Category Archives: education

Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer

By Liz Lerman (2011)
In this wide-ranging collection of essays and articles, Liz Lerman reflects on her life-long exploration of dance as a vehicle for human insight and understanding of the world around us. Lerman has been described by the Washington Post as “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art.” Here, she combines broad outlooks on culture and society with practical applications and accessible stories. Her expansive scope encompasses the craft, structure, and inspiration that bring theatrical works to life as well as the applications of art in fields as diverse as faith, aging, particle physics, and human rights law. Offering readers a gentle manifesto describing methods that bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world, this is the perfect book for anyone curious about the possible role for art in politics, science, community, motherhood, and the media.

Posted in art, autobiography, education

Art Critiques: A Guide

By James Elkins (2011)
This is a guidebook for art students at the college level (BA, BFA, MFA, PhD). “Elkins introduces refreshing commonsense in the tired and tiresome activity of the critique of art works by students. A dissection geared to avoid or delay a future autopsy of the field, the book uses case studies that teach as much about ‘how to’ as they do about ‘how not to.’ A nice and often funny exercise in debunking, Art Critiques: A Guide is also a fascinating analysis of the successes and failures in communication among people.” -Luis Camnitzer

Posted in art, education

Critical Response Process

By Liz Lerman and John Borstel (2003)
Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process is a multi-step, group system for giving and receiving useful feedback on creative processes and artistic works-in-progress. This book offers a detailed introduction to the Process, beginning with its three roles and four core steps.

Posted in art, education, theory

Innovations in Art and Design Series

Art and Visual Culture series from Routledge:

Network Art: Practices and Positions (2005)

Invisible Connections: Dance, Choreography and Internet Communities (2005)

Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research (2005)

New Practices – New Pedagogies: A Reader (2005)

New Visions In Performance (2004)

Digital Creativity: A Reader (2002)

Posted in art, culture, design, education, history, media, theory

New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader

Edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas W. Keenan (2005)
A comprehensive anthology of original and classic essays that explore the tensions of old and new in digital culture. Leading international media scholars and cultural theorists interrogate new media like the Internet, digital video, and MP3s against the backdrop of earlier media such as television, film, photography, and print. The essays provide new benchmarks for evaluating all those claims–political, social, ethical–made about the digital age. Committed to historical research and to theoretical innovation, they suggest that in the light of digital programmability, seemingly forgotten moments in the history of the media we glibly call old can be rediscovered and transformed. The many topics explored in provocative volume include websites, webcams, the rise and fall of dotcom mania, Internet journalism, the open source movement, and computer viruses.

Posted in art, education, history, media, technology, theory

Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man

By Joseph Beuys (1993)
Joseph Beuys, artist and scholar, was the most influential thinker among artists of the postwar generation. He inspired the avant-garde with his impassioned appeals for democratic anarchy, and actually founded a string of ‘free universities’ across Europe. His credo was “Every man is an artist.” In 1974, he accepted an invitation to visit the U.S. His travels too him to New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis, and he called the trip – fact an extended performance piece – “Energy Plan for the Western Man.” Beuys’ writings have never before been collected in any language, and most of the interviews and speeches in Joseph Beuys in America have never before appeared in book form.

Posted in art, counterculture, education, history, interview, myth, philosophy, politics, science

Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse

By Katherine and Michael McCoy (1990)
A book that documents Cranbrook’s Design Department faculty, student, and alumni work from 1980-1990. Although not defined by a style, the Cranbrook design philosophy has been influential in product, graphic and furniture design. Products have been treated as sensual objects to be interpreted. “We’ve tried to recognize that products carry the mythology of the culture,” said Michael McCoy, chairman of the design department with his wife, Katherine.

Posted in art, Cranbrook, design, education, media, semiotics, theory, typography

Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision, 1925-1950

Edited by Robert Clark and Andrea Belloli (1984)
As Neil Harris explains in one of the book’s most interesting essays, Cranbrook derived from the arts and crafts movement that started in mid- 19th-century England as a reaction against shoddy industrial output and that, spreading speedily through northern Europe, resulted in the foundation of several schools aimed at reforming design by relating it more to art and life.

The Cranbrook complex, consisting of a church, schools for children, residences, studios and workshops, took about nine years to complete, by which time it had become – not an art school, but, in the words of the architect Eliel Saarinen, ”a working place for creative arts.” The emphasis, says Robert Judson Clark in his essay, was more on ”place, people and experience than on curriculum and methods.” Still, during World War II, this shifted to more orthodox concerns – credits, degrees and specific courses in, for instance, industrial design.

The influence of the Saarinens diminishes as the first generation of Cranbrook students comes of age, in the 1940s. The students include Ray and Charles Eames, represented by architecture and furniture; Florence Knoll, with interiors, and Harry Bertoia, with welded-metal sculptures.

Posted in architecture, art, Cranbrook, design, education, history

Whereishere

By Scott and Laurie Makela (1998)
What is driving communication and what are the real challenges facing designers today? Whereishere presents a radical new take on both these issues, breaks from the orthodox approach to understanding two dimensional design. Leading graphic design studios are represented including Bruce Mau and Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Posted in art, Cranbrook, design, education, media, photography, typography

Printmaking in America: Collaborative Prints and Presses, 1960-1990

Edited by Trudy Hansen (1995)
Curators Hansen, Joann Moser, David Mickenberg, and Barry Walker chronicle the growth of American printmaking from early utilitarian works through the establishment of printmaking as a fine art. The work describes developments in technique but more importantly addresses the complex, cooperative process that was born in innovative printshops such as the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Mickenberg’s chapter on nonprofit and university-affiliated workshops provides refreshing insight into how the financial support of large foundations helped found the nonprofit printshops. Not only did such workshops pool the talents of printmakers, but they helped create new markets for what had previously been considered a dying art. The authors also attribute the rebirth of printmaking in the United States to several women and minority artists and printers; however, the most recognized prints, created by the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, have not been overlooked.