Download or read book Crafted Lives written by Patricia Ann Turner and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Turner also probes the ways in which African American quilts and quilters have been depicted, discussed, criticized, and characterized. From the displays of Harriet Powers's creations at the turn of the twentieth century to the contemporary exhibits of such black art-quilts as those promoted by Carolyn Mazloomi, and such utilitarian expressions as the celebrated examples from Gee's Bend, Alabama, Turner uses quilts to assess the level of control African Americans have had or have not had over the materials they craft and the art they leave as legacy to new generations."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Crafted Lives Stories and Studies of African American Quilters written by Patricia Ann Turner and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book African American Folklore written by Anand Prahlad and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American folklore dates back 240 years and has had a significant impact on American culture from the slavery period to the modern day. This encyclopedia provides accessible entries on key elements of this long history, including folklore originally derived from African cultures that have survived here and those that originated in the United States. Inspired by the author's passion for African American culture and vernacular traditions, African American Folklore: An Encyclopedia for Students thoroughly addresses key elements and motifs in black American folklore-especially those that have influenced American culture. With its alphabetically organized entries that cover a wide range of subjects from the word "conjure" to the dance style of "twerking," this book provides readers with a deeper comprehension of American culture through a greater understanding of the contributions of African American culture and black folk traditions. This book will be useful to general readers as well as students or researchers whose interests include African American culture and folklore or American culture. It offers insight into the histories of African American folklore motifs, their importance within African American groups, and their relevance to the evolution of American culture. The work also provides original materials, such as excepts from folktales and folksongs, and a comprehensive compilation of sources for further research that includes bibliographical citations as well as lists of websites and cultural centers.
Download or read book My Soul Has Grown Deep written by Cheryl Finley and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Soul Has Grown Deep considers the art-historical significance of contemporary Black artists and quilters working throughout the southeastern United States and Alabama in particular. Their paintings, drawings, mixed-media compositions, sculptures, and textiles include pieces ranging from the profoundly moving assemblages of Thornton Dial to the renowned quilts of Gee’s Bend. Nearly sixty remarkable examples—originally collected by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art—are illustrated alongside insightful texts that situate them in the history of modernism and the context of the African American experience in the twentieth-century South. This remarkable study simultaneously considers these works on their own merits while making connections to mainstream contemporary art. Art historians Cheryl Finley, Randall R. Griffey, and Amelia Peck illuminate shared artistic practices, including the novel use of found or salvaged materials and the artists’ interest in improvisational approaches across media. Novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney provides a thoughtful consideration of the cultural and political history of the American South, during and after the Civil Rights era. These diverse works, described and beautifully illustrated, tell the compelling stories of artists who overcame enormous obstacles to create distinctive and culturally resonant art. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture written by Carol Crown and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Folk art is one of the American South's most significant areas of creative achievement, and this comprehensive yet accessible reference details that achievement from the sixteenth century through the present. This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the many forms of aesthetic expression that have characterized southern folk art, including the work of self-taught artists, as well as the South's complex relationship to national patterns of folk art collecting. Fifty-two thematic essays examine subjects ranging from colonial portraiture, Moravian material culture, and southern folk pottery to the South's rich quilt-making traditions, memory painting, and African American vernacular art, and 211 topical essays include profiles of major folk and self-taught artists in the region.
Download or read book The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells written by Stacy I. Morgan and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2024-09-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and richly illustrated survey of one of the most significant and intriguing quilters of the 21st century, featuring 109 color plates of Wells's narrative quilts with intimate commentaries by Wells herself
Download or read book American Folk Art 2 volumes written by Kristin G. Congdon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 1433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Folk art is as varied as it is indicative of person and place, informed by innovation and grounded in cultural context. The variety and versatility of 300 American folk artists is captured in this collection of informative and thoroughly engaging essays. American Folk Art: A Regional Reference offers a collection of fascinating essays on the life and work of 300 individual artists. Some of the men and women profiled in these two volumes are well known, while others are important practitioners who have yet to receive the notice they merit. Because many of the artists in both categories have a clear identity with their land and culture, the work is organized by geographical region and includes an essay on each region to help make connections visible. There is also an introductory essay on U.S. folk art as a whole. Those writing about folk art to date tend to view each artist as either traditional or innovative. One of the major contributions of this work is that it demonstrates that folk artists more often exhibit both traits; they are grounded in their cultural context and creative in the way they make work their own. Such insights expand the study of folk art even as they readjust readers' understanding of who folk artists are.
Download or read book Blanket written by Kara Thompson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. We are born into blankets. They keep us alive and they cover us in death. We pull and tug on blankets to see us through the night or an illness. They shield us in mourning and witness our most intimate pleasures. Curious, fearless, vulnerable, and critical, Blanket interweaves cultural critique with memoir to cast new light on a ubiquitous object. Kara Thompson reveals blankets everywhere--film, art, geology, disasters, battlefields, resistance, home--and transforms an ordinary thing into a vibrant and vital carrier of stories and secrets, an object of inheritance and belonging, a companion to uncover. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Download or read book Writing History from the Margins written by Claire Parfait and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from leading American and European scholars, this collection of original essays surveys the actors and the modes of writing history from the "margins" of society, focusing specifically on African Americans. Nearly 100 years after The Journal of Negro History was founded, this book assesses the legacy of the African American historians, mostly amateur historians initially, who wrote the history of their community between the 1830s and World War II. Subsequently, the growth of the civil rights movement further changed historical paradigms--and the place of African Americans and that of black writers in publishing and in the historical profession. Through slavery and segregation, self-educated and formally educated Blacks wrote works of history, often in order to inscribe African Americans within the main historical narrative of the nation, with a two-fold objective: to make African Americans proud of their past and to enable them to fight against white prejudice. Over the past decade, historians have turned to the study of these pioneers, but a number of issues remain to be considered. This anthology will contribute to answering several key questions concerning who published these books, and how were they distributed, read, and received. Little has been written concerning what they reveal about the construction of professional history in the nineteenth century when examined in relation to other writings by Euro-Americans working in an academic setting or as independent researchers.
Download or read book Crafting Dissent written by Hinda Mandell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pussyhats, typically crafted with yarn, quite literally created a sea of pink the day after Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States in January 2017, as the inaugural Women’s March unfolded throughout the U.S., and sister cities globally. But there was nothing new about women crafting as a means of dissent. Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats is the first book that demonstrates how craft, typically involving the manipulation of yarn, thread and fabric, has also been used as a subversive tool throughout history and up to the present day, to push back against government policy and social norms that crafters perceive to be harmful to them, their bodies, their families, their ideals relating to equality and human rights, and their aspirations. At the heart of the book is an exploration for how craft is used by makers to engage with the rhetoric and policy shaping their country’s public sphere. The book is divided into three sections: "Crafting Histories," Politics of Craft," and "Crafting Cultural Conversations." Three features make this a unique contribution to the field of craft activism and history: The inclusion of diverse contributors from a global perspective (including from England, Ireland, India, New Zealand, Australia) Essay formats including photo essays, personal essays and scholarly investigations The variety of professional backgrounds among the book’s contributors, including academics, museum curators, art therapists, small business owners, provocateurs, artists and makers. This book explains that while handicraft and craft-motivated activism may appear to be all the rage and “of the moment,” a long thread reveals its roots as far back as the founding of American Democracy, and at key turning points throughout the history of nations throughout the world.
Download or read book Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination written by Kathy-Ann Tan and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how traditional notions of citizenship are contested and altered through literature. Literature has always played a central role in creating and disseminating culturally specific notions of citizenship, nationhood, and belonging. In Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination, author Kathy-Ann Tan investigates metaphors, configurations, parameters, and articulations of U.S. and Canadian citizenship that are enacted, renegotiated, and revised in modern literary texts, particularly during periods of emergence and crisis. Tan brings together for the first time a selection of canonical and lesser-known U.S. and Canadian writings for critical consideration. She begins by exploring literary depiction of "willful" or "wayward" citizens and those with precarious bodies that are viewed as threatening, undesirable, unacceptable—including refugees and asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, deportees, and stateless people. She also considers the rights to citizenship and political membership claimed by queer bodies and an examination of "new" and alternative forms of citizenship, such as denizenship, urban citizenship, diasporic citizenship, and Indigenous citizenship. With case studies based on works by a diverse collection of authors—including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Djuna Barnes, Etel Adnan, Sarah Schulman, Walt Whitman, Gail Scott, and Philip Roth—Tan uncovers alternative forms of collectivity, community, and nation across a broad range of perspectives. In line with recent cross-disciplinary explorations in the field, Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination shows citizenship as less of a fixed or static legal entity and more as a set of symbolic and cultural practices. Scholars of literary studies, cultural studies, and citizenship studies will be grateful for Tan's illuminating study.
Download or read book New Approaches to Gone With the Wind written by and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 1936, Gone with the Wind has held a unique position in American cultural memory, both for its particular vision of the American South in the age of the Civil War and for its often controversial portrayals of race, gender, and class. New Approaches to “Gone with the Wind” offers neither apology nor rehabilitation for the novel and its Oscar-winning film adaptation. Instead, the nine essays provide distinct, compelling insights that challenge and complicate conventional associations. Racial and sexual identity form a cornerstone of the collection: Mark C. Jerng and Charlene Regester each examine Margaret Mitchell’s reframing of traditional racial identities and the impact on audience sympathy and engagement. Jessica Sims mines Mitchell’s depiction of childbirth for what it reveals about changing ideas of femininity in a postplantation economy, while Deborah Barker explores transgressive sexuality in the film version by comparing it to the depiction of rape in D. W. Griffith’s earlier silent classic, Birth of a Nation. Other essays position the novel and film within the context of their legacy and their impact on national and international audiences. Amy Clukey and James Crank inspect the reception of Gone with the Wind by Irish critics and gay communities, respectively. Daniel Cross Turner, Keaghan Turner, and Riché Richardson consider its aesthetic impact and mythology, and the ways that contemporary writers and artists, such as Natasha Trethewey and Kara Walker, have engaged with the work. Finally, Helen Taylor sums up the pervading influence that Gone with the Wind continues to exert on audiences in both America and Britain. Through an emphasis on intertextuality, sexuality, and questions of audience and identity, these essayists deepen the ongoing conversation about the cultural impact and influence of this monumental work. Flawed in many ways yet successful beyond its time, Gone with the Wind remains a touchstone in southern studies.
Download or read book Is It a Sermon written by Donyelle C. McCray and published by Presbyterian Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is It a Sermon? is an informative and daring call to blur the boundaries of the sermon genre, exploring the “shoreline” of homiletics, or the place where preaching laps up against other modes of discourse. In this book, Donyelle McCray explores how preaching merges with prayer, song, performance, and activism—the gospel dancing in and out of the forms we create for it. Consider the sermonic performance of Isaiah walking naked and barefoot for three years, the deaconess whose morning prayer rhythmically flows into sermon, or the gospel soloist who pauses in her song to tell a story or break into a sermonette. McCray is interested in the possibilities that emerge when we play at the shoreline, and she questions what modes of preaching get overlooked due to genre classifications. She seeks to discover what we might learn from these shoreline preachers about bearing witness, enacting Scripture, and listening to life. While these questions could be explored generally, McCray focuses on African American preachers who play at the boundaries of the sermon genre, with attention to how genre fluidity provides a means of drawing on ancestral wisdom. Key figures like Mahalia Jackson, Harriet Powers, Rosie Lee Tomkins, Thea Bowman, Howard Thurman, and Toni Morrison are examined as artists, activists, and proclaimers. She shines a new light on their work and points out how they reform preacherly identities and refuse traditional patterns of holding authority. Ultimately, in blurring the boundaries of sermon genre, this book offers readers strategies for embracing their voices more fully within and beyond the pulpit.
Download or read book Fray written by Julia Bryan-Wilson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-02 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.
Download or read book Improvisation and Music Education written by Ajay Heble and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers compelling new perspectives on the revolutionary potential of improvisation pedagogy. Bringing together contributions from leading musicians, scholars, and teachers from around the world, the volume articulates how improvisation can breathe new life into old curricula; how it can help teachers and students to communicate more effectively; how it can break down damaging ideological boundaries between classrooms and communities; and how it can help students become more thoughtful, engaged, and activist global citizens. In the last two decades, a growing number of music educators, music education researchers, musicologists, cultural theorists, creative practitioners, and ethnomusicologists have suggested that a greater emphasis on improvisation in music performance, history, and theory classes offers enormous potential for pedagogical enrichment. This book will help educators realize that potential by exploring improvisation along a variety of trajectories. Essays offer readers both theoretical explorations of improvisation and music education from a wide array of vantage points, and practical explanations of how the theory can be implemented in real situations in communities and classrooms. It will therefore be of interest to teachers and students in numerous modes of pedagogy and fields of study, as well as students and faculty in the academic fields of music education, jazz studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, cultural studies, and popular culture studies.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies written by Simon J. Bronner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 1033 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies surveys the materials, approaches, concepts, and applications of the field to provide a sweeping guide to American folklore and folklife, culture, history, and society. Forty-three comprehensive and diverse chapters delve into significant themes and methods of folklore and folklife study; established expressions and activities; spheres and locations of folkloric action; and shared cultures and common identities. Beyond the longstanding arenas of academic focus developed throughout the 350-year legacy of folklore and folklife study, contributors at the forefront of the field also explore exciting new areas of attention that have emerged in the twenty-first century such as the Internet, bodylore, folklore of organizations and networks, sexual orientation, neurodiverse identities, and disability groups. Encompassing a wide range of cultural traditions in the United States, from bits of slang in private conversations to massive public demonstrations, ancient beliefs to contemporary viral memes, and a simple handshake greeting to group festivals, these chapters consider the meanings in oral, social, and material genres of dance, ritual, drama, play, speech, song, and story while drawing attention to tradition-centered communities such as the Amish and Hasidim, occupational groups and their workaday worlds, and children and other age groups. Weaving together such varied and manifest traditions, this handbook pays significant attention to the cultural diversity and changing national boundaries that have always been distinctive in the American experience, reflecting on the relative youth of the nation; global connections of customs brought by immigrants; mobility of residents and their relation to an indigenous, urbanized, and racialized population; and a varied landscape and settlement pattern. Edited by leading folklore scholar Simon J. Bronner, this handbook celebrates the extraordinary richness of the American social and cultural fabric, offering a valuable resource not only for scholars and students of American studies, but also for the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice.
Download or read book Jesus in America and Other Stories from the Field written by Claudia Gould and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2009-10-09 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on ethnographic field work she conducted among Christians in her home state of North Carolina, Claudia Gould crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them draw us into the complex essence of religious experience among southern American Christians.
