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 is a photographer who has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, including Art in General, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, SFCamerawork, Susanne Vielmetter/L.A. Projects, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Reviews of her exhibitions have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time Out New York, and she has published artist projects in Cabinet, Documents, Open City and The Literary Review. She is the recipient of grants from Art Matters, Inc., New York Foundation of the Arts, and Ohio Arts Council, and of residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Ucross Foundation. Larson’s work is represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York City. She earned a BA in English from Oberlin College, a MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Hidden Mother is available online at the Saint Lucy bookstore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 elaborates on how and why dance is political, how dance can give voice to subversive discourse, how it can articulate feminist perspectives, and how it can provide opportunity and outlet for those marginalized within society and politics. The scope of the book is global–integrating not only the groundbreaking work of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham as the building blocks for thinking about dance and politics–but exploring the Gumboots dance and development in South Africa; the One Billion Rising concept and diffusion to western countries, and non-western appropriation of the movement; and the integration of dance into human rights advocacy in Israel and in Palestine. The book concludes with another example of the role of dance within yet another community, the Native American communities in North America. Throughout the book, Mills teases apart the issues of the body as a political entity, while also exploring the conceptual notion of political space where dance is performed, and how the body is part of an understanding of political space. These questions are vital to consider in context of contemporary political theory and what we understand to be political discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 might have appeared to any freedom seeker. A person who explores her photography in this work may get the feeling they were actually there during this tumultuous time in American history. Framing the powerful visual narrative is an introduction by the author; a foreword by noted politician, pastor, and civil rights activist Andrew J. Young; and essays by noted historian Fergus M. Bordewich, journalism professor Robert F. Darden, and black studies scholar Eric R. Jackson. Author Jeanine Michna-Bales is a Dallas-based photographer. Her work explores the relationships between what has occurred, or is occurring, in a society and how people react to those events. She meticulously researches each topic considering different viewpoints, causes, and effects and political climates and often incorporates found or archival text and audio into her projects. Images from her Underground Railroad series have been exhibited throughout the United States and have appeared in numerous online and print publications. Her next book-length work will focus on the images and architecture of Cold War era nuclear fallout shelters in the United States. James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at [email protected]   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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, a new imprint that publishes high quality photography books. He is a contributing writer for Rangefinder Magazine and Photo District News, is a judge for the prestigious PDN Photo Annual, and reviews the work of developing photographers at Palm Springs Photo Festival, ASMP Fine Art, APA, Filter Photo Festival and at Savannah College of Art and Design. In his work as a curator, he has shaped shows at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, Darkroom Gallery in Vermont, and Lightbox Gallery in Oregon. He also serves on the Board of Advisers for the Center for Alternative Photography: Penumbra Foundation. No Plan B is available in two bindings; the black trade edition, and a white limited edition, which includes a gelatin silver print signed and numbered by the artist. No Plan B is available for sale online at Peanut Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 to painting. Chapters are followed by creative exercises and discussion questions that further understanding of the material. 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: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world. Author Paul Youngquist teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is a professor in the English Department and associate chair of Graduate Studies. His current areas of research focus are British literature, cultural studies, literacy theory, popular culture, film/digital media, and Romanticism. He is the author or editor of six books, including Cyberfiction: After the Future, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, and Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic. Dr. Youngquist now devotes much of his energy to studying the histories written and oral of resistance and creativity in the Caribbean. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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: [email protected]. 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 many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 identity, memory and time couldn’t help but mutate. I sent these images to them, they would critique them. This went on for years. Of the seven men I originally wrote, I remain in touch with one who has been in solitary confinement since 1995 for a crime committed at 16. One was released in 2010 at the age of 30 (after 15 years in prison), three eventually opted out, one was executed in 2009, another executed in 2012.” – Amy Elkins via LensCulture The title of the book comes from poem excerpts written by a man who has been in prison since the age of 13. He was retried as an adult at 16 for attempting escape and was sentenced to life in solitary without the possibility of parole at a super-max prison. He taught himself to write poetry over this time. Amy received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Elkins has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, California; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; North Carolina Museum of Art; Light Work Gallery, Syracuse, New York; and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, among many others. Her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, PDN, Harpers, NY Arts, Conveyor, and Contact Sheet, among others. Elkins has also been included in exhibition catalogues such as The Portrait. Elkins was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2011, and at Villa Waldberta, Munich, in 2012. In 2008, Elkins and Cara Phillips cofounded wipnyc.org, a platform for showcasing both established and emerging women in photography. Elkins is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York. Amy Elkins is currently based near Los Angeles. Black is the Day, Black is the Night is available through her website: http://www.amyelkins.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 paper engineer. 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 Children’sBook Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also 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 many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 workshops in Suzhou for a careful study of one of the central figures in the book and one who will be with us for the remainder of the story, Gu Erniang (fl. 1700-1722), one of the most accomplished inkstone makers of her day. The chapter takes us through the stages through which she practiced her crafts, from commissioning of the inkstone to carving (including attention to what she did not carve, including words), to understanding her signature marks. We move from here to follow Gu as a super-brand into the world of commercial inkstone-carving beyond Suzhou, and finally to collectors homes in Fujian. It is a masterful study that is equally sensitive to objects and texts as historical documents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 and Bodies of Desire, The Gothic, Jimmie Durham and Marco Breuer: Early Recordings. He is author of McDermott and McGough: A History of Photography, Robert Heinecken: A Material History and co-author of Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing and Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costume and Masquerade. In 2005, Durant co-curated and co-authored Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal. He has served on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, the University of New Mexico, Syracuse University, and the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, he is now Professor of Photography at the University of Maryland School of Visual Arts. 27 Contexts – An Anecdotal History in Photography is available through the publisher’s website: https://saint-lucy.com/shop/27-contexts/ . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 and continental philosophy, and is the author of French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2003). Professor Baugh’s work on Fondane will be of interest to a wide variety of readers seeking a better understanding of a thinker whose work invites consideration alongside his better known contemporaries Walter Benjamin and the early Levinas, among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 and studio photography business in his home initially at 1303 Adeline St. and then at 384 50th St. in Oakland. In 1980, Careth Reid purchased Josephs collection of negatives and personal papers, and nearly four decades later, a labor of love comes to fruition with the publication of The Picture Man: From the Collection of Bay Area Photographer E. F. Joseph (Arcadia, 2017). Ms. Reid, a lifelong educator and champion of community service in the Bay Area, partnered with longtime friend Ruth Beckford, a dancer, teacher, choreographer, actor, and author. Ms. Reid, a native of Berkeley, was the recipient of San Francisco State University’s Alumna of the Year Award in 1990 and is also a member of the university’s Hall of Fame. Ms. Beckford is featured in a downtown mural of the community’s artists and was also celebrated as an Outstanding Alumni of Oakland Technical High School in 2015. Together, they tell the story of the Bay Areas African American community through the eye and lens of one of its own. Ms. Beckford and Ms. Reid live in Oakland, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 its start. In “Every Day,” Baden has taken a single photograph of his face every day. According to a recent interview, he’s only missed one day in the entire 30 years, 15 October 1991, It was a dumb moment of forgetfulness,” he said. Karl currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Morrissey College of Art and Science at Boston College. The Americans by Car is available through the photographer: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

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 whose autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home is now a hit musical. Charles Burns, whose Black Hole tells a haunting story of a teenage plague, is highlighted as an artist unable to sugarcoat his work even when he was trying to have his art published in Playboy magazine. And Gilbert Hernandez, best known for his innovative Love and Rockets series, created with his brother Jaime, shows himself to be nigh-fearless when it comes to his work, blending everything from erotica to violence to a biography of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Join Pizzino and pop-culture junkie and author Gael Fashingbauer Cooper (no relation to Archie Comics’ Betty Cooper) for a lively look at comics and their evolution, and why the very idea that the medium has safely come of age may be working against it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In his new book The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing (Crown, 2017), Damion Searls presents the first biography of Hermann Rorschach and the history of the Rorschach Test. A story that is largely untold, Searls starts with the childhood of Rorschach and brings readers through his growth as a psychiatrist as he created an experiment to probe the mind using a set of ten inkblots. As a visual artist, Rorschach incorporated his ability to think about visuals and his belief that what is seen is more important than what we say. After his early death, Rorschach’s Test found its way to America being used by the military, to test job applicants, to evaluate defendants and parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness. In addition, it has been used throughout advertising and incorporated in Hollywood and popular culture. A tragic figure, and one of the most influential psychiatrists in the twentieth century, The Inkblots allows readers to better understand how Rorschach and his test impacted psychiatry and psychological testing. Searls’ work is eloquently written and detailed, pulling in unpublished letters, diaries and interviews with family, friends and colleagues. Searls’ well researched text presents insight into the ways that art and science have impacted modern psychology and popular culture. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Paul LeValley’s Art Follows Nature: A Worldwide History of the Nude (Edition One Books, 2016) is the first comprehensive study of the nude in art from around the world written by a naturist. Based on a series of columns LeValley wrote for Naturally magazine starting in 1988, the book is a deeply researched analysis of the nude in the history of art across Western and Non-Western cultures including Greece, Egypt, India, China, the Middle East, and Africa. Examples are examined within multiple contexts from the aesthetic to the philosophical and religious to the concern of popular culture. LeValley’s study includes over 700 color illustrations and the author has visited many of the sites in the narrative. To purchase the book please visit the author’s website. 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 Hill. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siecle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016), Elana Shapira, Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, examines the complex histories of Jewish cultural patronage in Vienna. She offers a nuanced and compelling account of the cultural networks of the time. This book is an important contribution, which overturns established ideas about the Jewishness of Viennese cultural figures of this period. Shapira brings into question dominant ideas about assimilation, modernism and cultural interchange. This book will be an important reference on this subject for many years to come. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Daniel Magaziner’s latest book, The Art of Life in South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2016, and UKZN Press, 2017), is a welcome addition to the intellectual history of South Africa. Rich in color images and documentary history, The Art of Life tells the story of African art in white apartheid South Africa, juxtaposing the beauty of an ordinary life well lived, against the random cruelty of the apartheid state. The book follows the story of the Ndaleni Art School in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal from 1952 until its closing in 1981. The school was set up to teach the art teachers of the Bantu education system, but in doing so, it opened up the student’s lives to more complex discussions of creativity, beauty and resilience. Magaziner sets up the tale by spinning the individual lives against the opposing pressures of both the apartheid state and the black consciousness movement. On the one side, rigid oppression, and on the other, the push to fight apartheid or be deemed a collaborator. The individual stories of former Ndaleni students force the reader to see beyond the black and white of these opposing narratives. The people profiled chose to lead fulfilled lives, not because they were defying apartheid, but because their only choice was to simply live. The book is, at its heart, a human story, set against the backdrop of apartheid. Erin Freas-Smith, Ph.D can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Hereditary Estate by Daniel W. Coburn, is published by Kehrer Verlag (2015), with an essay by Karen Irvine, Curator and Associate Director at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and Kristen Pai Buck, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico, 112 pages. The Hereditary Estate is the first major monograph by photographer Daniel W. Coburn. It functions as a ten-year retrospective and as a conceptual work of art. Coburn’s work and research investigates the family photo album employed as the visual infrastructure for the flawed ideology of the American Dream. Frustrated by the lack of images that document the true and sometimes troubling nature of his own familial history, the photographer set out to create a new archive, a potent supplement to the broken family album that exists in the collection of many families. Using photographs made over the last decade, and altered amateur photographs, he weaves a family narrative that is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. The careful sequencing of these images creates a powerful psychological dialogue designed to inspire an emotional and visceral response from the viewer. The international distribution of this book completes an essential conceptual component of this work, placing this supplementary album into family collections in countries all over the world. Daniel’s work and research investigates the family photo album as a form and narrative function. Selections from his body of work have been featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York. His prints are held in collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the Mulvane Art Museum, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, and the Mariana Kistler-Beach Museum of Art. Daniel’s work has been published widely, most recently appearing in the International New York Times. Daniel currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas and is an Assistant Professor of Photo Media at the University of Kansas. The Hereditary Estate is available through the photographer’s website, as well as Amazon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“Artaud lived with his neck placed firmly in the noose.” -Bauhaus* David Shafer’s new biography, Antonin Artaud (Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2016), situates the life of this enigmatic and fascinating figure in historical context. From his bourgeois family background, through a life that included a variety of physical and mental health challenges, drug use, and institutionalization, Shafer traces the ways that Artaud’s intellectual and artistic development was shaped by broader historical and political events and forces. An actor of stage and screen, a poet, and theatre director, Artaud emerges in these chapters as the embodiment of the French revolutionary tradition in the cultural realm. Shafer traces his subjects geographic movements from his Mediterranean origins to the streets of Paris, and on to other destinations, Mexico and Ireland among these. In addition to these sites, Artaud held in his imagination a number of other locales, including the physical and cultural landscapes of an East that informed his critique of Western society and its traditions. Throughout the book, Shafer takes Artaud on his own terms, avoiding judgments and hasty conclusions about the ideas, beliefs, and experiences of his protagonist. The result is an empathetic, yet still critical, biography of an icon of the world of performance. Readers not familiar with Artaud’s far-reaching influence across the domains of art, music, literature, theatre, and film up to the present will find much in these pages to justify his consideration as one of the most important cultural players of the last century. *After our interview, David shared the link to Aural Assault, a blog post on Artaud and music that he wrote for the Reaktion Books website. In it, he discusses the music he listened to while writing the biography, as well as the links between Artaud and musicians like Richard Hell and Patti Smith. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Photographer Leon Borensztein began Sharon (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), his most personal project, thirty years ago when his daughter was born: “Throughout my artistic career, I have been driven by the need to give voice to the unheard and unseen. This desire became a personal passion when my daughter Sharon was born. Just after her birth I felt there was something wrong, and slowly we learned that she was born with disabilities. I started photographing my daughter before she was born and I have never stopped.” When Sharon was in her early teens, Leon gained full custody of her when he split with her mother. His book is certainly a unique opportunity to increase awareness about disability, but is also a love letter to Sharon. It is both human and heartbreaking, beautiful and bold. Filled with poetic metaphor, Sharon has no text, which provides an intriguing and emotional experience. It is a book that demands and deserves multiple viewings. Leon Borenszstein earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987, and a grant from the California Council of the Humanities in 2003. His work has been exhibited internationally, e.g. at the Centre Nationale de la Photographie in Paris, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and is in important collections like the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His first monograph, One is Adam One is Superman, was published in 2004; his second, American Portraits, in 2011. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In “Georgia O’Keeffe: At Home in the Wonderful Nothing,” a text accompanying the exhibition catalogue Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors 1916-1918 (Radius Books and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2016), Amy Von Lintel investigates a lesser studied period in O’Keeffe’s life and work: the artist’s time in West Texas. In 1916, at the age of twenty-eight, O’Keeffe moved to Canyon, Texas to accept a position as founding faculty of the West Texas State Normal College. O’Keeffe had first journeyed to West Texas in 1912 to teach in the newly founded Amarillo City Public School District. During her time in Canyon, she produced 51 watercolors (46 of which are reproduced in the book), characterized by a level of experimentation that foreshadows her later work. The dry, flat lands of the region, and the stark horizons with their dramatic shadows and sunsets, appealed to O’Keeffe. From 1916-1918, she used watercolor to render landscapes, abstract images, and nude studies of her own body while learning to live in an American West so different from other parts of the United States. Some of the watercolors were shown by Alfred Stieglitz at the 291 Gallery in New York City but O’Keeffe kept many of them in her private collection for the duration of her life. Von Lintel’s discussion of O’Keeffe is framed by the author’s study of letters and records from the O’Keeffe archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Library made available in 1986, as well as correspondence between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz released in 2006. O’Keeffe’s observations are carefully documented throughout the text and offer insight into her personality and aesthetic ideas. Von Lintel also introduces readers to O’Keeffe as a teacher, another part of the artist’s identity that took form in the influential Texas years. 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: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research (Palgrave, 2016). Dr. Benneworth, from the University of Twente’s Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, was part of a pan-European project to consider the impact of Impact and the way Arts and Humanities narrate their public value, research which was the basis for the book. The book draws on a wealth of empirical and theoretical material, including comparative case studies from Ireland, Norway, and The Netherlands. The comparative approach allows the book to contextualise engagements with science policy, the role and purpose of the university, public value, and innovation, to offer a new vision of Arts and Humanities research that avoids instrumentalisation. The book is important and essential reading for all interested in the future of higher education and research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Amani Willett: Disquiet by Amani Willett, is published by Damiani Factory (2013), with an afterward by Marvin Heiferman, 128 pages. “Disquiet’s cinematic look suggests the palpable spaces in which Willett pondered both the depth and fragility of social and family relationships. And as we become immersed in the work, we imagine or remember ourselves in similar places and situations. While many photographic projects about parents and children have, in recent years, adopted a decidedly cool stance to keep sentimentality at bay, Willett takes a risk by so openly acknowledging our reflex to love, desire to protect, and the vulnerability we face once we do. This is the core subject or his work, without apology.” – Marvin Heiferman, excerpted from the essay, “Beneath the Surface in Disquiet.” New York-based photographer Amani Willett weaves intimate family pictures with broader portrayals of American society and its current economic and political instability in his book, Disquiet. Taken between 2010 and 2012, the portraits, landscapes and still lives is his book record the anxieties of starting a family in a time of social unrest, and with the societal challenges posed by the results of the 2016 election, his work takes on a new dimension. Amani draws on his work as a street photographer and visual storyteller to create the images and to construct the books overarching narrative. Amani’s work has been featured in the books Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson) and New York: In Color (Abrams). Willett’s pictures have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at the Howard Greenberg gallery and his work has been featured in such publications as American Photography, Newsweek and The New York Times. He has given talks about his work at institutions including the International Center of Photography. Willett received his MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. Amani currently lives in Brooklyn with his family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her photographs in her name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth.” Featuring the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published, Enduring Truths: Sojourners Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself. A Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley, the book’s author, Dr. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art, visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race and colonialism. Dr. Grigsby writes on painting, sculpture, photography and engineering as well as the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Dr. Grigsby is also the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including two Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowships, a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, and The Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California at Berkeley. Some of Dr. Grigsby’s previous works include Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France and Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal. In addition to her teaching, Dr. Grigsby is currently conducting research for a book project tentatively titled Creole Looking: Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century, which will examine France’s relationship to the Caribbean and Americas. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

On today’s program, I talk with Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle about their new book, The Art of the Bible Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World, published by Thames and Hudson (and distributed in the United States by W. W. Norton) in November 2016. The book looks at 45 featured manuscripts from across the globe and through 1,000 years of history, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Queen Mary Psalter, the Canterbury Royal Bible, the Old English Hextateuch, the Welles Apocalypse, and the Paduan Bible Picture Book, among others. With more than 300 illustrations, which have been meticulously color corrected for this new book, the authors shed light on some of the finest but least-known paintings from the Middle Ages and on the development of art, literature, and civilization as we know it. Dr. Scot McKendrick is the head of Western Heritage Collections at the British Library. His publications include Codex Sinaiticus: New Perspective on the Ancient Biblical Manuscript; Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe; and The Bible as Book: Transmissions of the Greek Text. Dr. Kathleen Doyle is the lead curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library. She was the co-curator, with Dr. McKendrick, of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded exhibition, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, and the lead investigator for the Royal Manuscripts follow-on project, editing with Dr. McKendrick the volume 1,000 Years of Royal Books and Manuscripts. Together the authors also edited Bible Manuscripts: 1,400 Years of Scribes and Scripture, published by the British Library in 2007. To view some of the illuminated manuscripts discussed on this program, visit the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts at https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/. You can also follow @blmedieval on Twitter, which is linked to the authors’ Medieval Manuscripts blog. Garrett Brown is the host of New Books in Biblical Studies. He is a publisher and editor and blogs at noteandquery.com. Follow the channel on Twitter @newbooksbible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Assistant Professor Federica Goffi fills a blind spot in current architectural theory and practice with this book, Time Matter(s): Invention and Re-Imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s, the Vatican (Routledge, 2013). In proposing a hybrid approach which merges architectural and conservation theory the work offers the reader a counter-viewpoint to common understandings of preservation as singular moment from the past which has been frozen and brought forward to the present. Through a micro-historical study of a Renaissance concept of restoration, a theoretical framework to question the issue of conservation as a creative endeavor arises. It focuses on Tiberio Alfarano’s 1571 ichnography of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, into which a complex body of religious, political, architectural and cultural elements is woven. By merging past and present temple’s plans, Alfarano created a track-drawing questioning the design pursued after Michelangelo’s death (1564), opening the gaze towards other possible future imaginings. Federica Goffi book further uncovers how the drawing was acted on by Carlo Maderno (1556-1629), who literally used it as physical substratum to for new design proposals, completing the renewal of the temple in 1626. This research shows how architectural and conservation practices can be merged in contemporary renovation. By creating hybrid drawings, the retrospective and prospective gaze of built conservation forms a continuous and contiguous reality, where a pre-existent condition engages with future design joining multiple temporalities within a continuity of identity. The study might provide a paradigmatic and timely model to retune contemporary architectural sensibility when transforming a building of recognized significance. Brant Matthew Tate https://au.linkedin.com/in/t8architect https://uq.academia.edu/BrantMatthewTate [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Proof: Photographs from Four Generations of a Texas Family by Byrd Williams, with text by Byrd Williams IV, forward by Roy Flukinger and afterword by Anne Wilkes Tucker, is published by the University of North Texas Press, (2016). 224 pages. The Byrd Williams Collection at the University of North Texas contains more than 10,000 prints and 300,000 negatives, accumulated by four generations of Texas photographers, all named Byrd Moore Williams. Beginning in the 1880s in Gainesville, the four Byrds photographed customers in their studios, urban landscapes, crime scenes, Pancho Villa’s soldiers, televangelists, and whatever aroused their unpredictable and wide-ranging curiosity. When Byrd IV sat down to choose a selection from this dizzying array, he came face to face with the nature of mortality and memory, his own and his family’s. In some cases, these photos are the only evidence remaining that someone lived and breathed on this earth. The 193 photos selected here are organized into thematic sections such as “Landscapes,” “Violence and Religion,” and “Darkness.” They are significant not just for the range of subjects, but for the inclusion of a variety of examples of the evolving photographic technology from the 1880s to the present. This book is an unprecedented portrait of both photographic history and the history of Texas, as well as a record of one unique family. BYRD M. WILLIAMS IV maintains a studio in Dallas and teaches photography at Collin County Community College. He provided the photographs for Fort Worth’s Legendary Landmarks and his work is in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The value of the arts is a constant and vital question in contemporary culture. In Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Intellect Books, 2016) Kirsty Sedgman, British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, approaches this question from the point of view of the audience. The book offers an introduction to the question of what an audience is, as well as thinking through the best methods to study the audience, before turning to the story of National Theatre Wales (NTW). The book discusses the tensions between aesthetics and participation, using places and performances from NTW to illustrate the range of responses, and the range of value, that different types of audience can derive from theatre. An engaging and accessible introduction to both the theoretical and practical questions surrounding cultural value, measurement, audiences, and theatre, the book will interest a range of humanities and social science scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of the black body that traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and extends to contemporary attitudes towards black hair? In Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Paul C. Taylor examines primary themes in racialism from the perspective of aesthetic culture. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies and an Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and at Penn State University, considers such issues as black invisibility, expressive culture and politics, and the problem of authenticity and cultural appropriation. He also lays the foundation for analytic philosophical tools to be brought more widely to bear on scholarly discussion of issues related to race and racialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.” Robert Brain’s The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Washington Press, 2015) unveils a fascinating world of exchange between artistic studios and physiology laboratories concealed by such pithy aphorisms. Brain argues that the influence and stature of physiological aesthetics have been overlooked in accounts of modernism in science and art, and seeks to recover experimental systems that were incredibly influential and fertile in their cultural situation. Brain first sets himself to chart the development of physiological recording in the sciences, first as experimental technique, then as ontology, in a fascinating chapter on the protoplasm theory of life and on to its application to the human qua human problems of linguistic analysis. He then describes the experimentalization of visual art (Georges Seurat, Edvard Munch) and poetry (Gustave Kahn, F. T. Marinetti). The influence of Charles Henry, who inhabited both artists’ circles and physiology laboratories in his work as a preparateur, becomes a key pivot in Brain’s narrative through his creation a scientific aesthetic that could be deployed as a kind of productive black-box. The Pulse of Modernism is a rich portrait of fin-de-siecle material and intellectual culture, and challenges the pride of place given to Victorian sensibilities in the fashioning of the late modern (early modernist) scientific subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Sister Mary Corita, IHM (1918-1986), was a beloved artist and teacher whose role as the rebel nun continues to inspire contemporary audiences. Corita joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 when she was just eighteen years old, and soon after became an initially reluctant Art teacher at Immaculate Heart College. Corita remained part of the community on Franklin and Western Avenues in Hollywood until 1968 when Los Angeles archbishop Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, and other conservatives, targeted the orders reformist ways. Corita’s Pop Art styled prints celebrating the presence of God in the most ordinary of everyday subjects (Mary is the juiciest tomato of all) drew the ire of McIntyre in particular. At age fifty, she took one of many unconventional steps and left the order to start life anew as an independent woman. In Corita Kent: Art and Soul: The Biography (Angel City Press, 2015), April Dammann traces Corita’s path as an artist and religious woman who participated in the heady scene of the Los Angeles art world in the 1960s while engaging her own devout spirituality at the same time. Coritas journey into printmaking took her beyond the confines of the college to the world of the most famous artists and designers in Los Angeles including Charles Eames, John Cage, Edward Kienholz, and Tony Duquette. She interacted with Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and other members of Los Angeles literary avant-garde. Clad in her nuns habit, Corita was more than a picturesque observer of the scene, however. Her highly refined silkscreens combining word and image with meticulously placed colors transformed the medium. She culled subject matter from the ideas of thinkers and social commentators ranging from Goethe to Isaiah, to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and radical priest and soul mate Daniel Berrigen. Corita’s students, many of whose voices color Dammann’s carefully researched book, were beneficiaries of Corita’s aesthetic and intellectual explorations. As we reconsider the life of Corita Kent, we are confronted, in the quiet yet powerful manner of the artist herself, with a woman whose contributions to the radical forms of the 1960s are immense. 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 Hill. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Piksa Niugini by Stephen Dupont, with forward by Robert Gardner and essay by Bob Connolly, is published by the Peabody Press and Radius Books, (2013). Volume 1: 144 pages, 80 duotone, 6 color images. Volume 2: 144 pages, 120 color images. Piksa Niugini records noted Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s most important cultural and historical zones – the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city Port Moresby. The project is contained in two volumes in a slipcase one of portraits of local people, and the second of personal diaries. This remarkable body of work captures one of the world’s last truly wild and unique frontiers. Stephen’s work for this book was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The first volume of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone and 4 color; the second is an eclectic collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary photographs that Dupont created as he produced the project, which add to a broader understanding of the images in volume one. Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples. He skillfully captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and often in some of the worlds most dangerous regions. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world. Dupont’s work has earned him photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondents Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007, he was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan, and in 2010 he received the Gardner Fellowship at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other, questions associated with the role of art in modern society are at the heart of The Composition of Movements to Come (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Stevphen Shukaitis, a senior lecturer in work and organisation at the University of Essex, approaches these issues from an Autonomist Marxist perspective, thinking through a diverse range of issues, for example cultural labour, and practices, for example the art strike. The book also uses a range of artistic examples, including a detailed engagement with Neue Slowenische Kunst to think through the composition of movements to come. The podcast discusses a forthcoming exhibition of the work of Gee Vaucher at Firstsite in Essex, UK. The book will be of interest to critical theorists, as well as scholars from art, politics and social movement studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The New Yorkers by Robert Herman, with an introduction by Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the City Museum of New York, is published by Proof Positive Press (2015). Robert Herman is a photographer and author of two books of his work, The New Yorkers and The Phone Book (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2015). Robert has been a street photographer since his days he started using his father’s Nikon F and a 50mm lens, and began by exploring the city as a means to connect with the people in his neighborhood and learn the craft of making images. Robert has a BFA in filmmaking from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and he received a masters degree in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Art. With his love of light and color, and a joy of making images that find the transcendent in the seemingly mundane, Robert’s images tell another story – that of his battle with bipolar disorder. Through the process of creating the work for The New Yorkers, Robert sought physical representation of the empathy he had for his subjects while struggling with his own sense of feeling as an outsider. Its this search for connection and connectedness in his images is what makes The New Yorkers of interest to all who know and love the city as well as those who want to know it. The New Yorkers is available through Roberts website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embraces writers, travelers, and natural philosophers ranging from Liudprand of Cremona (c. 920 972), Pope Sylvester II (c. 946 1003) and Fr. William of Rubruck (c. 1220 1293), to Sir John Mandeville, witness of marvels mechanical and divine, and a Charlemagne whose stay in Constantinople brings him face to face with a pagan rulers powers of astral science that test the potentials of Charlemagne’s piety. Our conversation about Truitt’s comprehensively researched and highly readable book ranges over C-3PO’s medieval forebears in the alabaster chamber, the religious rehabilitation of disembodied talking heads, the role of clocks and clockwork in the discourse shift from natural philosophy to mechanical engineering, and the political significance of lewd mechanical monkeys covered in rotting badger pelts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Since 2007, American photographer Jade Doskow has been documenting the remains of World’s Fair sites, once iconic global attractions that have often been repurposed for less noble aspirations or neglected and fallen into decay. Lost Utopias (Black Dog Publishing, 2016) brings together the substantial body of work that Doskow has completed over the past decade, including iconic monuments such as the Seattle Space Needle, the Eiffel Tower, Brussels Palais des Expositions and New York’s Unisphere. Doskow’s large-scale colorphotographs poignantly illustrate the utopian architecture and art that has surrounded the Worlds Fairs, across both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Presented in a large-scale hardback book, Doskow’s work carries a unique sense of both grandeur and dreaminess, whilst also reflecting upon the often temporary purposes that these structures once held. Jade Doskow is an award-winning photographer based in Peekskill, New York. She holds a BA in Philosophy of Art and Music from New York University and an MFA in Photography & Video from the School of Visual Arts. She is currently on the photography faculty of the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography, and was named by ‘American Photo’ as ‘One to Watch’ in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line (Prometheus Books, 2016) goes considerably beyond what its modest title would suggest. The circle has played a pivotal role–that’s “role” with an ‘e,’ but its ability to “roll” with an ‘l’–has helped produce our industrial civilization. Moreover, the circle appears in our art, our literature, and our culture as well. This delightful book will not only reacquaint readers with the pleasures of the geometry they once knew, but will show how the circle continues to enchant mathematicians today, who continue to discover new and surprising properties about this most fundamental of shapes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Resolution of the Suspect by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, with text by Ariella Azoulay, is co-published by the Peabody Museum Press at Harvard and Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM (2016). Mr. Kratsman was the 2011 recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, an internationally recognized award given annually by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to a photographer who has demonstrated great originality working in the documentary vein. Through images created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observers gaze under conditions of occupation. These photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state– and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a “suspect.” The work is both transgressive and banal, crossing boundaries between Israel and Palestine, wanted and innocent, street photography and surveillance imagery. Kratsman has also provoked vital, long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their “fate.” His complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer as we follow the gaze of both occupier and occupied within a complex web of power relations around issues of life and death. Supported with thought-provoking text by Ariella Azoulay, she looks at various models of historical and civil construction of the gaze and explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman’s photographed persons and frames both individuals and the borrowed time within which they exist. Miki Kratsman was born in Argentina and emigrated to Israel in 1971. He worked as a photojournalist for Hadashot and Ha’aretz until 2012. A photo educator for a number of years, Mr. Kratsman has taught at the Camera Obscura College of Photography and the School for Geographic Photography of Tel Aviv as well as in the Department of Art in Haifa University, he was also the head of the photography department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design until 2014, when he retired. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Stephen Lee Naish first became aware of Dennis Hopper watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, jumpstarting what would become a long examination of Hopper’s ambitions and creative output as an actor, filmmaker, photographer, sculptor, and painter. In his book, Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), Naish places Hopper’s work in its social and political context , showcasing the diverse career of a talented visual artist and pioneer in the American independent film movement.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

There is a long history in philosophy, art and religion of claims about the ineffable from The One in Plotinus to Kant’s noumena or thing-in-itself to Wittgenstein’s famous remark at the end of Tractatus that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But even if the ineffable cannot, in some sense, be expressed, what can we say about what it is to be ineffable? What sorts of things are ineffable and what sense can be made of the claim that these things are ineffable? In her new book, Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Silvia Jonas argues that there is no defensible sense in which there are ineffable objects, properties, propositions, or contents. There are however varieties of ineffable knowledge, and the core of these is the idea of a kind of knowledge based on acquaintance, specifically self-acquaintance. Jonas, who is a Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van Leer Institute and Visiting Researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, brings together historical and contemporary claims about and concepts of the ineffable, and provides a critique that will ground and inform philosophical discussion of the ineffable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Morgan Pitelka’s new book looks closely at the material culture of the Three Unifiers of the late sixteenth century in Japan– Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu–in order to foreground the politics of culture in an age of civil war. The chapters of Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), a beautifully illustrated volume that integrates its images centrally within the narrative, do this by examining the role of sociability in the interactions between warlords and other powerful figures, focusing on cultural practices and rituals like tea ceremony and gift exchange. Pitelka’s book aims to relink war and culture in the historiography of early modern Japan. It accomplishes this goal by helping us see commonalities in unusual places: by pointing to the resonance between the acquisition and exchange of art objects and hostages, between tea caddies and skulls and swords and severed heads, between the ambassadorial powers of people and objects. The epilogue of the book continues the story into an analysis of the politics of museum display in postwar Japan, exploring the ways that some modern exhibitions are imbricated in a modern form of spectacular accumulation and considering the implications for how we understand the importance and role of violence in the history of materials and material culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Cuban artists have been very productive this past decade, producing stunning and surprising works against a backdrop of political and economic transformation as well as continuing scarcity on the island. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture and the Future of the Island (Verso, 2015), Rachel Price’s thoughtful approach to this cultural scene, pays special attention to conceptual and performance art that moves from the very local to the global. Her focus on artistic vocabularies centered on trees, marabou, and water as well as the symbolic and real significance of time and surveillance brings together a provocative array of artists that have a lot to tell us about the everyday both in Cuba and on our shared planet. This marvelous book acquaints readers with unforgettable artists and their work.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Paul Roquet’s wonderful new book begins with an offering of jellyfish and proceeds to teach us how to read the air. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) looks carefully at the phenomenon of ambient subjectivication or, the emergence of self with and through ambient media in modern Japan. Beginning in the 1970s, atmosphere was becoming ambient, according to Roquet, and the emergence and proliferation of new techniques of ambient subjectivication reflected a shift in how the person was understood, away from collective self-understanding and toward a model rooted in a liberal ideal of autonomy and self-determination. Each chapter of the book looks at some specific way that music, film, video, and literature from the 1970s onward have incorporated forms of ambient subjectivication, from the Erik Satie boom and the birth of environmental music of the late 1970s to the music of artists like Hatakeyama Chihei (whose 2006 Minima Moralia I highly recommend!), to films like Ichikawa Jun’s Tony Takitani, and much much more. The book is also a gateway into a world of arresting and inspiring electronic media, and I recommend reading with an internet connection at hand to explore experiences like Ryoichi Kurokawa’s rheo: 5 horizons, Tsuchiya Takafumis’ Apoptosis, and Ise Shoko’s Noema while you work through Roquet’s text. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Diana L. Linden, an art historian of American art based in Claremont, California, explores the colorful–and political–murals of the leftist artist Ben Shahn during the New Deal. Born in Lithuania and raised in New York, Shahn distinguished himself in the 1930s as an artist with a keen eye for expressing the social and political events of his day and the history of Jews in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art