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Yumeji Modern

Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan

By Nozomi Naoi

The hugely popular Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) is an emblematic figure of Japan’s rapidly changing cultural milieu in the early twentieth century. His graphic works include leftist and antiwar illustrations in socialist bulletins, wrenching...

Citizens of Beauty

Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China

By Louise Edwards

In the early twentieth century China’s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew...

Proud Raven, Panting Wolf

Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks

By Emily L. Moore

Among Southeast Alaska’s best-known tourist attractions are its totem parks, showcases for monumental wood sculptures by Tlingit and Haida artists. Although the art form is centuries old, the parks date back only to the waning...

Great Qing

Painting in China, 1644-1911

By Claudia Brown

Addressing the previous lack of a comprehensive English-language study of Qing painting, art historian Claudia Brown’s account ranges from the tumultuous Ming–Qing transition to the end of imperial rule. In response to omissions in previous...

Continuum

Native North American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

By Gaylord Torrence, W. Richard West Jr., Stephanie Fox Knappe

This landmark publication brings North American Indigenous art to the fore with the presentation of 280 objects from the culturally and aesthetically rich collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. More than two-thirds of the...

New Deal Art in the Northwest

The WPA and Beyond

By Margaret E. Bullock

From December 1933 to February 1943, as part of a sprawling economic stimulus package, four federal programs hired artists to create public artworks and provide art-making opportunities to millions of Americans. When this initiative abruptly...

The Cycle of Life in the Paintings of Thai Artist Pichai Nirand

By Philip Constable

The paintings of contemporary Thai artist Pichai Nirand (b. 1936) are a vivid exploration of the interplay between Thailand’s Buddhist roots and its modern aspirations and struggles. Pichai engages fully with the world and belief...

Defining Dvāravatī

By Anna Bennett, Hunter Watson

The earliest phase of Thai history is an exciting but little understood period that bridged the gap between protohistory and the fully developed historical period. Ten international scholars examine the inception of the Dvāravatī period...

Protecting Asia’s Heritage

Yesterday and Tomorrow

By The Siam Society Under Royal Patronage

Asian activists, organizers, critics, teachers, artists, and entrepreneurs have become passionately involved in protecting Asia’s heritage. In this book, twelve principal authors from eleven of the region’s countries present their experience of what has been...

Troubling Borders

An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora

By Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Mariam B. Lam, Kathy L. Nguyen

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what...

Where Dragon Veins Meet

The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe

By Stephen H. Whiteman

In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain...

Eulogy for Burying a Crane and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy

By Lei Xue

Eulogy for Burying a Crane (Yi he ming) is perhaps the most eccentric piece in China’s calligraphic canon. Apparently marking the burial of a crane, the large inscription, datable to 514 CE, was once carved...

What the Emperor Built

Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming

By Aurelia Campbell

One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor...

Form and Relation

Contemporary Native Ceramics

By Jami C. Powell, Anya Montiel, Sequoia Miller, Courtney Leonard, and Morgan E. Freeman

Form and Relation showcases the versatility of ceramics and its many forms through the work of seven contemporary Indigenous artists from across what is now the United States. Bringing together recent acquisitions, commissioned works, and...

Jacob Lawrence

The American Struggle

By Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Austen Barron Bailly

This publication sets the precedent for the next generation of Lawrence scholars and studies in modern and contemporary discourse. The American Struggle explores Jacob Lawrence’s radical way of transforming history into art by looking at...

Taking to the Air

An Illustrated History of Flight

By Lily Ford

The possibilities of flight have long fascinated us. Each innovation captivated a broad public, from those who gathered to witness winged medieval visionaries jumping from towers, to those who tuned in to watch the moon...

"Something Over Something Else"

Romare Bearden's Profile Series

By Stephanie Mayer Heydt, Robert G. O'Meally, Rachael Z. Delue, Paul Devlin, and Ruth Fine

In November 1977, The New Yorker published a feature-length biography of artist Romare Bearden by Calvin Tomkins as part of its “Profiles” series. The essay, titled Profile: Putting Something Over Something Else (using Bearden’s words...

Climate Change and the Art of Devotion

Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850

By Sugata Ray

In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, Sugata Ray...

Becoming Mary Sully

Toward an American Indian Abstract

By Philip J. Deloria

Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was the great-granddaughter of respected nineteenth-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who captured the personalities of America’s first generation of celebrities (including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill)....

Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains

Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas

By Nachiket Chanchani

From approximately the third century BCE through the thirteenth century CE, the remote mountainous landscape around the glacial sources of the Ganga (Ganges) River in the Central Himalayas in northern India was transformed into a...