Art: Ceramics, Prehistoric Art, & Jewlery

Ceramics of Shimaoka Tatsuzo: Living National Treasure of Japan, A Retrospective 2000 (BOOK): by Martha Longenecker & Rob Sidner

Shimaoka began making pottery in 1939 as a student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Department of Ceramics. During Shimaoka's freshman year, he visited Hamada in Mashiko and was granted apprenticeship upon graduation. Shimaoka joined Hamada's workshop from 1946-49. Four years later, he built his own, independent kiln adjacent to his teacher's in Mashiko.

Gilded Vessel: The Lustrous Art and Life of Beatrice Wood (BOOK): by Garth Clark

Beatrice Wood turned to ceramics late in life at age 40, but still managed to work behind a potter's wheel for nearly 65 years. Influenced by the Dada movement, her lusterware pottery, with its rich and decadent palette of shimmering gold and silver, vindian greens, incandescent pinks, and intense purples, has captivated generations of collectors. Gilded Vessel is not so much a biography as a celebration of the life and ceramic artistry of Beatrice Wood. Glorious color pictures reveal the iridescent beauty of her pottery, while black-and-white photographs document the life, loves and luster, of a woman New York Times Magazine hailed as one of the great lives of the 20th century.

Image and Audience: Rethinking Prehistoric Art (BOOK): by Richard Bradley

There have been many accounts of prehistoric 'art', but nearly all of them begin by assuming that the concept is a useful one. In this extensively illustrated study, Richard Bradley asks why ancient objects were created and when and how they were used. He considers how the first definitions of prehistoric artworks were made, and the ways in which they might be related to practices in the visual arts today Extended case studies of two immensely popular and much-visited sites illustrate his argument: one considers the megalithic tombs of Western Europe, whilst the other investigates the decorated metalwork and rock carvings of Bronze Age Scandinavia.

Loud Bones: The Jewelry of Nancy Worden (BOOK): by Michelle LeBaron & Susan Noyes Platt

Nancy Worden's work explores the cultural dynamics that shape contemporary social and political agendas, emphasizing the female experience in the United States. Her jewelry is forceful, unapologetic, demanding, and gripping; often humorous, sometimes painful, but never timid. This is the first scholarly examination of her career.

The Art of Peter Voulkos (BOOK): by Rose Slivka & Karen Tsujimoto

This volume examines the work of Peter Voulkos, an influential figure in American ceramics.

The Way Jews Lived: Five Hundred Years of Printed Words and Images (BOOK): by Constance Harris

The author presents through pictures and text a social history of Jewish life and art in the last 500 years. Each chapter relates the brief history of a period, devoting particular attention to events concerning Jewish life.

Art: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire, Delirious New Orleans, & Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings

Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire (BOOK): by Charlene Villasenor Black

Creating the Cult of Saint Joseph is a refreshing and stimulating contribution to the fields of Spanish and Latin American art history and cultural studies. Villaseñor's combination of colonial and gender theories with art-historical analysis is sure to yield interesting results in future studies of religious art in the Spanish Empire. Her bibliography is an impressive collection of archival material, primary religious texts, and wide-ranging secondary sources; it promises to become an indispensable research tool for students of the period.—Marta Bustillo, CAA Reviews

Among this book's strengths are its engaging prose, impressive corpus of visual images, and emphasis on the connection between St. Joseph's cult and societal and religious ideals in the early modern Hispanic world. . . . This book offers fresh insight into the dissemination and popularity of the cult of St. Joseph in early modern Spain and colonial Mexico.—Joseph F. Chorpenning, Sixteenth Century Journal

In detail and with an abundance of sources, both graphic and literary, this book follows the major stages of growth in Josephine piety. . . . This book shows the need to study religious art not only on its own aesthetic terms but also as a key participant in and articulator of great (often too great) social, cultural, and religious themes in a given time and place.—Reverend Alvaro Silva, Religion and the Arts

Delirious New Orleans: Manifesto for an Extraordinary American City (BOOK): by Stephen Verderber

"Delirious New Orleans makes the argument that this collection of vernacular architecture serves as cultural touchstones, and that its presence is a necessary component to this great American city. " Kevin Alter, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin "As well as providing a superb record of New Orleans's endangered urban fabric, Delirious New Orleans is also a meditation on "placemaking", something he feels modern architects and town planners have ignored...Verderber's evocative, even loving, descriptions of these structures and artefacts and his striking images create a memorable celebration of the built environment of New Orleans and reflect a deep understanding of place. He hopes his study is not a eulogy but a blueprint for a soon-to-be-reborn city...Whether it continues to fulfil this role in the future will depend on whether the authorities listen to the communities they are supposed to represent and to "preservation warriors" such as Verderber; and whether placemaking triumphs over placelessness."—P.D. Smith, Times Literary Supplement

Merchants, Princes and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300-1550 (BOOK): by Lisa Monnas

Covering a period that witnessed the flowering of the Renaissance and the major expansion of the Italian silk industry, this volume examines the Italian silk fabrics depicted in paintings from Italy, England and the Netherlands over the course of 250 years. Lisa Monnas offers a masterly evaluation of these paintings as source material for classifying surviving textiles, giving particular attention to the identification of historic textile types and their weave structure.

Monnas examines a wide range of subjects, including silk as a marker of social status, the material possessions of artists and their ownership of textiles as props, the involvement of painters in silk design, and the repetition and transfer of patterns. She considers the evidence of paintings not only for the veracity with which the silks are depicted but also for their value as a historic source concerning the use of fabrics.

Art: Creating Cultural Significance & Robert Irwin

Moment to Monument: The Making and Unmaking of Cultural Significance (BOOK): by Ladina Bezzola Lambert & Andrea Ochsner

Why do certain works of art make it into the canon while others just enjoy a brief moment of recognition, if at all? How do moments produce monuments, and why are monuments erased from our cultural memory in only a moment? Taking into account the cultural processes of creating, storing, remembering and forgetting that are omnipresent and have an immense influence on how we perceive artifacts and cultural events, the essays in this collection analyze the phenomenon of cultural production, transmission and reception from various angles, drawing on approaches from both literary and cultural studies. With its transdisciplinary approach, this book uniquely responds to an everyday cultural phenomenon that so far has not received wide-ranging attention.

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (BOOK): by Lawrence Weschler

"Robert Irwin, perhaps the most influential of the California artists, moved from his beginnings in abstract expressionism through successive shifts in style and sensibility, into a new aesthetic territory altogether, one where philosophical concepts of perception and the world interact. Weschler has charted the journey with exceptional clarity and cogency. He has also, in the process, provided what seems to me the best running history of postwar West Coast art that I have yet seen."—Calvin Tomkins

Art, Engineering, Photography, History: Computational Fluid Dynamics, Enterprise Engineering, IRA's History, and Controversial Photography Books

You can find all of these books on the 4th floor in the Technology and Photography section located in the T's. The range of sub-topics is amazing!

Characteristics Finite Element Methods in Computational Fluid Dynamics (BOOK): by Joe Iannelli

This book details a systematic characteristics-based finite element procedure to investigate incompressible, free-surface and compressible flows. Several sections derive the Fluid Dynamics equations from thermo-mechanics principles and develop this multi-dimensional and infinite-directional upstream procedure by combining a finite element discretization with an implicit non-linearly stable Runge-Kutta time integration for the numerical solution of the Euler and Navier Stokes equations. Based on the mathematics and physics of multi-dimensional characteristics, convection as well as acoustics, and inducing by design a controllable multi-dimensional upwind bias that can be locally optimized, the procedure crisply captures contact discontinuities, normal as well as oblique shocks, and generates essentially non-oscillatory solutions for incompressible, subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic inviscid and viscous flows with chemical reactions and work, heat and mass transfer.

Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering (BOOK): by Jan A.P. Hoogervorst

Achieving enterprise success necessitates addressing enterprises in ways that match the complexity and dynamics of the modern enterprise environment. However, since the majority of enterprise strategic initiatives appear to fail – among which those regarding information technology – the currently often practiced approaches to strategy development and implementation seem more an obstacle than an enabler for strategic enterprise success.

IRA, the Bombs and the Bullets: A History of Deadly Ingenuity (BOOK): by A.R. Oppenheimer

I was some-what unacquainted with the history of the IRA so I was overwhelmed with the detail and research that went into this comprehensive work. I began to get a real feel for their struggle and the the absolute ingenuity as I worked my way into the book and was able to absorb the intricacies of the campaigns. This isn't a book to take lightly. I takes you into the details and history of the nuts and bolts of the bombings and the challenges. It also gave me a better insight into the whys and what-fors of the "troubles". If you are looking for a thorough explanation of the bombings and the strife, this is a good book to get you grounded in the subject. – David M. Quintana

Katrina: Personal Objects, Photography (BOOK): by Jarret Schecter

Because of government failure, millions viewed political
ineptitude, social inequity and an unpaved America where the streets were lined with anything but gold.
The images in this book show the abandoned and hardest-hit district of the Lower Ninth Ward over two years later, and still counting today.

Vacant and dilapidated, the city is a shadow of its former self. However, in these seemingly lifeless shadows, and through the broken windows of empty houses, one can eerily see the ghostly reflections of life and death in the form of PERSONAL OBJECTS.

These intensely personal items have been abandoned and left, and in most cases, will never be reclaimed.
This small format book touches on the ephemeral, and
surprisingly often beautiful, remnants of belongings that once made up the memories and precious moments of peoples’ lives.

In 1990 Jarret Schecter purchased a Pentax camera. Since then he has traveled the world. Committed to socio-political issues, Schecter believes that photography can bring awareness to social injustices the world faces today. Schecter, born in 1963, lives in New York City

Water in the 21st-Century West: A High Country News Reader (BOOK): by Char Miller

Water in the 21st-Century West captures the range and nature of the arguments that have defined water politics in the region over the past decade. The collection probes the issues and explores creative attempts to find solutions, bringing a focus and clarity to the most contentious environmental issue the West faces. Water in the 21st-Century West will be an essential primer in assessing and mapping the West’s water future.

Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (BOOK): by Michael Fried

From the late 1970s onward, serious art photography began to be made at large scale and for the wall. Michael Fried argues that this immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it that until then had been the province only of painting. Fried further demonstrates that certain philosophically deep problems—associated with notions of theatricality, literalness, and objecthood, and touching on the role of original intention in artistic production, first discussed in his contro­versial essay “Art and Objecthood” (1967)—have come to the fore once again in recent photography. This means that the photo­graphic “ghetto” no longer exists; instead photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art as never before.

Art: African American Artists of Note

Be inspired! Art and Art Education majors with both benefit from this book.

Encyclopedia of African American Artists (BOOK): by dele jegede 1945-

African American heritage is rich with stories of family, community, faith, love, adaptation and adjustment, grief, and suffering, all captured in a variety of media by artists intimately familiar with them. From traditional media of painting and artists such as Horace Pippin and Faith Ringgold, to photography of Gordon Parks, and new media of Sam Gilliam and Martin Puryear (installation art), the African American experience is reflected across generations and works.

Land arts of the American West (BOOK): by Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert 1965-

Land Arts of the American West is notable for presenting an unusually wide array of artistic exploration and intervention in the Western landscape. Given the range of sites presented and the depth of analysis that many of them receive, this book would have broad appeal not only to people interested in art, but also to those intrigued by landscape, land use, and Western history.