New Books in Art

The Hidden South–Come Home (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2016) is the result of an ongoing project that documents intimate stories of people who are often overlooked in society. Photographer and author Brent Walker traveled around the southern United States meeting and interacting with people of different backgrounds and experiences. Many of his subjects live with addiction and struggle daily with their survival. Started in September 2014, The Hidden South Come Home soon developed a large online presence and subsequent following, and in 2015, the project followers supported the funding the book. After almost a year in production, the book was published in early 2016. Since the release of the book, Brent spends his time speaking, teaching, and working on a second book, which he considers a second phase of the project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Could the Qur’an–understood, according to Muslims, as the verbatim word of God in Arabic–acquire a nationality? Specifically, could it be American? And written in English? Contemporary visual artist Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an (Liveright, 2015) raises these questions and many more. The groundbreaking and subversive project draws on multiple English translations, which Birk synthesizes to produce his own hand-written American graffiti-style translation. On top of that, every single page of the over-sized coffee table book contains meticulous illustrations of everyday American life, ranging from celebration to tragedy. As a commentary on both the Qur’an as well as American culture, moreover, the provocative visuals offer the reader a way to connect a book from 7th-century Arabia to 21st-century American cities, landscapes, challenges, and humanity. Given the herculean task that Birk accomplishes, it perhaps comes as no surprise that it took him nearly a decade to complete. Beyond the illustrations and translation, American Qur’an also contains essays from Reza Aslan (UC Riverside), Zareena Grewal (Yale), and Iftikhar Dadi (Cornell), which help to contextualize the project. As for Birk himself, he offers no commentary aside from a brief acknowledgements section; this lack of explanation thus challenges the reader to draw conclusions based on the primary source itself. Additionally, because many of the illustrations have no ostensibly straightforward connection to the text, readers have the opportunity to search for meaning in the pictures, which typical translations of the Qur’an cannot present. At the end of the day, American Qur’an is sure to spark conversations and make waves among a wide variety of people, including artists and academics (within Islamic studies and beyond), as well as other curious minds wishing to know more about the Qur’an. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Nude Reagan (Spurl Editions, 2016) is John Brian King’s second book of photography. His first book, LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84, was published by Spurl Editions in 2015. For his most recent book, King photographed twenty-three nude female models with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 camera in an empty Palm Springs office space. Each model wore the same Ronald Reagan mask, striking any pose she liked. Deliberately unsettling, these photographs depict Reagan as a demon and specter haunting the modern world. Evoking the dead conservative president, the models wear the hideous dark-eyed mask anemic and wrinkled and morph into unerotic, freakish wraiths. The colors of the photographs accentuate these figures’ eerie qualities: the camera’s unpredictable flash turns the bland office backdrop alternately into a mold green, a muddy gray, a brilliant white, or a dense, all-encompassing black setting. The womens’ shadows are sometimes starkly present, and at other times disappear. King was influenced by such disparate sources as Conrad Veidt’s The Man Who Laughs; Reagan’s own frozen, Brylcreem-lathered countenance; artist Maurizio Cattelan’s sardonic approach to politics in art; and Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Southern Gothic photographs of masked children. JOHN BRIAN KING is a Los Angeles native who graduated with a degree in photography from the California Institute of the Arts. He designed the film titles for over thirty films, including Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love,and The Ring. He wrote and directed the feature film Redlands, an examination of creativity and horror in relation to photography. His book LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84 was featured in the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Impose Magazine, LCeil de la Photographie, Yet Magazine, It’s Nice That, AnOther Magazine, and more. Nude Reagan is available through Spurl Editions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What’s Going On? 1969 -1974 (Lighted Square Media, 2015) is Ken Light‘s ninth book. Ken started his professional life as a photojournalist at his college newspaper in 1969 and has developed a career as a documentary photographer who tells stories about social and political life in the United States. Ken is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley and director for its Center for Photography. He was also the co-founder of Fotovision and the International Fund for Documentary photography. What’s Going On? 1969 -1974 is project born out of Ken’s observations that many of the significant politically based movements of our time have their roots, and are mirrored, in the social and cultural landscape of the early 1970s – from the Occupy movement of 2011 to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri and the many forms that Black Lives Matter has taken since the hashtag was first used in 2013. The book combines Ken’s photographs with personal memoir and a timeline of events from 1969 – 1974. The timeline describes day by day, year by year the significant incidents that occurred in the United States and shaped Ken’s perception and experience of the time period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, combines a gorgeous facsimile of a late 15th-century illuminated haggadah with a Latin prologue written by a Dominican Friar! Mystery abounds as a Jewish Passover text, written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe, is found to include illustrations of Christian significance. Thanks to a special collaboration of multi-disciplinary experts from three continents and an element of serendipity, the manuscript of a haggadah from the 15th century, now at home in a state library in Munich, was discovered, translated, and its importance as a primary source for Christian Jewish relations during the late medieval and early modern period recognized.The prologue by fifteen-century Dominican Hebraist Erhard von Pappenheim includes the testimony of Jews tortured to testify to blood libel in 1475 in Trent. Recorded by von Pappenheim in a matter-of-fact tone, as though by an ethnographer, the testimony also becomes a primary source for Jewish ritual practice during this period in German lands. It also speaks to Christian understanding of Jewish ritual and tradition.Read the essays in this special volume for the thoughtful questions that the experts raise and address. Turn the pages of the Haggadah to experience its beauty. During the interview we also discussed The Washington Haggadah (Harvard University Press, 2011), edited by David Stern. This elegant reproduction of the most beautiful haggadah in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington reflects the work of the late 15th century southern German illustrator Joel ben Simeon. The illuminations that adorn the text are an ethnographers dream: they evidence the home ritual practices of the era and place. When the book was displayed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, objects from the Museums collection that are reflected on the pages of the haggadah accompanied the display. Essays by David Stern and art historian Katrin Kogman-Apel accompany the text of the Passover haggadah, providing a history of the haggadah for interested readers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ultimately matters? Pamela D. Winfield‘s recent award-winning monograph, Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013), explores these major Japanese Buddhist figures artistic and textual productions in order to answer these questions. Bringing together her expertise in the fields of art history and Buddhist studies, Winfield guides the reader to more nuanced understandings of Kukai as a promoter of icons and Dogen’s seemingly iconoclastic stance. In addition, she offers a model for bridging textual studies and studies of material cultures that opens paths for further explorations of the relationship of practice, text, and image. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016), Tahneer Oksman explores the graphic memoirs of seven female cartoonists, whose works grapple with issues of Jewish identity – from confronting stereotypes of Jewish women’s bodies and behaviors, to ambivalence over what it means to be a progressive Jew on a Birthright trip to Israel. Through visual and textual analysis, Oksman illustrates how her authors’ connections to Jewishness remain complicated, fluid, and intimately tied to perceptions of self and how others view them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Charlotte Eubanks, Jonathan E. Abel, and Tina Chen about Volume 1, Issue 2: Collecting Asias (Fall 2015), which includes – among several fascinating essays – a portfolio of Akamatsu Toshiko’s sketches of Micronesia, an interview about Mughal collections, an introduction to three wonderful digital projects, and a field trip to collaboratively-curated exhibition. In addition to exploring the particular contributions of this special issue, we talked about some of the features of the journal that really excitingly push the boundaries of what an academic journal can be, considering aspects of the innovative forms that are curated in the Convergence section of Verge and reflected in its essays. Highly recommended, both for reading and for teaching! Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research and writing concern the histories of science, medicine, materiality, and their translations in early modern China. You can find out more about her work by visiting www.carlanappi.com. She can be reach at carlanappi@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 new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as “graphic novels.” Chute is particularly interested in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It, and Joe Sacco’s series Palestine, but she also introduces us to the long history of hand-drawn documentation of war-time trauma dating to Goya and Callot. Chute treats comics as a serious literary form that is especially efficacious for representing the act of witness-to-war and those who witness. It is through the power of graphic illustration combined with the written word–the comics-form–that the otherwise unspeakable atrocities of modern war can be conveyed. The book also serves as a primer to the language of comics–words like “gutter” and “tier”–and the craft of decoding comics as practiced by scholars such as Chute. In this interview Chute responded to questions about her path into comics as an academic pursuit, her thoughts on the newest trends in documentary comics, and her views from the college classroom on the pedagogy of comics. Jerry Lembcke can be reached at jlembcke@holycross.edu, Ellis Jones at ejones@holycross.edu.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015) is a gorgeous book. It’s about light and the practices of self representation in diasporic and Caribbean communities. Krista A. Thompson looks carefully and sees in the glittery surfaces of contemporary art, photographic and video practices in proms and dancehalls, and the visual culture of hip-hop the generative power of alternative modalities of being. Taking us to New Orleans, Jamaica, the Bahamas and on the global hip-hop circuit, this book engages with the discourses of art history and dissolves its Eurocentric bearings.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art