Art History

This volume explores how visual arts functioned in the indigenous pre- and post-conquest New World as vehicles of social, religious, and political identity. Twelve scholars in the field of visual arts examine indigenous artistic expressions in the American continent from the pre-Hispanic age to the present. The contributions offer new interpretations of materials, objects, and techniques based on a critical analysis of historical and iconographic sources and argue that indigenous agency in the continent has been primarily conceived and expressed in visual forms in spite of the textual epistemology imposed since the conquest.

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This book provides the first substantial analysis of the visual arts commissioned by Scots in France prior to Mary Queen of Scots. It examines how Scottish identity was represented and promoted through patronage of the visual arts. Tying together previously unpublished archival documents with under-researched visual and material culture, this book examines how Scots used patronage to establish their place in French society thus furthering the reputation of the royal house of Scotland, and progressing their own social, political, and diplomatic aims. Incorporating analysis of grand architectural projects, such as the foundation of the Sainte-Chapelle at Vic-le-Comte, and studies of extraordinary manuscripts such as the Monypenny Breviary and the military manuals of Bérault Stuart, this work highlights recurring themes within architectural history, art history, and material culture studies.

We tend to think of sixteenth-century European artistic theory as separate from the artworks displayed in the non-European sections of museums. Alessandra Russo argues otherwise. Instead of considering the European experience of “New World” artifacts and materials through the lenses of “curiosity” and “exoticism,” Russo asks a different question: What impact have these works had on the way we currently think about—and theorize—the arts? Centering her study on a vast corpus of early modern textual and visual sources, Russo contends that the subtlety and inventiveness of the myriad of American, Asian, and African creations that were pillaged, exchanged, and often eventually destroyed in the context of Iberian colonization actually challenged and revolutionized sixteenth-century European definitions of what art is and what it means to be human. In this way, artifacts coming from outside Europe between 1400 and 1600 played a definitive role in what are considered distinctively European transformations: the redefinition of the frontier between the “mechanical” and the “liberal” arts and a new conception of the figure of the artist.

Often seen as backward-looking and convention-bound, genre painting representing scenes of everyday life was central to the work of 20th-century artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence, who adapted such subjects to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art. This book asks what their works do to the tradition of genre painting and whether it remains a meaningful category through which to understand them. Working with and against the established narrative of American genre painting's late 19th century decline into obsolescence, John Fagg explores how artists and illustrators used elements of the tradition to picture everyday life in a rapidly changing society, whether by appealing to its nostalgic and historical connotations or by updating it to address new formal and thematic concerns. Fagg argues that genre painting enabled twentieth-century artists to look slowly and carefully at scenes of everyday life and, on some occasions, to understand those scenes as sites of political oppression and resistance. But it also limited them to anachronistic ways of seeing and tied them to a freighted history of stereotyping and condescension.

This is an important study of rare Siamese manuscripts of two kinds, biological and cosmological. These manuscripts are religious in nature, containing several genres of Buddhist texts including liturgical, narrative, historical, grammatical, psychological, ritual, and magical material, but, compared to other Thai and other Southeast Asian examples they are particularly strong in the realms of medical, biological and cosmological Thai thought. A recurrent feature is the story of Phra Malai, a monk whose travels to various heavens and hells. Several rare medical manuscripts serve to reveal how mythology, biology, astrology, physiognomy and pharmacology are blended in the pre-modern Thai tradition. Produced in 18th- and 19th-century Siam, the manuscripts are richly illustrated both with delightful and evocative and grotesque and terrifying depictions of the Buddha, Hindu deities, Bodhisattvas, nuns, monks, and laypeople. The book consists both of an explanation and a detailed catalogue of this collection and discussion of the belief systems and activities they represent.

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Tracing the evolution of the German applied arts movement from 1890 through the interwar period, Artists and Radicalism in Germany, 1890-1933 reveals how reforms in artistic and vocational education intersected with the professional politics of radical artists and the nature of intellectual labour. Challenging conventional views, Pegioudis reinterprets the conflict between modern art's advocates and opponents, arguing that professional politics-not merely political ideologies-shaped the historical avant-garde. Developing a fresh perspective on the role of radicalism and avant-garde labour in the history of modern art, this book casts new light on German modern art and its interpreters.

Early modern central Africa comes to life in an extraordinary atlas of vivid watercolors and drawings that Italian Capuchin Franciscans, veterans of Kongo and Angola missions, composed between 1650 and 1750 for the training of future missionaries. These "practical guides" present the intricacies of the natural, social, and religious environment of 17th- and e18th-century west-central Africa and outline the primarily visual catechization methods the friars devised for the region. Taking a bold new approach to the study of early modern global interactions, Cécile Fromont demonstrates how visual creations such as the Capuchin vignettes, though European in form and crafstmanship, emerged not from a single perspective but rather from cross-cultural interaction. Fromont models a fresh way to think about images created across cultures, highlighting the formative role that cultural encounter itself played in their conception, execution, and modes of operation. Centering Africa and Africans, and with ramifications on four continents, Fromont's decolonial history profoundly transforms our understanding of the early modern world.

Providing new evidence on the life and times of this Scottish painter, Andrew McPherson shows Gillies to be a modernist thinker. Including paintings never seen before, he reappraises his creative output, including the relationship of portraiture to still life, placing him firmly within not only a Scottish context but a British and European one too. Andrew McPherson has been researching the life, times and works of William Gillies for over twenty years. He has rethought the formative influence of his art of two World Wars, gender inequalities and the modernist crisis of meaning and belief.

A groundbreaking A-Z survey of the work of over 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Africa Modern and Contemporary African art is at the forefront of the current curatorial and collector movement in today's art scene. This groundbreaking new book, created in collaboration with a prestigious global advisory board, represents the most substantial appraisal of contemporary artists born or based in Africa available. Features the work of more than 300 artists, including El Anatsui, Marlene Dumas, David Goldblatt, Lubaina Himid, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, and Robin Rhode, as well as lesser-known names from across Africa.

The book examines how islands and their tropical associations figure in the cultural and political imaginaries of the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and identifies genealogies of local responses to continental fantasies of exotic insularity. Examining written and visual works that reflect on the Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean and the Canary Islands, as well as critical debates around discourses of insularity in island and metropolitan spaces, this book considers notions of ethnic purity, originality, imitation, appropriation, cosmopolitanism, and self-exoticism to challenge the idea that avant-garde practices were pre-eminently urban and metropolitan cultural forms. The book argues that attention to the relational dimension implicit in exchanges around ideas of anticolonial struggle, radical social transformation, and anti-fascist resistance should inform analyses of cultural production in Caribbean and Atlantic insular spaces.

Memesthetics is the first book to draw a comprehensive cartography of the relationship between visual arts and digital culture since the early 2000s. Tracing the path that's taken us "from Duchamp to TikTok," Valentina Tanni defines the contours of one of the most interesting, and at times disturbing, landscapes of our present.

This book presents a variety of ritual figures from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Figurative sculpture is considered the best expression of African ritual arts and was one of the most important sources of inspiration for early twentieth-century artists, leaving a deep impact in the world history of art. Produced in different materials, from wood to stone and ivory, figurative sculpture has been produced in the Congo region for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The first official collection of these artworks is dated 1873. This publication is enriched by new, beautiful pictures of the collection.

The archive of the German artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978) has long been an important source of material for historians researching the interwar avant-garde and artists associated with Berlin Dada. This book explores Höch's practices of organisation when assembling the documents in her house outside Berlin from 1939 until her death. Through extensive research, the author argues that Höch's archive should be considered not just a collection of documents but a work in its own right, intimately connected with the artist's daily life. Noting the importance of understanding the mechanisms of this work, the book suggests that Höch took charge of both preserving and exploring the possibilities of Dada long after the group had been officially dissolved. The file that Höch assembled on her friend, the artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), plays an important part in the book, its content revealing how domestic habits infused both artists' practices. Juxtaposing Höch's archive and Schwitters's Merzbau, the author argues for an interactive movement between the two that has fundamental implications for how we understand both artists' oeuvres.

The essays collected in this volume highlight some of the regimes of thought and changing trends that structure the field of Islamic art history. The authors present new research exploring the intentions of patrons, the agency of craftsmen, and their responses to previous artistic production, thereby allowing artifacts and monuments to be set within their historical, social, and artistic contexts. The contributions include a) discussion of significant changes to Qur'an production due to dynastic and political regime changes in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, b) examination of changes in the role and status of designers and weavers making silk in Khurasan in the post-Mongol period, c) exploration of Safavid art and architecture, and d) examination of how the rise of photography and new printing techniques shaped the production, exchange, and transmission of images in Iran and Turkey.

Facing Images begins by tracing the turbulent discourse surrounding the emergence of Japanese art history as a modern field. In lieu of examining canonical works from the twelfth century, Kersey foregrounds the elusive and the enigmatic in artworks little known and understudied outside Japan; the manuscripts he selects defy traditional art-historical narratives by exhibiting decidedly modern techniques, including montage, self-reference, reuse, noise, dissonance, and chronological disarray. Facing Images produces a history of non-Western art in which diverse and anachronic works are brought responsibly and equitably into dialogue with the present, without being subsumed under Eurocentric formalisms or false universals. A timely intervention in the history of medieval Japanese art, art historiography, and the history of global modernism, Facing Images redefines the relationship of the "premodern" non-West to "modern" art.

Informal art developed into the dominant art movement in Europe from the early 1950s to the early 1960s. The art historical view of this art movement, which is detached from classical principles of form and design, has so far mostly focused on its male representatives. The volume now takes a new look at the art of Informel and honors high-profile positions by 16 female artists. In addition to well-known names such as Maria Lassnig, Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff, Judit Reigl and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, long-forgotten artists are being rediscovered. Using art-sociological questions about networks, participation in exhibitions and reception, the mechanisms of the art world are also investigated.

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Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest

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.

With this engaging new volume, Sylvester Ogbechie examines the life and work of Ben Enwonwu (1917-94), a premier African modernist and pioneer whose career opened the way for the postcolonial proliferation and increased visibility of African art. In the decades between Enwonwu's birth and death, modernization produced new political structures and new forms of expression in African cultures, inspiring important developments in modern African art. Within this context, Ogbechie evaluates important issues such as the role of Anglo-Nigerian colonial culture in the development of modern Nigerian art, and Enwonwu's involvement with international discourses of modernism in Europe, Africa, and the United States over a period of five decades. The author also interrogates Enwonwu's use of the radical politics of Negritude ideology to define modern African art against canonical interpretations of Euro-modernism; and the artist's visual and critical contributions to Pan Africanism, Nigerian nationalism, and postcolonial interpretations of African modernity. First and foremost an intellectual biography of Ben Enwonwu as a modern African artist, Ben Enwonwu situates the artist historically and interprets his work in ways that surpass traditional discourse around the canon of modern art.

This book examines the bronze door of Hildesheim Cathedral, which is not only a masterpiece of Ottonian art but is among the most recognizable and studied works of medieval sculpture. Commissioned by Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim and cast around 1015, the door's two leaves feature the oldest-known monumental image cycle in German sculpture, depicting significant events from the Old and New Testaments. Isabelle Marchesin closely reads each of the door's sixteen panels, analyzing the detailed iconography to excavate the elaborate theological and deeply spiritual significance of the biblical scenes cast into metal. Studying the door's technical, material, political, and theological dimensions, Marchesin argues that Bernward intended the cathedral door to be read and reread like scripture so that unifying messages about God's presence in the world could be understood. Featuring nearly two hundred detailed color photographs of the panels that reveal their remarkable artistry and materiality, The Tree and the Column offers an innovative explication of a total work of medieval art.

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.

Whether in the visual arts, literature, cinema, science or fashion-in the crises after World War I, the fascination with "types" was largely influenced by a debate that was pervasive in the Weimar period: the search for the "face of the era." People were looking for new role models, and the portraits by artists of the New Objectivity movement such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Jeanne Mammen and Hanna Nagel testify to this. Many of the clichéd images, such as those of the "new woman" or the "worker," however, continue to have an effect in the present, reminding us with their classification of individuals of a problem that lives on in today's bigotry. A broad spectrum of contributors from art history, medical history, media studies, and sociology venture into a detailed investigation of the historical context of the 1920s and the complex interactions between art and its time. An installation developed especially for the exhibition by contemporary artist Cemile Sahin, born in 1990, spans an arc to the present.

Accompanying a major traveling exhibition, this book examines the unique artistic and cultural exchange between the Republic of Venice and Turkish Ottoman culture and identity over a three-hundred-year period. From the early Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, Venice held a central position in the global trade network. This book explores how artistic and cultural ideas originating in the Ottoman Empire arrived in Venice and were reinterpreted through the decorative arts, printed books, painting, drawing, and architecture. Featuring selection from the collections of the Musei Civici di Venezia, this volume showcases the creative contributions of well-known Venetian artists such as Vittore Carpaccio, Gentile Bellini, Michele Giambono, and Mariano Fortuny alongside works created by the best anonymous craftspeople both in Venice and the Ottoman Empire, including textiles, metalwork, armor, and ceramics. With essays on topics such as trade routes, the involvement of international communities in Venice, diplomatic interactions, and military power dynamics, this volume offers freshly reviewed and new perspectives on the intricate artistic relationship that existed between Venice and the Ottoman Empire.

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.

Woher kommt der Zeitstrahl in Geschichtsdarstellungen? Judith Sieber unternimmt eine historische Tiefenbohrung in die Zeit der Europäischen Aufklärung in Großbritannien. Anhand konkreter Beispiele arbeitet sie die Kontexte und Einsatzgebiete der damals neuen Darstellungsform heraus. Neben Geschichtsdiagrammen stehen dabei auch anschauliche Illustrationen von Handelsbeziehungen im Fokus der Analyse, die sich einerseits von tabellarischen Formen abgrenzen und andererseits an der Kartografie orientieren. Deren koloniale Entstehungszusammenhänge im British Empire machen klar: Es braucht eine fundamentale Kritik am behaupteten Universalismus linearer Zeit

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).

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

This book looks at why museum finance is inherently challenging and how difficult it is to balance the need to generate adequate funding while providing accessible, meaningful mission-based services. It’s purpose is to help museum leaders at all levels recognize and avoid certain financial minefields and realize that while there are financial hurdles in the museum world, they are solvable. The book is filled with numerous examples illustrating the range of challenges faced by museums and how institutions met these challenges along with advice on how institutions can be successful in the face of financial difficulty.

This book explores the interplay of Western European exploration and trade, with collecting, cabinets of curiosities and museums, and with the role of booty and plunder in the building of empires from ca.1600 until the end of the 19th century. The book focuses principally on the Dutch, English, Spanish, French and Italian at different times of their colonial power over the course of these 300 years. The achievements of exploration and trade provide the basis for these countries and both the state and individuals to build collections and museums. Throughout much of this period, there were hose who stood up and challenged such practices, passing laws to criminalize, curtail or contain these activities. By the late 18th century, these parallel but disparate activities converged. It was era of Napoleon and his imperial ambitions that drew these disparate activities together, with his support of intellectual inquiry alongside military plunder and collecting. This served as a symbol of imperial power of the French empire that, alongside England and Italy, exploited the wealth and riches of Egypt, India, and China.

This fully revised and expanded fourth edition addresses a thorough range of legal developments museums face, including new developments in the digital age and under new repatriation regulations. The book covers a wide range of issues, including nonprofit status, fraud, copyright, loans, documentation, accessioning and deaccessioning, international exhibitions, and cultural heritage concerns. The authoritative A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections offers detailed explanations of the law that make it a go-to book for any museum professional.

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.

-- Open Access eBook.
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.

-- Open Access eBook.
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.

-- Open Access eBook.
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.

- Open Access book
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.

-- Open Access eBook.
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.