Can we change minds about Confederate monuments? Kevin Levin is a historian and educator studying the American Civil War and memory. His book, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), was just released in paperback and he is the author of a recent article in the Atlantic Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments . The " Why We Argue " podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility a...
Nov 16, 2017•32 min•Season 1Ep. 16
This is the first in a series of podcasts from Zoe Kontes’ terrific “ Looted .” Listen to the story of a gold funerary wreath, looted from Northern Greece in the 1990s, smuggled into Germany, and eventually purchased by an illustrious U.S. museum. With their abundance of gold and other luxury items, the royal tombs of Macedonia in this area have been the target of looters (and archaeologists) for years. The debates about the VIPs who may or may not be interred within (the father of Alexander the...
Nov 02, 2017•3 min
Richard Rabinowitz is one of the leading public historians in the United States. He has helped conceptualize, design, organize, and build over 500 history programs across the U.S. at such sites as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Between 2004 and 2011, Richard curated six blockbuster history exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, including Slavery in New York and Re...
Oct 30, 2017•1 hr 2 min
Slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world for centuries. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture, pamphlet campaigns, and artwork, yet an important piece of this visual culture has gone unexamined: the popular and frequently reprinted antislavery illustrated books that were utilized extensively by the antislavery movement in the first half of the nineteenth ...
Oct 19, 2017•33 min
In her new book, Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany (Routledge 2015), Marion Deshmukh , the Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History Emeritus at George Mason University, examines the life and career of the prolific German artist Max Liebermann. Liebermann, a pioneer of German modernism, portrayed scenes of the Dutch countryside and rural life, along with portraits of Germany’s cultural and political elites. Deshmukh describes Liebermann’s life and career in wonderful detail, while also d...
Oct 17, 2017•1 hr 8 min
Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art ( University of Illinois Press , 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences influenced his work. Born in Russia, Arnautoff’s service as a cavalry officer for the anticommunist White forces in the Russian Civil War forced him to abandon his homeland for an ...
Oct 04, 2017•56 min
A Usable Past: American Folk Art at the Colby College Museum of Art ( Colby College Museum of Art , 2016) is a contemporary analysis of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, needlework, quilts and other forms of folk art drawn primarily from the college’s American Heritage Collection donated by Edith Kemper and Ellerton Marcel Jette. Essays by contributors Lauren Lessing , Seth A. Thayer, Jr., Elizabeth Finch and Tanya Sheehan offer new insights into the definition and display of folk art. How ...
Aug 15, 2017•39 min
Marsden Hartley’s Maine ( Yale University Press , 2017), published to accompany a major exhibition of his work organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art, traces the artist’s complex relationship to his native state. Essays examine Hartley’s negotiation of various identities including that of the American individualist, the native son, and the avant garde Modernist. Hartley’s literary work and interests in the Green Acre Transcendentalist community are also d...
Jul 28, 2017•45 min
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 b...
Jul 20, 2017•46 min
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 politi...
Jul 10, 2017•46 min
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 unt...
Jun 23, 2017•42 min
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 Sch...
Jun 21, 2017•35 min
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 ...
Jun 14, 2017•49 min
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 ear...
May 27, 2017•54 min
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 ...
May 23, 2017•48 min
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 Youn...
May 23, 2017•15 min
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 securi...
May 22, 2017•48 min
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...
May 21, 2017•23 min
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 a...
May 18, 2017•1 hr 6 min
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 mem...
Apr 26, 2017•42 min
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 ...
Apr 07, 2017•1 hr 12 min
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 pag...
Mar 30, 2017•19 min
In his new book Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method ( University of Toronto Pres s, 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 Anthropol...
Mar 27, 2017•57 min
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...
Mar 25, 2017•1 hr 16 min
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 Arre...
Mar 19, 2017•33 min
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 h...
Mar 07, 2017•57 min
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 con...
Mar 07, 2017•41 min
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 i...
Mar 02, 2017•47 min
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 fr...
Feb 17, 2017•56 min
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 investig...
Feb 13, 2017•49 min
