This Is Our Music Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture Iain Anderson "An excellent study of the heyday of one of the most problematic bodies of work in the history of jazz music. . . . Essential."--Choice "This Is Our Music takes us back to that moment between the fifties and the sixties when a new music called free jazz took root in the coffeehouses and nightclubs of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In this rich and evocative book, Iain Anderson meets the challenge posed by the music and follows its lead into the complex political realignments, shifting racial...
This Is Our Music Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture Iain Anderson "An excellent study of the heyday of one of the most problematic bodies o...
"I was in high spirits all through my unwise teens, considerably puffed up, after my drawings began to sell, with that pride of independence which was a new thing to daughters of that period."--The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote Mary Hallock made what seems like an audacious move for a nineteenth-century young woman. She became an artist. She was not alone. Forced to become self-supporting by financial panics and civil war, thousands of young women moved to New York City between 1850 and 1880 to pursue careers as professional artists. Many of them trained with masters at the...
"I was in high spirits all through my unwise teens, considerably puffed up, after my drawings began to sell, with that pride of independence which was...
Looking behind the scenes at the personalities and policies of such venerable institutions as the Federal Arts Project and the Museum of Modern Art, A. Joan Saab discerns a broad-based democratic modernism inspired by and engaged with the social life of the period.
In the summer of 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Arts Project under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. The project's goal was, in the words of its director Holger Cahill, to "get people all over the United States interested in art as an everyday part of living and working." In...
Looking behind the scenes at the personalities and policies of such venerable institutions as the Federal Arts Project and the Museum of Modern Art...
Influenced by two decades of debate inside and outside the academy about the relationship among the arts, politics, and public policy, the essays collected in The Arts of Democracy represent the coming of age of one of the liveliest fields in contemporary academic life. Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields, this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts, public culture, and the state in modern America, beginning with an art market at the turn of the twentieth century...
Influenced by two decades of debate inside and outside the academy about the relationship among the arts, politics, and public policy, the essays c...
In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born.
In "Late Modernism,"...
In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the r...
Do Museums Still Need Objects? Steven Conn "Conn's well-written essays centralize objects as the defining feature of museums as they shifted (albeit incompletely) from being places of public instruction to being places of private consumption, from taxonomic exhibits to narrative ones, influenced by the development of the academic disciplines of science, anthropology, and art history. . . . An interesting and significant contribution to the literatures of museum studies and public history."--American Historical Review "Steven Conn provides an eclectic, provocative, and extremely...
Do Museums Still Need Objects? Steven Conn "Conn's well-written essays centralize objects as the defining feature of museums as they shifted (albeit i...
Spiritualism emerged in western New York in 1848 and soon achieved a wide following due to its claim that the living could commune with the dead. In "Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art," Charles Colbert focuses on the ways Spiritualism imbued the making and viewing of art with religious meaning and, in doing so, draws fascinating connections between art and faith in the Victorian age.
Examining the work of such well-known American artists as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, William Sydney Mount, and Robert Henri, Colbert demonstrates that Spiritualism played a critical role in...
Spiritualism emerged in western New York in 1848 and soon achieved a wide following due to its claim that the living could commune with the dead. I...
How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. "Consuming Pleasures" reveals how a group of...
How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize p...
In 1921 Sam Rodia, an Italian laborer and tile setter, started work on an elaborate assemblage in the backyard of his home in Watts, California. The result was an iconic structure now known as the Watts Towers. Rodia created a work that was original, even though the resources available to support his project were virtually nonexistent. Each of his limitations whether of materials, real estate, finances, or his own education passed through his creative imagination to become a positive element in his work. In "The Modern Moves West," accomplished cultural historian Richard Candida Smith...
In 1921 Sam Rodia, an Italian laborer and tile setter, started work on an elaborate assemblage in the backyard of his home in Watts, California. Th...
American art museums of the Gilded Age were established as civic institutions intended to provide civilizing influences to an urban public, but the parochial worldview of their founders limited their democratic potential. Instead, critics have derided nineteenth-century museums as temples of spiritual uplift far removed from the daily experiences and concerns of common people. But in the early twentieth century, a new generation of cultural leaders revolutionized ideas about art institutions by insisting that their collections and galleries serve the general public.
"Things American: Art...
American art museums of the Gilded Age were established as civic institutions intended to provide civilizing influences to an urban public, but the...
