Download or read book Vatnasafn Library of Water written by Roni Horn and published by Steidl. This book was released on 2009 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sited in a converted library building on a promontory overlooking the ocean in the town of Stykkish�lmur on the west coast of Iceland, VATNASAFN / LIBRARY OF WATER incorporates many of Roni Horn's abiding artistic concerns with water and weather, reflection and illumination, and the fluid nature of identity. Twenty-four glass columns containing water from glaciers around Iceland refract and reflect the day into a rubber floor embedded with words used to describe weather, inside or out. VATNASAFN / LIBRARY OF WATER also offers a space for community gatherings, a studio for writers, and it houses an oral archive of weather reports gathered from people who live in and around Stykkish�lmur. This book surveys the interconnecting elements of Roni Horn's long-term project on the island through a series of image sequences and texts. It also includes a selection of writings by the artist inspired by her experience of being in Iceland.

Download or read book A Companion to Public Art written by Cher Krause Knight and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Public Art is the only scholarly volume to examine the main issues, theories, and practices of public art on a comprehensive scale. Edited by two distinguished scholars with contributions from art historians, critics, curators, and art administrators, as well as artists themselves Includes 19 essays in four sections: tradition, site, audience, and critical frameworks Covers important topics in the field, including valorizing victims, public art in urban landscapes and on university campuses, the role of digital technologies, jury selection committees, and the intersection of public art and mass media Contains “artist’s philosophy” essays, which address larger questions about an artist’s body of work and the field of public art, by Julian Bonder, eteam (Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht), John Craig Freeman, Antony Gormley, Suzanne Lacy, Caleb Neelon, Tatzu Nishi, Greg Sholette, and Alan Sonfist.

Download or read book Going All City written by Stefano Bloch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.

Download or read book Michael Heizer The Once and Future Monuments written by William L. Fox and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive account available of Michael Heizer's art by a writer and curator who has critical experience with the artist and his work. Michael Heizer is among the greatest, and often least accessible, American artists. As one of the last living figures who launched the Land Art movement, his legacy of works that are literally and metaphorically monumental has an incalculable influence on the world of sculpture and environmental art. But his seclusion in the remote Nevada desert, as well as his notorious obduracy, have resulted in significant gaps in our critical understanding. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments spans the breadth of Heizer's career, uniquely combining fieldwork, personal narrative, and biographical research to create the first major assessment in years of this titan of American art. Author William L. Fox, founding director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, has alternately been a sponsor, advocate, and critic of Heizer's work for decades. Fox's understanding of the artist's history and connection to landscape, his time spent with Heizer at the remote ranch where Heizer is finishing his magnum opus--the mile-long sculpture City--and his access to some of Heizer's key associates give him a unique position from which to discuss the artist's work. Fox has also made numerous site visits to Heizer's work--including early pieces in the Nevada desert now largely lost to the elements--to correct the often inconsistent accounts of their locations. Last, Fox imparts a crucial new understanding of Heizer's work by elaborating on the artist's bond with his father, the famed archaeologist and cultural ecologist Robert Heizer, who enlisted his son on important digs in Mexico and Peru, providing the young man with an appreciation of site, landscape, and geology that would thoroughly inform his work. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments is a long overdue addition to the critical and biographical literature of this major figure in American art.

Download or read book Ritual Arts of Oceania New Ireland written by Michael Gunn and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For twenty years now the Barbier-Mueller Museum has mounted exhibitions that have travelled throughout Europe, North America, and the Far East. To people everywhere the museum has presented its extensive collections of tribal art, brought together over three quarters of a century by three generations of a single family." "For the first time ever forty pieces of sculpture from New Ireland, selected for their beauty, rarity, and originality, are being brought out of the museum's storerooms where they have been conserved - several for over half a century - and put on display in the galleries of Paris's Foundation Bismarck, a unique event that ran from 28 April to 28 June 1997. Unlike traditional tribal sculpture, largely limited to a number of conventional forms which native craftsmen have little choice but to respect, the masks and statues of New Ireland are striking for their freedom of invention. Animal and humanlike motifs are combined with infinite variety according to rules laid down by the rites employing such objects."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Lost Angeles written by Michael Dressel and published by Gingko Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Dressel's street photography relies on his long practiced ability to anticipate events that are about to happen and the readiness to capture these moments. In Lost Angeles, the viewer is invited to view some of Dressel's most poignant portraits and to be transported to that moment and place. Dressel professes to loving Los Angeles "warts and all" and is clearly comfortable moving through the city's streets, angling for those "magical" moments and showing us things that most would rather look away from. Mr. Dressel was born in East Berlin and spent 2 years in a Stasi prison after being captured while climbing the Berlin wall. He moved from Berlin to Los Angeles in 1986 and has spent the past 35 years taking photos while making a living as a movie sound editor. Lost Angeles features an interview with F. Scott Hess, artist and associate professor at Laguna college of Art along with an afterword by Matthias Harder, the director of the Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin. The black & white photographs collected for Lost Angeles were taken between 2014 - 2020. "I do believe in magic. The magic that happens when I am pointing a camera at life and freeze a few hundredths of a second into an image. Afterwards that image turns into this thing that communicates what I think and feel about the world This magic allows me to photograph myself into the world." - Michael Dressel

Download or read book Letters written by Jamie Hilder and published by Black Dog Pub Limited. This book was released on 2015 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry profiles artist Michael Morris during the period between 1964 and 1971. The book has a particular focus on concrete poetry, considered as perhaps the first global art movement, springing up in South and North America, Japan and Europe in the mid to late 1950s. Recognising the potential of concrete poetry as an area that included design, poetry, architecture, art, and communications, Morris co-curated an important exhibition of Concrete Poetry at the University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery in 1969. It presented a selection of Morris' large ?Letter” paintings and a selection of international concrete poetry from the period.

Download or read book All the Saints of the City of the Angels written by J. Michael Walker and published by Heyday Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Artist-author J. Michael Walker wandered L.A.'s many streets named after saints, uncovering their transcendent beauty. Combining meticulous research with artistic inspiration, Walker depicts historical and contemporary Angelinos as their divine equivalents. Proud, defiant, and illuminative, these "street-saints" reveal their own unique versions of sublimity and, in doing so, challenge traditional notions of what it means to bless and blessed."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Public Art Now written by Claire Doherty and published by Art / Books. This book was released on 2015-03-09 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place is the first survey of progressive public art from around the world. It presents some of the most significant artworks in the public realm from the last decade, challenging preconceptions about where, when and how public art takes place. The face of public art is changing. For decades, art in the public realm has been characterized by the landmark sculpture or spectacular outdoor event that helps to define or brand a place. But in recent years, a new wave of international artists and producers has rejected the monumental scale and mass appeal of such artworks. Instead, these individuals and groups favour unconventional forms that unsettle rather than authenticate a place's identity; disrupt rather than embellish a particular location; and contest rather than validate the design and function of public space. Performed interactions, collaborative social movements and small-scale subversive acts are just some of the unorthodox approaches taken by these artists. Their works challenge preconceived ideas about the role of art in place-making as they seek to remake places through radical forms and practices. Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place presents the artists who have been redefining the practice of public art over the past decade. They directly address the most pressing issues of our time, including the encroachment of corporate concerns on public space, the implications of global migration and the isolation of the individual, and the potential of collective action to share the future of our towns and cities. Some forty key works from around the world are organized into five sections – 'Displacement', 'Intervention', 'Disorientation', 'Occupation' and 'Perpetuation' – with detailed descriptions and dozens of installation and process shots. Interviews and quotes from practitioners, commissioners and commentators reveal the impetus and context for the projects, while the editor's introduction sets out the conceptual, practical and ethical issues raised by the works. Bringing together the most significant artworks in the public realm of the last ten years – from ephemeral interventions to long-term ongoing projects – this dynamic survey is an essential reference for anyone interested in the ideas, issues and impulses behind progressive public art, and an accessible introduction to one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary art.

Download or read book The Making of Urban America written by Raymond A. Mohl and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.

Download or read book Boom written by Michael Shnayerson and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The meteoric rise of the largest unregulated financial market in the world -- for contemporary art -- is driven by a few passionate, guileful, and very hard-nosed dealers. They can make and break careers and fortunes. The contemporary art market is an international juggernaut, throwing off multimillion-dollar deals as wealthy buyers move from fair to fair, auction to auction, party to glittering party. But none of it would happen without the dealers-the tastemakers who back emerging artists and steer them to success, often to see them picked off by a rival. Dealers operate within a private world of handshake agreements, negotiating for the highest commissions. Michael Shnayerson, a longtime contributing editor to Vanity Fair, writes the first ever definitive history of their activities. He has spoken to all of today's so-called mega dealers -- Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Arne and Marc Glimcher, and Iwan Wirth -- along with dozens of other dealers -- from Irving Blum to Gavin Brown -- who worked with the greatest artists of their times: Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and more. This kaleidoscopic history begins in the mid-1940s in genteel poverty with a scattering of galleries in midtown Manhattan, takes us through the ramshackle 1950s studios of Coenties Slip, the hipster locations in SoHo and Chelsea, London's Bond Street, and across the terraces of Art Basel until today. Now, dealers and auctioneers are seeking the first billion-dollar painting. It hasn't happened yet, but they are confident they can push the price there soon.

Download or read book Elizabeth Catlett written by Dalila Scruggs and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-10-04 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book highlighting the work of pioneering Black printmaker, sculptor, and activist Elizabeth Catlett. Accomplished printmaker and sculptor, avowed feminist, and lifelong activist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) built a remarkable career around intersecting passions for formal rigor and social justice. This book, accompanying a major traveling retrospective, offers a revelatory look at the artist and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces. Catlett’s activism and artistic expression were deeply connected, and she protested the injustices of her time throughout her life. Her work in printmaking and sculpture draws on organic abstraction, the modernism of the United States and Mexico, and African art to center the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Catlett attended Howard University, studied with the painter Grant Wood, joined the Harlem artistic community, and worked with a leftist graphics workshop in Mexico, where she lived in exile after the US accused her of communism and barred her re-entry into her home country. The book’s essays address a range of topics, including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, her pedagogical legacy, her achievement as a social realist printmaker, her work with the arts community of Chicago’s South Side, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice.

Download or read book Michele Oka Doner written by Suzanne Ramljak and published by Hudson Hills. This book was released on 2003 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exceptional volume presents the breadth of Doner's work as found in collections across the country as well as expansive projects designed for public spaces.

Download or read book Testimonies of the City written by Joanna Herbert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oral testimony is one of the most valuable but challenging sources for the study of modern history, providing access to knowledge and experience unavailable to historians of earlier periods. In this groundbreaking collection, oral testimonies are used to explore themes relating to the construction of urban memories in European cities during the twentieth century. From the daily experiences of city life, to personal and communal responses to urban change and regeneration, to migration and the construction of ethnic identities, oral history is employed to enrich our understanding of urban history. It offers insights and perspectives that both enhance existing approaches and forces us to re-examine official histories based on more traditional sources of documentation. Moreover, it enables the historian to understand something of the nature of memory itself, and how people construct their own versions of the urban experience to try to make sense of the past. By using the full range of opportunities offered by oral history, as well as fully considering the related methodological issues of interpretation, this volume provides a fascinating insight into one of the least explored areas of urban history. As well as adding to our understanding of the European urban experience, it highlights the potential of this intersection of oral and urban history.

Download or read book California Art written by Nancy Dustin Wall Moure and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Space Site Intervention written by Erika Suderburg and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Ferdinand Chevel's Palais Ideal (1879-1905) and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers (1921-1954) to Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974) and Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981), installation art has continually crossed boundaries, encompassing sculpture, architecture, performance, and visual art. Although unique in its power to transform both the site in which a work is constructed and the viewer's experience of being in a place, installation art has not received the critical attention accorded other art forms. In Space, Site, Intervention, some of today's most prominent art critics, curators, and artists view installation art as a diverse, multifaceted, and international art form that challenges institutional assumptions and narrow conceptual frameworks. The contributors discuss installation in relation to the genealogy of modern art, community and corporate space, multimedia cyberspace, public and private ritual, the gallery and the museum, public and private patronage, and political action. This ambitious volume focuses on issues of class, sexuality, cultural identity rase, and gender, and highlights a wide range of artists whose work is often marginalized by mainstream art history and criticism. Together, the essays in Space, Site, Intervention investigate how installation resonates within modern culture and society, as well as its ongoing influence on contemporary visual culture.

Download or read book Creating the Future written by Michael Fallon and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-08-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceived as a challenge to long–standing conventional wisdom, Creating the Future is a work of social history/cultural criticism that examines the premise that the progress of art in Los Angeles ceased during the 1970s—after the decline of the Ferus Gallery, the scattering of its stable of artists (Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Ed Rusha and others), and the economic struggles throughout the decade—and didn't resume until sometime around 1984 when Mark Tansey, Alison Saar, Judy Fiskin, Carrie Mae Weems, David Salle, Manuel Ocampo, among others became stars in an exploding art market. However, this is far from the reality of the L.A. art scene in the 1970s. The passing of those fashionable 1960s–era icons, in fact, allowed the development of a chaotic array of outlandish and independent voices, marginalized communities, and energetic, sometimes bizarre visions that thrived during the stagnant 1970s. Fallon's narrative describes and celebrates, through twelve thematically arranged chapters, the wide range of intriguing artists and the world—not just the objects—they created. He reveals the deeper, more culturally dynamic truth about a significant moment in American art history, presenting an alternative story of stubborn creativity in the face of widespread ignorance and misapprehension among the art cognoscenti, who dismissed the 1970s in Los Angeles as a time of dissipation and decline. Coming into being right before their eyes was an ardent local feminist art movement, which had lasting influence on the direction of art across the nation; an emerging Chicano Art movement, spreading Chicano murals across Los Angeles and to other major cities; a new and more modern vision for the role and look of public art; a slow consolidation of local street sensibilities, car fetishism, gang and punk aesthetics into the earliest version of what would later become the "Lowbrow" art movement; the subversive co–opting, in full view of Pop Art, of the values, aesthetics, and imagery of Tinseltown by a number of young and innovative local artists who would go on to greater national renown; and a number of independent voices who, lacking the support structures of an art movement or artist cohort, pursued their brilliant artistic visions in near–isolation. Despite the lack of attention, these artists would later reemerge as visionary signposts to many later trends in art. Their work would prove more interesting, more lastingly influential, and vastly more important than ever imagined or expected by those who saw it or even by those who created it in 1970's Los Angeles. Creating the Future is a visionary work that seeks to recapture this important decade and its influence on today's generation of artists.