Gwendolyn Wright, author of the recently published USA: Modern Architectures in History, was interviewed by School Library Journal about her work on PBS's History Detectives. The video of the interview can be viewed on the School Library Journal website.
Watch the School Library Journal interview of Gwendolyn Wright
Learn more about Gwendolyn Wright's USA: Modern Architectures in History
Stephen Eisenman's The Abu Ghraib Effect was reviewed last week on the Art Blog By Bob blog. It was also reviewed last month in CAA Reviews:
Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke, one of American Photo's 2007 Best Retrospectives of the Year, was also featured on several photography blogs near the end of 2007.
The 5B4 blog reviews Frank Gohlke's entire oeuvre of photography books and declares that Accommodating Nature is his latest success:
Throughout his other books, Frank has exhibited not only his talent for making images but also his remarkable talent for writing. What is an added joy about this new book is that Frank ties all of his various projects together with a running narrative of text that covers his life with photography as a near constant companion. Uncharacteristic of most retrospective type books, this one is not constructed with a strict chronological order to the images. The photographs follow the text in this regard and pleasurably serve as flash back and memory alongside Frank's steady narration. . . . If you are not familiar with the work of Frank Gohlke then this book would be a perfect introduction.
The muse-ings blog links to this review and also praises the exhibition of Accommodating Nature photographs at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
The Accommodating Nature exhibition runs through January 6th at the Amon Carter Museum and will then move to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts from April 16 through July 13.
Read the full book review at 5B4 and notes about the exhibition at muse-ings
Learn more about the Accommodating Nature photography exhibition
Learn more about Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke
Gwendolyn Wright was interviewed last week about her forthcoming book USA: Modern Architectures in History on the interview program "The Alcove with Mark Molaro." The full webcast of the interview can be viewed here.
The Alcove with Mark Molaro
Learn more about Gwendolyn Wright's USA: Modern Architectures in History
Architectural Record recently published a lengthy feature on Gwendolyn Wright's October 25th lecture at the Museum of Modern Art's "Women in Modernism" colloquium. An excerpt from the article:
If you didn't know better, you might think that the history of women practicing architecture and design began with women's lib during the 1960s. Earlier figures including Lilly Reich or Catherine Bauer are virtually unknown despite their central role in high-profile projects: Reich co-designed the famous Barcelona chair, usually attributed solely to Mies van der Rohe, and Bauer was as an early hero of social housing who co-authored the Housing Act of 1937, establishing public housing in the U.S.Who better to help uncover these forgotten stories than Gwendolyn Wright, a host on the popular PBS series History Detectives and professor of architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. . . .
Wright outlined certain myths that have perpetuated incomplete versions of history, offering as an example the idea that many 20th century arbiters overvalued an ideal type of architect who was hyper-rational, uncompromisingly idealistic, and invariably male. As a result, important figures falling outside that standard were either unnoticed or, if they did achieve recognition, soon forgotten. For example, even with today's booming interest in sustainability it's a rather obscure fact that architect Eleanor Raymond, who worked in Boston for more than 50 years, and chemist Dr. Maria Telkes, from M.I.T., built what was arguably the first solar-powered house, the Dover Sun House, in 1948. Wright challenged the audience to resist "myths that are clearer and more convenient than real history."
Read the full Architectural Record article
Learn more about Gwendolyn Wright's USA: Modern Architectures in History
Gwendolyn Wright's keynote lecture at the "Women and Modernism" colloquium at the Museum of Modern Art was featured in the October 31st New York Times column by architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. Using the colloquium and Wright's comments as a launching point, Oursoussoff considers the reasons why females continue to be underpresented in the architecture profession:
Continue reading "Author in the News: Gwendolyn Wright and USA" »
Gwendolyn Wright will be speaking on Thursday, October 25th at 6:30 p.m. at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She will be giving the keynote address at the Women in Modernism—Making Places in Architecture colloquium, which is sponsored by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.
Wright's address will be followed by a discussion panel featuring leading architectural scholars and practitioners Toshiko Mori, Sarah Herda, Karen Stein, and moderator Barry Bergdoll. Wright is author of the forthcoming USA: Modern Architectures in History.
"At last, the book I have been waiting for: the story of modern American architecture deeply contextualized in the history of the last century and a half. Wright is that rare scholar who understands how intricately the built environment is laced into larger historical trends. This is a wonderful book for all who care about architecture and the long history of modern work, housing, and public life in the United States."
—Lizabeth Cohen, professor of history, Harvard University, and author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation Women in Modernism colloquium at the Museum of Modern Art
Learn more about USA: Modern Architectures in History
Partha Mitter will give a lecture on Sunday, October 21 at 2:00 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His talk will be drawn from his newly published book The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde 1922–47. A book signing will follow the lecture.
National Gallery of Art Lectures
Learn more about Partha Mitter's The Triumph of Modernism
Professor Partha Mitter will be giving a talk entitled "Early Indian Photography and the Complex Legacy of the Mughal Era" this Thursday, October 18th at 6:00p.m. in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art at Harvard University. Admission is free.
Mitter is the author of the newly published The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-47.
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art lecture series
Learn more about The Triumph of Modernism
At 12pm (Eastern Time) on Saturday, July 28th, 2007, Book TV will be presenting the annual "Best of the Best from the University Presses."
Included in the schedule is the University of Alaska Press title Alaska Native Art: Tradition, Innovation, Continuity by Susan W. Fair.
"The Best of the Best from the University Presses" was originally presented on Sunday, June 24th, 2007, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC.
John Corbett, co-editor of the WhiteWalls Sun Ra titles The Wisdom of Sun Ra, Pathways to Unknown Worlds, and the forthcoming Traveling the Spaceways, recently wrote an article on Sun Ra for Design Observer. Corbett provides an eloquent introduction to Sun Ra and his Arkestra, mapping the Chicago spaces inhabited by Ra and his collaborators as they developed the El Saturn label and launched the Arkestra.
Learn More about The Wisdom of Sun Ra
Paul Werner, author of Museum, Inc., will be interviewed this coming Sunday, July 8th, at 10:00am (AEST - Australia Eastern Standard Time) on Artworks, a radio show from ABC Radio National in Australia.
Audio of the show will be available from the Artworks site
Al Jadid recently posted a review of Gannit Ankori's Palestinian Art, winner of a 2007 Polonsky Prize for creativity and originality in the humanistic disciplines. Doris Bittar writes, "Palestinian Art provides its readers a documentary-like and cinematic experience while teaching them about the history and culture of a troubled land."
Bittar credits Ankori for avoiding the pitfalls of previous scholarship on Palestinian art, "Ankori knows not to wear the cloak of the authoritative colonial scholar in this landscape. That alone is a refreshing change from the usual stance that Western critics and historians adopt."
Ankori traces the history and development of Palestinian art, from its roots in folk art and traditional Christian and Islamic painting to the predominance of nationalistic themes and diverse media used today. Drawing on over a decade of extensive research, studio visits, and interviews, Ankori explores the vast oeuvre of prominent contemporary Palestinian artists, navigating between the personal and biographical dimensions of specific artworks and the symbolic meanings embedded within them. She provides detailed interpretations of many works and considers the complex historical, geographical, political, and cultural contexts in which the art was created. Questions of gender, exile, colonialism, postcolonialism, and hybridity are integral to Ankori's investigation as she probes the influence and thematic dominance of issues such as rootedness and displacement in Palestinian art.
Byron Coley recently praised Pathways to Unknown Worlds from WhiteWalls in the May issue of the Wire. Coley praises the visual work included in the volume, "It looks incredible. . . ." He praises the essays by Corbett and Adam Abraham for setting the scene. Finally, he exclaims of Ra's work, ". . . [I]ts visionary brilliance will become plain to anyone who takes the time to look at it with the wonder it deserves."
The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music (Review Unavailable Online)
Swan Isle translator and editor Christopher Maurer will be speaking at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City at 6:30pm on Monday, March 26th.
The event is part of Guggenheim's "Looking with Literature" series. Christopher Maurer will be giving readings of classical and contemporary Spanish texts in the museum's galleries and exploring the intersections of the literary and visual art worlds.
Looking with Literature: Christopher Maurer at the Guggenheim
Monday, March 26th
6:30pm
$25 ($20 members, students, and seniors)
Public Programs take place in the Peter B. Lewis Theater of the Sackler Center. For more information, call the Guggenheim Box Office at (212) 423-3587.
Scott Verrastro recently reviewed Pathways to Unknown Worlds from WhiteWalls in JazzTimes, calling it, ". . . a fascinating array of early Sun Ra and El Saturn artifacts. . . ." Verrastro contextualizes the collection within the universe of Sun Ra, reminding readers new to Sun Ra that his Afro-Futurist mythology is both serious and full of humor.
We agree with Verrastro: "To these eyes, too much Sun Ra epehemera is never enough. . . ."
Adrian Searle recently reviewed the exhibition behind Kodwo Eshun's upcoming book Ghosts of Songs: The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective in the Guardian. The exhibition is presently showing at Liverpool's FACT center.
Searle reviews the history of the Black Audio Film Collective and its penchant for political discussion and debate:
The collective was heavily informed by film and psychoanalytic theory, by political discussion and debate. It is salutory to note how unfashionable these are, however much intense theorising there is in the exhibition catalogue. Sadly, much of it is likely to remain unread. Perhaps the most significant achievement of the group was the formulation of a poetic, a tone of voice, a particular kind of filmic space that resisted categorisation.
He also notes Eshun's commentary :
Kodwo Eshun, the group's most compelling commentator, writes that they "projected a stance of high seriousness with seductive stylishness." Stylishness could be serious too, and they always carried their seriousness with something much more than style.
Robert McCarter, author of Frank Lloyd Wright from Reaktion's Critical Lives series, will be speaking at the University of Louisville on February 27th. The lecture is entitled "The Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright."
McCarter is expected to discuss the Prairie Houses (1895-1915) to examine Wright's development of "the space within," the Concrete Block Houses (1915-1935) to uncover what Wright called "the nature of materials," and the Usonian Houses (1935-1959) to demonstrate the relationship between the interior spaces of the houses and the landscapes in which they were built.
Feb. 27, 6 p.m.
Speed Art Museum Auditorium
2035 South Third Street
Louisville, Kentucky 40208
Admission to the lecture is free and open to the public
Angela Bennie recently reviewed Stephen Connor's Fly in Melbourne's The Age, calling it, ". . . an intriguing monograph on our humble companion through life." Bennie calls out some of the more enlightening facts about the humble fly, but situates Connor's book in the context of his larger philosophical project of ". . . tracking the way the seemingly small, the ignored, the taken-for-granted phenomena of the world we live in impinge upon our senses and our understanding of ourselves."
Museum, Inc. continues to find support among the anti-Krens and anti-consumerist crowds. In "Museums, Art, and the Rackets" Paula Rabinowitz uses Werner's pamphlet to expand on the concept of the museum as mall.
Ian Wedde writes in The Listener on New York's artworld. He credits Werner's analysis of the relationship between art and money.
John Belcham, editor of Liverpool 800, recently spoke on the celebration of Liverpool's 800th year on BBC's Thinking Allowed. Belcham discusses Liverpool architecture, cultural quarters, and the importance of sugar to the city's history.
In anticipation of Liverpool's eight-hundredth anniversary in 2007, Liverpool 800 is the definitive biography of this magnificent world city. The book uses the latest historical research to explore the life of Liverpool over eight centuries to the present day, and includes detailed sections on politics, economics, and culture. Written by experts on Liverpool history, such as Donald M. MacRaild and Colin G. Pooley and incorporating exquisite color illustrations, Liverpool 800 offers an insider's perspective on the city the European Union has named "European Capital of Culture" for 2008.
Ann M. Wolfe's Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl has been receiving great praise, both for the book and for the exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art of the same name.
Theo Douglas of Orange County Weekly claims that Suburban Escape "finds a ruinous beauty in the sterile sameness so many of us call home."
Karen E. Steen of Metropolis Magazine considers how Suburban Escape confonts our prejudices: "If you think nothing good has ever come out of the suburbs, consider the history of art and literature about suburbia. . . ."
Tracy Vogel of Wave Magazine credits Suburban Escape for its balance:
Suburban Escape takes an artist's-eye view of what folk songwriter Malvina Reynolds famously called "little boxes made of ticky-tacky," and the landscape that surrounds them. But this is no one-sided anti-development screed. It's clear that the artists hold complex and differing viewpoints. . . .
Read the Exhibition Review in the San Francisco Bay Guardian
Read the Exhibition Review in the San Jose Metro
What Makes a Great Exhibition? is already generating interest. Libby Rosof reviews the writing of her favorite curators on her artblog. Rosof credits Ingrid Schaffner with turning a "narrow, boring subject into an essay on values and taste and cultural change." Rosof gives Jeffrey Kipnis the award for "attitude," and recommends Iwona Blazwick's history of the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Of the whole work, she exclaims, "It's a who's who of curating, " and:
It's also a how-to-do-it of curating, but way way more. It's the way way more part that makes this book more than just a manual for curators, but rather a discourse about values and cultures.
James Parker recently reviewed Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco's Karaoke: A Global Phenomenon in the Boston Globe. Parker uses the book to trace some of the highlights of Karaoke's history. In the end, he offers his article as a tribute to karaoke-lovers: "I dedicate this one to the karoke-lovers, who will make tonight their own."
In Karaoke, Zhou Xun and Tarocco reveal karaoke's surprisingly complex history and significant cultural impact around the world. Originating in postwar Japan, karaoke soon spread to Southeast Asia and the West. Karaoke traces how the practice became a wildly successful social phenomenon that constantly evolved to keep pace with changes in technology and culture. Drawing on extensive research and international travels, the authors chart the varied manifestations of karaoke, from karaoke taxis in Bangkok to nude karaoke in Toronto to the role of karaoke in prostitution. Extensive personal anecdotes reveal the dramatic range of social experiences made possible by karaoke and how the obsession with performance and song has touched politics, history, and pop culture throughout global society.
Nancy C. Andreasen, author of The Creating Brain, will be interviewed on NPR's Science Friday by Ira Flatow on Friday, December 15th.
Michelangelo was raised in a rustic village by a family of modest means. Shakespeare's father was a middle-class businessman. Abraham Lincoln came from a family of itinerant farmers. Yet all these men broke free from their limited circumstances and achieved brilliant careers as creative artists and leaders. How such extraordinary creativity develops in the human brain is the subject of renowned psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen's The Creating Brain.
Holland Cotter of the New York Times recently reviewed the exhibition of Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. Cotter compares the selections included in the show to the terraced architecture of the Mughal gardens in which the various man-made sections represent all of creation:
[The artworks emanate] . . . the suggestion of the world as a continuous, light-catching fabric, ever on the loom and always hiding something ineffable behind it: space, time, God, life energy, call it what you will.
With a history spanning some fourteen centuries, Islamic art is one of the world's great artistic traditions, although it largely eschews such familiar art forms as painting on canvas and monumental sculpture. Cosmophilia is also the catalog of the exhibition of 123 examples of the finest examples of Islamic art from the C. L. David Collection in Copenhagen, Denmark showing at the McMullen Museum at Boston College and soon to travel to the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago. These beguiling works from Spain, West Africa, China, and Indonesia include ornamental textiles, calligraphy, book-painting, ceramics, and inlaid wood.
An introductory essay by cocurators Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom that explores the nature and meaning of ornament in Islamic art accompanies this lavishly illustrated catalog. In addition to their in-depth discussion of the collection, Blair and Bloom reveal how Islamic artists incorporate figural ornament, written text, geometry, and even vegetation in their designs. The resulting volume will thrill anyone interested in the distinctive beauty of Islamic art.
Toni Salama recently reviewed Fred Gray's Designing the Seaside: Architecture, Society and Nature in the Chicago Tribune. Salama first distinguishes between the American beach and the British seaside and goes on to say that Designing the Seaside is ". . . a fascinating, sometimes embarrassing, gallery of how we once saw ourselves, or at least how the British did."
Sebastian's Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca received glowing praise on the blog Kendall's Quest:
. . .transcendent bliss, despite the "punctured state," despite the "holes," no: because of the holes. Once again my head spins from so much evenement, from the conjunction of ironies, miracles, and large and small joys.
Christopher Maurer's masterful prologue and selection of letters, texts, and images (many generously provided by the Fundacion Gala-Salvador Dali and Fundacion Federico Garcia Lorca), offer compelling and intimate insights into the lives and work of two iconic artists. The two men had a "tragic, passionate relationship," Dali once wrote—a friendship pierced by the arrows of Saint Sebastian.
Michael S. Gant recently reviewed Fred Gray's Designing the Seaside on the Silicon Valley-based Metroactive blog. "Summer has passed, and now is the time to read about going to the beach, instead of going to the beach," claims Gant. Gant praises Gray's work, equating the book's charms with that of its subject: "You can almost smell the salt air."
Dawoud Bey's photography is included in "Photographs by the Score", which opens on Saturday, October 7th at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition is a collection of Bey's photographs of American youth.
Kevin Nance, the Sun-Times art critic, describes the allure of Bey's photography:
In his large-scale color protraits of high school students from Chicago, Detroit and other cities, the teens look straight at the camera—straight at you—with the fank and steady gaze of someone ready for a heart-to-heart talk. Here I am, the look says. Deal with it.
See a collection of Bey's photographs presented by the Sun-Times
Read Kevin Nance's article in the Sun-Times
Learn more about "Photographs by the Score" at the Art Institute of Chicago
Kim Stringfellow's cover image from Greetings from the Salton Sea was published in the New York Times as part of a review of the group exhibition "Ecotopia: The Second I.C.P. Triennial of Photography and Video," which runs through Jan. 7 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street; (212) 857-0000.
Read the Review of the ICP show in the New York Times (only available temporarily)
Nancy C. Andreasen, author of The Creating Brain, was recently interviewed in USA Today by Kathleen Fackelmann. Andreasen discusses the brain and its relation to genius, madness, and creativity. The article concludes with suggestions for giving your mind a workout.
The magisterial proclamations contained in Whitewalls' Wisdom of Sun Ra are garnering interest from Chicago, where the broadsheets were written, to the U.K. at the New Statesman.
Peter Margasak writes in the Chicago Reader:
The Wisdom of Sun Ra includes beautiful reproductions of the dog-eared broadsheets, with full transcriptions in the second half of book. As interesting as the writings are in their own right, they're also offer powerful insights into the personality and philosophy that was central to Ra's later work.
Rachel Aspden is less enthralled with the particularities of Ra's space-mythologies than Peter Margasak, but she still advocates the book as a "fascinating window" into Ra's views:
It's easy to overdose on Ra's liberal use of capitals and frequent invocations of Neptune, but for browsing, John Corbett's selection offers a fascinating window on to the weird world of one of the 20th century's most influential musicians.
Read Rachel Aspden's review in the New Statesman
Robert Bevan's Destruction of Memory continues to impress readers. Given the ongoing destruction throughout various global wars, it continues to be a timely work. Alfred A. Brophy writes in the PropertyProf Blog, ". . . I highly recommend Bevan's Destruction of Memory; it's an important and moving book."
Brophy even expands on Bevan's themes, relating the destruction of architecture following race riots in Tulsa and the destruction of the University of Alabama's Library at the hands of Union soldiers in 1865.
Kim Stringfellow was interviewed by Bobby Tanzilo of OnMilwaukee.com in conjunction with an exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The center is located at 608 New York Ave, Sheboygan, WI 53082 and can be contacted at 920-458-6144. The exhibition runs until October 22.
Stringfellow describes the relations between art and science in her work, focusing on the environment and its degradation as it is manifested at the Salton Sea.
Read the interview with Kim Stringfellow
Learn more about the exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Joshua Arthurs recently reviewed Robert Bevan's The Destruction of Memory in In These Times:
Although cultural heritage has been protected by international treaties for more than 50 years, it rarely features in war crimes tribunals. Yet from the Nazi looting of synagogues to the Taliban's demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, deliberate destruction of the physical environment has often presaged devastating conflicts. Bevan's timely book urges us to remain attentive to such early warning signs.
Given the ongoing wars, Bevan's book is sure to continue to appeal to readers.
Paul Werner's Museum, Inc. recently received praise from Zeke's Gallery. In short form, "Museum Inc. is a wicked cool book."
Paul Werner draws on his nine years at the Guggenheim Museum to reveal that contemporary art museums have not broken radically with the past, as often claimed. Rather, Werner observes, they are the logical outcome of the evolution of cultural institutions rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the colonial expansion of the liberal nation-state, and the rhetoric of democracy.
This year marks the 400th birthday of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. Rembrandt was born in Leiden, the Netherlands on July 15th, 1606, and died in Amsterdam on October 4th, 1669. Hundreds of years haven't diminished Rembrandt's impact. One of the true masters, his work still reverberates in the minds of modern scholars.
The University of Chicago Press distributes a number of Rembrandt-related titles for Amsterdam University Press and Eburon Academic Publishers.