In her new book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (University of California Press, 2016), Pamela M. Potter , Professor of Germany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, carefully examines why historians and the general public have clung to a problematic narrative, which argued that the Nazi government had total control over the visual and performing arts. In order to address this narrative Potter details how historians after the fall o...
Jun 27, 2018•50 min
When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba ’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press, 2018) will change the way you think about the contents, forms, and significance of the palette of this critical moment in the history of modernity. Examining the impact of emergent color technologies on French visual culture and landscapes, Color in the Age of Impressionism ...
Jun 14, 2018•1 hr 1 min
In Steven Lubar ’s latest book Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven gets to the heart of what makes museums so interesting to both appreciate and critique. For him, the complex nature of the museum lies in the balancing act a curator and other museum staff must strike in both displaying a collection and making it open, accessible and useful while resisting the temptation to encourage or even force a certain way of looking or behaving among v...
Jun 13, 2018•1 hr 16 min
Wojtek Sawa ‘s The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard (National Center of Culture, 2016) is a bilingual Polish-English project that engages with the intricacies of remembering and forgetting as part of the individual’s personal history, which appears to challenge and collaborate with documented histories. Evolving out of personal memories, The Wall Speaks seeks to illuminate how the individual responds to overwhelming changes that shape and modify not only personal experiences but also collectiv...
Jun 05, 2018•46 min
In Foucault on Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Catherine Soussloff discusses an area of Foucault’s development that has remained largely overlooked: his engagement with painting. Indeed Foucault, we learn, described himself as a painter. Throughout his career, he examined painting and the image as he pursued critical elements of his philosophical ideas. Soussloff examines Foucault’s engagement with periods in European art history that captured his attention in particular: the Bar...
May 22, 2018•36 min
Folklore scholar Joseph Sciorra is the Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Queens College which is part of the City University of New York. He’s also a Brooklyn-born and -raised Italian American and in this episode of the New Books in Folklore podcast, he talks about his latest book, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) which “offers a place...
May 08, 2018•1 hr 3 min
At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing. You would write the beginning of a story or poem at the top of a piece of paper and, when you finished, fold the paper so that only the last line of the poem or story is visible. Then you’d hand the paper to another player, and this person would add to the story or poem knowin...
May 07, 2018•48 min
Susan M. Squier ’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017) is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, graphics) that experts have created to understand development and to communicate without verbal language has shaped—and continues to affect—the worlds in which we live. Squier’s book takes its title from a set of images from the embryologist C.H. Waddington, all meant to demonstrate his theory of how life ...
Apr 17, 2018•46 min
Modeled on Bad Girls of Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017), edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas stands apart from the edited volume crowd. It includes, not only academic entries, but personal essays and reflections on art by their artists, all centered on the theme of transgression, or to put it in the language of Bad Girls of the Arab World itself, bad girls. And there is no one bad girl. Some bad girls of the Arab world us...
Apr 16, 2018•48 min
Sewing, knitting, quilting, the crafts related to fabric making, are usually not what we think about when we consider our digital communications devices. Yet, many of the activities that we find ourselves doing with our devices touching the screen, scrolling, swiping, etc. and some of the language that we use to describe our actions, draw from textile culture. In his book T he Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender (MIT Press, 2017), Stephen Montiero , at Concordia University, exp...
Apr 06, 2018•28 min
In his latest book, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences published in 2017 by Princeton University Press, Craig Clunas puts to question the entire concept of “Chinese painting” by looking at how this category is in fact a creation of its viewers. The book, which expanded on the A. W. Mellon lecture series Clunas gave at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 2012, was selected as one of the best art books of 2017 by The New York Times. The engaging and lavishly illustrated book draws on s...
Apr 05, 2018•1 hr 16 min
In Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Natchee Blu Barnd examines how Indigenous populations create space and geographies through naming, signage, cultural practices, and artistic expression within the confines of settler colonialism in the United States. Native Space explores these acts as everyday cultural practices, and also examines how settler societies deploy the concept of Indian-ness to create colonial geographies. Ba...
Mar 29, 2018•1 hr
Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, it weighs just over eight and a half pounds and contains over 1300 color photographs (with over 4000 more plus site plans on the accompanying CD). Its author, Jo Farb Hernandez , is the Director of SPACES, a non-profit focused on art environments around the world. She first became interested in place-b...
Mar 28, 2018•1 hr 4 min
This is the fourth in a series of podcasts from Zoe Kontes’ terrific “ Looted .” Archaeologist Dr. Spencer Pope shares his thoughts on looting in Sicily, particularly at the site of Palik, a 2,400 year old town not far from Catania on Sicily’s east coast, in the fertile plains of the islands active volcano, Mt Etna. The site has a mystical nature, considered sacred since antiquity due to the bubbling lakes near which it is situated. Looters use metal detectors at the site to find ancient coins, ...
Mar 10, 2018•6 min
My students don’t remember Vietnam. That’s hard to believe, for someone born in 1968. But it’s true, nonetheless. High school history courses rarely make it past World War Two. The Cold War and the Berlin Wall are mysteries. And Vietnam, unless someone in their family fought there, is just a country. But most, if not all, of my students have heard of the Vietnam Memorial. They may not know what or who it commemorates. But they’ve seen it on class trips, or in textbooks. And they universally prai...
Mar 07, 2018•59 min
For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson , considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price...
Feb 27, 2018•25 min
In the Arab world, photography is often tied to the modernizing efforts of imperial and colonial powers. However, indigenous photography was itself a major aspect of the cultural and social lives of Middle Eastern societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Sheehi’ s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016) tells that story, focusing primarily on portraiture and those that took portraits. Sheehi examines t...
Feb 15, 2018•51 min
James Delbourgo ‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose collection and last will laid the foundation for the British Museum, the first national, free, public museum. For Delbourgo, Sloane was for far too long an overlooked figure, who knitted together the interests of a rising empire through methods of botany, natural history and medicine. Overshadowed in part ...
Feb 09, 2018•1 hr 32 min
In T he Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Kevin Patrick examines the history of The Phantom—an American comic strip superhero that made his debut in 1936. Although not popular in the United States, The Phantom knows a long history and popularity in Australia, Sweden, and India. In The Phantom Unmasked, Patrick explores this history. By tracing the publication history of The Phantom and connecting its success to the media licensing industries starting i...
Feb 02, 2018•1 hr 8 min
Is making art a job? This question is central to The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers (Stanford University Press, 2017), the new book by Alison Gerber , a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Lund University. The book explores the working lives of artists by thinking through the idea of value in their work. At the heart of this exploration are four accounts of being an artist; four accounts of value; and four accounts of the occupation. These four accounts—pecuniary, crede...
Jan 19, 2018•52 min
Tom Mullaney’ s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from the origins of telegraphy in the early 1800s to the advent of computing in the 1950s – the book explores the at times fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity. It covers some of the earliest and varied attempts to make the Chinese script fit for Western communication systems, ta...
Jan 09, 2018•2 hr 17 min
This is the third in a series of podcasts from Zoe Kontes’ terrific “ Looted .” There’s nothing like a full-bodied ancient Greek bronze nude to get the crowds to a museum. A visitor might even fall in love (speaking from personal experience Riace Bronzes, here’s looking at you). We’ll focus on two of these very rare figures, found in US museums, but currently the subject of great debates of identification and international ownership. On Looted: The Podcast , we uncover the hidden stories of anci...
Jan 02, 2018•4 min
The Syrian Revolution, which began in March 2011, has since resulted in what can be described as a civil war, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the forced migrations of millions of Syrians. This story has been told countless times in news media. However, less known is the story of the Syrian artists who have portrayed the revolution with all of its nuances. miriam cooke’ s Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution ( Routledge , 2017) tells that story,...
Jan 02, 2018•1 hr 4 min
In his new book, Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), cultural historian and biographer Bob Batchelor examines the life of Marvel’s Stan Lee one of the most iconic figures in comic book history. Batchelor has written the first biography of Stan Lee. Starting with his childhood as a Depression-era New Yorker born to immigrant parents, Batchelor follows Lee’s career as a teenage editor at Marvel Comics, his stint as a playwright for the United States Army during World Wa...
Dec 12, 2017•1 hr 11 min
John Neel’s Focus in Photography: Master the Advanced Techniques That Will Change Your Photography Forever (Ilex Press, 2016) is both instructional manual and analysis on why focus is such an important artistic tool for photographers. Neel uses his own images to illustrate how focus works to directs viewers into and around an image. In his book Neel creates the first serious treatment of the topic in the digital age, by showing how mastery of the lens will greatly enhance the quality and “wow” f...
Nov 29, 2017•55 min
In Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity ( University of Nebraska Press , 2016), Laura E. Smith , Assistant Professor of Art History at Michigan State University, unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the ...
Nov 28, 2017•37 min
This is the second in a series of podcasts from Zoe Kontes’ terrific “ Looted .” Marble figurines made ca. 5,000 years ago in the Cycladic Islands of the Aegean became all the rage for collectors, and a great influence in Modernist Art. Easily looted and almost as easily faked, these objects have a unique role in the modern world. The question is, what was their role in the ancient world? More to see, read and hear: Gill, D. W. J., and C. Chippindale. “Material and intellectual consequences of e...
Nov 24, 2017•6 min
Just after World War II, West Indians began moving to London in large numbers. The artists, writers, and musicians among them found a place to create, and they found ways to express their complex notions of belonging to both the Caribbean and to the British Empire. Amanda Bidnall ‘s The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965 ( Liverpool University Press , 2017) traces their paths and their fortunes, their successes and their troubles. Bidnall writes against a preva...
Nov 24, 2017•46 min
Edgar Degas died in the fall of 1917. Marking this 100th anniversary, Kathryn Brown ‘s edited collection, Perspectives on Degas ( Routledge , 2016) brings together a range of authors and methodologies to consider the French artist in context, to examine aspects of his practice in terms of form and technique, and to think and rethink critical approaches to Degas and his legacies. Working in Europe, North America, and Asia, the volume’s fascinating and provocative essays introduce the reader to th...
Nov 22, 2017•56 min
In A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy ( The University Press of Mississippi , 2014), Ian Brodie , an associate professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, brings a folkloristic approach to the study of stand-up comedy. By focusing on comedic performance, Brodie shows stand-up comedy to be a collaborative act between comedian and audience similar to folk performance around the world, even as mediatization sees professional comedians transcend the initial performance to reach mas...
Nov 20, 2017•50 min
