Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2021 -

Anyone who has watched Mad Men is aware of the masculine bias that prevailed in the Golden Age of advertising. All of visual communication within business tended to be a men's club, with a few exceptions in the area of fashion publishing houses. Now, most of the students in design schools and colleges are women, and the number of minority and LBGTQ young designers is also significant. In this book, Lupton (Maryland Institute of College of Art) et al. help balance what design history has weighted toward the white male end the spectrum. The book is light, breezy, and an easy read with ample illustrations, but the reader should not be fooled into thinking that the book is lightweight. Social equity is an important subject, and Extra Bold gets into many of the critical details. This is a must-read contribution in a rapidly changing field.Summing Up: Essential. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; students in technical programs; professionals; and general readers.

In its myopia, art history has reinforced an outdated canon of "great men" and a limited timeline for surrealism, and art historians have paid heed to the trope of women and their bodies as popular subjects of surrealist art--thereby neglecting the agency of women and their decisive roles as artists shaping the ideas and imagery of the movement. Fantastic Women, catalogue as well as exhibition, explores the thematic, biographical, and stylistic diversity of 34 women artists from 11 countries, recounting the revolutionary role of women and their contributions to surrealism as they grappled with issues of autonomy, identity, and politics. Stunningly illustrated to reveal the ways in which writing, drawing, painting, photography, collage, and related media drew on the subconscious, dreams, chance, metamorphosis, literature, and spiritual beliefs to shed light on the artists and on the politics of the day, Fantastic Women shows women celebrating subversion as active participants of surrealism as the movement spanned Europe and North and Central America. Thoroughly researched and beautifully presented with ample photographs and artist biographies, the catalogue is a stunning accomplishment and an invaluable addition to scholarship. It will be of interest to scholars of women and gender studies and cultural studies, as well as those researching surrealism, the avant-garde, and early 20th-century art history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

That some incarcerated people create thoughtful, noteworthy art is hardly a revelation since options for using time well in the US's carceral wasteland are few, and making art is one of them. Fleetwood (Rutgers) takes on this subject with passion and originality, looking at how the creation of art liberates the incarcerated; how the institution itself impacts artistic expression; and how artistic products of the truly innocent translate differently onto surfaces. The artist-prisoners she discusses are disproportionately poor and of color, and Fleetwood argues that their humanity is dispossessed by the oppression and sterility of the prison. The decision to create a "haptic artifact" is consequential and deeply individualistic. The author first visited a prison as a child, accompanying her mother to visit an incarcerated uncle, and she has retained her interests in prison matters over decades, now as a scholar. The book analyzes how art is formed under different circumstances: by individuals, collectives, and collaborations. Fleetwood writes with poignancy about the power imbalance between the prisoner and the omnipotent state, and how this is reflected in artistic production--on paper, as sculpture, and even from a bootlegged cellphone. Accolades are due to Harvard University Press and Sam Potts, the designer, for such a beautiful volume on such an agonizing topic.Summing Up: Highly recommended, All readers.