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Art of the Northwest Coast

By Aldona Jonaitis

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often...

Monet at Étretat

By Chiyo Ishikawa

One understudied aspect of the life and works of Oscar-Claude Monet (1840–1926) is the artist’s engagement with the town of Étretat on the Normandy coast of France during the mid-1880s. Monet traveled there twice for...

Ancient Egypt and Early China

State, Society, and Culture

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Although they existed more than a millennium apart, the great civilizations of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1548–1086 BCE) and Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) shared intriguing similarities. Both were centered around major, flood-prone rivers—the...

Re-visualizing Slavery

Visual Sources about Slavery in Asia

By Nancy Jouwe, Wim Manuhutu, Matthias van Rossum, Merve Tosun

In Re-visualizing Slavery, historians, heritage specialists, and cultural scientists shed new light on the history of slavery in Asia by centering visual sources—specifically, Dutch paintings, watercolors and drawings from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The...

Faces from the Interior

The North American Portraits of Karl Bodmer

By Toby Jurovics, Scott Manning Stevens, Lisa Strong, Kristine K. Ronan, and Annika K. Johnson

In the early nineteenth century, Prince Maximilian of Wied traveled the Missouri River to uncover what he called “the natural face of North America”—its landscapes, flora and fauna, and Native inhabitants. Among his small party...

Opening Kailasanatha

The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

By Padma Kaimal

Stone figures hardened by ascetic discipline and heroic effort face north in deep shadow. There they meet the gazes of the same gods and goddesses but with gentler bodies enacting grace, warmth, seduction, and marriage,...

Painful Beauty

Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

By Megan A. Smetzer

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively...

The Social Life of Inkstones

Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China

By Dorothy Ko

An inkstone, a piece of polished stone no bigger than an outstretched hand, is an instrument for grinding ink, an object of art, a token of exchange between friends or sovereign states, and a surface...

Shifting Grounds

Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art

By Kate Morris

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers—and settlers—into...

Christian Krohg's Naturalism

By Øystein Sjåstad

The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852–1925) is best known for creating highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s and for serving as a mentor to Edvard...

Each/Other

Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger

By John P. Lukavic. with contributions by Jami Powell and Namita Gupta Wiggers

Each/Other includes major pieces in diverse media by artists Marie Watt (Seneca and German-Scots) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European) and their collaborators. The collection explores their engagement with community, materials,...

Latinx Photography in the United States

A Visual History

By Elizabeth Ferrer

Whether at UFW picket lines in California’s Central Valley or capturing summertime street life in East Harlem Latinx photographers have documented fights for dignity and justice as well as the daily lives of ordinary people....

Alden Mason

Paintings

By Roger Hull. with essays by Regina Hackett and Robert Ayers. Foreword by Chuck Close

Born in Everett, Washington, painter Alden Mason (1919–2014) earned his MFA from the University of Washington in 1947, launching what would become an extraordinary career as both artist and teacher. He reinvented his style several...

Totem Pole Carving

Norman Tait, Bringing a Log to Life

By Vickie Jensen

In 1985, photographer and writer Vickie Jensen spent three months with Nisga’a artist Norman Tait and his crew of young carvers as they transformed a raw cedar log into a forty-two-foot totem pole for the...

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast

By Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Aldona Jonaitis

Inseparable from its communities, Northwest Coast art functions aesthetically and performatively beyond the scope of non-Indigenous scholarship, from demonstrating kinship connections to manifesting spiritual power. Contributors to this volume foreground Indigenous understandings in recognition of...

Making Kantha, Making Home

Women at Work in Colonial Bengal

By Pika Ghosh

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use...

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...

A Fashionable Century

Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing

By Rachel Silberstein

Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women’s participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women’s work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an...

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...

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...