Art History: Books

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History

This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions-the museum, the art market-are not only products of colonial legacies, but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice-racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. The volume unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture and the discourse that contains them. It equally addresses the manifold complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity. This companion is organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies (Provided by Publisher).

In the Black Fantastic

In the Black Fantastic' assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora that embraces ideas of the mythic and the speculative. It brings to life the forces that shape Afrofuturism - the cultural movement that conjures otherworldly visions out of the everyday of Black experience - and beyond, looking at how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender, identity and the body in the 21st century.0Standing apart from Western narratives of progress and modernity - based as they are on the historical subjugation of people of colour - the book explores how Black artists are drawing inspiration from African-originated myth, knowledge systems and spiritual practices to confound the Western dichotomy between the real and unreal, the natural and the supernatural. With 250 illustrations spanning the spheres of photography, painting, sculpture, cinema, literature and architecture, this book reaches across time, space and art form, drawing together everything from works by leading visual artists such as Kara Walker, Chris Ofili and Lina Iris Viktor to groundbreaking films like Black Panther and Get Out and the radical politics of pan-Africanism (Provided by Publisher).

This title was acquired through the Library's Order a Book service.

Stigmatics and Visual Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy

This book places the discourse surrounding stigmata within the visual culture of the late medieval and early modern periods, with a particular focus on Italy and on female stigmatics. Echoing, and to a certain extent recreating, the wounds and pain inflicted on Christ during his passion, stigmata stimulated controversy. Related to this were issues that were deeply rooted in contemporary visual culture such as how stigmata were described and performed and whether, or how, it was legitimate to represent stigmata in visual art. Because of the contested nature of stigmata and because stigmata did not always manifest in the same form - sometimes invisible, sometimes visible only periodically, sometimes miraculous, and sometimes self-inflicted - they provoked complex questions and reflections relating to the nature and purpose of visual representation (Provided by Publisher).

Prof Cordelia Warr is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at The University of Manchester.

Authors and Art Movements of the Twentieth Century

This book explores the great influence of twentieth-century artists and art movements on many major writers of the twentieth century. It focuses in particular on four seminal writers who were strongly influenced by very different movements: they are Gertrude Stein and Cubism, William S. Burroughs and Dada, J. G. Ballard and Surrealism, and Douglas Coupland and Pop Art. For these authors the presence and influence of these art movements is not limited to a small cluster of texts, but can be felt much more expansively across their work, infiltrating all manner of multifarious and complex dimensions. These authors are all keen to explore new methods of shifting the signature styles and forms of visual art into the literary world. Alongside these more overt methods of artistic transposition, the authors also often demonstrate a deep philosophical affinity with their chosen movements. This book uproots and examines these kinds of artistic engagements, and also explores the authors' own personal connections with the world of art. For these are all authors not only interested in visual art, but also intimately connected to the art world. Indeed, some went on to become renowned artists in their own right, while others were closely associated with major historical art figures. Above all however, they are unified by a kindred interest in exploring how the methods and philosophies of art can be transposed into and even challenge the constraints of traditional forms of literature (Provided by Publisher).