New Books In Art

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences influenced his work. Born in Russia, Arnautoff’s service as a cavalry officer for the anticommunist White forces in the Russian Civil War forced him to abandon his homeland for an involuntary exile, first in China, then in the United States. Long interested in a career as an artist, his studies of art in San Francisco during the 1920s led to a two-year period working for the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Returning to San Francisco during the depth of the Great Depression, Arnautoff quickly emerged as one of the greatest talents on the regional art scene, with works that championed the working man and criticized the brutalities of capitalism. Arnautoff’s embrace of Communism by the end of t

A Usable Past: American Folk Art at the Colby College Museum of Art (Colby College Museum of Art, 2016) is a contemporary analysis of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, needlework, quilts and other forms of folk art drawn primarily from the college’s American Heritage Collection donated by Edith Kemper and Ellerton Marcel Jette. Essays by contributors Lauren Lessing, Seth A. Thayer, Jr., Elizabeth Finch and Tanya Sheehan offer new insights into the definition and display of folk art. How should folk art fit into constructions of the American past and understandings of American Art? Individual entries detail the rich history of a variety of 19th Century American folk art objects from young women’s so-called accomplishment needlework pieces to portraiture and landscape painting by self-trained artists. Kirstin L. Ellsworth has a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University (2005) and currently is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. She can be reach

Marsden Hartley’s Maine (Yale University Press, 2017), published to accompany a major exhibition of his work organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art, traces the artist’s complex relationship to his native state. Essays examine Hartley’s negotiation of various identities including that of the American individualist, the native son, and the avant garde Modernist. Hartley’s literary work and interests in the Green Acre Transcendentalist community are also discussed. The book reveals how in his quest to serve as “the painter from Maine,” Hartley contended with the legacies of depictions of the region by earlier American painters, as well as questions of the role of technology on the landscape among others. The book features a chapter on new studies of Hartley’s materials and techniques that provide insight into his artistic process. An extensive Chronology that situates events in Hartley’s career amidst socio-cultural and historical events is included. Kirstin L. Ellswo

Hidden Mother by Laura Larson was published by Saint Lucy Press (January 2017), with 96 pages and 26 Color and black and white images. Hidden Mother tells the story of the adoption of Larson’s daughter from Ethiopia as mapped through nineteenth-century hidden mother photographs. The term “hidden mother” refers to the widespread but little-known practice in 19th-century portrait photography of concealing a mother’s body as she supported and calmed her child during the lengthy exposures demanded by early photographic technology. In the final portrait of the child, the mother–often covered from head-to-toe in a black drop cloth–appears as an uncanny figure. A practical strategy deployed by the photographer unintentionally yielded an evocative representation of the mother; never meant to be seen, her presence nonetheless haunts these images. Part photography book, part essay, Hidden Mother enlists these strange and powerful images to present a lyrical account of becoming a mother through adoption. Laura Larson

Dance & Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries (Manchester University Press, 2017) by Dana Mills, considers dance as a political expression from a number of perspectives, situating the analysis within a framework of contemporary political theory. Mills notes that dance has always been with us, as humans, but that we do not usually think about it as part of our political discourse in the same way that other performative or artistic expressions are integrated into political discussions and political life. Mills’ book argues that dance, as a language or means of communication, should be considered from the dancers’ perspective but also from the audience or the receivers’ experience and understanding, as well as the choreographers’ point of view, and the interactions of the other dancers involved. Mills digs into the overarching question of how can we expand our notion of what is political so that dance is included, trying to also understand why it has often been excluded from the notion of the political. The book el

When the Sun comes back And the first quail calls Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd. For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom If you follow the Drinkin’ Gourd. -“Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd” author unknown (possibly Peg Leg Joe) They left in the middle of the night, often carrying little more than the knowledge to follow the North Star. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, an estimated one hundred thousand slaves became passengers on the Underground Railroad, a journey of untold hardship, in search of freedom. Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017) presents a remarkable series of images following a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana, through the cypress swamps of Mississippi and the plains of Indiana, north to the Canadian border a path of nearly fourteen hundred miles. The culmination of a ten-year research quest, Through Darkness to Light imagines a journey along the Underground Railroad as it

No Plan B by David J. Carol was published by Peanut Press Books in 2017. The book is a retrospective of David’s work with 32 black and white images and an afterward by photojournalist Jason Eskenazi. No Plan B is a David’s fifth book and is a culmination of images from David’s road trips from the Arctic Ocean to post-Soviet Russia, from the Mojave Desert to the streets of Istanbul taken between 1993 and 2016. David was born in New York City, and attended the School of Visual Arts and The New School for Social Research, where he studied under Lisette Model. He was the first assignment photographer for The Image Bank photo agency (now part of Getty Images) at the age of 26. David has traveled the world taking pictures for himself and others for over thirty years. David is a photographer first and foremost, he has most recently worked daily in the real world of commercial photography as the Director of Photography at Outfront Media (formerly CBS Outdoor). Currently he is Editor-in-Chief at Peanut Press Books,

Gillian McIver‘s Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual Storytelling (Bloomsbury, 2016) is a ground-breaking book that illustrates the relationships among the histories of painting and cinema. Of interest to established filmmakers, students of film, and those engaged with the history of art and visual storytelling overall, Art History for Filmmakers is a comprehensive study of the ways in which painting and film influence one another in terms of light, composition, subject matter, theme and style. McIver presents examples of the impact of painting from the antique to the modern upon the work of filmmakers Peter Greenaway, Martin Scorcese, Peter Webber, Stan Douglas, Guillermo de Toro, John Ford and others. Through an array of color images, McIver demonstrates how Dutch Baroque, Realism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Minimalism and other art historical movements shape story and appearance in film. Art History for Filmmakers also provokes consideration of the ways the language of film brings idea and form t

The legendary band leader Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on Earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the “Arkestra,” Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created “space music” as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth. A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (University of Texas Press, 2016) offers a spirited introduction to the life and works of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. The book explores and assesses Sun R’as wide-ranging creative output–music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry–and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement,

In Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) Adair Rounthwaite examines the roles of artist, audience and institutional context in the rise of new forms of live art during the Reagan years. The book focuses upon live art projects sponsored by the Dia Foundation involving a variety of practices from installation to Town Hall meetings and other participatory forms. Rounthwaite synthesizes diverse archival materials in order to develop a richly textured study that recovers the complexities of projects committed to fostering audience agency in the consumption of contemporary art. Kirstin L. Ellsworth has a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University (2005) and currently is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Email: kellsworth@csudh.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

George White, President and COO of Up With Paper and Jumping Jack Press interviewed following the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, discusses the intricacies of creating pop-up art for greeting cards and for books. Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Childrens Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’salso a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and man

Black is the Day, Black is the Night by Amy Elkins is self-published (2016), with an essay by Gregory J. Harris and C.F., unpaged, 80 color and black-and-white illustrations. Black is the Day, Black is the Night started as an exploration into, what author and photographer has called, “extreme manifestations of masculinity,” but over time it evolved into a meditation on time and memory through personal correspondence with men serving life and death row sentences in some of the most maximum security prisons in the U.S., all of whom had served between 13-26 years at point of contact in 2009 when the project started. “Out of our letters a collaboration unfolded. I constructed images using formulas specific to each of their stories, age and years incarcerated. Through these formulas their portraits became more unrecognizable and their memories became more muddled, regurgitated and fictional with the endless passing years of their sentence. Stripped of personal context and placed in solitary cells, their sense of

Matteo Faglia, discusses the 2017 Bologna Book Fair exhibition, “Pop-up Show: The Magic Inside Books,” which traces some of the important milestones in the story of 3-dimensional, or as they have been called since the 1930s, pop-up books. The exhibition showcases the extensive collection of Artist and Collector Massimo Missiroli. Starting with texts published in the 1800s to books created in the 1970s the exhibition, which Faglia plans to tour – features works by great maestros of printing, such as Ernest Nister and Raphael Tuck and Sons as well as the first book to be called a pop-up, Harold Lenz’s Blue Ribbon Press book, Pinocchio. The exhibition, which is featured on www.popupshow.net, was co-curated by Matteo Faglia and Massimo Missiroli. Matteo Faglia, is head of Consulenze Editoriali, and has worked for some of Italy’s most prominent publishers, including De Agostini. Here, we discuss why pop-ups have been a special part of the children’s books industry and what it takes to become a pop-up artist or p

Dorothy Ko‘s new book is a must-read. Troubling the hierarchy of head over hands and the propensity to denigrate craftsmen in Chinese history, The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China (University of Washington Press, 2017) explores the place of inkstones in the early Qing political project in a story that places ink-grinding stones and their craftspersons at the center. Ko’s book takes us to a series of places, in each case opening out into a beautifully written and careful analysis of text and material. We begin in the Imperial Workshops in the Forbidden City, for a peek into the imperial workshop system and the bondservants who were crucial to it. As Ko helps us to understand, that system is emblematic of a new Qing ruling style that can only be called materialist. Next, we move to the Duan quarries in Guangdong, where Ko explores the work and world of stonecutters and physical, literate, and visual knowledge-making therein. Next we join Ko in the commercial inkstone-carving w

27 Contexts –An Anecdotal History in Photography by Mark Alice Durant was published by Saint Lucy Books (January, 2017) with 288 pages and 90 Color and black and white images. 27 Contexts is a series of linked essays that examine how photographs are inextricably bound in our personal and collective histories. Beginning with the author’s childhood obsession with his parents’ wedding album through a lifetime making photographs, teaching, and writing about photography, Durant’s narrative weaves memoir with photographic history and theory. Illustrated with a broad spectrum of images from family snapshots to Hubble space imagery, to the work of artists such as Josef Koudelka, Julia Margaret Cameron, Larry Sultan, Maya Deren, Odilon Redon, Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz and Chris Marker, 27 Contexts describes a life immersed in the quotidian, the political, and the enigmatic aspects of photography. Durant has contributed to numerous catalogs, monographs and anthologies including The Passionate Camera: Photography

Benjamin Fondane, a Franco-Romanian writer and contributor to the development of existential philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, is in the process of being rediscovered. His work has gained a new relevance in the contemporary period due in part to the way it anticipates some of the core themes and interests of critical theory, including the limits of rationality and subjectivity, and ideas about the ineffable and the impossible. Until recently, few of Fondane’s writings, aside from his poetry, had been translated into English, despite a long-standing recognition of their importance to philosophical debates in the period, including by Fondane’s contemporaries, such as Lev Shestov and Albert Camus. A new collection entitled Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays edited and translated by Bruce Baugh and published by the New York Review of Books in 2016, aims to rectify this. Professor Baugh, who teaches Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, has written extensively on existential thought

From 1927 until his death in 1979, E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area. His images were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, but not widely published in his home community. A graduate of the American School of Photography in Illinois, Joseph photographed the likes of such celebrities and activists as Josephine Baker, Mahalia Jackson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Thurgood Marshall. However, what is perhaps more compelling within these pages are the countless images of everyday citizens teaching, entertaining, worshipping, working, and serving their community and their nation. Emmanuel Francis (E. F.) Joseph (1900-1979) was born on November 8, 1900 in St. Lucia, West Indies. After graduating from the American School of Photography of Illinois, he moved to Oakland, California in 1924 where he served as an apprentice in a photography studio. He was the first professional African American photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area operating a commercial an

In his new book Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method (University of Toronto Press, 2016) Andrew Causey argues that social science practitioners can cultivate new ways of experiencing the world through drawing. He has developed thirty-nine “etudes,” drawing exercises that challenge the reader to become a more rigorous observer and to transform their relationship with both visual media and academia. These etudes have been tried and tested over many years in his class, Visual Anthropology, at Columbia College – Chicago. With exciting interdisciplinary possibilities, this is book expands the toolbox available to ethnographers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Americans by Car is Karl Baden’s latest book. An homage to Robert Frank’s The Americans and Lee Friedlander’s America by Car, Baden’s book “is a personal, more specific answer to the vague question of ‘how are we influenced,'” according to the artist. The photographs in the book were taken by Baden from his car and offer a snapshot of American life. Karl Baden, a New York City native, he received his B.A. in Fine Arts at Syracuse University in 1974 and an M.F.A. in photography at University of Illinois at Chicago in 1979. Baden has taught at Boston College, Harvard, Clark University, and Rhode Island School of Design. He was Director of Photography at the Project Art Center, Cambridge, in the early 1980s, and served on the board and programming committee for the Photographic Resource Center, Boston. Baden has had numerous one person and group exhibitions and has received noteworthy fellowships. Baden’s probably best known work is called “Every Day” which, this past February, marked thirty years since it

There’s a common myth about the history of comic books and strips. It’s the idea that the medium languished for decades as a sort of time-wasting hobby for children, but now has redeemed itself and can be appreciated even by the literary. University of Georgia professor and comics scholar Christopher Pizzino argues that this history is as false as Clark Kent’s eyeglass prescription. Comics, he says, are still burdened by their early stigma, their status in modern culture tenuous at best. In Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (University of Texas Press, 2016), Pizzino offers up an educated and entertaining history of the comics medium, then devotes a chapter to each of four groundbreaking comic artists. In one, he looks at the film noir and manga-influenced work of Frank Miller, creator of The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City. Another chapter examines the work of Alison Bechdel, whose famed lesbian-centered comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, led to pop culture’s Bechdel Test, and