre species, a source of life and death, a site of new beginnings and tragic endings, both wondrous and disastrous. From migration to melting ice caps, the sea is omnipresent in international news and politics, leaking into popular culture and proliferating in recent art and exhibitions.

Dissident Practices: Brazilian women artists, 1960s-2020s

In Dissident Practices, Claudia Calirman examines sixty years of visual art by prominent and emerging Brazilian women artists from the 1960s to the present, covering the period from the military dictatorship to the return to democracy in the mid-1980s, the social changes of the 2000s, the rise of the Right in the late-2010s, and the recent development of an overtly feminist art practice. Though they were lauded as key figures in Brazilian art, these artists still faced adversity and constraints because of their gender. Although many of them in the 1960s and 1970s disavowed the term feminism, Calirman gives a nuanced account of how they responded to authoritarianism, engaged with trauma in the aftermath of the military dictatorship, interrogated social gender norms, and fought against women's objectification.

The Complex Answer: on art as a nonbinary intelligence

Essays on the question on how art--and contemporary art practices in particular--embodies an intelligence capable of serving the erasure of the culture/nature distinction. The Complex Answer: On Art as a Non-Binary Intelligence presents a series of entangled essays on the question on how art--and contemporary art practices in particular--embodies an intelligence capable of serving the erasure of the culture/nature distinction. The book is conceived in four parts and each not only introduces a slightly different writing on the subject matter, but also refers to concrete questions that affect the practice of art, the exercise of exhibiting, the duty of reflecting, and the institutional forms that define our present but may radically change in a near future. The book imagines art and contemporary art as an organ. An organ that produces an experience of inexpressible realities that are fundamental to understanding life and its processes. Stem cells exist, first, without a purpose and it is for the whole organism to decide if they will become part of an auditive nerve or the brain or the cornea of an eye. This adding to an organ is how Chus Martínez understands the intelligence of art.

Casa Susanna: the story of the first trans network in the United States, 1959-1968

Brings together a wealth of research and an expansive selection of photographs to create an enduring account of America's first known trans network, Casa Susanna. In the 1950s and 60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed - dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalized for their self-expression. This book opens up that now-lost world.

Women in Revolt! Art and activism in the UK 1970-90

A timely exploration of the work and lived experiences of a postwar generation of women artists that have largely been omitted from art historical narratives, Women in Revolt! surfaces the wealth and diversity of work created in the UK during the 1970s and '80s, a period of seismic social and political change. Across a wide variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film, and photography, this extensive exhibition book reflects on how women's needs were marginalized within mainstream culture and reveals how artists used radical ideas and methods to confront issues that will resonate with contemporary audiences--from access to healthcare and class struggles to ecological disaster, racism, and misogyny.

Re/sisters: a lens on gender and ecology

Reflecting on a range of themes, from extractive industriesto the politics of care, this timely exhibition catalog looks atenvironmental and gender justice as indivisible parts of a globalstruggle. A culturally diverse selection of works by Laura Aguilar,melanie bonajo, Xaviera Simmons, Minerva Cuevas, BarbaraKruger, Nadia Huggins, Ana Mendieta, Sim Chi Yin, Pamela Singh,Francesca Woodman and others are presented alongside worksof an activist nature to demonstrate how women are regularlyat the forefront of advocating and caring for the planet.Amplifying these visions are illuminating essays by experts inthe field, including Professor Kathryn Yusoff, Professor AstridaNeimanis, Professor Catriona Sandilands and Professor ElizabethDeLoughrey, that consider a diverse range of pertinent topicssuch as hydrofeminism, the body as earth, queer ecologies,and environmental racism.

Collaboration: a potential history of photography

A new, revolutionary history of photography from a stellar team of writers and thinkers that challenges all existing narratives by focusing on the complex collaborations between photographer and subject. Led by five of the great thinkers and practitioners in photography, and including texts by over 100 writers, critics and academics, this groundbreaking publication presents a potential history of photography explored through the lens of collaboration, challenging the dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship. With more than 1,000 photographs, it breaks apart photography's 'single creator' tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration - the various relationships, exchanges and interactions that occur between all participants in the making of any photograph.

Today Is Always Yesterday: Contemporary Brazilian Art

A compelling survey of contemporary radical art in Brazil.   Today Is Always Yesterday explores the historical constructs underlying contemporary art in Brazil. Michael Asbury argues that art can activate as well as illustrate history. The colors of the Brazilian flag structure the book's five chapters as Asbury explores artists' vital role in unraveling Brazil's core myths and its projected image as a racial melting pot. Richly illustrated, this book presents a compelling account of contemporary debates in Brazilian art.

International Departures: Art in India After Independence

A new global history of Indian art after 1947.   In this richly illustrated account, Devika Singh presents together for the first time the work of Indian and foreign artists active in India after independence in 1947. The book engages with the many creators, critics, and patrons of post-war Indian art from Bhupen Khakhar, Zarina and Kekoo Gandhy to Isamu Noguchi, Le Corbusier, and Clement Greenberg. Devika Singh opens up new ways of thinking about Indian art by considering their reception in India and abroad. Featuring a wealth of rare and previously unpublished images, this provocative new book explores how artists in India participated in global modernism during a crucial period of decolonization and nation-building.

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History

This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions - the museum, the art market - are not only products of colonial legacies but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice - racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world.

Activism

An edited collection that addresses the vital intersection of contemporary art and activism in this watershed cultural moment. Activism is a critical point of contention for institutions and genealogies of contemporary art around the world. Yet artists have consistently engaged in activist discourse, lending their skills to social movements, and regularly participating in civil and social rights campaigns while also boycotting cultural institutions and exerting significant pressure on them. This timely volume, edited by Tom Snow and Afonso Ramos, addresses an extraordinary moment in debates over the institutional frameworks and networks of art including large-scale direct actions, as well as a radical rethinking of art venues and urban spaces according to racial, class, or gender-based disparities, including demonstrations against the extractive and exploitative practices of neoliberal accumulation and climate catastrophe.

The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art

"This companion examines the global Renaissance through object-based case studies of artistic production from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe in the early modern period. The international group of contributors take an art historical approach characterized by close analysis of form and meaning as well as function, and a focus on questions of cross-cultural dialogue and adaptation. Seeking to de-emphasize the traditional focus on Europe, this book is a critical guide to the literature and the state of the field. Chapters, outline new questions and agendas while pushing beyond familiar material. Main themes include workshops, the migrations of artists, objects, technologies, diplomatic gifts, imperial ideologies, ethnicity and indigeneity, sacred spaces and image cults, as well as engaging with the open questions of "the Renaissance" and "the global." This will be a useful and important resource for researchers and professors alike and will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, material culture and Renaissance studies"--

Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects

A compelling exploration of trans art, activism, and resistance.   Spanning over four centuries, this volume brings together a wide-ranging selection of artworks and artifacts that highlight the under-recognized histories of trans and gender-nonconforming communities. Through the contributions of artists, writers, poets, activists, and scholars, this title reflects on historical erasure and imagines trans futures. An expansive array of objects chart not a patriarchal history but a gender-neutral, trans-centric hirstory. The first publication of its kind, this survey celebrates trans forebearers, highlights struggles and triumphs, and reflects on the legacies of trans creative expression.

Art Monsters: unruly bodies in feminist art

What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty. In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin--the celebrated author of Flâneuse--explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?

Unlicensed : bootlegging as a creative practice

Over the last few decades the term ‘bootlegging’—a practice once relegated to smugglers and copyright infringers—has become understood as a creative act. Debates about homage, appropriation, and theft that are common in the art world, are now being held in the spheres of corporate branding, social media, and the creative industry as a whole. Today, bootlegging has become fetishized as an aesthetic in and of itself, influencing everything from underground record labels to DIY T-shirts, publishing ideologies, to acts of high fashion détournement. UNLICENSED contains twenty-one interviews with a range of creative practitioners on the topic of bootlegging.

Being and Belonging: contemporary women artists from the Islamic world and beyond

Interviews with women artists connected with the Islamic world and their compelling works that are shaping contemporary art today. Showcasing artworks that offer political and poetic commentary on many of today's major global issues, Being and Belonging also features powerful and intimate interviews with 25 women artists from the Islamic world and beyond. Born and living in many different countries, the artists claim space and place as equal commentators on the world we live in today.

Kapwani Kiwanga : die Länge des Horizonts = the length of the horizon

This publication accompanies the first mid-career retrospective of an artist who knows how to entice visually and touch the viewer with the thematic content of her work. Using the power of colours, light, and materials charged with content, she narrates global (hi-)stories from new perspectives. Published on occasion of the exhibition ‘Kapwani Kiwanga: The length of the horizon’, 16 Sep  2023 — 7 Jan 2024, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. The artist will also exhibit at Copenhagen Contemporary in 2024.

The Detroit Printing Co-Op

A timely exploration of political organizing, publishing, design and distribution in 1970s Detroit In 1969, shortly after moving to Detroit with wife and partner Lorraine Nybakken, Fredy Perlman and a group of kindred spirits purchased a printing press from a Chicago dealer, transported it, in parts, back to Detroit in their cars and the Detroit Printing Co-op was born. Operating between 1969 and 1980 out of southwest Detroit, the Co-op was the site for the printing of the first English translation of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and journals like Radical America, produced by the Students for a Democratic Society; books such as The Political Thought of James Forman printed by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; and the occasional broadsheet, such as Judy Campbell's stirring indictment, "Open letter from 'white bitch' to the black youths who beat up on me and my friend."

Secret Poetics

The first English-language translation of Oiticica's "secret" poetry, featuring facsimile renderings of the handwritten poems and accompanying notes by the artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) is widely considered one of Brazil's most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar.

Multiplicity: Blackness in contemporary American collage

An engaging introduction to contemporary Black American collage brings together art by fifty artists that reflects the breadth and complexity of Black identity   Building on a technique that has roots in European and American traditions, Black artists have turned to collage as a way to convey how the intersecting facets of their lives combine to make whole individuals. Artists have assembled pieces of paper, fabrics, and other, often salvaged, materials to create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives despite the fragmentation of our times.   As artist Deborah Roberts asserts, "With collage, I can create a more expansive and inclusive view of the Black cultural experience."   More than 50 artists are represented in the book's 140 color images, with some creating original artworks for this project.

Photography: race, rights, and representation

Following the highly influential Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, this collection of essays, interviews and reflections gives new depth to Mark Sealy’s work challenging the legacies of colonial Othering in photography over a quarter of a century.
Weaving together analyses of work by Black photographers in the UK and internationally, interviews with key figures and personal reflections on the changing landscape of Black photography, this book offers an exploration of the past, present and future of decolonial visual practices. Sealy marks out a new path for photography – jazz-like, sensorial and experimental – in order to free it from the classifying colonial lens, offering the reader the opportunity to move both conceptually and spiritually into new visual realms when reading an image.

Copy Machine Manifestos

The first publication dedicated to artists' zines in North America, a revelatory exploration of an unexamined but thriving aesthetic practice Copy Machine Manifestos captures the rich history of artists' zines as never before, placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. Fully illustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, Ari Marcopoulos, Mark Morrisroe, Raymond Pettibon, Brontez Purnell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Kandis Williams. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art

This companion examines the global Renaissance through object-based case studies of artistic production from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe in the early modern period. The international group of contributors take an art historical approach characterized by close analysis of form and meaning as well as function, and a focus on questions of crosscultural dialogue and adaptation. Seeking to de-emphasize the traditional focus on Europe, this book is a critical guide to the literature and the state of the field. Chapters outline new questions and agendas while pushing beyond familiar material. Main themes include workshops, the migrations of artists, objects, technologies, diplomatic gifts, imperial ideologies, ethnicity and indigeneity, sacred spaces and image cults, as well as engaging with the open questions of "the Renaissance" and "the global."

Keisha Scarville : lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound

Keisha Scarville has spent much of her life tracing routes of movement between the Caribbean and America in order to investigate her own lineage. Attempting to understand how notions of belonging and identity are formed and structured, her image-making practice visualises the latent narratives inscribed within the thresholds of memory across generations. This first publication by Scarville unfolds as a sprawling, hypnotic visual essay, evocatively interweaving the artist’s striking black-and-white photography with archival imagery, passages from books, collages, personal texts, and film stills.

Hanne Darboven--Writing Time

An investigation of conceptual artist Hanne Darboven's artistic practice and her highly personal mark-making as a form of marking time on paper   Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) is best known for her immersive installations of individually framed sheets filled with written formulations and collaged images. Approaching Darboven's life and work through the lens of drawing, this succinct survey is organized around three watershed moments in the artist's practice.

Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties

Pop Art and Beyond foregrounds the roles of gender, race, and class in encounters with Pop during the Long Sixties. Exploring the work of over 20 artists from 5 continents, it offers new perspectives on Pop's heterogeneity. Featuring an array of rigorous chapters written by both acclaimed experts and emerging scholars, this anthology transcends the borders of individual and national contexts, and suspends hierarchies creating a space for the work of artists like Andy Warhol and the women of the Black Arts Movement to converse. It casts an inclusive look at the intersectional complexities of difference in Pop at a moment that gave rise to a plethora of radical social movements and identity politics.

Forecast Form: art in the Caribbean diaspora, 1990s-today

Caribbean art as a diasporic, fugitive phenomenon: a groundbreaking global survey The 1990s were a period of profound political transformation, from the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc to the rise of trade agreements that continue to influence the world we live in today. Emerging from this pivotal decade--which also shaped the production, circulation and framing of art in the Caribbean--Forecast Form traces a path into the present, highlighting forms, materials and processes that reveal new modes of thinking about identity and place. This volume features scholarly essays alongside richly illustrated plate sections and texts focused on an intergenerational group of 37 artists working across the Americas and Europe. A radical rethinking of contemporary art in the Caribbean, Forecast Form reveals the region as a place where the past, the present and the future meet--where continuous exchanges forecast what is to come while remaining grounded in the histories that shape the present.

Duchamp's Telegram: from beaux-arts to art-in-general

A revisionist history of Duchamp's legacy and impact on modern art.   In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent out a 'telegram' in the guise of a urinal signed R. Mutt. When it arrived at its destination a good forty years later it was both celebrated and vilified as proclaiming that anything could be art; from that point on, the whole Western art world reconfigured itself as 'post-Duchamp'. This book offers a reading of Duchamp's telegram that sheds new light on its first reception, corrects some historical mistakes and reveals that Duchamp's urinal in fact heralded the demise of the fine arts system and the advent of what Thierry de Duve calls the 'Art-in-General' system.

Weaving at Black Mountain College

A detailed study of the role and legacy of weaving at the legendary Black Mountain College   In the mid-twentieth century, Black Mountain College attracted a remarkable roster of artists, architects, and musicians. Yet the weaving classes taught by Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and six other faculty members are rarely mentioned or are often treated as mere craft lessons. This was far from the case: the weaving program was the school's most sophisticated and successful design program. About ten percent of all Black Mountain College students took at least one class in weaving, including specialists like textile designers Lore Kadden Lindenfeld and Else Regensteiner, as well as students from other disciplines, like artists Ray Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg and architects Don Page and Claude Stoller.

A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China

A lively tour through experimental Chinese photography from the early 1990s to today   The past thirty years were dynamic, transformative decades in Chinese photography. Artists exposed to recent work from around the globe experimented with photography in newly conceptual and expressive ways, and their art from this period offers a portrait of a country at a moment of rapid urbanization, globalization, and cultural foment. A Window Suddenly Opens reveals the key role that photography has played in questioning and refashioning the aesthetic and social status quo of modern Chinese society for the past three decades.

The Art of Walking

A lively and thought-provoking tour of the intertwined histories of art and walking   What does a walk look like? In the first book to trace the history of walking images from cave art to contemporary performance, William Chapman Sharpe reveals that a depicted walk is always more than a matter of simple steps. Whether sculpted in stone, painted on a wall, or captured on film, each detail of gait and dress, each stride and gesture has a story to tell, for every aspect of walking is shaped by social practices and environmental conditions.   From classical statues to the origins of cinema, from medieval pilgrimages to public parks and the first footsteps on the moon, walking has engendered a vast visual legacy intertwined with the path of Western art.

Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas is a long-overdue monograph for one of the most provocative and controversial British artists of our time.   Sarah Lucas is an internationally celebrated artist known for the provocative use of materials and imagery in her work. Incorporating ordinary objects in unexpected ways, she has consistently challenged our understandings of sex, class, and gender over the last four decades.   Looking beyond the generation of 1990s Young British Artists during which Lucas emerged, this visually stunning exhibition book invites the public to marvel at the diversity of her work across sculpture, installation, and photography. Breaking boundaries with her bawdy humor and bold daring, Lucas shows us the whole spectrum of what it truly means to be human.

The New York Tapes: Alan Solomon's Interviews for Television, 1965-66

Previously unpublished interviews with some of America's leading postwar artists--including Frankenthaler, Johns, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Stella and Warhol--originally conducted for TV in the mid-'60s by famed curator Alan Solomon This substantial volume publishes for the first time a series of interviews conducted with seminal East Coast artists and their associates, including Kenneth Noland, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Marcella Brenner, Helen Jacobson, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Barnett Newman, Leo Castelli, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick. These were produced in late 1965 and early 1966 for the documentary television series USA: Artists by famed curator Alan Solomon, who was a regular fixture in the New York art world of the time.

Male Bodies Unmade: Picturing Queer Selfhood

Male Bodies Unmade explores white men's disunified physicality in modern and contemporary art while attending to erotic polysemy that questions the visual ethos of Occidental patriarchy. Art historian Jongwoo Jeremy Kim's approach is informed by his own status as an immigrant--a polyglot queen, drawn to extravagant fantasies of misbehaving bodies that are in truth foreign territories, colonies of misbelief. In six case studies focusing on configurations of irrational anatomy and horny self-extinction, this book celebrates the lessons and pleasures of disrupting art history's hegemonically Western narratives.

Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life

A multidisciplinary study of pattern and chaos. This book explores critical and visual practices through the lens of interactions and intersections between pattern and chaos. The interrelationship between pattern and chaos challenges disciplinary boundaries, critical frameworks, and modes of understanding, perception, and communication. Drawing on fields such as visual culture, sociology, physics, neurobiology, linguistics, and critical theory, contributors to this volume explore the results of experiments with pattern and chaos-related forms, processes, materials, sounds, and language. The result is a bracing, wide-ranging examination of a central dynamic in the making and understanding of art.  

Called to the Camera

A timely reconsideration of the history of photography that places Black studio photographers, and their subjects, at the center From photography's beginnings in the United States, Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of popular media to produce affirming portraits for their clients, as well as a wide range of photographic work rooted in their communities. Called to the Camera offers a comprehensive history of this work, from the nineteenth-century daguerreotypes of James Presley Ball to the height of Black studios in the mid-twentieth century, and considers contemporary photographers responding to Black studio traditions today.

Women Artists Together

A fresh perspective on collaboration, collectivity, and conflict in the women's art movement of the 1970s   Women Artists Together is a thought-provoking study of how the women's liberation movement galvanized a generation of women artists. It offers a fresh perspective on the history of the women's art movement and considers how it was shaped by collaboration and togetherness. Retracing 1970s liberation politics, Amy Tobin emphasizes how artworks emerged from--and contested--feminist paradigms and contexts.   Taking class, gender, race, and sexuality as central concerns, the book includes examples of inspirational feminist activism as well as fallings out, disagreements, and antagonism.

A Long Arc: Photography and the American South

Collects over 175 years of key moments in the visual history of the Southern United States, with over two hundred and fifty photographs taken from 1845 to present The South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South's people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. Indeed, many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines the American experience--from racism, poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster, immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global economy--appear as key themes in the photography of the South.

Kehinde Wiley

"That is the archaeology I am unearthing: the specter of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and brown people all over the world." -Kehinde Wiley Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence features a new body of paintings and sculptures by American artist Kehinde Wiley confronting the legacies of colonialism through the visual language of the fallen figure. It expands on a subject the artist first explored in his 2008 series Down--a group of large-scale portraits of young Black men inspired by Wiley's encounter with Hans Holbein the Younger's The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521-22) at the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Painting in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Painting in Fifteenth-Century Italy: This Splendid and Noble Art is a transformational study that introduces groundbreaking approaches and discoveries. Challenging the traditional focus on Venice, Florence, and Rome, the lively narrative traverses the peninsula from north to south and culminates in the global ports of Naples and Sicily. It reappraises the careers and collaborations of painters, some little-known today. With greater frequency than previously imagined, these masters traveled widely to seek professional opportunities and expand their artistic horizons. Through such journeys, they engaged with local visual culture as well as the art of antiquity, Byzantium, Spain, and northern Europe.

Strong Women in Renaissance Italy

The lives, works and imagery of women artists, patrons and icons in Renaissance Italy The story of the Renaissance in Italy is often told through the work of great male artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo. But what about the female half of the population? By exploring works made by, for, or about women, this book aims to reconsider a period of creative ingenuity and artistic excellence from their often-overlooked perspective. Drawing on the rich collection of paintings, ceramics, textiles, illustrated books and prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this publication focuses on images of feminine power, both sacred and secular, telling the stories of saints such as Mary Magdalen as examples of strength and ascetic devotion, Biblical heroines such as Judith as civic and domestic role models, and the mythical sorceress Medea as the ideal of a heroic nude.

Carrie Mae Weems: Hasselblad Award 2023

This richly illustrated catalogue celebrates the 2023 Hasselblad Award winner, by highlighting a number of prominent works, including 'Family Pictures and Stories' (1978-84), 'Kitchen Table Series' (1990), and 'From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried' (1995-96).With an intersectional approach to history and politics, Weems digs deep into photography's multiple roles in the representation of race, gender, and class.Published on occasion of the exhibition 'Carrie Mae Weems: Hasselblad Award Winner 2023', 14 Oct 2023 - 21 Jan 2024, Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg.

The Space Between: the Modern in Korean Art

Featuring over 130 artworks--some previously unpublished--this richly illustrated volume is essential for understanding modern art in Korea and how it evolved to meet the contemporary global context In The Space Between, a generative period in Korean art between the traditional and the contemporary is illuminated comprehensively for the first time. After the centuries-long Joseon dynasty came 35 uninterrupted years of the Japanese colonial period (1910-45) followed by the Korean War (1950-53). During this tumultuous time, Korean artists grappled with issues such as identity and nationalism and experimented with a broad range of media.

The Artist's Novel: a New Medium

On the emergence of novels as artistic medium Rotterdam-based Spanish artist and scholar David Maroto (born 1976) explores the novel as an art medium. The first volume features interviews with Benjamin Seror, Cally Spooner, Mai-Thu Perret, Goldin+Senneby, Francis McKee, Vivian Ziherl, Natasha Soobramanien, Clive Phillpot and others

Art after Instagram

This book explores the effects of the Instagram platform on the making and viewing of art. Authors Lachlan MacDowall and Kylie Budge critically analyse the ways Instagram has influenced artists, art spaces, art institutions and art audiences, and ultimately contemporary aesthetic experience. The book argues that more than simply being a container for digital photography, the architecture of Instagram represents a new relationship to the image and to visual experience, a way of shaping ocular habits and social relations.

Weak painting after Modernism: material strategies 1968-1978.

This book examines the terms upon which painting in the United States sought to negotiate with the legacy of American formalist aesthetics and by extension, the understanding of modernist painting it had become most readily associated with. In so doing, a separate set of possibilities for painting gradually began to emerge. The salient debates and practices that collectively worked to establish such a response are approached through the philosopher Gianni Vattimo's idea of pensiero debole or so-called weak thought. To this end, the proposed study both identifies and seeks to examine a type of "weak" painting which, like Vattimo's idea, took as its critical point of departure "the exhaustion - but not the vanishing - of the project of modernism (the belief in reason, progress, history, the nation-state, etc.)."

Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie

This collection explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture, "selfies," with a specific interest in online self-imaging strategies in a Western context. This book examines the selfie as a social and technological phenomenon but also engages with digital self-portraiture as representation: as work that is committed to rigorous object-based analysis. The scholars in this volume consider the topic of online self-portraiture--both its social function as a technology-driven form of visual communication, as well as its thematic, intellectual, historical, and aesthetic intersections with the history of art and visual culture. This book will be of interest to scholars of photography, art history, and media studies.

The Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography

This book is a theoretical examination of the relationship between the face, identity, photography, and temporality, focusing on the temporal episteme of selfie practice. Claire Raymond investigates how the selfie's involvement with time and self emerges from capitalist ideologies of identity and time. The book leverages theories from Katharina Pistor, Jacques Lacan, Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson, and Hans Belting to explore the ways in which the selfie imposes a dominant ideology on subjectivity by manipulating the affect of time. The selfie is understood in contrast to the self-portrait.

The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography

By carefully conceptualising the domestic in relation to the self and the photographic, this book offers a unique contribution to both photography theory and criticism, and life-narrative studies. Jane Simon brings together two critical practices into a new conversation, arguing that artists who harness domestic photography can advance a more expansive understanding of the autobiographical. Exploring the idea that self-representation need not equate to self-portraiture or involve the human form, artists from around the globe are examined, including Rinko Kawauchi, Catherine Opie, Dayanita Singh, Moyra Davey, and Elina Brotherus, who maintain a personal gaze at domestic detail.

Citizens of Photography

Citizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography's performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities.

On the Nude: looking anew at the naked body in art

This book provides a timely reappraisal of one of the most enduring subjects in the history of art - the naked body. Beginning with reflections on what denuding entails and means, the volume then shifts to a consideration of body politics in the context of Black political empowerment, disability, and queer and Indigenous politics of representation. Themes including the animal nude, the male nude, and nudity in childhood are also considered. The final section examines the nude from the perspective of the artist and the artist's model. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, screen studies, and trans studies.

The Persistence of Dance

There is a category of choreographic practice with a lineage stretching back to mid-20th century North America that has re-emerged since the early 1990s: dance as a contemporary art medium. Such work belongs as much to the gallery as does video art or sculpture and is distinct from both performance art and its history as well as from theater-based dance.  The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art clarifies the continuities and differences between the second-wave dance avant-garde in the 1950s - 1970s and the third-wave starting in the 1990s. Through close readings of key artists such as Maria Hassabi, Sarah Michelson, Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher, Adam Linder, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Shelley Lasica and Latai Taumoepeau, The Persistence of Dance traces the relationship between the third-wave and gallery-based work.

Crafted with Pride

An exploration of the important relationship between craft, queerness, and activism in Britain. Crafted with Pride is a collection of critical essays, oral histories, and creative responses that explore queer craft and the material cultures of LGBTQ+ activism in Britain since the 1980s. There is a long history of using craft and DIY processes to explore identities and encourage social change and political change, yet these stories remain undocumented and insufficiently researched. Daniel Fountain sheds light on them, bringing together contributions from academics, artists, activists, curators, and heritage professionals.

Marina Abramovic

A career-spanning survey on Marina Abramovic, created in close collaboration with the legendary performance artist. Over the past half century, Marina Abramovic has earned worldwide acclaim as a pioneer of performance art. In the fall of 2023 the Royal Academy in London is staging a massive exhibition featuring works from her entire career. Re-performances of some of her best-known and most radical works join new works created for the exhibition. Produced in collaboration with the artist, this important publication brings expert voices into the debate that Abramovic's work engenders.

Contemporary Queer Chinese Art

Contemporary Queer Chinese Art is the first English-language academic book that explores the intersections of queer culture and contemporary Chinese art from the mid-1980s to the present. This book brings together 15 internationally renowned artists, activists, curators and scholars to explore heterogeneous expressions of Chineseness and queerness in contemporary art from China and Chinese diasporas in Asia, Europe and North America.

A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography

A celebration of the visual and cultural landscape of contemporary African photography, this stunning exhibition book offers critical insight from the perspectives of Africa's leading artists and thinkers. Since the invention of photography in the 19th century, Africa has been defined largely by Western images of its cultures and traditions. From the colonial carte de visite and ethnographic archive to the rise of studio portraiture and social documents of racial surveillance, the fraught relationship between Africa and the photographic lens has become inseparable from the discourses of postcolonialism. Challenging these dominant images of exoticism and otherness, this book illustrates how photography has allowed artists to reimagine African histories through the lens of the present, to shape our understanding of the contemporary realities we face.

A Year in the Art World

A panoramic insider's account of the global art industry, revealing the fascinating but mysterious workings of the world of contemporary art. Over the last few decades the contemporary art world has become more globalized and more visible than ever before - and yet in many ways it remains closed and obscure. What actually happens behind the doors of a contemporary artist's studio? At an auction house before a major sale? In the vaults of an art storage unit? How can art museums keep up with Instagram - and why does everyone seem to hate art fairs? Join curator, writer and art historian Matthew Israel on a year-long journey through the contemporary art world.

The Politics of Artists in War Zones

What exactly is contemporary war art in the West today? This book considers the place of contemporary war art in the 2020s, a whole generation after 9/11 and long past the 'War on Terror'. Exploring the role contemporary art plays within conversations around war and imperialism, the book brings together chapters from international contemporary artists, theorists and curators, alongside the voices of contemporary war artists through original edited interviews. It addresses newly emerged contexts in which war is found: not only sites of contemporary conflicts such as Ukraine, Yemen and Syria, but everywhere in western culture, from social media to 'culture' wars.

Implication: an ecocritical dictionary for art history

Readers of Implication will come away convinced that all art—regardless of historical period, context, genre, or medium—has an ecological connection to the world in which it was created. Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry that examines the environmental significance of art, literature, and other creative endeavors. In Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History, Alan C. Braddock, a pioneer in art historical ecocriticism, presents a fascinating group of key terms and case studies to demonstrate that all art is ecological in its interconnectedness with the world.

Dear Earth

'Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis' is published on occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Hayward Gallery, London, 2023.Inspired by artist Otobong Nkanga's suggestion that "caring is a form of resistance", this pioneering book will highlight the ways in which artists are helping to reframe and deepen our psychological and spiritual responses to the climate crisis.Essays by Rachel Thomas, Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes, and Rebecca Solnit explore work by the 14 featured international artists; the history of climate-concerned art; and the role art has to play in climate activism today..

Object Lessons in American Art

A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more. Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past.

Roy Lichtenstein

The first book-length study to examine the materials and techniques used in the fabrication and painting of the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's outdoor sculpture. Vibrant color was essential to the paintings of the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), and when he began exploring the creation of outdoor sculpture in the late 1970s, vivid hues remained an important part of his artistic vocabulary. Today, preserving these remarkable works after they have endured decades in outdoor environments around the world is an issue of pressing concern.

Lateness and Longing

How a generation of women artists is transforming photography with analogue techniques. Beginning in the 1990s, a series of major artists imagined the expansion of photography, intensifying its ideas and effects while abandoning many of its former medium constraints. Simultaneous with this development in contemporary art, however, photography was moving toward total digitalization. Lateness and Longing presents the first account of a generation of artists--focused on the work of Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart, and Moyra Davey--who have collectively transformed the practice of photography, using analogue technologies in a dissident way and radicalizing signifiers of older models of feminist art.

NO Rhetoric(s)

An incisive examination of the intersection of global art and political resistance. NO Rhetoric(s) examines a subject intensely debated during the last three decades but rarely a topic of its own: art as an agent of resistance, whether as a rhetorical stance or critical strategy. In the face of today's discourse on revolt and insurrection, it is necessary to ask whether the gesture of "negation" still has an emancipatory potential. NO Rhetoric(s) contributes a deeper understanding of the different logics of resistance at play between art and politics.

Signals: How Video Transformed the World

Having become widely accessible as a consumer technology in the 1960s, video is ever-present today-on our phones and our screens, defining new spaces and experiences, shaping our ideas and politics, and spreading disinformation, documentation, evidence, fervor. Signals: The Politics of Video charts the ways in which artists have both championed and questioned the promise of video, revealing a history that has been planetary, critical, and activist from its very beginnings. The Museum of Modern Art has been at the forefront of bringing video into museums-pioneering the collection, conservation, and definition of a new artistic medium. Signals aims to renew and revise our understanding of art and video, both within and outside the museum.

Totality

An original and ambitious approach to understanding the creative achievements of one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century; Totality offers a deeply researched and thoughtful account of the art of Barnett Newman (1905-1970). While Newman's paintings are widely regarded as among the most significant statements of abstract expressionism--and emblematic of modernism at midcentury--they pose distinct challenges to formal description and historical evaluation. With this book, Michael Schreyach guides readers toward a transformed understanding of Newman's profound body of work.

Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists

A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery. In Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography's narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin's New York demimonde to Justine Kurland's pictures of rebel girls on the open road.

Radical Futurisms

What comes after end-of-world narratives- visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end-of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. Drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed-Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist-as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, in this book. T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives, arguing that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance.

To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die

A book-length essay about photography's unique ability to ease the ache of human mortality. Drawing on the writings of Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson and other poets, artists, musicians and thinkers, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter (born 1968) argues passionately--in one main essay and a series of lively digressions--that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one's sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality.

The Geometries of Afro Asia

A groundbreaking method for writing art history, using the language of geometry. How do we embark on a history of art from the assumption of a global majority, outside of essentializing categories like race or hollow proclamations of solidarity? With this book, Joan Kee presents a framework for understanding the rich and surprisingly understudied relationship between Black and Asian artists and the worlds they initiate through their work.

The Impossibillity of Silence: Writing for Designers, Artists & Photographers

Ian Lynam's The Impossibility of Silence is a book for artists, photographers and designers interested in approaching writing about their vocation and culture. Drawing upon decades of experience as a writer, designer, artist and teacher, Lynam offers up a plethora of inspirational and concrete approaches to writing about creative fields. Called "the Hunter S. Thompson of design writing," Lynam uses his industry knowledge to convey his philosophy on writing specifically in a professional creative setting.

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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.