New Books in Art

In Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) to argue that photography, in its capacity as a visual and technological practice, can be a powerful tool for understanding and shaping what modernity meant in the region. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017), Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe gather artists and scholars whose work disrupts, challenges, and reimagines ways of being Asian and Asian American. Through nine original artist interviews and seven critical essays, the editors showcase contemporary artists who queer our conceptions of surveillance, affect, mixed race, and Asian America itself. In doing so, the editors remain interested in the queer disturbances within artworks that respond to racism and state violence, while also forming solidarities based on critical understandings of shared oppression. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Why is the artist’s voice missing from cultural policy? In Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Dr. Simone Wesner, a lecturer in arts management at Birkbeck, University of London, explores this question in the context of post-war and post-unification Germany. The book offers a wealth of detail on the German context, comparing two cultural policy regimes across Saxony, through a longitudinal study of a cohort of artists. Published as part of Palgrave’s New Directions In Cultural Policy Research series, the book offers new theoretical insights to cultural policy, particularly working with the idea of memory to help understand artistic careers as well as national and regional cultural policy. A fascinating read, the book will be of interest across media and cultural studies, as well as for historians, along with anyone interested in understanding the artist’s career and the artists’ role in society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Leopard print has a long history, as Jo Weldon shares in her new book, Fierce: The History of Leopard Print (Harper Design, 2018). In her illustrated text, Weldon chronicles the history of leopard print, situating it throughout popular culture. Starting in the early 1900s, Weldon examines the mass production of textiles and changes in the fashion industry to bring about the use of prints, colors, and patterns giving women more opportunities to use daring styles. In addition to fashion, Weldon explores influential individuals who changed popular culture with their choices in couture. Weldon’s book combines historical information about fashion, distinguishing features of large cats and large cat prints, and full color images of the compelling textile and its wearers. She argues that leopard print has been a powerful statement for women throughout history, adapting and changing to different fashion trends and technological advancements. Weldon’s book is a vivid illustration of a fashion statement that has not gone out of style. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book and any book at University Press Books, Berkeley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Quilts and Health (Indiana University Press, 2017), Marsha MacDowell and her colleagues examine the phenomenon of health-related quilts, of which there are millions around the world. In fact, and as this book documents, almost any illness, disease, or condition is likely to be associated in some way with quiltmaking. Quilts are made to support health education and patient advocacy, to raise funds, to memorialize those passed, to promote personal well-being, and to comfort others in distress. Some quilts even document medical history; for example, Ohio-based quilter Helen Murrell created a piece that serves as a statement of outrage for the unjust treatment of 600 African-American men who, without their knowledge or consent, were subjected to a forty-year medical experiment of the United States government.  During the experiment, 399 men were deliberately infected with syphilis and were allowed to go untreated, even after a cure was developed. Quilts and Health explores the myriad connections that are forged between disease, recovery, and quilt making.  As the authors note, systematic study of quilts and the stories they hold has “great potential to help us understand the human experience for illness and health, advance medical knowledge, and, ultimately, enhance the quality of health, outcomes, and life” (2). McDowell’s co-writers are Clare Luz and Beth Donaldson, both of whom are also based at Michigan State University. Luz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopedic Medicine.  Donaldson is Digital Humanities Project Asset Coordinator at the Museum and Coordinator of the Museum’s Quilt Index. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Did you catch that look? The theory of fabulousness is on the move. In his new book, Fabulous: the Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (Yale UP, 2018), madison moore explores some of the sites where fabulousness is highly valued, such as the street, the catwalk, the club (including the line to get in), and the body itself. Our hour-long conversation references many personal experiences that capture the ephemeral quality of fabulousness, which can appear in any place, at any time, through any body. madison also speaks of his participation in and organization of the worlds that his scholarship extends. A running theme of our conversation is that fabulousness is never without risk. As he writes, “You can’t understand fabulousness unless you get that it emerges from trauma, duress, exclusion, exhaustion, and depression, and that in some ways being fabulous is the only thing that can get us out of bed in the morning.” There are, of course, groups of people who actively police fabulousness. But its self-making potential resides in all bodies. It is a confidence, and a gift to be shared. You just have to look—and listen—for yourself. madison moore is a dj, cultural critic, and assistant professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies. He is also creative director and resident dj at OPULENCE, an art-collective and queer techno party. He has home bases in New York, London, and Berlin. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He will be a Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin beginning this fall. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In her latest book, Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club (Routledge, 2017), Stacey J. Pierson reveals the fascinating history of one of the most refined and influential fine art clubs in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club. Drawing on the club’s near-complete, yet understudied archives at the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Stacey focuses on the club’s exhibition practices. In this way, the Burlington Fine Arts Club functioned as a social space to practice, probe and participate in a connoisseurial approach to the fine arts. They included not just Old Masters but also Persian, Chinese and Indian works of art too, thus demonstrating how the ‘global turn’ in art history came about much earlier than is generally understood. This book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in art market studies and the interconnectedness of the public and the private, the formation of private clubs and public taste and the network of agents who manoeuvre between them. Ricarda Brosch is a museum assistant (trainee) at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. Her research focuses on Ming and Qing Chinese art & material culture, transcultural interchanges, especially with Timurid and Safavid Iran, as well as provenance research & digital humanities. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology.  How are bodies reproduced, broken apart, and circulated?  And how do the representations of these processes help us understand transnational biopolitics? Heinrich takes up these questions and others in this pathbreaking work, one that will change how readers think about the body in contemporary art and media. Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present. Well before the anointment of the “Mission School” by art-world arbiters at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latino artists, writers, poets, playwrights, performers, and filmmakers made the Mission their home and their muse. The Mission, home to Chileans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Mexican Americans, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans never represented a single Latino identity. In tracing the experiences of a diverse group of Latino artists from the 1940s to the turn of the century, Cordova connects wide-ranging aesthetics to a variety of social movements and activist interventions. The book begins with the history of the Latin Quarter in the 1940s and the subsequent cultivation of the Beat counterculture in the 1950s, demonstrating how these decades laid the groundwork for the artistic and political renaissance that followed. Using oral histories, visual culture, and archival research, she analyzes the Latin jazz scene of the 1940s, Latino involvement in the avant-garde of the 1950s, the Chicano movement and Third World movements of the 1960s, the community mural movement of the 1970s, the transnational liberation movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s. Through these different historical frames, Cordova links the creation of Latino art with a flowering of Latino politics. Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art