When the word "diversity" is used, especially when applied to people, it can mean any number of things, including ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, culture and beyond. Similarly, the word "art" can apply to film, paintings, architecture, design, poetry... The list goes on and on. So don't be surprised when this month's diversity book display, which is entitled Diversity in the Arts, merely scratches the surface and provides glimpses of what the world has to offer. Not every type of diversity in people nor type of art will be touched upon, but the hope is that we can find something of interest that is beyond what in the past has been elevated in the arts. So this month, celebrate diversity in the arts!
Special thanks to our Materials Processing Coordinator Leah Zande, for compiling this list. Learn more in the Diversity in the Arts Research Guide, compiled by Senior Librarian Jill Chisnell. Feature image by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash.
Hip-Hop Architecture
Cooke, Sekou (2021)
As architecture grapples with its own racist legacy, "Hip-Hop Architecture" outlines a powerful new manifesto-the voice of the underrepresented, marginalized, and voiceless within the discipline. Exploring the production of spaces, buildings, and urban environments that embody the creative energies in hip-hop, it is a newly expanding design philosophy which sees architecture as a distinct part of hip-hop's cultural expression, and which uses hip-hop as a lens through which to provoke new architectural ideas.
Examining the present and the future of Hip-Hop Architecture, the book also explores its historical antecedents and its theory, placing it in a wider context both within architecture and within Black and African American movements. Throughout, the work is illustrated with inspirational case studies of architectural projects and creative practices, and interspersed with interludes and interviews with key architects, designers, and academics in the field. This is a vital and provocative work that will appeal to architects, designers, students, theorists, and anyone interested in a fresh view of architecture, design, race and culture. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Race & Modern Architecture
Cheng, Irene; Davis, Charles; Wilson, Mabel (2020)
Although race—a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination—has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century.
Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality—from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants—Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators
Walters, Kelly (2021)
In "Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators," Kelly Walters collects twelve deeply personal interviews with graphic design educators of color who teach at colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. The book centers the unique narratives of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators, from their childhood experiences to their navigation of undergraduate and graduate studies and their career paths in academia and practice.
The interviewees represent a cross-section of ethnic and multiracial backgrounds—African American, Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, and Brazilian. Their impactful stories offer invaluable perspectives for students and emerging designers of color, creating an entry point to address the complexities of race in design and bring to light the challenges of teaching graphic design at different types of public and private institutions. Interwoven throughout the book are images that maintain cultural significance, from family heirlooms to design works that highlight aspects of their cultural identities. Readers will gain insight into the multitude of experiences of Black, Brown, and Latinx design educators who teach and work in the field today. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Indigenous Dance & Dancing Indian
Krystal, Matthew (2011)
Focusing on the enactment of identity in dance, "Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian" is a cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, and cross-national comparison of indigenous dance practices. Considering four genres of dance in which indigenous people are represented--K'iche Maya traditional dance, powwow, folkloric dance, and dancing sports mascots--the book addresses both the ideational and behavioral dimensions of identity.
Each dance is examined as a unique cultural expression in individual chapters, and then all are compared in the conclusion, where striking parallels and important divergences are revealed. Ultimately, Krystal describes how dancers and audiences work to construct and consume satisfying and meaningful identities through dance by either challenging social inequality or reinforcing the present social order. Detailed ethnographic work, thorough case studies, and an insightful narrative voice make Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian a substantial addition to scholarly literature on dance in the Americas. It will be of interest to scholars of Native American studies, social sciences, and performing arts. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Music Practices Across Borders
Peres da Silva, Glaucia; Hondros, Konstantin (2020)
Transnational music practices have been paid large attention to by musicians, arts management professionals, social scientists as well as internet-mediated audiences. "Music Practices across Borders” is exactly the book to address the current issues of its practices and how musical genres are interconnected by mass migration and globalisation.
The editors Glaucia Peres da Silva and Konstantin Hondros have collected nine articles in this book, published at transcript in 2019. It covers a wide range of timely examples from inside the music sector (for instance, Eurovision and Pieces of Africa), as most of the authors have had industry experience. Hence, this book is a concise discussion for everyday practices of transnational music collaboration and innovation. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Films on Ice
Westerståhl Stenport, Anna; MacKenzie, Scott (2014)
The first book to address the vast diversity of Northern circumpolar cinemas from a transnational perspective, "Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic" presents the region as one of great and previously overlooked cinematic diversity. With chapters on polar explorer films, silent cinema, documentaries, ethnographic and indigenous film, gender and ecology, as well as Hollywood and the USSR’s uses and abuses of the Arctic, this book provides a groundbreaking account of Arctic cinemas from 1898 to the present.
Challenging dominant notions of the region in popular and political culture, it demonstrates how moving images (cinema, television, video, and digital media) have been central to the very definition of the Arctic since the end of the nineteenth century. Bringing together an international array of European, Russian, Nordic, and North American scholars, Films on Ice radically alters stereotypical views of the Arctic region, and therefore of film history itself. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
African Film Cultures
Mano, Winston; Knorpp, Barbara; Agina, Añuli (2017)
The growing body of films in and around Africa, and the seemingly incongruent growth in African film scholarship, suggests the need for new perspectives, approaches and insights into film cultures in Africa. Although it is impossible to capture the entire diversity of existing African film cultures, this collection, which has resulted from African film conferences organized by the University of Westminster, United Kingdom, has recognized the significance and urgency of this task. The book offers a unique engagement with widened African film ‘cultures’ in the context of diverse peoples, histories, geographies, languages and changing film production cultures shaped by audiences and users at home and in the diaspora.
The volume is a significant contribution to the processes of representing the self and other, as well as the emergence of alternative, non-official dialogues, circulation and consumption, including on social media. Students, researchers, film policy makers, film producers, distributors and anyone else with an interest in African screen media will find in the book useful and readable analyses of socio-political factors that affect and are shaped by African film. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
A Companion to Korean Art
Park, J. P; Rhi, Juhyung; Jungmann, Burglind; Arnold, Dana (2020)
Korean pop culture has become an international phenomenon in the past few years. The popularity of the nation’s exports—movies, K-pop, fashion, television shows, lifestyle and cosmetics products, to name a few—has never been greater in Western society. Despite this heightened interest in contemporary Korean culture, scholarly Western publications on Korean visual arts are scarce and often outdated. A Companion to Korean Art is the first academically-researched anthology on the history of Korean art written in English. This unique anthology brings together essays by renowned scholars from Korea, the US, and Europe, presenting expert insights and exploring the most recent research in the field.
Insightful chapters discuss Korean art and visual culture from early historical periods to the present. Subjects include the early paintings of Korea, Buddhist architecture, visual art of the late Chosŏn period, postwar Korean Art, South Korean cinema, and more. Several chapters explore the cultural exchange between the Korean peninsula, the Chinese mainland, and the Japanese archipelago, offering new perspectives on Chinese and Japanese art. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power
Cahan, Susan (2016)
Prior to 1967 fewer than a dozen museum exhibitions had featured the work of African American artists. And by the time the civil rights movement reached the American art museum, it had already crested: the first public demonstrations to integrate museums occurred in late 1968, twenty years after the desegregation of the military and fourteen years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. In "Mounting Frustration" Susan E. Cahan investigates the strategies African American artists and museum professionals employed as they wrangled over access to and the direction of New York City's elite museums. Drawing on numerous interviews with artists and analyses of internal museum documents, Cahan gives a detailed and at times surprising picture of the institutional and social forces that both drove and inhibited racial justice in New York's museums.
Cahan focuses on high-profile and wildly contested exhibitions that attempted to integrate African American culture and art into museums, each of which ignited debate, dissension, and protest. The Metropolitan Museum's 1969 exhibition "Harlem on My Mind" was supposed to represent the neighborhood, but it failed to include the work of the black artists living and working there. While the Whitney's 1971 exhibition "Contemporary Black Artists in America" featured black artists, it was heavily criticized for being haphazard and not representative. The Whitney show revealed the consequences of museums' failure to hire African American curators, or even white curators who possessed knowledge of black art. Cahan also recounts the long history of the Museum of Modern Art's institutional ambivalence toward contemporary artists of color, which reached its zenith in its 1984 exhibition "Primitivism" in Twentieth Century Art. Representing modern art as a white European and American creation that was influenced by the "primitive" art of people of color, the show only served to further devalue and cordon off African American art.
In addressing the racial politics of New York's art world, Cahan shows how aesthetic ideas reflected the underlying structural racism and inequalities that African American artists faced. These inequalities are still felt in America's museums, as many fundamental racial hierarchies remain intact: art by people of color is still often shown in marginal spaces; one-person exhibitions are the preferred method of showing the work of minority artists, as they provide curators a way to avoid engaging with the problems of complicated, interlocking histories; and whiteness is still often viewed as the norm. The ongoing process of integrating museums, Cahan demonstrates, is far broader than overcoming past exclusions. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye
Ellenzweig, Allen (2021)
"George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye" is a life of the gregarious American portrait, dance, fashion, and male nude photographer whose career spanned the late 1920s to 1955. From age 18, Lynes entered the cosmopolitan world of the American expatriate community in Paris when he became acquainted with the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Intending to pursue a literary and small press publishing career, Lynes also began photographing authors like Stein, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Colette. Soon, he turned exclusively to photography, establishing himself as one of the premier fashion photographers in the Condé Nast stable, documenting the early ballets of George Balanchine, and pursuing his private obsession with seductive images of young male nudes almost never published in his time.
Lynes's private life was as glamorous and theatrical as his images with their brilliant studio lighting and dramatic Surrealist set-ups. Barely out his teens, he met the publisher Monroe Wheeler who was already in a relationship with the emerging expatriate novelist Glenway Wescott. The peripatetic threesome maintained a polyamorous connection that lasted some 15 years. Their New York apartment became a mecca for elegant cocktail and name-dropping dinner parties. Their ménage-à-trois complicates our understanding of the pre-Stonewall gay "closet." This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual, literary, and performing arts that defined transatlantic cosmopolitan culture and presaged later gay political activism. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination
Murray, Stuart (2008)
From concerns of an 'autism epidemic' to the MMR vaccine crisis, autism is a source of peculiar fascination in the contemporary media. Discussion of the condition has been largely framed within medicine, psychiatry and education but there has been no exploration of its power within representative narrative forms. "Representing Autism" is the first book to tackle this approach, using contemporary fiction and memoir writing, film, photography, drama and documentary together with older texts to set the contemporary fascination with autism in context.
"Representing Autism" analyses and evaluates the place of autism within contemporary culture and at the same time examines the ideas of individual and community produced by people with autism themselves to establish the ideas of autistic presence that emerge from within a space of cognitive exceptionality. Central to the book is a sense of the legitimacy of autistic presence as a way by which we might more fully articulate what it means to be human. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Women & Migration: Responses in Art and History
Willis, Deborah; Toscano, Ellyn; Brooks Nelson, Kalia (2019)
The essays in this book chart how women’s profound and turbulent experiences of migration have been articulated in writing, photography, art and film. As a whole, the volume gives an impression of a wide range of migratory events from women’s perspectives, covering the Caribbean Diaspora, refugees and slavery through the various lenses of politics and war, love and family.
The contributors, which include academics and artists, offer both personal and critical points of view on the artistic and historical repositories of these experiences. Selfies, motherhood, violence and Hollywood all feature in this substantial treasure-trove of women’s joy and suffering, disaster and delight, place, memory and identity. This collection appeals to artists and scholars of the humanities, particularly within the social sciences; though there is much to recommend it to creatives seeking inspiration or counsel on the issue of migratory experiences. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Global Photography: A Critical History
Duganne, Erina; Weissman, Terri; Diack, Heather (2020)
This innovative text recounts the history of photography through a series of thematically structured chapters. Designed and written for students studying photography and its history, each chapter approaches its subject by introducing a range of international, contemporary photographers and then contextualizing their work in historical terms. The book offers students an accessible route to gain an understanding of the key genres, theories and debates that are fundamental to the study of this rich and complex medium.
Boxed focus studies throughout the text offer short interviews, curatorial statements and reflections by photographers, critics and leading scholars that link photography's history with its practice. Short chapter summaries, research questions and further reading lists help to reinforce learning and promote discussion. Whether coming to the subject from an applied photography or art history background, students will benefit from this book's engaging, example-led approach to the subject, gaining a sophisticated understanding of international photography in historical terms. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Jews & Muslims Made Visible in Christian Iberia and Beyond, 14th to 18th Centuries
Franco Llopis, Borja (2019)
This volume aims to show through various case studies how the interrelations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in Iberia were negotiated in the field of images, objects and architecture during the Later Middle Ages and Early Modernity.
By looking at the ways pre-modern Iberians envisioned diversity, we can reconstruct several stories, frequently interwoven with devotional literature, poetry or Inquisitorial trials, and usually quite different from a binary story of simple opposition. The book’s point of departure narrates the relationship between images and conversions, analysing the mechanisms of hybridity, and proposing a new explanation for the representation of otherness as the complex outcome of a negotiation involving integration. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Self-Representation in an Expanded Field
Lehner, Ace (2021)
Defined as a self-image made with a hand-held mobile device and shared via social media platforms, the selfie has facilitated self-imaging becoming a ubiquitous part of globally networked contemporary life. Beyond this selfies have facilitated a diversity of image making practices and enabled otherwise representationally marginalized constituencies to insert self-representations into visual culture.
In the Western European and North American art-historical context, self-portraiture has been somewhat rigidly albeit obliquely defined, and selfies have facilitated a shift regarding who literally holds the power to self-image. Like self-portraits, not all selfies are inherently aesthetically or conceptually rigorous or avant-guard. But, -as this project aims to do address via a variety of interdisciplinary approaches- selfies have irreversibly impacted visual culture, contemporary art, and portraiture in particular. Selfies propose new modes of self-imaging, forward emerging aesthetics and challenge established methods, they prove that as scholars and image-makers it is necessary to adapt and innovate in order to contend with the most current form of self-representation to date. The essays gathered herein will reveal that in our current moment it is necessary and advantageous to consider the merits and interventions of selfies and self-portraiture in an expanded field of self-representations. We invite authors to take interdisciplinary global perspectives, to investigate various sub-genres, aesthetic practices, and lineages in which selfies intervene to enrich the discourse on self-representation in the expanded field today. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Born of Resistance
Baugh, Scott; Sorell, Victor (2015)
This collection of essays interrogates the most contested social, political, and aesthetic concept in Chicana/o cultural studies—resistance. If Chicana/o culture was born of resistance amid assimilation and nationalistic forces, how has it evolved into the twenty-first century? This groundbreaking volume redresses the central idea of resistance in Chicana/o visual cultural expression through nine clustered discussions, each coordinating scholarly, critical, curatorial, and historical contextualizations alongside artist statements and interviews. Landmark artistic works—illustrations, paintings, sculpture, photography, film, and television—anchor each section. Contributors include David Avalos, Mel Casas, Ester Hernández, Nicholas Herrera, Luis Jiménez, Ellen Landis, Yolanda López, Richard Lou, Delilah Montoya, Laura Pérez, Lourdes Portillo, Luis Tapia, Chuy Treviño, Willie Varela, Kathy Vargas, René Yañez, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and more. Cara a cara, face-to-face, encounters across the collection reveal the varied richness of resistant strategies, movidas, as they position crucial terms of debate surrounding resistance, including subversion, oppression, affirmation, and identification.
The essays in the collection represent a wide array of perspectives on Chicana/o visual culture. Editors Scott L. Baugh and Víctor A. Sorell have curated a dialog among the many voices, creating an important new volume that redefines the role of resistance in Chicana/o visual arts and cultural expression. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
The Obama Portraits
Caragol, Taína; Moss, Dorothy; Powell, Richard; Sajet, Kim; Golden, Thelma (2020)
From the moment of their unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery in early 2018, the portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama have become two of the most beloved artworks of our time. Kehinde Wiley's portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald's portrait of the former first lady have inspired unprecedented responses from the public, and attendance at the museum has more than doubled as visitors travel from near and far to view these larger-than-life paintings. After witnessing a woman drop to her knees in prayer before the portrait of Barack Obama, one guard said, "No other painting gets the same kind of reactions. Ever." "The Obama Portraits" is the first book about the making, meaning, and significance of these remarkable artworks.
Richly illustrated with images of the portraits, exclusive pictures of the Obamas with the artists during their sittings, and photos of the historic unveiling ceremony by former White House photographer Pete Souza, this book offers insight into what these paintings can tell us about the history of portraiture and American culture. The volume also features a transcript of the unveiling ceremony, which includes moving remarks by the Obamas and the artists. A reversible dust jacket allows readers to choose which portrait to display on the front cover. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Arabicity: Contemporary Arab Art
Issa, Rose (2019)
"Arabicity" reflects on four decades of the aesthetic, conceptual, and socio-political concerns of contemporary Arab artists. Beautifully produced, it features over 200 artworks by 50 Arab artists including Bahia Shehab, Ayman Baalbaki, Hassan Hajjaj, and Raeda Saadeh, who explore their cultural heritage, and themes such as memory, destruction, and conflict, with great warmth, humour and visual poetry.
Whether through video art, painting, photography or installation, these artists challenge the confines of their identity, resist stereotyping, and reshape the parameters of their cultural traditions. In their diverse media and subject matter, their works reflect the pulse of the region. In chaos they discover what endures. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Roots of the New Arab Film
Armes, Roy (2018)
"Roots of the New Arab Film" deals with the generation of filmmakers from across North Africa and the Middle East who created an international awareness of Arab film from the mid-1980s onwards. These seminal filmmakers experienced the moment of national independence first-hand in their youth and retained a deep attachment to their homeland. Although these aspiring filmmakers had to seek their training abroad, they witnessed a time of filmic revival in Europe – Fellini and Antonioni in Italy, the French New Wave, and British Free Cinema.
Returning home, these filmmakers brought a unique insider/outsider perspective to bear on local developments in society since independence, including the divide between urban and rural communities, the continuing power of traditional values and the status of women in a changing society. As they made their first films back home, the feelings of participation in a worldwide movement of new, independent filmmaking was palpable. "Roots of the New Arab Film" is a necessary and comprehensive resource for anyone interested in the foundations of Arab cinema. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title
Eco-art History in East & Southeast Asia
Lee, De-nin Deanna (2019)
The essays in this anthology examine artwork and sites in East and Southeast Asia through the lens of ecoart history. In these regions, significant anthropogenic changes to terrain, watercourses, and ecosystems date back millennia, as do artwork and artefacts that both conceptualize and modify the natural world. The rising interest in earth-conscious modes of analysis, or ecoart history, informs this anthology, which explores the mutual impact of artistic expressions and local environments in East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, conceptual tools and case studies focused on these regions impart important insights bearing on the development of ecoart history.
The book includes case studies examining the impact of the Little Ice Age on court painting and systems of representing marine life in the Joseon period in Korea. Other contributors consider contemporary artistic strategies, such as developing a sustainability aesthetics and focusing attention to non-human agents, to respond to environmental damage and climate change in the present. Additional essays analyse the complicated art historical ecology of heritage sites and question the underlying anthropocentrism in art historical priorities and practices. As a whole, this anthology argues for the importance of ecological considerations in art history. - Publisher's Description
Request this Title