Cover ArtArt and Trousers by David Elliott
Call Number: N 7260 .E45 2021
 
An illustrated collection of essays on modern and contemporary Asian art by a key figure of the international contemporary art world. With more than thirty essays and 640 color images, Art and Trousers moves deftly between regional analysis, portraits of individual artists, and a metaphorical history of trousers. This book presents a panoramic view of contemporary art from across Asia, focusing on the impacts of invention, exchange, colonization, politics, social development, and gender. Moving deftly between regional analysis, portraits of individual artists, and a metaphorical history of trousers, Elliott begins with a discussion about the important coexistence of traditional and modern ideas and motifs in contemporary Asian art. In a rejection of prevalent cultural chichés about globalization, he shows how many of today's leading artists developed practices that are international in outlook while still rooted in specific perspectives from Asia, and form a dynamic culture of the present that extends far beyond this vast continent.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Smokehouse Associates edited by Eric Booker
Call Number: N 6538 .A35 S66 2022
 
Between 1968 and 1970, the artist collective Smokehouse Associates transformed Harlem with vibrant, community-oriented abstract murals and sculptures. Established by William T. Williams and including Melvin Edwards, Guy Ciarcia, and Billy Rose, Smokehouse grew to encompass a range of creative practitioners united around the revolutionary potential of public art. Though relatively unknown today, Smokehouse was ambitious in its scale, community engagement, and interaction with the built environment.
 
Published over fifty years after the collective’s founding, Smokehouse Associates offers the first critical examination of the group’s work. Eric Booker provides a historical overview of the collective; Charles Davis II and James Trainor delve into contextual histories of public art, urban design, and architecture; and an artist roundtable moderated by Ashley James presents critical reflections. With previously unpublished images and ephemera and a rich chronology, Smokehouse Associates serves as a sourcebook that expands the narrative of public art and social practice in the United States to include the contributions of artists of African descent.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-1979 edited by Alex Balgiu & Mónica de la Torre
Call Number: PN 6110 .C77 W66 2020
 

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 takes as its point of departure Materializzazione del linguaggio—the groundbreaking exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women curated by Italian feminist artist Mirella Bentivoglio for the Venice Biennale in 1978. Through this exhibition and others she curated, Bentivoglio traced constellations of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and visual who sought to “reactivate the atrophied tools of communication” and liberate words from the conventions of genre, gender, and the strictures of the patriarchy and normative syntax.

 

The works in this volume evolved from previous manifestations of concrete poetry as defined in foundational manifestos by Öyvind Fahlström, Eugen Gomringer, and the Brazilian Noigandres Group. While some works are easily recognized as concrete poetry, as documented in canonical anthologies edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams in the late ’60s, it also features expansive, serial works that are overtly feminist and often trouble legibility. Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 revisits the figures in Bentivoglio’s orbit and includes works by women practicing in other milieus in the United States, Eastern Europe, and South America who were similarly concerned with activating the visual and sonic properties of language and experimenting with poetry’s spatial syntax.