What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question by referring to historical evidence about an artists sexual identity or to particular kinds of imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter is mainstream?
As Dutch merchants became drivers of the transatlantic slavery business in the seventeenth century, Dutch art increasingly used Blackness to signal slavery and servitude. In this brilliant and pathbreaking work, Angela Vanhaelen proposes new ways of looking at Dutch paintings that do not equate Blackness with enslavement. Vanhaelen reframes the ......
Aesthetic Violence in American Literature and Art, 1945-2001
In the wake of World War II, Americans struggled to grasp the shifting scale of violence brought on by the nuclear era. To grapple with the overwhelming suffering of the sociopolitical moment, new ways of thinking about violence-as structural, systemic, and senseless-emerged. Artists and writers, however, challenged the cultural impulse to make ......
Aesthetic Violence in American Literature and Art, 1945-2001
In the wake of World War II, Americans struggled to grasp the shifting scale of violence brought on by the nuclear era. To grapple with the overwhelming suffering of the sociopolitical moment, new ways of thinking about violence-as structural, systemic, and senseless-emerged. Artists and writers, however, challenged the cultural impulse to make ......
In The Human in Bits, Kris Cohen examines black abstractionist painting to demonstrate how race and computation are intimately entangled with the personal computer's graphic user interface. He shows how the personal computer and the graphical field of its screen meant to transform the human by transforming what environments humans were to labor ......
In The Human in Bits, Kris Cohen examines black abstractionist painting to demonstrate how race and computation are intimately entangled with the personal computer's graphic user interface. He shows how the personal computer and the graphical field of its screen meant to transform the human by transforming what environments humans were to labor ......
Art at the Crossroads: The Surprising Aesthetics of the Texas Panhandle underscores the striking richness of art stories about the Texas Panhandle-a strange and wondrous place, where old and new, tradition and innovation are constantly in productive tension. East meets West; Midwest meets Southwest; cars and trains and planes have long connected ......
Okwui Enwezor is widely regarded as a leader among the brilliant curators who emerged in the 1990s to set agendas for understanding the global expansiveness of contemporary art. Among his pathfinding exhibitions were the second Johannesburg Biennial (1997), the paradigm-shifting Documenta 11 (2002), Archive Fever (2008), and Postwar (2016). In ......
In this provocative and intensely personal new book of essays about love and language, desire and drama, reminiscence, change, and fandom, William J. Simmons takes up Eve Sedgwick's reparative reading as a challenge to empirical and taxonomical approaches to art, music, and film and instead promotes new ways of discussing them that create ......
