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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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Hearts of Our People

Native Women Artists

By Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Teri Greeves

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists explores the artistic achievements of Native women and establishes their rightful place in the art world. This landmark book includes works of art from antiquity to the present,...

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...