The promises and conflicts faced by public figures, artists, and leaders of Northeast Los Angeles as they enliven and defend their neighborhoods
Los Angeles is well known as a sprawling metropolis ...with endless freeways that can make the city feel isolating and separate its communities. Yet in the past decade, as Jan Lin argues in Taking Back the Boulevard, there has been a noticeable renewal of public life on several of the city’s iconic boulevards, including Atlantic, Crenshaw, Lankershim, Sunset, Western, and Wilshire. These arteries connect neighborhoods across the city, traverse socioeconomic divides and ethnic enclaves, and can be understood as the true locational heart of public life in the metropolis.
Focusing especially on the cultural scene of Northeast Los Angeles, Lin shows how these gentrifying communities help satisfy a white middle-class consumer demand for authentic experiences of “living on the edge” and a spirit of cultural rebellion. These neighborhoods have gone through several stages, from streetcar suburbs, to disinvested neighborhoods with the construction of freeways and white flight, to immigrant enclaves, to the home of Chicano/a artists in the 1970s. Those artists were then followed by non-Chicano/a, white artists, who were later threatened with displacement by gentrifiers attracted by the neighborhoods’ culture, street life, and green amenities that earlier inhabitants had worked to create. Lin argues that gentrification is not a single transition, but a series of changes that disinvest and re-invest neighborhoods with financial and cultural capital.
Drawing on community survey research, interviews with community residents and leaders, and ethnographic observation, this book argues that the revitalization in Northeast LA by arts leaders and neighborhood activists marks a departure in the political culture from the older civic engagement to more socially progressive coalition work involving preservationists, environmentalists, citizen protestors, and arts organizers. Finally, Lin explores how accelerated gentrification and mass displacement of Latino/a and working-class households in the 2010s has sparked new rounds of activism as the community grapples with new class conflicts and racial divides in the struggle to self-determine its future.
An exploration of how young artists imagine and maintain
hope in post-revolutionary Egypt Creating Spaces of
Hope explores some of the newest, most dynamic creativity
emerging from young artists in ...Egypt and the way in which these
artists engage, contest, and struggle with the social and political
landscape of post-revolutionary Egypt. How have different types of
artists-studio artists, graffiti artists, musicians and
writers-responded personally and artistically to the various stages
of political transformation in Egypt since the January 25
revolution? What has the political or social role of art been in
these periods of transition and uncertainty? What are the aesthetic
shifts and stylistic transformations present in the contemporary
Egyptian art world? Based on personal interviews with artists over
many years of research in Cairo, Caroline Seymour-Jorn moves beyond
current understandings of creative work primarily as a form of
resistance or political commentary, providing a more nuanced
analysis of creative production in the Arab world. She argues that
in more recent years these young artists have turned their creative
focus increasingly inward, to examine issues having to do with
personal relationships, belonging and inclusion, and maintaining
hope in harsh social, political and economic circumstances. She
shows how Egyptian artists are constructing "spaces of hope" that
emerge as their art or writing becomes a conduit for broader
discussion of social, political, personal, and existential ideas,
thereby forging alternative perspectives on Egyptian society, its
place in the region and in the larger global context.
In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism-Joyce, Picasso, ...Stravinsky-and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. InLate Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners-abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others-debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.
In Technocrats of the Imagination John Beck and Ryan Bishop explore the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial complex during the 1960s, in which ...artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. For artists, designers, and educators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but a new utopian social order based on collective experimentation. In examining these projects' promises and pitfalls and how they have inspired a new generation of collaborative labs populated by artists, engineers, and scientists, Beck and Bishop reveal the connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s.
The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing.Pens and ...Needlesis the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication.
Because early modern people saw verbal and visual texts as closely related, Susan Frye discusses the connections between the many forms of women's textualities, including notes in samplers, alphabets both stitched and penned, initials, ciphers, and extensive texts like needlework pictures, self-portraits, poetry, and pamphlets, as well as commissioned artwork, architecture, and interior design. She examines works on paper and cloth by such famous figures as Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, as well as the output of journeywomen needleworkers and miniaturists Levina Teerlinc and Esther Inglis, and their lesser-known sisters in the English colonies of the New World. Frye shows how traditional women's work was a way for women to communicate with one another and to shape their own identities within familial, intellectual, religious, and historical traditions.Pens and Needlesoffers insights into women's lives and into such literary texts as Shakespeare'sOthelloandCymbelineand Mary Sidney Wroth'sUrania.
This edited volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to art and design that not only reframes but also repositions agendas and actions to address fragmented global systems. Contributors explore the ...pluriverse of art and design through epistemological and methodological considerations. What kinds of sustainable ways are there for knowledge transfer, supporting plural agendas, finding novel ways for unsettling conversations, unlearning and learning and challenging power structures with marginalised groups and contexts through art and design? The main themes of the book are art and design methods, epistemologies and practices that provide critical, interdisciplinary, pluriversal and decolonial considerations. The book challenges the domination of the white logic of art and design and shifts away from the Anglo-European one-world system towardsthe pluriverse. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, arts-based research, and design studies.
Design Objects and the Museum brings together leading design historians, curators, educators and archivists to consider the place of contemporary design objects within museums. Contributors draw on a ...wide range of 20th century and contemporary examples from international museums to consider how design objects have been curated and displayed within and beyond the museum. The book continues contemporary global debates on the ways in which museums of design engage and educate their public. Chapters are grouped into three thematic sections addressing The Canon and Design in the Museum; Positioning Design within and Beyond the Museum; and Interpretation and the Challenge of Design, with chapters exploring museological practice and issues, the roles people play in creating meaning, and the challenges contemporary design presents to interpretation and learning within the museum.
Creativity Class Chumley, Lily
2016, 2016., 20160621, 2016-06-21
eBook
The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative ...practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates.Creativity Classis the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new "market socialist" economy where value is produced through innovation.
Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy,Creativity Classsheds light on an important facet of today's China.
The first academic volume to theorize and historicize contemporary artistic practices and culture from Chile in the English language, Dismantling the Nation takes as its point of departure a radical ...criticism against the nation-state of Chile and its colonial, capitalist, heteronormative, and extractivist rule, proposing otherwise forms of inhabiting, creating, and relating in a more fluid, contingent, ecocritical, feminist, and caring worlds. From the case of Chile, the book expands the scholarly discussion around decolonial methodologies, attending to artistic practices and discourses from distinct and distant locations—from Arica and the Atacama Desert to Wallmapu and Tierra del Fuego, and from the Central Valley, the Pacific coast, and the Andes to territories beyond the nation's modern geographical borders. Analyzing how these practices refer to issues such as the environmental and cultural impact of extractivism, as well as memory, trauma, collectivity, and resistance towards neoliberal totality, the volume contributes to the fields of art history and visual culture, memory, ethnic, gender, and Indigenous studies, filmmaking, critical geography, and literature in Chile, Latin America, and other regions of the world, envisioning art history and visual culture from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective.
The late nineteenth century saw a re-examination of artistic creativity in response to questions surrounding the relation between human beings and automata. These questions arose from findings in the ...'new psychology', physiological research that diminished the primacy of mind and viewed human action as neurological and systemic. Concentrating on British and continental culture from 1870 to 1911, this unique study explores ways in which the idea of automatism helped shape ballet, art photography, literature, and professional writing. Drawing on documents including novels and travel essays, Linda M. Austin finds a link between efforts to establish standards of artistic practice and challenges to the idea of human exceptionalism. Austin presents each artistic discipline as an example of the same process: creation that should be intended, but involving actions that evade mental control. This study considers how late nineteenth-century literature and arts tackled the scientific question, 'Are we automata?'
