Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

This book collects new and fresh narratives in the form of interviews with Black, brown, and Latinx graphic design educators with diverse backgrounds and experiences. All the designers offer interviewer Kelly Walters (Parsons School of Design) views on how art and education have shaped their careers and established a place for them in society. In addition they share personal insights about what it is to be a Black or a person of color in education. Discussions on diversity and inclusion incorporate reflections on the effective and not-so-effective current practices taking place in higher education to address minorities on college campuses. The common thread is the educators' agency as role models in helping students find their voices as artists and designers. Importantly, the interviews make clear how identity and where one comes from shape how one talks about design. These design educators tackle hard questions about race, identity, discrimination, and equity. At the intersection of design and education, these interviews show that cultural diversity can inspire creative work and foster enriching conversations between educators and their students.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Tracing surrealism through the paraphernalia of childhood from Marcel Duchamp's use of toys in his "readymade" sculptures to Susan Hiller's exploration of Punch and Judy puppet shows in video art, this volume unpacks themes like nostalgia, retrospection, sexual perversion, consumerism, and violence as entertainment. Whereas many scholars maintain that surrealism ended in the 1960s, Hopkins (Univ. of Glasgow) ascribes to a "long history of surrealism," seeing the influence of the movement on artists from its beginnings in the 1920s through the pop art movement and into the present. The chronological arrangement of the book allows for insights into changing social and cultural mores on the conception of childhood and engagement with topics from psychoanalysis to feminism. Well supported by full color reproductions, the volume provides deep analysis and new explorations into surrealist fascination with memory, identity, and materiality.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Electrifying Design: A Century of Lighting is the catalogue of Schleuning and Strauss's large-scale 2021 exhibition examining lighting design. The exhibit was first mounted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, but also traveled to the High Museum in Atlanta, GA. Although it provides a tremendous amount of background information on the various luminaires and their designers, this is not a history of lighting. Rather, it is a rich tracing of the development of lighting fixtures by types, looking at creative ideas for desk, floor, and ceiling light sources. Since it focuses on the most compelling, innovative, and influential expressions of light distribution, mass produced lighting is not included. The volume is blessed with detailed color and black-and-white photographic documentation that more than does justice to the actual creations. The photographs, mostly full-page images, are crisp, clear, and provide a sense of almost being at the exhibit. Several prolific and innovative lighting fixture designers are singled out in chapters that recapture their efforts.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

This lively, well-illustrated book catalogues a 2022 Getty Center exhibition inspired by the museum's acquisition of three life-sized anatomical prints, each comprising five sheets, produced in Bologna around 1780. The 56 catalogue entries tell an expansive story of science and art that stretches from 1523 to 2014. Eight incisive essays introduce the material: ample attention is paid to familiar highlights of European anatomical illustration, but plenty of revelations are also offered. Most prints date to the 17th and 18th centuries, and central to the volume is 16th-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius, whose De humani corporis fabrica (1543) served as a persistent touchstone for subsequent artists and illustrators. Monique Kornell, a specialist in the history of anatomical book illustration, contributes six essays, addressing themes such as the role of anatomy books for artists, the use of ancient Greek and Roman sculptural conventions, questions of scale, and the relationship between dissections and illustrations. Erin Travers contributes an essay on Dutch anatomist/biologist Frederick Ruysch, and Thisbe Gensler addresses three-dimensional models. All three scholars effectively--and efficiently--synthesize large bodies of literature while still taking the conversation in fresh directions.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Barnhill has deep knowledge of book history, having served as a curator at the American Antiquarian Society for more than four decades. In this generously illustrated book, she tells the story of how pictures became plentiful in American publishing. She also tells the histories of publishing as a business and of printmaking as a technology. Readers learn that it was risky for publishers to transition to illustrated printing. Readers also learn about major techniques used for printing illustrations, such as relief cuts, copper engravings, steel engravings, mezzotints, lithographs, and photogravures. Celebrated authors discussed include William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier, and notable illustrators include F. O. C. Darley, Augustus Hoppin, and David Claypoole Johnston. Barnhill also discusses the work of less-known female illustrators, editors, and publishers. Because of its numerous illustrations, the volume also serves as a guide for literature enthusiasts who wish to identify such books to study and enjoy. An appendix listing illustrated poetry books published in the US from 1786 to 1820 is included for reference. The book is extremely readable and does not assume prior knowledge.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

As if by design, this study on the influence on modern art of the French poet, madman, dramatist, and actor Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) arrived at a noteworthy moment, i.e., during a pandemic. In "The Theater and the Plague"--one of the seminal essays collected in Le Theatre et son double (1938; Eng. tr., The Theater and Its Double, by Mary Caroline Richards, 1958)--Artaud likened the theater to the plague. Recounting the prescient dream of the viceroy of Cagliari concerning a ship's plague-ridden cargo, Artaud wrote (as translated by Richards) "it cannot be denied that between the viceroy and the plague a palpable communication, however subtle, was established: and it is too easy and explains nothing to limit the communication of such a disease to contagion by simple contact." Bradnock (Univ. of Nottingham, UK) recounts how American translators, performers, and purveyors of Artaud's radical notions of language, theater, indeterminacy, spectatorship, and the body responded directly and obliquely to the writings of and mythologies surrounding Artaud. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Richards, David Tudor, and John Cage at Black Mountain College; Rachel Rosenthal, the Living Theater, Allen Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, Wallace Berman, Michael McClure, Bruce Conner, Nancy Spero, and, presently, Terry Riley form a formidable, original, and arguably influential cast.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

Richly illustrated and bolstered by contemporary research and an up-to-date bibliography, this book will serve as a guide to global surrealism for many years to come. Wide ranging in its consideration of the avant-garde sensibility, this catalogue accompanies the exhibition collaboratively presented by NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art and London's Tate Modern. Curators Stephanie D'Alessandro and Matthew Gale bring new life to a well-known subject. Some 45 short essays by scholars around the world tell new stories: many locate self-identifying surrealists in the late 20th century. There is no more equitable overview of underrepresented surrealist artists, photographers, printmakers, writers, choreographers, and collectives working anywhere. Whether in Cairo or Thailand in the 1930s or 1970s, whether inflected by politics, mysticism, or machinery, classic surrealism's tenets and methods held sway. This is not the generic surreal--the weird, odd, dreamlike. Rather, artist after artist, group after group acknowledges a common genealogy in Andre Breton, founder of the movement and author of the 1924 Manifeste du surrealisme. Surrealism's original liberatory/aesthetic appeal clearly resonates, and the curators demonstrate its variety, diversity, and longevity as arguably the most influential art movement of the 20th century.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Readers, take note! Despite the title's pun, this important book does not focus on the trending topics of the "stuff" or materiality of design. Instead, goods as used here references the ethics of design and design practice as viewed through the lens of virtue ethics. This approach, grounded in ancient philosophers such as Confucius and Aristotle, then elaborated by contemporary philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, questions the nature of the good life and what sort of person one should be. This philosophically grounded treatise establishes the need for a professional ethics for designers, then authorizes and encourages designers to act ethically. Philosopher, design theorist, and educator Ariel Guersenzvaig (ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, Spain) offers a critical, much-needed examination of the relatively young profession of design, providing an overview of an ethics of design practice. Unlike manifesto authors, Guersenzvaig eschews oversimplification and ranting and instead proceeds at a measured pace, providing a philosophically reasoned argument with lively accessible language supported by deep and timely scholarly references. A noteworthy bibliography compiles and expands on these excellent resources with handy topical categorization. Educators will especially appreciate the coda, "Teaching Design Professional Ethics."Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 excellent reproductions, almost all in color, this beautifully produced book provides a magisterial account of the church altarpiece over an impressive chronological span, c. 1220-1600. As Ekserdjian (Univ. of Leicester, UK) rightly claims, this is the first comprehensive study of "one of the most distinctive and remarkable art forms of the Italian Renaissance." Ekserdjian examines the genre's content and subject matter, from the origins of the altarpiece in the 13th century to Caravaggio in the early 1600s. The book is organized thematically, with chapters considering such topics as patrons, artists, and contracts; Virgin and child and saints; narrative altarpieces; frame, predella, and sculpture; and the Council of Trent. Clearly the author covers an immense amount of heterogeneous material while also offering a broad chronological outline of the altarpiece from its earliest to its most innovative forms. The book is lucidly organized and written, so one can dip into or immerse oneself in the author's manifold ideas, observations, and interpretations. The defining resource on this subject, this volume gathers an immense amount of information and visual material in one convenient place.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.