Monday
15Jun

#A-030

Notes at the Easel: A Working Practice
Laura Eklund

I propose to write a multi-genre book that includes journal entries, poems about art, prose poems that all tie around the artistic process of painting and being a visual artist.

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Monday
16Mar

#A-029

The Rape of the Rose
Francine Koslow Miller

The Rape of the Rose will chronicle the pillaging of the collection of a crown jewel of contemporary art -- the Rose Art Museum on the campus of Brandeis University -- in response to the University’s current economic crisis. This project -- intended to serve as a memorial and warning to other university museums -- focuses on the six months of protest that preceded the eventual shutting of the Rose’s doors as a public institution on May 17, 2009, in preparation for the sell-off of the core of its 7,000 work collection.

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Thursday
26Feb

#A-028

September 2009

For and Against: Views on the Infamous 1913 Armory Show

For and Against is the frank and engaging account of the historic 1913 Armory Show’s original reception. The included essays capture the full range of impassioned opinion both for and against Modern Art's greatest works upon their first American showing. First published, remarkably, by the show’s organizers and sold at its Chicago venue, For and Against has long been out of print, but this new, expanded edition brings the Armory story and the birth of modern art in America, to life once again.

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Thursday
26Feb

#A-027

September 2009

The New Spirit: Pamphlets from the Infamous 1913 Armory Show

The New Spirit collects four pamphlets originally produced and sold at the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art--otherwise known as the Armory Show. With excerpts from Gauguin’s provocative Tahitian journal, Élie Faure’s enthralling essay on Cézanne, and more, each pamphlet offers an enduringly original approach to some of modern art’s most interesting and provocative artists. Long out of print, this new, expanded edition reintroduces readers to artists and ideas that remain as powerful today as they were nearly a century ago.

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Thursday
26Feb

#A-026

September 2009

Venus
Auguste Rodin

“Behold the marvel of marvels!” —Auguste Rodin

Venus is the renowned sculptor, Auguste Rodin's brief, uniquely passionate ode to one of his medium's great masterpieces, the Venus de Milo.

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Thursday
26Feb

#A-025

September 2009

Whistler As I Knew Him
Mortimer Menpes

“In reading this remarkable book, with its exaggerations and distortions of fact, its cutting satire, but withal its under-current of real affection for and appreciation of, its subject, it is impossible to help wondering what the effect of it would have been upon Whistler himself had it been published during his lifetime.” —The International Studio, 1904

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Sunday
22Feb

#A-024

October 2009

Thoughts on Landscape:
Collected Writings and Interviews

Frank Gohlke

Frank Gohlke has been a leading figure in American landscape photography for thirty years. Photographing grain silos in Minnesota, the aftermaths of a tornado in Texas and the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington, and a river’s quiet course in Massachusetts, his is a career of deep, unbroken contemplation of the land, and of our livelihood and survival within it. And for nearly as long as Gohlke has been photographing the landscape, he has also been writing about it.

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Wednesday
18Feb

#A-023

The Light's Beloved: Poems of Mary in Paintings
Judith Sornberger

This collection of poems addresses and seeks to interact with paintings depicting the woman called the Virgin Mary. Although the New Testament offers scant information of Mary's life, artists of subsequent ages haven't seemed to be able to get enough of painting her, relying on apocryphal sources, folk tales, and their own imaginations to fill in the blanks. The forty or so poems in this collection engage with Mary as both historical woman and mythical figure as depicted in paintings. The collection begins with her girlhood, and winds through her roles as the chosen one, the young mother, the pieta, and the queen of heaven.

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Monday
02Feb

#A-022

Seeing Painting
Nevin Mercede

Seeing Painting explores historical, scientific and socially relational developments that contribute to what Painting offers as twenty-first century expressive cultural communication. Visual practices are its story’s main characters—Painting, Photography, Printmaking, Drawing—as these are the collective enterprise of countless artists and the historical events that shaped them. Seeing Painting doesn’t focus on specific materials or build through progressively challenging techniques, instead it presents an expanded discussion on the interwoven meanings inherent in Painting’s constituent materiality: the physical and conceptual materials, the types of time and space their exploration requires, and how a painting’s expressions emerge interdependently within a larger cultural arena. I call this Painting’s gestalt, meaning that its whole is larger than the sum of its parts.

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Monday
02Feb

#A-021

House of Pictures
Elizabeth Bernays

House of Pictures is a series of essays, individually inspired by pictures that hang on the walls of a home in Tucson, Arizona. The essays combine memoir, philosophy, and some elements about the picture. Two themes link the essays: the role of art in the home, and what is the meaning of home.

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Tuesday
06Jan

#A-020

October 2009

Nostalgia's Thread: Ten Poems on Norman Rockwell Paintings
Randall R. Freisinger

Accessible and engaging, the poems in Randall R. Freisinger's Nostalgia's Thread are provocative reconsiderations of the American experience as depicted in ten of Norman Rockwell's best known paintings. Arguably the only serious collection of poems inspired by Norman Rockwell's images, they were conceived just prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and written in their wake. These poems remind us that visual art is never static, the beholder's eye never innocent. They bear witness to the fact that each cultural era must inevitably reinterpret its rich artistic inheritance within the context of its current collective experience.

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Tuesday
06Jan

#A-019

Daring Daughters/Defiant Dreams
Pamela L. Laskin

Daring Daughters/Defiant Dreams focuses on the work of Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party", and follows the lives of the historical and mythological women in history, while using the famous women as catalysts to inspire my own life (Ie: A Woman's Right is inspired by Susan B. Anthony, but I use her life to help explain the ambivalence I feel about my mentally ill mother).The book begins with the Primordial Goddesses and ends in the 20th Century, though the last part of the collection is primarily focused on my own narratives. I visted Through the Flower in Belen, New Mexico, this past summer, in order to help me with the book.

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Tuesday
06Jan

#A-018

Holy Family
Alice Bolstridge

Holy Family is a novel about an aging unschooled artist, Amelia Hardy, the narrator. Not religious, she is nevertheless fascinated from childhood by the Holy Family as a subject for art. She lives in the family farmhouse where she grew up and takes care of Justin, her youngest brother, mentally disabled all his adult life with schizophrenia. Justin’s care becomes increasingly difficult, and her other siblings—Eliza, Thurston, Willard, and Carl—urge her to give up his care and place him in a nursing home. Amelia’s distress about Justin’s care is fed by memories of other major conflicts in the family and community over three generations. These conflicts fuel her art work which is described throughout the novel.

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Thursday
15May

#A-017

Debuts September 13, 2009
at the Brooklyn Book Festival!

Museum Legs
Amy Whitaker

If you’ve ever considered going to an art museum and then thought, errr, I’ll do something else… If you’ve ever arrived at one and left a little glazed and confused… If you’ve ever thought, I might read an eight-page article about art museums but not a whole book… Then this is your story.

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Monday
05May

#A-016

Re:Considering Conceptual Art
Ursula Meyer and Owen Smith

"[O]ne doesn't want to insist that the conceptualist movement is without point. It may, indeed, be heralding the complete collapse of art into philosophy. Several possibilities suggest themselves. Perhaps we should now leave art to philosophers who would seem to be, on this thesis, especially well suited to the tasks of "framing propositions," "advancing investigations," "initiating inquiries," etc. Or perhaps we should recognize that a Hegelian dialectical apocalypse is coming to pass, and that the apologia pro vita artis conceptualis documented in this anthology signals the death of art." --The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1974

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