Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery by
Presenting new work by American artist Kehinde Wiley, as he explores the European landscape tradition through film and painting The American artist Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) is best known for his spectacular portraits of African Americans with knowing references to the grand European tradition of painting. He was commissioned in 2017 to paint Barack Obama, becoming the first Black artist to paint an official portrait of a president of the United States. His work makes reference to old master paintings by positioning contemporary Black sitters in the pose of the original historical figures, raising issues of power and identity, and the absence or relegation of Black and minority-ethnic figures within European art. For his first collaboration with a major UK gallery, Wiley will depart from portraiture to explore the European landscape tradition through the medium of film and painting, casting Black Londoners from the streets of Soho. His new works will explore European Romanticism and its focus on epic scenes of oceans and mountains, drawing inspiration from the National Gallery's masterpieces in landscape and seascape. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London (December 10, 2021-April 18, 2022)
Nature's Nation by
A groundbreaking ecocritical exploration of American art that examines the complex and evolving relationship between art and the environment Public awareness of environmental issues has never been greater, nor has the need for imagining more sustainable and ethical habits of human action and thought, including environmentally informed ways of understanding art history. This multidisciplinary book offers the first broad ecocritical review of American art and examines the environmental contexts of artistic practice from the colonial period to the present day. Tracing how visions of the environment have changed from the Native-European encounter to the emergence of modern ecological activism, more than a dozen scholars and practitioners discuss how artists have both responded to and actively instigated changes in ecological understanding. Far-reaching in its interpretive approach, Nature's Nation looks at artworks across genres and media--including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, decorative arts, and video--revealing important new discoveries about creative encounters with environmental history and politics through materials, techniques, subjects, and ideas. The book features work by more than one hundred artists, from Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Cole, and Winslow Homer to Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Providing a fascinating and timely reframing of more than three centuries of American art, this volume is a powerful example of how greater ecological consciousness can expand and enrich the discipline of art history.
Infowhelm by
How do artists and writers engage with environmental knowledge in the face of overwhelming information about catastrophe? What kinds of knowledge do the arts produce when addressing climate change, extinction, and other environmental emergencies? What happens to scientific data when it becomes art? In Infowhelm, Heather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in an age of climate crisis and information overload. Houser argues that the infowhelm--a state of abundant yet contested scientific information--is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises. Infowhelm analyzes how artists transform the techniques of the sciences into aesthetic material, repurposing data on everything from butterfly migration to oil spills and experimenting with data collection, classification, and remote sensing. Houser traces how artists ranging from novelist Barbara Kingsolver to digital memorialist Maya Lin rework knowledge traditions native to the sciences, entangling data with embodiment, quantification with speculation, precision with ambiguity, and observation with feeling. Their works provide new ways of understanding environmental change while also questioning traditional distinctions between types of knowledge. Bridging the environmental humanities, digital media studies, and science and technology studies, this timely book reveals the importance of artistic medium and form to understanding environmental issues and challenges our assumptions about how people arrive at and respond to environmental knowledge.
Lois and Franziska Weinberger: the Mobile Gardens by
The internationally renowned collaborative duo Lois & Franziska Weinberger have played a key role in contemporary debates about sustainability, art and nature. This edition presents 60 color images of their public works from the past 30 years, which hinge on the idea of a garden as a "perfectly provisional realm."
Nature by
Contemporary artists' radical investigations of nature, juxtaposed with the eclectic scientific and philosophical sources that inform their art.Nature, as both subject and object, has been repeatedly rejected and reclaimed by artists over the last half century. With the dislocation of disciplinary boundaries in visual culture, art that is engaged with nature has also forged connections with a new range of scientific, historical, and philosophical ideas. Developing technologies make our interventions into natural systems both increasingly refined and profound. Advances in biological and telecommunication technology continually modify the way we present ourselves. So too are artistic representations of nature (human and otherwise) being transformed. This anthology addresses these issues by considering how the rise of transdisciplinary practices in the postwar era allowed for new kinds of artistic engagement with nature. These include the postminimalist inscriptions associated with Land art; environmentally engaged practices designed to propose novel forms of stewardship; and more recent projects concerned with relationships between the most subtle and minute components of life and the large-scale appearance of the world. These projects unsettle the most basic operations of "natural" personhood and identity. Including a wide range of writings by and about artists, juxtaposed with influential texts from diverse theoretical bases, this collection provides an overview of the eclectic scientific and philosophical sources that inform contemporary art's investigations of nature.
Radical Nature by
Radical Nature is a major exhibition bringing together artists across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet. The beauty and wonder of nature have provided inspiration for artists and architects for centuries. Since the 1960s, the increasingly evident degradation of the natural world and the effects of climate change have brought a new urgency to their responses. The exhibition and this accompanying book draw on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. Works by pioneering figures such as the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson are presented alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners including Heather and Ivan Morison, R&Sie (n), Philippe Rahm and Simon Starling. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Radical Nature at Barbican Art Gallery, London, 19 June - 18 October 2009. English text.
Design Futuring by
Sustainability is now a buzzword both among professionals and scholars. However, though climate change and resource depletion are now widely recognised by business as major challenges, and while new practices like 'green design' have emerged, efforts towards change remain weak and fragmented. Exposing these limitations, Design Futuring systematically presents ideas and methods for Design as an expanded ethical and professional practice. Design Futuring argues that responding to ethical, political, social and ecological concerns now requires a new type of practice which recognises design's importance in overcoming a world made unsustainable. Illustrated throughout with international case material, Design Futuring presents the author's ground-breaking ideas in a coherent framework, focusing specifically on the ways in which concerns for ethics and sustainability can change the practice of Design for the 21st Century. Design Futuring - a pathfinding text for the new era - extends far beyond Design courses and professional practice and will be invaluable also to students and practitioners of Architecture, the Creative Arts, Business and Management.
The Responsible Object by
Within the design discipline, calls for sustainability and social responsibility have become some of the most common rallying cries of the past decade, generating countless new products, materials and technologies--all designed to change the course of our future. Adjectives like "sustainable," "green" and "eco" describe this new wave of socially committed design. But though today's conditions are urgent and particular, the ideologies behind these new products are often not totally new, but rather a part of design history. Contemporary sustainable design is just the newest chapter of a story that stretches back throughout the previous centuries. The Responsible Object presents a selected history of socially committed design strategies within the Western design tradition of roughly the last 150 years, from William Morris to Victor Papanek, and from VKhUTEMAS to FabLab. It includes about 20 interstitial mini-posters with slogans from the text, printed on different colored papers.
Green Patriot Posters by
A graphic rallying cry for ecological awareness, this collection contains 50 tear-out reproductions of posters based on the theme of sustainability by a variety of contemporary artists. Full color.
Textile Visionaries by
Technologized textiles and sustainable fabrics are among the most innovative designed today, and together they are driving the rest of the industry dramatically forward. Many designers are now integrating hi-tech fabrics, such as protective and impact-resistant textiles, or cellulose fabrics, with groundbreaking results. Embracing new processes such as biomimicry, they bridge the gap between art, design, technology, and sustainability more than any other material. This book shows how the development of fabrics today is immersed in technology, sustainability, and innovation. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in contemporary textile design.
Anthropocene / Edward Burtynsky with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. by
Anthropocene is the newest book by Edward Burtynsky to document human destruction of the earth on a geological scale. In photos as beautiful as they are disconcerting, Burtynsky explores issues such as extinction (large-scale burning of elephant tusks to disrupt illegal trade and the black market, the plight of the last white rhino), technofossils (Nigerian landfi ll sites entirely of plastic, massive concrete tetrapods to protect Chinese coastline from erosion), and terraforming (mines and industrial agriculture). Conta ining specially commissioned poems by Margaret Atwood published here for the fi rst time, a statement by Burtynsky and a range of essays, Anthropocene presents compelling artistic and scientifi c responses to these urgent topics. The book is one part of the larger "Anthropocene" project, a multi-disciplinary body of work with fi lmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier which includes a major traveling exhibition, documentary fi lm and interactive website. Its starting point is the research of the Anthropocene Working Group, an international body of scientists advocating to change the name of our present geological epoch, Holocene, to Anthropocene-the period where human activity dominates climate and environmental change. Including images of the video components and augmented reality experiences from the exhibition, the book, like the overall project, combines traditional and new lens-based media in an innovative and dynamic expression of humanity's profound and lasting changes on the planet.
Art Nature Dialogues by
Art Nature Dialogues offers interviews with artists working with, in, and around nature and the environment. The interviews explore art practices, ecological issues, and values as they pertain to the siting of works, the use of materials, and the ethics of artmaking. John K. Grande includes interviews with Hamish Fulton, David Nash, Bob Verschueren, herman de vries, Alan Sonfist, Nils-Udo, Michael Singer, Patrick Dougherty, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and others.
Planetary Cinema by
The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning the media and film culture of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Panoramas, giant globes, world exhibitions, photography and stereography: all promoted and hinged on the idea of a world made whole and newly visible. When it emerged, cinema did not simply contribute to this effervescent globalism so much as become its most significant and enduring manifestation. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of that media culture can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.
Artists Activating Sustainability by
Artists Activating Sustainability: the Oregon Story examines the way in which the artists within specific communities, against the background of landscape and history, reveal concepts of sustainability that help us broaden our knowledge of what is needed to create a sustainable world.
Ends of the Earth by
The fascinating and generously illustrated catalogue documents the history of Land art from its emergence during the early 1960s through 1974. A companion volume to the first large-scale exhibition on Land art, this book traces the emergence of the artistic impulses to use the earth as material, land as medium, and to locate works in remote sites, beyond familiar art contexts. Ends of the Earth challenges many myths about Land art-that it was primarily a North American phenomenon, that it was foremost a sculptural practice, and that it exceeds the confines of the art system. Essays by leading young scholars will offer new insights into Land art's emergence, including its intrinsic connection to media, its dreams of an elsewhere, the attraction of wastelands, and the problems inherent in a historical evaluation of site-specific or ephemeral art. The book will also include a series of reflections from the major curators, critics, and dealers who helped to make Land art both as work and discourse in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nick Brandt: the Day May Break by
The Day May Break, photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, is the first part of a global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction. The people in the photos were all affected by climate change, displaced by cyclones and years-long droughts. Photographed at five sanctuaries, the animals were rescues that can never be re-wilded. As a result, it was safe for human strangers to be close to them, photographed so close to them, within the same frame. The fog on location is the unifying visual, as we increasingly find ourselves in a kind of limbo, a once-recognizable world now fading from view. However, in spite of their loss, these people and animals are the survivors. And therein lies possibility and hope.