The philosophical ties between Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies as represented in a selection of fine art — including Daoist nature deities and immortals, Confucian scholar brushes and ...inkstones, and Buddhist guardian kings and compassionate bodhisattvas — have never been explicated. This catalog lays the groundwork for a serious discussion of trans-Pacific acculturation: first by explaining the fundamentals of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism in reference to rare works of art produced in China, Korea, and Japan between the Tang Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, and second, by assessing the prevalence of these philosophies as indicated by photographs of temples, shrines, deities, and rituals recreated in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado between the Civil War and World War I. Drawing from the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Daryl S. Paulson Collection in Bozeman, Montana, Asian art curator Stephen Little offers three brief essays that distinguish the philosophies of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism according to their founding values, each followed by several object case studies that illustrate, elaborate, and develop those ideals. Mining the photographs of the state historical societies of Boise, Helena, Cheyenne, and Denver, Euro-American art professor T. Lawrence Larkin offers a long essay that compares religious values and artistic forms on both sides of the Pacific illustrated by objects that highlight migrant and settler culture in the Inner West. Profusely illustrated with new color and rarely seen black-and-white images, and containing useful maps, chronologies, and an index, Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies is an invaluable reference for the general reader and an important resource for the regional scholar.
This book accompanies the first exhibition entirely of Jamaican art to take place in the north-west of the UK. The exhibition, Jamaica Making: The Theresa Roberts Art Collection, is sited at the ...Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool in 2022, and is a comprehensive presentation of the best of Jamaican art since the 1960s. The Theresa Roberts Art Collection is the private collection of Theresa Roberts, a Jamaican-born businesswoman and philanthropist, who has made the UK her home. This collection offers an important insight into the development of Jamaican art since the country gained independence in 1962. Indeed, the exhibition also acts to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Jamaican independence in 2022. Included in the book are the following: an official welcome from the Prime Minister of Jamaica; an essay by the collector, exhibition donor and philanthropist, Theresa Roberts; an introduction by eminent British-Jamaican art historian, Edward Lucie-Smith; essays by Emma Roberts, the exhibition curator (Liverpool John Moores University), Davinia Gregory-Kameka, writer, educator and researcher (Columbia University, USA) and Sireita Mullings, arts practitioner and visual sociologist (University of Bedfordshire). The final section of the book is the full visual catalogue of the Jamaica Making exhibition – a unique record of this historic exhibition.
Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically ...and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven artists, scholars, and writers to trace Nairobi’s becoming. Methodologically experimental and multimodal, it seeks to balance an appreciation of Nairobi’s fragmented character while also recognizing its contingent coherency. Nairobi Becoming curates an eclectic collection of different voices and interventions to evoke something of the city's manifold guises and historicities – an urban mosaic of partial experiences as well as dawning possibilities for future becomings. Assembling scholarship, literature, creative non-fiction, and visual art, the contributions are arranged around particular themes, while resisting the urge to develop a singular coherent voice. Security – in its various guises – is the linking thread, the point of articulation that connects apparently disparate elements of Nairobi life, from sex work to roadbuilding, goat markets to funerals. Security is here an analytical operator: a concept that refracts the seemingly diverse modalities of life in Nairobi, and, with the related domains of uncertainty and contingency, brings the city’s dynamics of fragmentation and coherence to the surface in surprising ways. If confronting Nairobi’s will to coherence amidst the strains of fragmentation is the empirical and analytical challenge of Nairobi Becoming, then it is through collaboration and juxtaposition, curation and contrast, and the messiness of assemblage, that this book chimes with the fraught multiplicities of a city-in-the-making. As such, this book is also an exploration of the inevitable tension that exists between curatorial intent and the possibility of allowing each contribution to stand for itself.
History According to Cattle is an expanded account of the acclaimed art and research project History of Other’s first major installment, The Museum of the History of Cattle (2013). The exhibition ...presents a large-scale ethnographic museum of world history as seen from the perspective of cattle, one of the most important companion species of humans. Thus, The Museum of the History of Cattle is the first museum to exhibit the cultural history of a non-human species. In the exhibit, the connections of animal rights issues with violations of human rights become visible while the situations of indigenous cattle populations, the development of genetics, and industrialization are imagined through the eyes of this silent, ever present companion. Both tragic and humorous, The Museum of the History of Cattle portrays humans as a species mesmerized by its own image. The book-catalog includes a full presentation of the research and visual material of the exhibition, with contextualizing essays by art historian Anne Aurasmaa, philosopher Elisa Aaltola, theorist Kirs Forkasiewizc, and researcher-curator Radhika Subramaniam. Drawing from critical animal studies, animal philosophy, art theory and the lived companionship of humans and cattle, the publication provides a fresh insight into the possibilities of creative imagination, and into the ethical encountering of the species-other in our society.
Vividly illustrated, this is the first comprehensive catalogue of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s celebrated collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French silver. The collection of seventeenth- ...and eighteenth-century French silver at the J. Paul Getty Museum is of exceptional quality and state of preservation. Each piece is remarkable for its beauty, inventive form, skillful execution, illustrious provenance, and the renown of its maker. This volume is the first complete study of these exquisite objects, with more than 250 color photographs bringing into focus extraordinary details such as minuscule makers’ marks, inscriptions, and heraldic armorials. The publication details the formation of the Museum’s collection of French silver, several pieces of which were selected by J. Paul Getty himself, and discusses the regulations of the historic Parisian guild of gold- and silversmiths that set quality controls and consumer protections. Comprehensive entries catalogue a total of thirty-three pieces with descriptions, provenance, exhibition history, and technical information. The related commentaries shed light on the function of these objects and the roles they played in the daily lives of their prosperous owners. The book also includes maker biographies and a full bibliography. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/french-silver/ and includes 360-degree views and zoomable high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.
The things sought after here are apparitional: they appear and disappear at will; they perfect the art of materialization and vanishing. Such is the nature of living dangerously, and with it the ...short duration of enchantment. This collection tracks provocative ideas, artifacts, and phenomena rising and fading across different territories of the contemporary world. Through a constellation of powerful thought-images, the authors uncover spaces of an ephemeral and fugitive nature in order to generate a fractal vision of our time and beyond. A former communist prison island in the Adriatic Sea, now abandoned and overgrown with wild plants; the stone garden of a deaf Iranian peasant who dances ecstatically among his geological formations; a Belgian sculptor who combines wax and flesh to depict human and animal forms in states of half-manifestation, incompletion (missing limbs), or branching (morphing into other organisms); a cultural movement in Brazil that takes the discarded debris of urban centers and transforms their splintered wood pieces into massive labyrinths and underground caverns; a blacksmith poet in Afghanistan who alternates between tasks of hammering metal and writing lyrical verses amidst the smoke-clouds of his forge; a Cuban writer whose delirious fixation with the sea compels him to invent a language of pure untimeliness. There are countless sites of disturbance within the postmodern landscape, and yet far too often these disruptive “scenes” remain untheorized and misaligned, treated as random deviations and thus afforded no surpassing consequence or philosophical complexity. Such micro-trajectories necessitate an archive and conceptual matrix that will steal them from their false obscurity and decipher them instead as the passcodes to an imminent global turn. For this, one must return to the amorphous outlook of “the marauder” or “the wanderer.” This book, then, aims to devise an ever-expanding configuration of radical outsides: elemental fronts that lead to unforeseen principles; alternative profiles of experience (intense becomings); incendiary, ominous, or vitalistic signs in circulation across the epochal horizon.
Mineral Policies provides a record of an art residency organized by ZETA Center for Contemporary Art in the mining region of Bulqiza in northeastern Albania, where four artists and activists from ...Albania, Blerta Hoçia, Diana Malaj, Pleurad Xhafa, and Ergin Zaloshnja, created a collective body of works in close proximity with the local miners, while still maintaining their own discrete sphere of action. This residency followed by a public exhibition, Each Strike Leads to the Next, featuring video works produced during the residency as well as a series of object, curated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, director of the Department of Eagles in Tirana. This publication includes documentation of the residency and the exhibition, as well the record of a public discussion between curator Van Gerven Oei, former Minister of Finance Arben Malaj, mining engineer Genc Myftiu, and mining worker Bardhul Alla, moderated by cultural journalist Elsa Demo and an interview of cultural theorist Jonida Gashi and Van Gerven Oei with the artists. Mineral Policies documents an important attempt of present-day Albanian artists to reflect on and align themselves with workers and labor activities within a political climate in which neoliberal extractivism and mafia-controlled local and national government have seriously compromised modes of solidarity and survival.
Companion to the exhibition “Japan’s Book Donation to the University of Louvain”, KU Leuven University Library, 28 October 2022 - 15 January 2023 With more than 3,000 titles in almost 14,000 volumes, ...the 1920s Japanese book donation to the University of Leuven/Louvain constitutes an invaluable time capsule of Japan’s pre-modern culture in all its diversity and richness. A century on, the time is right to take a new look at its contents, as well as its history and the political, social and cultural context surrounding the donation. To commemorate its centenary, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) and the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) have joined forces to set up a special exhibition under the title “Japan’s Book Donation to the University of Louvain. Japanese Cultural Identity and Modernity in the 1920s” (October 2022–January 2023), at the University Library of KU Leuven. The present book has been compiled for the occasion of the exhibition, to serve as a durable guide to the magnificent book donation and its historical background, and as a reference for further research in the future. In five essays by historians of politics, media, culture, and arts of Japan, it offers a richly illustrated overview of the history of the donation and its wider historical context, providing illuminating insights into the vibrant 1920s in Japan, its politics, society, and popular culture. The reader is further invited to explore a sample of 65 remarkable and rare items from the donation, which were carefully selected for inclusion in the exhibition and are provided here with a detailed description. Moreover, the reader is introduced to 41 representative items, including visually captivating commercial and political posters related to Japan’s modernity in the 1920s, which represent mass culture, progress, and tensions, and highlight both imperial ambitions and a willingness to contribute to international cooperation.
Site-specific installations are created for specific locations and are usually intended as temporary artworks. The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums: Staging Contemporary ...Art shows that these artworks consist of more than a singular manifestation and that their lifespan is often extended. In this book, Tatja Scholte offers an in-depth account of the artistic production of the last forty years. With a wealth of case studies the author illuminates the diversity of site-specific art in both form and content, as well as in the conservation strategies applied. A conceptual framework is provided for scholars and museum professionals to better understand how site-specific installations gain new meanings during successive stages of their biographies and may become agents for change in professional routines.
Site-specific installations are created for specific locations and are usually intended as temporary artworks. The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums: Staging Contemporary ...Art shows that these artworks consist of more than a singular manifestation and that their lifespan is often extended. In this book, Tatja Scholte offers an in-depth account of the artistic production of the last forty years. With a wealth of case studies the author illuminates the diversity of site-specific art in both form and content, as well as in the conservation strategies applied. A conceptual framework is provided for scholars and museum professionals to better understand how site-specific installations gain new meanings during successive stages of their biographies and may become agents for change in professional routines.
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