Art History

Medieval art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire, but less known are the profound artistic contributions of Nubia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had an indelible impact on the medieval Mediterranean world. Bringing together more than 170 masterworks in a range of media and techniques--from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, panel paintings, and religious manuscripts--Africa and Byzantium recounts Africa's centrality in transcontinental networks of trade and cultural exchange. This publication sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of late antique Africa. It reconsiders the continent's contributions to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of Africa as a vibrant, multiethnic society of diverse languages and faiths that played a crucial role in the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.

A ground-breaking contribution that broadens our understanding of the history of prints, this edited volume showcases an array of exciting new research that reassesses the history of women in the graphic arts c. 1700 to 1830. The essays present archival findings and insightful analyses that tell compelling stories about women across social classes and nations who persevered against the obstacles of their gender to make vital contributions as creative and skilled graphic artists, astute entrepreneurs and savvy negotiators of copyright law in Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and the United States.

Christina Ramberg first gained renown for her acrylic-on-board paintings from the 1960s and 1970s that feature stylized fragments of female figures. Often associated with Chicago Imagism, Ramberg's distinct linear approach was informed by a wide range of popular and art-historical sources, resulting in works that are both highly polished and grippingly enigmatic. The first comprehensive consideration of the artist since her death, this study considers the full scope of her practice--from her intimate early scrapbooks and drawings to her late-career geometric abstractions--and includes the first substantive discussion of her often-overlooked quiltmaking. Essays from both scholars and artists situate Ramberg within her Chicago-based network of colleagues and approach her work from a variety of perspectives, such as gender and sexual identity, the body and disability studies, artistic craft, canon formation, and pedagogical practice.

What are the origins of the imagery and designs on common jewelry and portable artwork between late antiquity and the Middle Ages? These dynamic centuries encompass the transformation of the Greco-Roman world into the nascent kingdoms and medieval states upon which most modern European nations are based. The choices of jewelry and other forms of personal expression among the lower classes in ancient times is notoriously difficult to contextualize for a number of reasons. Nonetheless, these precious articles were expressions of individual identity as well as signifiers of rites of passage. As such, they reflect not only the people who wore them, but also the social milieu and artistic trends at that moment in time. This study assists in identifying the types, origins and routes of transmission of personal artwork, particularly finger rings, across Europe and Byzantium, an area of study that has been neglected in previous works. Some of this material represents the first time relevant research from Central and Eastern Europe has been translated and made available to the general reader in the English-speaking world.

In the early 1970s at Papunya, a remote settlement in the Central Australian desert, a group of Indigenous artists decided to communicate the sacred power of their traditional knowledge to the wider worlds beyond their own. Their exceptional, innovative efforts led to an outburst of creative energy across the continent that gave rise to the contemporary Aboriginal art movement that continues to this day. In their new book, anthropologist Fred Myers and art critic Terry Smith discuss six Papunya paintings featured in a 2022 exhibition in New York. They draw on several discourses that have developed around First Nations art--notably anthropology, art history, and curating as practiced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous interpreters. Their focus on six key paintings enables unusually close and intense insight into the works' content and extraordinary innovation. Six Paintings from Papunya also includes a reflection by Indigenous curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist, who considers the nature and significance of this rare transcultural conversation.

The significant influence of the periodical Signature on fine art has long been overlooked. While few people nowadays will have read it, no journal has greater claim to have stimulated the taste that became British neo-romanticism in the mid-20th century. Oliver Simon, its editor, publisher, patron and printer was something of an enigma. Although shy, he somehow knew 'everyone' in the London literary and arts scene during the 1930s and 40s. So outwardly conservative to be dubbed 'the archbishop' by Ben Nicholson, Oliver elicited adventurous art from his artist contributors to Signature. The Signature artists were fellow travellers on a journey: young artists working in commercial art to pay the bills. Having mastered graphic techniques for applied purposes they then began to apply what they learned to their own artwork. Then they went off to War. Those interested in the work of Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden, and Barnett Freedman will enjoy the story of the influence and fellowship of Oliver Simon, Signature, and the Curwen Press, on their art.

For hundreds of years, skilled craftspeople in the Syrian centers of Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs produced intricately woven textiles for the royal courts, worldly merchants, and elite Bedouin families of the Ottoman Empire. City dwellers were renowned for wearing brightly colored silk garments that glittered with gold and silver threads. By contrast, nomadic Bedouins wore woolen garments in hues and designs reflecting their desert lifestyle. Dressed with Distinction offers a window onto the history of textile production in the Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until political and social changes led to the dominance of Western-style commercially manufactured attire. In addition to articulating the social and seasonal contexts in which the garments were worn, this book examines the styles of dress of women, men, and children in Ottoman Syria, including cloaks (abaya), head coverings (hatta), women’s body coverings (carsaf), and jackets (qumbas).

Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532-1625), an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family, was one of the first women artists to establish an international reputation during her lifetime. This book explores the evolution of Anguissola's art from her youth in Cremona through her service as a lady-in-waiting to the Spanish queen Elisabeth of Valois to her later years as a married woman in Sicily and Genoa. Alongside discussions of Anguissola and her work, author Cecilia Gamberini offers a tantalizing exploration of Renaissance court life, detailing how the circles of influence and power operated. This book highlights the social, political, and cultural preconditions surrounding Anguissola's role in the court of King Philip II of Spain and her ascent to becoming an internationally acclaimed painter. Gamberini draws on archival documentation, as well as her own original research, to shine a new light on Anguissola's life, career, and work in this tribute to a truly groundbreaking artist.

Of what significance are sacred art objects in Africa? In this book, the author launches an investigation into the grammar of sacred and religious art objects and presents them as encoded language of shrines and cults; thus providing insights into the notion of the divine as it appears in all African systems of thought. The book is unique for presenting a perspective that African cultic institutions should be seen as the syntax of some special and exclusive language for appreciating African art objects

This book takes a feminist approach to media history to examine how photographic social media cultures change human bodies and the experience of being human. To illuminate these glitches, Greene focuses on the inevitable distortions that arise from looking at the past through the lens of the present. Treating these distortions as tools, Greene uncovers new ways of viewing social media cultures of the past, while also revealing parallels between historical contexts and contemporary digital media environments. Greene uses three "born-digital keywords"-real time, algorithmic filters, and sousveillance-to examine photographic media environments in and around 1930s Europe. Each chapter of the book places one of the keywords in dialogue with an unconventional archive of popular "feminized" cultural artifacts and technological innovations from this historical moment that have been overlooked as critical resources - Evelyn Waugh's novel Vile Bodies (1930) and reproductions for the tabloid press; Lee Miller's war photography for British Vogue and photo-retouching techniques; and the Mass-Observation Movement's surrealist anthropology.

In 1925, Pius XI staged the Vatican Missionary Exposition in Rome's Vatican City. Offering a narrative of the Catholic Church's beneficence to a global congregation, the exposition displayed thousands of cultural belongings stolen from Indigenous communities, which were seen by one million pilgrims. Gloria Jane Bell's Eternal Sovereigns offers critical revision to that story. Bell reveals the tenacity, mobility, and reception of Indigenous artists, travelers, and activists in 1920s Rome. Animating these conjunctures, the book foregrounds competing claims to sovereignty from Indigenous and papal perspectives. Bell deftly juxtaposes the "Indian Museum" of nineteenth-century sculptor Ferdinand Pettrich, acquired by the Vatican, with the oeuvre of Indigenous artist Edmonia Lewis. Focusing on Turtle Island, Bell analyzes Indigenous cultural belongings made by artists from nations including Cree, Lakota, Anishinaabe, Nipissing, Kanien'kehá:ka, Wolastoqiyik, and Kwakwaka'wakw.

The history of art and new media are inextricably linked - both historically and in the present day. This publication can be described as an interdisciplinary reflection: it examines the confrontation and interaction between art history and new media, highlighting key developments, opportunities, and tensions. The researchers present new findings and explore the techniques and methods of new media - from electronic to digital and post-digital media - and the challenges these pose for art history. The book covers a wide range of topics, from the history and historiography of new media to their practical application, use, and reception, as well as creative processes, material conservation, and mediation.

Art collector, patron and arbiter, Hanna Bekker vom Rath (1893-1983) was a trailblazer for the artistic avant-garde and one of the most important female personalities in Germany during the pre-war and post-war modern periods. She was a friend of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Alexej von Jawlensky, Ida Kerkorius and Paul Klee. A refuge for modernism, Hanna Bekker vom Rath promoted the art of the Brücke artists and the avant-garde in a variety of ways. Even during the National Socialist era, her "Blue House" in Hofheim served as an intimate space for exchanges and exhibitions for the artists who were her friends. After the war she founded the Kunstkabinett in Frankfurt, the city's first postwar gallery, and she undertook numerous international journeys on behalf of modern art. This book’s texts and images sketch a multi-faceted portrait of an "ambassador of art" and document the influence of her achievements.

This is not a book about miraculous images of the Virgin Mary, but rather about their representations in French illuminated manuscripts from ca. 1250 to ca. 1450. Illustrations such as these point to the ubiquity of local miraculous Marian images in devotional practices from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century in French-speaking regions. This book examines in systematic fashion a large quantity of images, mostly unpublished, from the various types of texts devoted to Marian miracles. It then analyzes the depiction of their materiality and the animated miracles they perform, and traces their evolution from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in Old French through to the Burgundian court of the late Middle Ages.

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This book examines The Thousand and One Nights by Abol-Hassan Khan Sani' ol-Molk Ghaffari (1813/1814-1867), of the content of the illustrations of the main story, the story of Shahrzad and Shahrbaz, as well as a codicological study of the manuscript. It explores how Sani' ol-Molk complicates the visual frame by adaptive strategies that build on the relationship between presented objects inside an illustration and the meanings that could be conventionally attributed to them from outside of the image. Examining the illustrations of the manuscript shows how Sani' ol-Molk's visualization of the main story of The Thousand and One Nights adds to the narrative and adapts it to convey meaning(s) that transcend the story the illustrations refer to.

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As evidenced by the famed Book of Kells and monumental high crosses, Scotland and Ireland have long shared a distinctive artistic tradition. The story of how this tradition developed and flourished for another millennium through survival, adaptation and revival is less well known. Some works were preserved and repaired as relics, objects of devotion believed to hold magical powers. Respect for the past saw the creation of new artefacts through the assemblage of older parts, or the creation of fakes and facsimiles. Meanings and values attached to these objects, and to places with strong early Christian associations, changed over time but their 'Celtic' and/or 'Gaelic' character has remained to the forefront of Scottish and Irish national expression. Exploring themes of authenticity, imitation, heritage, conservation and nationalism, these interdisciplinary essays draw attention to a variety of understudied artworks and illustrate the enduring link that exists between Scottish and Irish cultures.

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Against the backdrop of an insurgent far right and numerous deadly neo-Nazi attacks, various cultural practitioners have written far-right violence into Germany' collective memory and imagined more inclusive futures in its wake. This volume explores contemporary examples from literature, music, theatre, film, television and art that respond to this situation. They demonstrate that, alongside the ways in which art expands the public sphere in terms of what is said and who is heard, aesthetic questions of how artistic works are presented are a crucial part of how they open up new perspectives.

Garland of Visions explores the generative relationships between artistic intelligence and tantric vision practices in the construction and circulation of visual knowledge in medieval South Asia. Shifting away from the traditional connoisseur approach, Jinah Kim instead focuses on the materiality of painting: its mediums, its visions, and especially its colors. She argues that the adoption of a special type of manuscript called pothi enabled the material translation of a private and internal experience of "seeing" into a portable device. These mobile and intimate objects then became important conveyors of many forms of knowledge--ritual, artistic, social, scientific, and religious--and spurred the spread of visual knowledge of Indic Buddhism to distant lands. By taking color as the material link between a vision and its artistic output, Garland of Visions presents a fresh approach to the history of Indian painting.

Offering essayistic reflection and close readings of key images and texts - including works by Gautier d'Agoty, William Cheselden, Joseph Maclise and many others - Queer Anatomies places medical history, connoisseurship, queer studies, and art history into dialog with each other, and sheds new light on the history of anatomical illustration and the body. The book contains full-colour reproductions of a range of drawings - from renderings of dead and dissected bodies, penises, vaginas, rectums, hands, and skin, to images of male viewers gazing upon drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures of the naked body.

In The ABCs of ZERO, writers, scholars, and authors from the fields of art, music, sociology, and theater tell the story of this art movement-from A for atelier to Z for ZERO. Featuring a wealth of photos and documents from an era just emerging from the ruins, but facing the future with optimism, this book recalls a moment in time of peaceful utopia in Europe. Challenging traditional concepts of art, for the ZERO avant-garde, the atelier became the exhibition space and books were a way to disseminate art. International thinking united the young artists of the 1950s and 60s, whose network extended from Düsseldorf to Milan, Brussels, Paris, and Zagreb. Kinetics and light replaced brush and canvas, and new music played in the background. They also tried to get closer to nature with the concept of the Open Artwork.

In this comprehensive, long-view study on the concept of the Neue or Moderne Frau (New or Modern Woman) that spans the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, post-war period, and a divided Germany, Contested Femininities explores how different political and social groups constructed images of women to present competing visions of the future. It takes the highly contested representations of women presented in the illustrated press and examines how they emerged as crucial markers of modernity. In doing so it reveals the surprising continuity of these images across political periods and reflects on how debates over paid work, the gender division of labor in the household, the politics of the body, and consumption, played a central role in how different German regimes defined the Modern Woman.

An astonishing variety of murals greet visitors to the temples and palaces of southern India. Beautiful in execution and extensive in scope, murals painted on walls and ceilings adorn the most important spaces of early modern religious and political performance. Scene by scene, histories of holy sites, portraits that incorporate historical figures into mythic landscapes, and Tamil and Telugu inscriptions that evoke the imagined topographies of devotional poetry unfold before the mobile spectator. Body, History, Myth reconceives the relationship between art and devotion in South India by describing how the extraordinary sensory experience of a viewing body in motion unfurls a sacred narrative exquisitely designed to teach, impress, and inspire. Anna Lise Seastrand offers new insights into the arts of early modern southern India, bringing to life one of the most culturally vibrant yet least understood periods in Indian art.

This book explores this female Renaissance artist's fascinating biography and the cultural climate that enabled her to become the first woman artist in Western Europe to gain commercial success beyond the confines of a court or a convent. Bringing together several strands of scholarship on Fontana and her contemporaries, it provides context to her career and examines areas underrepresented in current scholarship on the painter, including information on her workshop practice. Focusing on the portraiture for which she was renowned, Lavinia Fontana tells stories that will be universally familiar--tales of family bonds, sibling rivalries, engagements, weddings, births, and deaths. Written by Aoife Brady, with contributions from one of the leading scholars on Fontana, Babette Bohn, and a foremost expert on Renaissance fashion, Jonquil O'Reilly, this book explores Fontana's world and how she forged a successful career in the male-dominated world of Renaissance Italy.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, during Brazil's military dictatorship, artists shifted their practices to critique the government and its sanitized images of Brazil, its use of torture, and its targeted persecutions. This book examines these artworks and their engagement with politics and mainstream art institutions and practices. Artists appropriated processes like photocopy, offset lithography, and thermal and heliographic printing, making newly available technologies of mass production foundational to their work of resistance against both the dictatorship and the established art world. Often working collaboratively, these artists established alternative networks of exchange locally and internationally to circulate their work. As democracy was reestablished in Brazil, and in the decades that followed, their works largely fell out of sight.

Textiles were the second-most-traded commodity in all of world history, preceded only by grain. In the Ottoman Empire in particular, the sale and exchange of silks, cottons, and woolens generated an immense amount of revenue and touched every level of society, from rural women tending silkworms to pashas flaunting layers of watered camlet to merchants traveling to Mecca and beyond. Sea Change offers the first comprehensive history of the Ottoman textile sector, arguing that the trade's enduring success resulted from its openness to expertise and objects from far-flung locations. Amanda Phillips skillfully marries art history with social and economic history, integrating formal analysis of various textiles into wider discussions of how trade, technology, and migration impacted the production and consumption of textiles in the Mediterranean from around 1400 to 1800. Surveying a vast network of textile topographies that stretched from India to Italy and from Egypt to Iran, Sea Change illuminates often neglected aspects of material culture, showcasing the objects' ability to tell new kinds of stories.

Dedicated to the stories of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles, this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art, art practices, activism, reception, and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration, flight, and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts--the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These entanglements take center stage when migration shapes art and aesthetic practices (and vice versa), when actors employ image politics and visualization strategies in and about migration at different times and places, or when materialities, sites, and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes. Giving space to these stories of art and migration and its power of pluriverse knowledge production, the book takes an art and cultural studies perspective, questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration, and elaborates on new or different theory formation.

Who is Caspicara? Nothing is known of Caspicara's life, and not a single sculpture has been documented as his work. Yet traditional histories laud him as a prolific Indigenous sculptor in eighteenth-century Quito who created exquisite polychrome figures and became a national artistic icon. Drawing on extensive archival, historical, and object research, Susan Verdi Webster peels away layers of historiographical fabrication to reveal what we do and do not know about Caspicara and his work. Rather than being a solitary master, Caspicara collaborated with other, largely Indigenous artists in Quito's protoindustrial workshops, manufacturing sculptures now credited to him alone. The high quality of Quito sculptures produced by anonymous artists turned the city into a hub of wide-ranging commerce in religious icons. The art world and post-independence Ecuadorians have lionized the one named sculptor, Caspicara, according to the Western model of the artist-genius, amplifying the market for works bearing his name and creating a national hero on par with European masters. Lost in this process were the artists themselves. Webster returns to their world, detailing their methods and labor and, for the first time, documenting a sculpture made by Caspicara.

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The exhibition Les Immatériaux was presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985. Curated by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and design theoretician Thierry Chaput, it is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of postmodern philosophy, as well as for discourses around art, science and digital culture. Broeckmann’s book provides the first comprehensive account of the preparation of this event. It shows how the exhibition resulted from multiple, collaborative and interdisciplinary trajectories in such diverse fields as contemporary art, architecture, science, and network media. Throughout its ten chapters, the book highlights the different forms of cooperation among the people involved in the conception of the exhibition. Les Immatériaux marks a pivotal point in the history of exhibitions in the 20th century because it gave important impulses for the organisation, design and structure of interdisciplinary exhibitions.

Open Access book.
Automimesis or the idea that “every painter paints himself” was a notion that was frequently voiced in art literature of the Italian Renaissance. It was initially thought to be an artistic flaw which threatened the faithful imitation of nature. The corporeal or spiritual similarity between an artist and his work, however, was soon to become a facet that was regarded as positive. Considering biographies of artists, art treatises, and artworks, this book explores the reasons for this paradigmatic shift and shows how ideas from the early modern period continue to shape our modern understanding of the autonomy of the arts.

Digital art history has often aligned itself with the practical concerns of digital technology and the responsibilities of art institutions and associated institutional roles such as collection managers, information specialists, curators, and conservators. This emphasis on practicalities and implementation, while undeniably important, has often left little room for critical examination of the broader implications of digital technology and computational methodologies in art history. A long-standing concern of the field--and a major focal point of this book--is museum and collecting practices in the digital era. While there is a certain degree of continuity in the field, there are also important shifts and changes to address--namely, the widespread uptake of artificial intelligence tools and increased attention to both the broader historical and societal aspects of the use of digital repositories and tools. This anthology seeks to address the dearth of critical reflection by critically assessing specific case study examples and considering the political dimensions associated with large-scale digitization and the application of digital tools within museums and collection management.

Cifuentes and Charlin provide an expert guide to the methods, risks, and rewards of investing in art. They detail how to apply the financial and statistical tools and techniques used to evaluate more traditional investments such as stocks, bonds, and real estate to art markets. The Worth of Art: Financial Tools for the Art Markets shows readers how to use empirical evidence to answer questions such as: How do the returns on Basquiat compare to the S&P 500? Are Monet's portraits as valuable as his landscapes? Do red paintings fetch higher prices than blue ones, and does the color palette matter equally to the sales of abstract Rothkos and figurative Hockneys? How much should be loaned to a borrower who is pledging one of Joan Mitchell's late abstract paintings as collateral? Would the risk-return profile of a conventional portfolio benefit from exposure to Warhol? The book also demonstrates how quantitative analysis can deepen aesthetic appreciation of art.

Designed for individuals without formal training or previous on-the-job experience in nonprofit management or accounting, Financial Leadership for the Arts makes organizational finance simple and clear, freeing creative leaders to do their important work for communities. Governing board leaders, working professionals, and students alike will appreciate clear case studies, as well as the several chapters that examine contemporary challenges and their implications for present and future financial management, program management, and program evaluation.

Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology. She explores how researched-based exhibitions have proliferated turning the artist into an investigator or archivist with mixed results. Spatial performance can now involve the artist, dancers, or even the audience as participants, often framed with Instagram in mind. The political event is not longer activated without an understanding of the media that will record and distribute it. The proliferation of works that use modernist architecture is noticeable; but has this become a shorthand for something else?

Through onsite interventions, artist Aldo Giannotti challenges the existing order of public art institutions Responding to the museum status quo, Giannotti's concepts and props reshape the institution's social and spatial architecture. Through dialogue with staff, guards and visitors, Giannotti engages with the museum and its underlying purpose.

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Care has become a trend in the art field, but much of the recent curatorial focus seems to be limited to symbolic gestures through exhibitions and public programming. These efforts, however, have led to few (infra)structural changes. The need remains for bringing about fair working conditions, gender equity, and support structures for caregivers and care-receivers. In response, Sascia Bailer redefines »curatorial care« as an infrastructural practice grounded in feminist care ethics that provides »care for presence« for diverse audiences. Drawing from socially engaged curatorial and artistic practices, she offers hands-on propositions for constructing caring infrastructures and provides a micro-political roadmap for curating with care.

In this book, Bettina Messias Carbonell examines how African American history and culture is--and historically has been--represented in culturally specific and mainstream museums. Carbonell argues that African American museums provide a corrective history that is both argumentative and pragmatic: these museums educate and enlighten, and they seek to effect change. Themes examined include settlement narratives; key movements and individuals in political, social, and military history; the treatment of slavery; the status of Africa--the continent and individual countries and regions--as a source of origins and traditions and a destination for reconnection with the past; and activism and human rights.

How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations - much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism operates in museum bureaucracies. Using the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History as her reference, Hannah Turner organizes her study by the technologies framing museum work over two hundred years: field records, the ledger, the card catalogue, the punch card, and eventually the database. She examines how categories were applied to ethnographic material culture and became routine throughout federal collecting institutions. As Indigenous communities encounter the documentary traces of imperialism while attempting to reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on access to and return of cultural heritage.

This book is a practice-based guide designed to introduce qualitative research to established and upcoming museum professionals and increase their confidence to conduct this type of research. Highlighting the work of researchers who are studying museums around the world, the book begins by explaining why there is a need for qualitative research in museums. Rowson Love and Randolph then go on to provide guidance, including theories and frameworks, on how to envision a qualitative research project that facilitates meaningful interpretation of visitor experiences. Chapters in the methodology section begin with descriptions of featured qualitative methodologies and will assist readers as they determine which are most appropriate for their projects and as they advocate for their research. The final section will prepare readers still further, by demonstrating data analysis and reporting using the examples in the book.

This book explores how recent Colombian historical memories are informed by cultural diversity and how some of the country's citizens remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the internal war (1980-2016). Its chapters delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and what not to represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth case study, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their way of remembering, which emphasizes peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue.

This book examines how cultural institutions and their collections can support a goal shared with the scientific community: creating a climate-literate public that engages with environmental issues and climate change in an informed way. Demonstrating that archival and object-based resources can act as vital evidence for change, Sutton shows how the historical record, paired with contemporary reality, can create more personal connections to what many consider a remote experience: the changing climate. Providing valuable examples of museum collections used in discussions of environmental and climate change, the book shares how historic images and landscape paintings demonstrate change over time. Images, personal records, and professional documents have critical roles as boundary objects and proxy data.

"After twenty-eight years of desire and determination, I have visited Africa, the land of my forefathers." So wrote Lida Clanton Broner (1895-1982), an African American housekeeper and hairstylist from Newark, New Jersey, upon her return from an extraordinary nine-month journey to South Africa in 1938. During her travels, this woman of modest means circulated among South Africa's Black intellectual elite, including many leaders of South Africa's freedom struggle. How did Broner--a working class mother--come to be a globally connected activist? What were her experiences as an African American woman in segregated South Africa and how did she further her work after her return? Broner's remarkable story is the subject of this book, which draws upon a deep visual and documentary record now held in the collection of the Newark Museum of Art.

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This book investigates whether and how theoretical findings and insights in contemporary art conservation can be translated into the daily work practices of conservators or, vice versa, whether and how the problems and dilemmas encountered in conservation practice can inform broader research questions and projects. Because of contemporary art’s variable constitution, its care and management calls for a fundamental rethinking of the overall research landscape of museums, heritage institutions, private-sector organizations and universities. At first, this research was primarily pursued by conservation professionals working in or with museums and other heritage organizations, but increasingly academic researchers and universities became involved, for instance through collaborative projects. This book is the result of such collaboration.

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This book brings together innovative, multidisciplinary perspectives on contemporary museology and participatory museum practice that contribute to wider debates on museum communities, heritage, and sustainability. Set within the context of globalisation and decolonisation, this book draws upon bi-regional research that will enrich our understanding of the complex relationships between Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean through museum studies and practice. Chapters reflect upon the role of museums in defining community identities; the importance of young people’s participation and intergenerational work for sustainability; the role of museums in local development; and community-based museums and climate change.

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The Queer Museum examines how relationships between institutions and LGBTQ+ communities function and how they help to define queer museum practice. Analysing what it means to queer the museum in Western contexts, the book builds upon and challenges texts about inclusionary, activist museum practice and discusses the ways in which Othered communities are engaged with and represented. Arguing that an institution’s understanding of queerness is directly related to the kind, and extent, of change pursued by the museum, the author clarifies that governance structures, staff hierarchies, funding and relationships to queer communities affect the way queering might be pursued. The analysis looks critically at exhibitions and institutions and particularly forefronts the experiences of museum practitioners.

This book begins to trace the growth of the American historic preservation movement over the last 50 years. The first generation of the New Preservation (1966-1991) was characterized by the establishment of the bureaucratic structures that continue to shape the practice of heritage conservation in the United States. The National Register of Historic Places began with less than a thousand historic properties and grew to over 50,000 listings. The book uses the story of how sites associated with African American history came to be officially recognized and valued, and how that process challenged the conventions and criteria that governed American preservation practice.

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While museums have long focused on building digital object databases, the existing data can now become a field of application for machine learning, deep learning, and foundation model approaches. This goes hand in hand with new artistic practices, curation tools, visitor analytics, chatbots, automatic translations and tailor-made text generation. With a decidedly interdisciplinary approach, the volume brings together a wide range of critical reflections, practical
perspectives and concrete applications of artificial intelligence in museums, and provides an overview of the current state of the debate.

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This book focuses on big data analytics methods and tools that have been specifically developed for the domain of cultural heritage, as well as on experiences from the adaptation and/or application of general-purpose solutions in the domain of cultural heritage. The editors aimed to gather solutions, but also to summarise the lessons learnt, methodologies, and good practices that researchers and practitioners can use as a basis for their own work in the domain.

Open Access eBook.
Dieses Buch ist für alle, die mutig genug sind, sich selbst und das Zeigen von Kunst zu stören. Beatrice Miersch entwirft radikal-relationale Alternativen zu zeitgenössischen Ausstellungspraktiken. Um sich der gesellschaftlichen Verantwortung im Rahmen des Ausstellens von Kunst zu stellen, erprobt sie queer-feministische, kulturwissenschaftliche und selbstreflektierende Methoden in der Praxis und Theorie des Kuratierens. Momente kuratorischer Störung werden zu produktiv-schöpferischen Momenten der Unterbrechung, mit denen sie reflektierte, offene, engagierte und vulnerable Perspektiven auf das Ausstellen eröffnet und tradierte Strukturen durchbricht.

This book's content is presented by museum educators, arts administrators, occupational therapists, and school psychologists--contributors with different expertise and perspectives on the stakes of cultural arts experiences for neurodiverse visitors. Their practical goals for the reader are threefold: to understand the value of programming for neurodiverse visitors and effectively communicate this to others; to build a toolkit of strategies and resources for neurodiverse visitors to have successful visits to cultural institutions, no matter the staff size, budget, or current stages of accessibility; to develop evaluation strategies to gauge the impact of offerings for neurodiverse visitors with results that help the reader improve, grow, and refine for the future.

In 1927, Kenneth Crosthwaite Murray left England to develop the art program in the British colony of Nigeria. As he traveled the country, Murray saw the cultural practices and craft production of Nigerian visual material under threat and decided to collect these pieces to preserve, understand, and, perhaps, console during a period of great change. He and a few of his colleagues built seven museums before independence, established export policies, began calling for the return of cultural heritage, and developed excavation protocol. This book captures Murray’s life and legacy and explores the tension that arose among the colonial government, officers, and Nigerians who sought to build these cultural institutions during the transition to a newly independent Nigeria.

This book examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Rather than dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival, this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists.