Kategoria BISAC: Art >> General

Cave paintings of our prehistoric ancestors, elaborate ritual dances of preliterate tribesmen, long lines at the movies, earnest scribbles of the three-year-old next door--evidence of human preoccupation with art is everywhere, and it is overwhelming. But unlike other human universals--language, tool use, the family--art makes no material contribution to mankind's survival. What impels the artist to the lonely effort at self-expression? What moves the audience to resonate to the work of a master? What accounts for the child's inherent fascination with pictures and stories and...

In a list of objectives and inquiries meant to guide and make profitable the European travel of two young Americans in 1788, Thomas Jefferson noted, -Architecture is] worth great attention. As we double our numbers ever 20 years we must double our houses.... It is then among the most important arts: and it is desireable to introduce taste into an art which shews so much.- Referring both to the large physical presence of architecture, as well as the ability of a structure to reveal its owner's character, Jefferson articulates the telling relationship in eighteenth-century Virginia between...

Architecture in Michigan, a pictorial survey of Michigan architecture from 1831 to the present, explores the architecture of Detroit and many other cities, towns, and villages. Here is Romantic Michigan, before the Civil War, with dozens of examples of Greek, Gothic, and Italian villas from Grosse lIe to Grass Lake, Tecumseh, and Ypsilanti, as well as Gothic churches.

Then there is Glorious Michigan of the exuberant 1870s and 1880s, when architects evoked the Paris of the Second Empire and the doctrine of John Ruskin cast its peculiar spell. And Discreet Michigan, when the wealthy,...

As we have been reminded by the renewed acceptance of racial profiling, and the detention and deportation of hundreds of immigrants of Arab and Muslim descent on unknown charges following September 11, in times of national crisis we take refuge in the visual construction of citizenship in order to imagine ourselves as part of a larger, cohesive national American community.

Beginning with another moment of national historical trauma--December 7, 1941 and the subsequent internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans--Imaging Japanese America unearths stunning and seldom seen...

In 1965, the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act ushered in a huge wave of immigrants from across the Caribbean--Jamaicans, Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans, among others. How have these immigrants and their children negotiated languages of race and ethnicity in American social and cultural politics? As black immigrants, to which America do they assimilate?

Constructing Black Selves explores the cultural production of second-generation Caribbean immigrants in the United States after World War II as a prism for understanding the formation of Caribbean American identity. Lisa...