New Books In Art

Can care be enacted through art? Inside a cathedral, staff members from a nursing home work with an artist to perform a poetic text about caregiving, loss, and taking the time to feel one’s feelings. In the months leading up to the performance, the artist navigates her twenties—and art and life converge in unexpected ways. In Stages: On Dying, Working, and Feeling (Thick Press, 2020), Rachel Kauder Nalebuff has created a stirring work of hybrid nonfiction that takes us behind the scenes of artmaking and caregiving. Melding curiosity, humility, playfulness, and self-deprecation, Stages is an inquiry into the work it takes to sustain a meaningful life. Rachel Kauder Nalebuff is a writer working often in the realms of performance and oral history. She is editor of My Little Red Book (Hachette, 2009), a collection of people’s first period stories, and co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project (Feminist Press, 2015) with Alexandra Brodsky. She runs a mentor program for seniors with Caitlin Ryan O’Connell and many f

Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018 (Intellect Books, 2019) collects more than thirty years of critical writing by artist and writer Jacki Apple. These essays trace important developments in performance art both in the Los Angeles and New York scenes, discuss artists including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Meredith Monk, and Lin Hixson, and track cultural shifts such as the culture wars of the 1980s, the emergence of left-wing censorship in the 1990s, and the emerging ecological consciousness of today. An essential monument to performance practices that often left behind few records and produced scant archives but radically reshaped performance in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Andy Boyd is a playwright and podcaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Alex Berke's Beautiful Symmetry (MIT Press, 2020) is both a fascinating book and a concept -- it's like no other book I’ve ever read. It's a coloring book about math, inviting us to engage with mathematical concepts visually through coloring challenges and visual puzzles. We can explore symmetry and the beauty of mathematics playfully, coloring through ideas usually reserved for advanced courses. The book is for children and adults, for math nerds and math avoiders, for educators, students, and coloring enthusiasts. Through illustration, language that is visual, and words that are jargon-free, the book introduces group theory as the mathematical foundation for discussions of symmetry, covering symmetry groups that include the cyclic groups, frieze groups, and wallpaper groups. The illustrations are drawn by algorithms, following the symmetry rules for each given group. The coloring challenges can be completed and fully realized only on the page; solutions are provided. Online, in a complementary digital editi

In our most recent public memory, images of the Prophet Muhammad have caused a great deal of controversy, such as satirical cartoons of Muhammad in French magazine Charlie Hebdo, or Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The sometimes violent backlash to these images has reinforced the popular narrative that Islam is aniconic and iconoclastic. In The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Indiana University Press, 2019), Christiane Gruber, Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan, demonstrates that there is long rich history of images of Muhammad from within the Islamic tradition. The styles, themes, and strategies used to represent the Prophet have significantly shifted and altered over time. Gruber synthesizes an extensive archive of images and leads the reader through various thematic patterns, cultural specificities, and unique examples. We are presented with a detailed overview of textual and visual representations of Muhammad that is placed within a deep unde

Like the better-known and perhaps luckier Georgia O’Keeffe, the American painter Agnes Pelton also found her unique vision in the western desert. As Mari Coates details in our conversation, Pelton and O’Keeffe took art classes from the same teacher and had parallel careers in several ways, yet Pelton is relatively unknown despite a number of major exhibitions during her lifetime and one traveling the United States even as this interview airs. But Pelton’s time in the California desert is only a small part of the captivating story traced in The Pelton Papers (She Writes Press, 2020). Born in Germany, where her ex-pat parents connected while escaping family scandals and tragedies, Pelton came to New York at the age of seven. A sickly girl in a dark and brooding house, she survived her childhood with a deeply religious grandmother, an absent father, a strong-minded mother who supported the family by giving music lessons, and no social life to speak of by losing herself in colors and paint. That set her on a path

The fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast society is not especially well understood. A lot more must be at play than simply the PRC state’s vast censorship apparatus when it comes to obscuring everything from the leadership’s private lives to dark chapters of country’s recent history. Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020) sheds unique light on the operation of what she calls China’s culture of ‘public secrecy’. Focusing on the storied afterlives and artistic re-purposings of photographic images from key junctures of China’s twentieth-century – the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests – Hillenbrand shows how they expose the subtle contours of what it is permissible and what impermissible to know. The book’s highly original and at times haunting

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its diffe

Limning – the painting of miniature portraits – was an important art form in 16th-century Europe. Among its greatest practitioners was Nicholas Hilliard, who enjoyed an international reputation for his skill in crafting the finely wrought images. In Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist (Yale University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Goldring explains how a young man from a family of Exeter goldsmiths became one of the premier artists of his age. Timing was a key factor, as the ascent of the Catholic Queen Mary to the throne in 1553 led the Protestant Hilliard family to decamp for the continent. Exposure to the art styles there influenced the young Hilliard, who after returning to England and completing his apprenticeship as a goldsmith quickly established himself as the foremost miniature portraitist in England. Goldring shows how both Hilliard’s technical skills and his court connections played equal roles in his prominence, over a career that led to a period at the court of the French king Henri III and lasted thr

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Public art is a form of communication that enables spaces for encounters across difference. These encounters may be routine, repeated, or rare, but all take place in urban spaces infused with emotion, creativity, and experimentation. In Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter (Temple University Press, 2019), Caitlin Frances Bruce explores how various legal graffiti scenes across the United States, Mexico, and Europe provide diverse ways for artists to navigate their changing relationships with publics, institutions, and commercial entities. Painting Publics draws on a combination of interviews with more than 100 graffiti writers as well as participant observation, and uses critical and rhetorical theory to argue that graffiti should be seen as more than counter-cultural resistance. Bruce claims it offers resources for imagining a more democratic city, one that builds and grows from personal relations, abandoned or under-used spaces, commercial sponsorship, and tacit commu

In The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (Penn State University Press, 2018), Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several de

With scholarship in the discipline of history witnessing a shift toward global approaches to local historical processes, new questions are being raised about how to identify commensurate theoretical methods and conceptual frameworks for analysis – with art history being no less part of this scholarly shift. How do we strike a balance between acknowledging distinctly local historical transformations with related global ones? In what ways can we conceptualize intertwined global networks that gave rise to local phenomena without erasing local agency and uniqueness? Where do we account for power in our analyses of local and global historical developments? Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (UNC Press, 2019) by Alex Dika Seggerman deftly takes up the challenge posed by these and other questions by punctuating its mark both in the field of global modernism and in modern Arab and Islamic art history, offering the commensurate theories and frameworks necessary to help move th

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague

The person in the photograph of a thirteen-year-old Vincent Van Gogh What did the influential Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh actually look like? Popular culture and media have propagated the belief that there have been only two photographs of Vincent Van Gogh himself. If his written exchanges are to be believed, Vincent despised self-portrait photography. However, a recent breakthrough study in the Brill journal Oud Holland suggests that there are not just two photographs of Vincent Van Gogh. There is just one. So, what about the second photograph? Teio Meedendorp, Researcher at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, discusses the breakthrough discovery he made with his co-author Yves Vasseur, General Commissioner of Mons 2015 European Capital of Culture. Listen to this podcast now! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

There are a handful of pieces from the Medieval and Renaissance periods that most music students learn about in their introductory history courses; among them are Guillaume Du Fay’s, Ave regina celorum III and Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum. Some of these foundational compositions have been studied by musicologists for over one hundred years, but generally they have been examined in isolation as masterworks by great composers. In her new book Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Jane D. Hatter effectively contextualizes these pieces within a larger repertory of motets and masses written between 1450 and 1550 that mention other musicians or explore complex theoretical topics. She sees these works as evidence of an international community of musicians that might have been separated geographically and isolated by their itinerant lifestyles, but who were connected through a shared attitude towards art and their own sense of t

The companion publication to the 2019-2020 traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton University Press, 2019, published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University) tells the story of how trade routes across the Saharan Desert facilitated the movement of people, ideas, and objects between the 8th and the 16th century. Not your typical exhibition catalogue, Caravans of Gold is a selection of chapters that reach across academic fields and genres of writing, seeking to evoke the exhibition’s central themes, including cultural movement, archaeological fragments, and global connection. We talk to the exhibition’s curator and the publications’s editor, Kathleen Bickford Berzock, about this expansive project. The conversation ranges from the exhibition’s conception, how the catalogue was designed in relation to it, and best practices associated with building a project like this one. Moreover, K

In her book, Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany (Camden House, 2018), April Eisman examines one of East Germany's most successful artists as a point of entry into the vibrant art world of the "other" Germany. In the 1980s, Bernhard Heisig (1925-2011) was praised on both sides of the Berlin Wall for his neo-expressionist style and his commitment to German history and art. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt chose him to paint his official portrait, major museums collected his work, and in 1989 he had a major solo exhibition in West Germany. After unification, Heisig was a focal point in the Bilderstreit, a virulent debate over what role East German art should play in the new Germany. Challenging current understandings of Heisig and East German art, this book focuses on Heisig's little-known fight for modern art in East Germany. Examining major debates of the 1960s, it shows the key role he played in expanding the country's art from the limits of Soviet-style socialist realism to a socialist mod

Fran Altvater talks about the Medieval Pilgrimage, a practice that became central to Christian Europe in the early Middle Ages and evolved into the military pilgrimages of the Crusades in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Altvater is a professor of art history at the University of Hartford. Her book, Sacramental Theology and the Decoration of Baptismal Fonts, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017. Baptismal fonts were necessary to the liturgical life of the medieval Christian. Baptism marked the entrance of the faithful into the right relation, with the Catholic Church representing the main cultural institution of medieval society. In the period between ca. 1050 and ca. 1220, the decoration of the font often had an important function: to underscore the theology of baptism in the context of the sacraments of the Catholic Church. This period witnessed a surge of concern about sacraments. Just as religious thinkers attempted to delineate the sacraments and define their function in sermons and S

What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity. Architects: Portraits of a Practice (Cornell University Press, 2019) rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made. Prue Chiles is Professor of Architectural Design Research at Newcastle University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support

Befitting an art history book, Erin Schoneveld’s Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde (Brill, 2018) is a beautifully packaged analysis of the early twentieth-century Japanese modern art collective Shirakaba and its eponymous coterie magazine (1910-1923). Shirakaba, which means “white birch,” is recognized as the most significant art movement of the period, and had a lasting impact on the discourse and practice of art in modern Japan. The group’s journal was among the first and most important Japanese art magazines to include the works of prominent European artists, and doing so shaped the contours of the art world of twentieth-century Japan. Schoneveld shows how Shirakaba arose in opposition to the statist art of the young Meiji state, the strategies deployed to promote its artistic agenda, how the group established sometimes tangible and direct personal, artistic, and ideological connections to the European artists who represented the ideal of indiv