Download or read book We Are Made of Stories written by Leslie Umberger and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly illustrated history of self-taught artists and how they changed American art Artists without formal training, who learned from family, community, and personal journeys, have long been a presence in American art. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, with the help of trailblazing advocates, that the collective force of their creative vision and bold self-definition permanently changed the mainstream art world. In We Are Made of Stories, Leslie Umberger traces the rise of self-taught artists in the twentieth century and examines how, despite wide-ranging societal, racial, and gender-based obstacles, they redefined who could be rightfully seen as an artist and revealed a much more diverse community of American makers. Lavishly illustrated throughout, We Are Made of Stories features more than one hundred drawings, paintings, and sculptures, ranging from the narrative to the abstract, by forty-three artists—including James Castle, Thornton Dial, William Edmondson, Howard Finster, Bessie Harvey, Dan Miller, Sister Gertrude Morgan, the Philadelphia Wireman, Nellie Mae Rowe, Judith Scott, and Bill Traylor. The book centralizes the personal stories behind the art, and explores enduring themes, including self-definition, cultural heritage, struggle and joy, and inequity and achievement. At the same time, it offers a sweeping history of self-taught artists, the critical debates surrounding their art, and how museums have gradually diversified their collections across lines of race, gender, class, and ability. Recasting American art history to embrace artists who have been excluded for too long, We Are Made of Stories vividly captures the power of art to show us the world through the eyes of another. Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum Exhibition Schedule Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC July 1, 2022–March 26, 2023

Download or read book Ruth Asawa written by Ruth Asawa and published by David Zwirner Books. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known for her extensive body of intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, American sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College. Their unique structure was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local craftsmen taught her how to create baskets out of wire. While seemingly unrelated to the lessons of color and composition taught in Josef Albers’s legendary Basic Design course, these works, as she explained, are firmly grounded in his teachings in their use of unexpected materials and their elision of figure and ground. Presenting an important and timely overview of the artist’s work, this monograph brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper, and more. Together the body of work demonstrates the centrality of Asawa’s innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the twentieth century. In addition to an incredible group of photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham, a selection of rare archival materials will illustrate a chronology of the artist’s life and work. Featuring an extensive text by Tiffany Bell which explores the artist’s influences, history, and, most importantly, the work itself, as well as a significant essay by Robert Storr discussing Asawa’s work in relation to mid-twentieth century art history, culture, and scientific theory.

Download or read book Ruth Asawa written by Tamara H. Schenkenberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together works from across Asawa's career, this expansive and beautifully illustrated volume examines her output both as an artist and as a passionate advocate for arts education.

Download or read book The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa Second Edition written by Timothy Anglin Burgard and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expanded edition of the definitive book on Ruth Asawa’s fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art. The work of American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) is brought into brilliant focus in this definitive book, originally published to accompany the first complete retrospective of Asawa’s career, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2006. This new edition features an expanded collection of essays and a detailed illustrated chronology that explore Asawa's fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art. Beginning with her earliest works—drawings and paintings created in the 1940s while she was studying at Black Mountain College—this beautiful volume traces Asawa’s flourishing career in San Francisco and her trajectory as a pioneering modernist sculptor who is recognized internationally for her innovative wire sculptures, public commissions, and activism on behalf of public arts education. Through her lifelong experimentations with wire, especially its capacity to balance open and closed forms, Asawa invented a powerful vocabulary that contributed a unique perspective to the field of twentieth-century abstract sculpture. Working in a variety of nontraditional media, Asawa performed a series of remarkable metamorphoses, leading viewers into a deeper awareness of natural forms by revealing their structural properties. Through her art, Asawa transfigured the commonplace into metaphors for life processes themselves. The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa establishes the importance of Asawa’s work within a larger cultural context of artists who redefined art as a way of thinking and acting in the world, rather than as merely a stylistic practice. This updated edition includes a new introduction and more than fifty new images, as well as original essays that reflect on the impact of American political history on Asawa's artistic vision, her experience with printmaking, and her friendship with photographer Imogen Cunningham. Contributors include Susan Ehrens, Mary Emma Harris, Karin Higa, Jacqueline Hoefer, Emily K. Doman Jennings, Paul J. Karlstrom, John Kreidler, Susan Stauter, Colleen Terry, and Sally B. Woodbridge. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF).

Download or read book Bullhorn High Wire written by Matthew Nies and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring ties of life in story and experience, Bullhorn High Wire winds its poems with varying rhythm and structure, unhindered or refined for natural need, to capture moment and expectation. The poems elevate conversation into higher realms of hope and purpose like highlighting the wonder of the bedtime routines of the author’s children and witnessing the beauty and grace of growing up on the high plains. Bullhorn High Wire celebrates poetry and invites readers to have fun with it, especially if you think you don’t like poetry. The poems are accessible and dense with deeper meaning and often echo the wisdom of great voices while beckoning to true importance. In dealing with abstract themes, many of the poems employ narrative vision to highlight nature and structure in metaphor for the intangible. The throughline of it all is the author’s faith.

Download or read book Martin Puryear written by Mark Pascale and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating glimpse into the creative process of a major contemporary sculptor, featuring many previously unseen works on paper American sculptor Martin Puryear (b. 1941) creates work that combines the clean elegance of minimalism and the simplicity of traditional materials. His stunning sculptures explore themes of identity, ethnicity, and history, and are rich with social and cultural commentary. Puryear, who is known for abstract, large-scale pieces in wood, stone, and bronze, has captured the attention of the art world for the past 30 years. Despite the apparent simplicity of his works, however, he engages in an extensive iterative process that has, until now, been unknown. Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions explores that process, featuring numerous drawings, prints, and small-scale sculptures that have never before been published. This catalogue is the first to examine Puryear's work across media, providing invaluable insight into his visual thinking, from sketches to working drawings and constructions for sculpture. Handsomely illustrated with nearly 120 color plates that demonstrate the evolution of Puryear's ideas between drawings, prints, and sculptures, this beautiful volume draws back the curtain on the methodology of this important and enigmatic artist.

Download or read book Minerals Yearbook written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Writing to the Wire written by Dan Disney and published by Apollo Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seeking of asylum in Australia has been politicised in recent decades. Our national conversation has vilified people fleeing persecution and desensitised the Australian polity to human suffering. We are further marginalising the most vulnerable groups in the world and at greater expense than accommodating refugees in the community. What impact does this have upon our collective ethics and national identity? And if our public conversation is steering us into murky moral territory, where may a dissenting voice be heard? Writing to the Wire is a collection of poems by Australians and people who would like to be Australians. It is a book about the idea of being Australian. It is about who we are and who we would rather be. Writing to the Wire offers new ways to understand injustice, to speak out and tell stories. Poetry can show us what were thinking and feeling in a way our politics has failed to do.

Download or read book In a Cloud in a Wall in a Chair written by Zoë Ryan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication brings together six artists and designers working in Mexico at midcentury who expanded the horizons of modernism.

Download or read book Michael Lucero written by Mark Richard Leach and published by Hudson Hills. This book was released on 1996 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucero's colorful, imaginative sculptures and ceramics synthesize diverse forms and influences?bottle trees and face jugs inspired by African art; a hanging ram and blood-red sacred hearts with roots in Mexico; looming stick figures suggestive of Native American rock art; delicate totem poles that evoke Pacific Northwest Indian cultures. Hybrid animals, found objects, jug-headed infants in baby carriages and dreamers who externalize the contents of their dreams in multilayered glazes animate the work of this California-born artist, now living in New York. Cataloging a traveling exhibition that opened at the Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, N.C.), this volume reproduces 47 of Lucero's glazed ceramic, bronze and mixed-media creations in full-page color plates. Co-curator Bloemink finds pervasive echoes of surrealism and Dada in Lucero's improvisations. Art historian Lippard relates his themes of intercultural exchange to his family history; his ancestors, practicing Sephardic Jews, escaped persecution in Spain by migrating to New Mexico. Also included is an interview with Lucero by Leach, the exhibit's curator. 74 colour & 58 b/w illustrations

Download or read book On Line written by Cornelia H. Butler and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2010 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century explores the radical transformation of drawing that began during the last century as numerous artists critically re-examined the traditional concepts of the medium. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing and from reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed the line into real space, expanding the medium's relationship to gesture and form and connecting it with painting, sculpture, photography, film and dance. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, On Line presents a discursive history of mark-making through nearly 250 works by 100 artists, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, Karel Malich, Eva Hesse, Anna Maria Maiolino, Richard Tuttle, Mona Hatoum and Monika Grzymala, among many others. Essays by the curators illuminate individual practices and examine broader themes, such as the exploration of the line by the avant-garde and the relationship between drawing and dance.

Download or read book Behind Barbed Wire written by Tan Teng Phee and published by Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Behind Barbed Wire looks behind the façade to ask what it was really like to be moved to, and live in, a 'New Village'. Tan, who himself lived in New Villages growing up, combines archival sources and oral history to give us a rounded account . . . We need Tan's book, because up to now the outsider's view has predominated, and outsiders have their own agenda." Karl Hack, in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society This unique book revisits the moment in the Malayan Emergency when some 500,000 women, children and men were uprooted from their homes and moved into new settlements, guarded day and night by police and troops. A majority were rural Chinese: market gardeners, shopkeepers, rice farmers, tin miners and rubber tappers who had long made Malaya their home and had lived through the hardships of the Japanese Occupation. Based upon newly accessible archival materials and painstaking multilingual interviews with more than 80 informants in four New Villages, Tan Teng Phee rewrites the history of the Emergency, exposing the voices of those at the heart of this lauded ‘social experiment’. In Francis Loh’s words, these were ordinary villagers ‘caught in the crossfire between the British security forces and the Malayan Communist Party’ whose lives were turned inside-out and re-ordered completely, with daily curfews, body searches and food controls alongside the carrots and sticks of registration, (re)education, sanitation, psychological warfare and swift punishment. Highlighting the disciplinary aims of British policy, as well as the ways in which villagers resisted this discipline through ‘weapons of the weak’, this book forms a unique history from below of the Malayan Emergency, and of a resettlement programme which shaped the social and geographical landscape of Malaysia for generations to come.

Download or read book Crossing the Wire written by David Coombes and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-03-07 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Truly we are objects of interest to the Jerries we meet on the road, and especially in the villages. Taunts are hurled at us; epithets are numerous, and souvenir hunters molest us, but so far not violently. After passing through the village of Villers, we come across some British prisoners who are clearing the road, and they present a sorry spectacle, unshaven and dirty looking... Some offered some appeal for food, but we have none to give. In fact we are ourselves hungry... Their predicament does not create in us a very favourable impression, although I like others, do not realise the seriousness of what is in store for us. The future is a blank, as no-one knows what it holds." So wrote an Australian prisoner-of-war, Corporal Lancelot Davies, only recently taken prisoner at the first battle of Bullecourt, on 11 April 1917. For him - like another 1,200 Australians captured at Bullecourt - the future was indeed `blank' and unpredictable. The experiences of Australian prisoners of war (POWs) or Kriegsgefangeners held captive in Germany has been largely forgotten or ignored- overshadowed by the terrible stories of Australians imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II. Yet, as David Coombes makes known, the stories are interesting and significant - not only providing an account of what those young Australian soldiers experienced, and the spirit they showed in responding to captivity - but also for the insight it provides into Germany in the last eighteen months of the war. Drawing on previous inaccessible records, Coombes focuses on one Australian brigade, the 4th Infantry, from its formation in 1914, through Gallipoli to its baptism of fire on the Western Front, culminating in the first battle of Bullecourt - which, in turn, leads to the prisoner of war experience.

Download or read book Crocheted Wire Jewelry written by Arline Fisch and published by Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past ten years, crochet has developed in an exciting new direction, as many artists have begun using wire to create unique jewelry. Arline Fisch, an internationally acclaimed jeweler and one of the foremost experts in adapting textile techniques for metal, introduces this new form of needlework and provides a wide range of exceptional projects from 16 international designers.

Download or read book Nature Behind Barbed Wire written by Connie Y. Chiang and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in United States history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in desolate camps in the nation's interior. Photographers including Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange visually captured these camps in images that depicted the environment as a source of both hope and hardship. And yet the literature on incarceration has most often focused on the legal and citizenship statuses of the incarcerees, their political struggles with the US government, and their oral testimony. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the environment. It explores how the landscape shaped the experiences of both Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA's power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, the incarcerees also found that their agency in transforming and adapting to the natural world could help them survive and contest their incarceration. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world. Ultimately, as Connie Chiang demonstrates, the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story.

Download or read book 54th Carnegie International written by Laura J. Hoptman and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by Gary Garrels, Laura Hoptman, Midori Matsui, Cuauhtemoc Medina, Francesco Bonami, Elizabeth Smith, Jean-Pierre Mercier, Branka Stipancic, and Elizabeth Thomas. Foreword by Richard Armstrong.

Download or read book Crafting America written by Glenn Adamson and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A companion to the exhibition Crafting America curated at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, this publication explores the interdisciplinary contexts of the assembled works, featuring contributions from scholars with expertise in art history, American studies, folklore, and museum studies. Essay topics include the significance of craft within Native American histories and explorations of craft's relationship to ritual and memory, personal independence, and abstraction"--