New Books In Art

In Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Dr. John Etty explains how Krokodil magazine provided a venue in which the state, the the magazine’s editors, and readers all participated in defining what it was permissible to laugh at in the USSR. A standard view of Krokodil as propaganda would suggest that the magazine largely functioned as an arm of state ideology. In some cases, Krokodil did serve this function, but more often than not, its contents were the product of a process of co-creation, with all three groups playing a creative role in producing the magazine’s contents. With an engaging mix of visual analysis and theoretical sophistication, the author provides a window into everyday reading materials consumed by Soviet citizens. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include

It was the passionate amateur painter, Winston Churchill, who introduced one of the Cold War’s key metaphors: The Iron Curtain. As John J. Curley argues in Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King Publishers, 2019), this provocative image defined the binary logic of the Cold War and speaks to the larger importance of visuals in both the deployment of contemporary propaganda and in political resistance. A meticulously-researched and accessible monograph, Global Art and the Cold War demonstrates the crucial role of art in the greatest geopolitical conflict of the 20th century. Presenting a nuanced investigation of how the Cold War shaped major art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Conceptualism in the West and Socialism realism in the Eastern Bloc, Curley also challenging the traditional history of American Abstract painting in opposition to Soviet Socialist Realism by integrating other regions including Asia, Africa, and Latin America in to the study. Art from the “Cold War peripheries

Linda M. Grasso's Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) provides an in-depth look at O'Keeffe's ambivalent relationship with feminism from her early beginnings as a New Woman of the 1910s, to the support she received from women to become a national icon for feminism. Along the way, she distanced herself in multiple ways from women and feminism seeking to establish herself as an artist rather than as a woman artist with art making serving as a personal form of activism. Her desire to control her career and image motivated her to seek gender-transcendence and embrace personal feminism of individualism, self-expression and professional achievement. O’Keeffe’s success, the modernism of her time, and feminism are deeply linked and demonstrate the complexities for women who excelled in their chosen fields and the enduring conflicts within the movement. How the meaning of feminism changed during the course of O’Keeffe’s lifetime and how she became a

In a world where heritage, culture, creativity, and the capacity to imagine are themselves commodified and sold under the banner of neoliberal freedom, (how) can art be harnessed for anti-capitalist agendas? At a time when scholars along all points of the political spectrum seem to agree that expressing their creativity is good for oppressed groups, whether because creativity makes them entrepreneurial or because creativity is an inherent challenge to capitalism, Dia Da Costa offers a refreshingly nuanced perspective on the dangers that creative economy discourses pose for radical activism. In Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger Called Theater (U Illinois Press, 2016)--her multisited ethnography focusing on two activist theater troupes in the Indian cities of Delhi and Ahmedabad--Da Costa shows how these ‘theaters of the oppressed’ exist alongside, fall prey to, re-appropriate, and jostle with capitalist discourses and definitions of ‘creative economy’ which seek to contain and tame the cultu

Installed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 to commemorate the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin's statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit (leader) as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But after the statue's unveiling, Massasoit began to move and proliferate in ways one would not expect of generally stationary monuments tethered to place. The plaster model was donated to the artist's home state of Utah and prominently displayed in the state capitol; half a century later, it was caught up in a surprising case of fraud in the fine arts market. Versions of the statue now stand on Brigham Young University's campus; at an urban intersection in Kansas City, Missouri; and in countless homes around the world in the form of souvenir statuettes. As Lisa Blee, Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University, and Jean M. O’Brien, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, show

In her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doing, she moves beyond a simple analysis of objectification to reveal the powerful role Ornamentalism plays in constituting modern ideas of personhood, racialized femininity and the figure of the Asian woman. Drawing on examples from the realms of law, popular culture and art from the 19th and 20th centuries, Cheng deepens our understanding of racial formation by demonstrating how race and gender are conceived not only in relation to the body, but inorganic ornamentation as well. Anne A. Cheng is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Princeton University. Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these rela

This is a magically journey about the mystery of the design process. Chip Sullivan's Cartooning the Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is about using your drawing skills to exercise and stretch your imagination. He takes you step by step through a process of creativity to enhance your own design and challenge your limitations. Why not? Where does creativity come? This book will help guide you on your own path to go there...somewhere. You are your only limitation. Chip Sullivan is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblage

Harold Holzer has written a biography of one of America’s greatest public artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Daniel Chester French.  In Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), Holzer chronicles the career of French, who became best known for his sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.  French was born in 1850 and became one of the most sought after sculptors of portraits and thematic sculptures in America.  Holzer reveals French’s methods of creation and execution of his sculptural commissions, which included many notable works before the famous Lincoln Memorial.  Yet, the Lincoln Memorial and its place in the American imagination are a central feature of this book.  Holzer reveals how the statue had different political meanings to different audiences from the moment of it dedication. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly intere

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. Winner of the 2019 National Council on Public History Book Award, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture(University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers Colwell's personal account of the process of repatriation, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a

In one of history’s largest migrations, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians immigrated to North American during the 1800s and early 1900s. In addition to letters sent home, Norwegian-Americans often included photographs showcasing their new American lives. In her book, Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Dr. Sigrid Lien keenly evaluates the photographs Norwegian immigrants sent home—including one of her own grandfather. Throughout the book, Lien delves into the lives of everyday people seeking a new and prosperous life in America. Using talented writing and skillful research Sigrid Lien brings the past to life without overlooking the important historical context in which the Norwegian-American migration took place. A new edition translated by Barbara Sjoholm, Pictures of Longing is an endlessly fascinating account of real people who, through photographs, sought to share their experience during a time of hope and change. Sigrid Lien is pr

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspense through Baker’s performances, personal journals, museums, architectural designs, and the lyrics of Cole Porter--to name a few--Cheng draws on the oft-studied but little considered Josephine Baker as a figure of articulation for the nuanced contradictions of primitivism, modernism, and theory. Through Baker, Cheng invites us to reconsider the mutual imbrication of object/subject, surface/depth, and exploitation/fascination. Cheng’s careful eye and beautiful command of texture illustrates that dissolving Baker into pure particularity--into pure surface--is the best way to capture her unique agency. Learn more about

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices w

Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedented in form and extent, and new socioeconomic structures, including slavery, coinage, and market-exchange. These physical and historical developments were closely linked: building the Republican city was expensive, and meeting such costs had significant implications for urban society. Building Mid-Republican Rome brings both architectural and socioeconomic developments into a single account of urban change. Seth Bernard, an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, assembles a wide array of evidence, fr

What are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh, a writer, publisher, and journalist, details lessons from key arts thinkers. The book covers issues including funding, networking, audience development, the challenge of digital, and diversity in the arts. Crucially the book confronts the struggles and failures, as well as the successes, associated with developing an arts career and becoming an arts leader. The book draws on a wealth of interview data and the experience of the Curve Cultural Leadership Programme, as well as Farhana's own reflections on imposter syndrome, motherhood, and arts leadership. These insights are now the basis for an arts mentoring programme aimed at Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic writers, and the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!

Alexander Langlands is a British archaeologist, historian, writer, and broadcaster.  His most recent book, Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, was published by Norton to great acclaim in 2017 and has just been reissued as a paperback.  Cræft is an antiquated spelling of “craft” and in the book, Langlands explores what the word meant when it first appeared in English over a thousand years ago. Our modern understanding of the term, Langlands argues, is at some remove from its original meaning.  When it first began to appear in the writings of Anglo-Saxons, the term referred to “power or skill in the context of knowledge, ability, and a kind of learning” (17). In Cræft, Langlands combines scholarly research with personal anecdotes as he discusses a range of pursuits which he himself has undertaken, including hay-making, hedgerow planting, dry wall building, and roof thatching. Folklorist Millie Rahn describes Cræft as follows: “This beautifully-written book is basically a c

Andrew McClellan and Sally Anne Duncan’s book offers a behind-the-scenes exploration of the career of Paul J. Sachs (1878-1965) and the graduate program he developed at Harvard University and the Fogg Museum that came to be known as the “museum course.” Sachs and the course played a major role in training students who became museum directors and curators at American art museums from the late 1920s through the 1960s. By drawing upon archival correspondence, class notes, and oral histories, The Art of Curating: Paul J. Sachs and the Museum Course at Harvard (Getty Research Institute, 2018) delves into the practical training in connoisseurship, the art market, exhibition planning, conservation, and financial management as well as the philosophical discussions that made up the class.  Participants’ training and insider connections gained at Harvard had a profound impact on the development of American art museums in the first half of the twentieth century. While the book looks into some of the male students that w

Nadia Amoroso’s Representing Landscapes: A Visual Collection of Landscape Architectural Drawings (Routledge, 2012) is a collaboration between landscape architecture professors and practitioners leading the field today. The inspiration for the book came from her design studios. She wanted to demonstrate to students how they too could produce beautiful graphics by utilizing a software workflow. The book is divided into the major visual language alphabet for landscape architects: diagrams and mapping, presentation plans, axonometric, section-elevations, perspectives, modeling, and finally case studies. Each section contains an essay describing the graphic elements and usefulness for students and professionals. Nadia Amoroso is the co-founder and Creative Director of DataAppeal, a visualization firm that focuses on the creative mapping of digital media, urban design and GIS representation. She also actively teaches design studios at the University of Guelph. Her academic background includes degrees in Landscape A

We know quite a bit about the physical signatures of urban “modernity” foisted upon Paris by Baron Haussmann in the late nineteenth century — the broad boulevards, networked infrastructures, connected apartment houses, and assorted monuments — but little scholarship has seized on its precursors in the half-century prior. In Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Sun-Young Park turns to another modernity, recovering a daunting array of Romantic and especially post-Napoleonic interventions — less spectacular but arguably more complex — on mobile Parisian bodies and the everyday spaces that host them. Park considers military gymnasia, schools, barracks, leisure gardens, and other spaces purpose-built to inculcate vigor in both individuated physical bodies and, their proponents hoped amid specters of national decline, in the French body politic. Each of these spaces, Park shows, a “threshold” between fully private and fully public

A new book explores how and why New York City became a showcase for the art and architectural styles of ancient Greece and Rome. Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham (Empire States Editions, 2018), co-edited by Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Matthew McGowan (Fordham University Press, 2018), examines the Greco-Roman influence on buildings, monuments and public spaces from Rockefeller Center to the Gould Memorial Library at Bronx Community College. Walking around New York, Macaulay-Lewis says she “was struck by how many classical-looking buildings there were.” Indeed, references to the myths, gods, motifs and structures of the ancient world are seemingly everywhere: in courthouses, museums and libraries, in arches and columns, in Latin inscriptions and sculptures. But these classical references aren’t just about aesthetics or engineering. They also symbolize the aspirations of a city that saw itself as a capital of learning, culture, and civic life, on par with the finest institutions of the