UC Press - Art New Titles

Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti by Elizabeth C. Childs

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In the late nineteenth century Tahiti embodied Western ideas of an earthly Paradise, a primitive utopia distant geographically and culturally from the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque. Stimulated by fin de siècle longings for the exotic, a few adventurous artists sought out this Eden on the South Seas--but what they found did not always live up to the Eden of their imagination. Bringing three of these figures together in comparative perspective for the first time, Vanishing Paradise offers a fresh take on the modernist primitivism of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the nostalgic exoticism of the American John LaFarge, and the elite tourism of the American writer Henry Adams....
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Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art by Philip Ursprung

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

This innovative study of two of the most important artists of the twentieth century links the art practices of Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in their attempts to test the limits of art--both what it is and where it is. Ursprung provides a sophisticated yet accessible analysis, placing the two artists firmly in the art world of the 1960s as well as in the art historical discourse of the following decades. Although their practices were quite different, they both extended the studio and gallery into desert landscapes, abandoned warehouses, industrial sites, train stations, and other spaces....
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Surfaces: A History by Joseph A. Amato

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Human beings are surrounded by surfaces: from our skin to faces, to the walls and streets of our homes and cities, to the images, books, and screens of our cultures and civilizations, to the natural world and what we imagine beyond. In this thought-provoking and richly textured book, Joseph A. Amato traces the human relationship with surfaces from the deep history of human evolution, which unfolded across millennia, up to the contemporary world. Fusing his work on Dust and On Foot, he shows how, in the last two centuries, our understanding, creation, control, and manipulation of surfaces has become truly revolutionary--in both scale and volume....
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Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Updated Edition with a New Preface by Grant H. Kester

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Some of the most innovative art of the past decade has been created far outside conventional galleries and museums. In a parking garage in Oakland, California; on a pleasure boat on the Lake of Zurich in Switzerland; at a public market in Chiang Mai, Thailand--artists operating at the intersection of art and cultural activism have been developing new forms of collaboration with diverse audiences and communities. Their projects have addressed such issues as political conflict in Northern Ireland, gang violence on Chicago's West Side, and the problems of sex workers in Switzerland....
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Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad by Glenn Willumson

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The construction of the transcontinental railroad (1865-1869) marked a milestone in United States history, symbolizing both the joining of the country's two coasts and the taming of its frontier wilderness by modern technology. But it was through the power of images--and especially the photograph--that the railroad attained its iconic status. Iron Muse provides a unique look at the production, distribution, and publication of images of the transcontinental railroad: from their use as an official record by the railroad corporations, to their reproduction in the illustrated press and travel guides, and finally to their adaptation to direct sales and albums in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries....
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Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia by Jinah Kim

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In considering medieval illustrated Buddhist manuscripts as sacred objects of cultic innovation, Receptacle of the Sacred explores how and why the South Asian Buddhist book-cult has survived for almost two millennia to the present. A book manuscript should be understood as a form of sacred space: a temple in microcosm, not only imbued with divine presence but also layered with the memories of many generations of users. Jinah Kim argues that illustrating a manuscript with Buddhist imagery not only empowered it as a three-dimensional sacred object, but also made it a suitable tool for the spiritual transformation of medieval Indian practitioners....
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