Diversity in Our Collections

"This exhibition is the result of an independent, interdisciplinary academic research project about the artist known as Banksy. Organizers and curators wish to inform the audience that the artist known as Banksy is not involved in this exhibition and has not provided any endorsement, support, nor artworks for this project. Artworks and objects represented have been selected by curators from private collections all over the world. This catalogue has been approved by Pest Control Office Ltd. after being submitted to it for accuracy and authenticity checks"--Exhibition catalog.

his is the story of Andy Warhol--and how his pop art took the world by storm. From drawing shoes for a shoe company to his Campbell's Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe prints, Andy made art out of the everyday. People claimed Andy's art wasn't real art, but that didn't stop him from making it, plus movies, a magazine, a TV show, and more!

"Bisa Butler (b. 1975) is an American artist who creates arresting and psychologically nuanced portraits composed entirely of vibrantly colored and patterned fabrics that she cuts, layers, and stitches together. Often depicting scenes from African American life and history, Butler invites viewers to invest in the lives of the people she represents while simultaneously expanding art-historical narratives about American quiltmaking. Situating her interdisciplinary work within the broader history of textiles, photography, and contemporary art, contributions by a group of scholars--and entries by the artist herself--illuminate Butler's approach to color, use of African-print fabrics, and wide-ranging sources of inspiration. The first monograph on one of America's most innovative contemporary artists, this volume will serve as a primary resource that both introduces Butler's work and establishes a scholarly foundation for future research." -- Provided by publisher.

"'The Black Experience in Design', an anthology centering a range of perspectives, spotlights teaching practices, research stories, and conversations from a Black/African diasporic lens. Through the voices represented, this text exemplifies the inherently collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of design, providing access to ideas and topics for a variety of audiences, meeting people as they are and wherever they are in their knowledge about design"-- Page 4 of cover.

"The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. is one of the most famous memorials in the world. But most people are not as familiar with the college student who won the design competition to build it. This carefully researched volume chronicles Maya Lin's childhood, her battle to create the memorial as she envisioned it, and the incredible body of work she has produced since then. More than simply an art book, this compelling biography of a young woman who became a visionary artist and activist is also a timely celebration of the role of women and minorities in American society--past, present, and future"-- Provided by publisher.

In this book, the authors explore and discuss the development of one of the most interesting and dynamic of photographic genres. Hailed as a landmark work when it was first published in 1994, Bystander is widely regarded by street photographers as the 'bible' of street photography. It covers an incredible array of talent, from the unknowns of the late 19th century to the acknowledged masters of the 20th, such as Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Frank, Arbus, Winogrand and Levitt to name just a few. In this new and fully revised edition, the story of street photography is brought up to date with a re-evaluation of some historical material, the inclusion of more contemporary photographers and a discussion of the ongoing rise of digital photography.

"Kitchen Table Series is the first publication dedicated solely to this early and important body of work by the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman's life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships-with lovers, children, friends-and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude. As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts "the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes." Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist's words, "unrequited love.""-- Provided by publisher.

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985, September 17, 2017-April 1, 2018"--Colophon.
"The first to explore the design and architecture that defined California and Mexico in the twentieth century, this book is arranged into four sections--Spanish Colonial Inspiration, Pre-Hispanic Revivals, Folk Art and Craft Traditions, and Modernism. Essays by leading scholars and nearly 350 illustrations highlight the roles of such renowned figures as Luis Barragán, Charles and Ray Eames, Richard Neutra, and Clara Porset as well as introduce others less known. All created objects and buildings that helped shape values and identity. Their work is placed in context: the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the Panama-California Exposition, the rise of the Chicano movement, and the Olympic Games in Mexico City and Los Angeles are among the many historical events between 1915 and 1985 illuminated by examining the material culture that emerged in response. The word translation originally meant "to bring or carry across." The constant migration between California and Mexico has produced cultures of great richness and complexity, while the transfers of people and materials that began with centuries-old trade routes continue to resonate in modern society, resulting in synergies that are 'found in translation.'" -- Provided by publisher

This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America's greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist's career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism. Exhibition: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA (23.04-09.09.2016) / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (09.2016-01.2017) / Museum of Contemporary, Los Angeles, USA (spring 2017).

"Arrows, swashes, swooshes, globes, sunbursts, and parallel, vertical and horizontal lines, words, letters, shapes and pictures. Logos are the most ubiquitous and essential of all graphic design devices, representing ideas, beliefs and, of course, things. They primarily identify products, businesses and institutions, but they are also associated, hopefully in a positive way, with the ethos or philosophy of those entities. The 50 logos in this book are examples of good ideas in the service of representation, reputation and identification."--Publisher's description.

"Examining Walker's striking silhouettes, evocative gouache drawings, and dynamic prints, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw analyzes the inspiration for and reception of four of Walker's pieces: 'The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, ' 'John Brown, ' 'A Means to an End, ' and 'Cut.' She offers an overview of Walker's life and career, and contextualizes her art within the history of African American visual culture and in relation to the work of contemporary artists ... Shaw describes how Walker deliberately challenges viewers' sensibilities with radically de-sentimentalized images of slavery and racial stereotypes ... By exploiting the racist icons of the past, Walker forces viewers to see the unspeakable aspects of America's racist past and conflicted present"--Back cover

New York Times Notable Book Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Wall Street Journal--One of Five Best Artist Biographies Edward Hopper's canvasses are filled with stripped-down spaces and unrelenting light, evocative landscapes, and the lonely aspects of men and women seemingly isolated in their surroundings. What kind of man had this haunting vision, and what kind of life engendered this art? No one is better qualified to answer these questions than art historian Gail Levin, author and curator of the major studies and exhibitions of Hopper's work. In this intimate biography she reveals the true nature and personality of the man himself--and of the woman who shared his life, the artist Josephine Nivison.

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S.

During the early part of the Cold War, Japan emerged as a model ally, and Japanese Americans were seen as a model minority. From Confinement to Containment examines the work of four Japanese and Japanese/American artists and writers during this period: the novelist Hanama Tasaki, the actor Yamaguchi Yoshiko, the painter Henry Sugimoto, and the children's author Yoshiko Uchida.

Discover one hundred of the greatest folk artists practicing in the United States in Folk Masters: A Portrait of America. Over the past 25 years, photographer Tom Pich has traveled the country to the homes and studios of recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship, the highest honor given to folk and traditional artists in the US. His portraits give us a glimpse into their art, their process, and their culture.

InThe Heart of the Mission, Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation's oldest civil rights organization, having dedicated itself to the fight for racial equality since 1909. While the group helped achieve substantial victories in the courtroom, the struggle for civil rights extended beyond gaining political support. It also required changing social attitudes. The NAACP thus worked to alter existing prejudices through the production of art that countered racist depictions of African Americans, focusing its efforts not only on changing the attitudes of the white middle class but also on encouraging racial pride and a sense of identity in the Black community. Art for Equality explores an important and little-studied side of the NAACP's activism in the cultural realm.

Syndicated cartoonist and illustrator Tim Jackson offers an unprecedented look at the rich yet largely untold story of African American cartoon artists. This book provides a historical record of the men and women who created seventy-plus comic strips, many editorial cartoons, and illustrations for articles. The volume covers the mid-1880s, the early years of the self-proclaimed black press, to 1968, when African American cartoon artists were accepted in the so-called mainstream.

When many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and spandex-wearing super-heroes. Perhaps, inevitably, these images are of white men (and more rarely, women). It was not until the 1970s that African American superheroes such as Luke Cage, Blade, and others emerged. But as this exciting new collection reveals, these superhero comics are only one small component in a wealth of representations of black characters within comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels over the past century.

A Companion to American Art presents 35 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars that explore the methodology, historiography, and current state of the field of American art history.

Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art explores the powerful relationship between artistic production and cultures of conflict in the United States. Such a theme continues to provoke practitioners and scholars across a range of media and disciplines, especially as definitions of war and protest evolve and change in the twenty-first century. This anthology presents vital discussions of visual works in relationship to national identity, the politics and contexts of artistic production and reception, and the expressive and political function of art within historical periods defined by wars, rebellions, and revolutions.

Most people outside of the art world view art as something that is foreign to their experiences and everyday lives.A People's Art History of the United States places art history squarely in the rough-and-tumble of politics, social struggles, and the fight for justice from the colonial era through the present day.

In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process served as architects of modern American identity.

Queer Images chronicles representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer sexualities over one hundred years of American film. The most up-to-date and comprehensive book of its kind, it explores the ever-changing images of queer characters onscreen as well as the work of queer filmmakers and the cultural histories of queer audiences--from the works of discreetly homosexual filmmakers during Hollywood's Golden Age and classical Hollywood's attempt to purge sex perversion from films, to queer exploitation and physique films, cinematic responses to AIDS, and how contemporary Hollywood deals with queer issues. An essential volume for film buffs and anyone interested in sexuality and culture.

In the heady and hallucinogenic days of the 1960s and '70s, a diverse range of artists and creative individuals based in the American West--from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest--broke the barriers between art and lifestyle and embraced the new, hybrid sensibilities of the countercultural movement.

Ledger art has traditionally been created by men to recount the lives of male warriors on the Plains. During the past forty years, this form has been adopted by Native female artists, who are turning previously untold stories of women's lifestyles and achievements into ledger-style pictures.

A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this "extraordinary" and beloved Pulitzer Prize winner from the author of The Secret History that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review). Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community. As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).

Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The contributors to this volume analyze this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression.

Etching Our Own Image: Voices From Within the Arab American Art Movement is a celebration of Arab American art and identity. In the wake of 9/11, the need for Arab Americans to define themselves, rather than be defined by others has galvanized an artistic movement. This collection of writers includes poets, musicians, playwrights, creative writers, painters, conceptual artists, comedians and scholars of the arts who have gathered to assert for themselves what it means to be Arab American.

"Once a thriving working class neighborhood on Chicago's south side, the 'Bottomyards' is now the definition of urban blight. When an aspiring fashion designer named Darla and her image-obsessed friend, Cynthia, descend upon the neighborhood in search of cheap rent, they soon discover something far more seductive and sinister lurking behind the walls of their new home."

In the United States at midcentury - a time of few opportunities for women in general and even fewer for African American women - Jackie Ormes (1911-85) blazed a trail as a popular cartoonist with the major black newspapers of the day. Ormes's work provides an invaluable glimpse into American culture and history, with topics that include racial segregation, U.S. foreign policy, educational equality, the atom bomb, and environmental pollution, among other pressing issues of the times. This biography's more than 150 illustrations include photographs of Jackie Ormes and a large sampling of her cartoons and color comic strips.

"For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus and this time she shares all of her comics-making exercises. In a new hand drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can't draw that they can, and most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn"--Provided by publisher.

The secret story of Superman's creation, told from the perspective of illustrator Joe Shuster, reveals how after creating the famed character, he and his partner Jerry Siegel made a deal they ultimately regretted.

The Encyclopedia of Black Comics focuses on people of African descent who have published significant works in the United States or have worked across various aspects of the comics industry. The book focuses on creators in the field of comics: inkers, illustrators, artists, writers, editors, Black comic historians, Black comic convention creators, website creators, archivists and academics--as well as individuals who may not fit into any category but have made notable achievements within and/or across Black comic culture.

At 88 years-old, Audrey Flack holds a unique place in the history of contemporary art in America. Feminist, rebel, mother, painter, sculptor and teacher, Audrey's often controversial 40-year career evolved from abstract expressionism in the 1950s to photorealism in the 1970s. One of the first women ever included in the famed Janson's History of Art, Audrey continues to create, explore, and inspire with her unique style and indomitable spirit. Queen of Hearts follows Flack as she takes her work in a brand new direction and reveals her long-term struggles as the mother of a child with autism. Flack has something deep and genuine to communicate to the world. She is a provocateur and a rebel, an example and an inspiration. Queen of Hearts is a moving portrait of an artist who is still testing, still experimenting, still searching.

This documentary sheds valuable light on all aspects of Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, including the daunting challenge of securing investment and a venue for this production about a working class Black family, the casting process, artistic debates and finally its public reception. The film features interviews with the play's original cast members, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Louis Gossett, Jr. and Glynn Turman, director Lloyd Richards, producer Phil Rose, supporter Harry Belafonte as well as writer Amiri Baraka along with excerpts from the 1961 Hollywood movie. Additionally the film reveals how central feminism was to her ideas and boldly acknowledges (using her diary entries) her same gender relationships and private lesbian identity before the appearance of the gay rights movement.

The life of artist Frida Kahlo, from her humble upbringing to her worldwide fame and controversy that surrounded both her and her husband, Diego Rivera.

With overview essays and more than 400 A-Z entries, this exhaustive encyclopedia documents the history of Asians in America from earliest contact to the present day.

In this dictionary of American art, 945 alphabetically arranged entries cover painters, sculptors, graphic artists photographers, printmakers, and contemporary hybrid artists along with important aspects of the cultural infrastructure.

Covering Western art from the ancient Greeks to the present day, this dictionary contains clear and concise entries on styles and movements, materials and techniques, and museums and galleries. It also includes biographical entries for artists, critics, collectors, dealers, and patrons, with places and full dates of birth and death (in many instances correcting misinformation that has found its way into other sources). For this new edition, entries have been thoroughly revised and updated, and almost fifty new entries have been added.

Why is St. Sebastian an icon of gay male artists? Is there such a thing as a gay or lesbian sensibility? What's the connection between Buddhist monasteries and Japanese homoerotic imagery? And are all those European bathing scenes as deliciously homoerotic as they seem? The perfect browser's guide to queer art - and the ideal reference work - The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts answers these questions and more in essays that will keep you turning pages long after you've found the answer you were looking for. An easy-to-use, culturally inclusive volume with in-depth critical analyses of major figures, and bibliographies to guide further study.