Category Archives: culture
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
bell hooks (1994)
Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.
Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide for a World in Constant Motion
Liz Lerman (2026)
A sequel to Hiking the Horizontal, Liz Lerman’s Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide for a World in Constant Motion is a choreographic manifesto for living in motion—part memoir, part creative toolkit, part philosophical inquiry. Written in a series of essays, from single-paragraph meditations to expansive chapters, the book weaves together personal anecdotes, creative theory, and movement-based wisdom. Lerman draws on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to frame a central question: how do we hold both shape and momentum—form and change—at once?
An Indigenous Present
Edited by Jeffrey Gibson (2023)
This landmark volume is a gathering of Native North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, designers and more. Conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, a renowned artist of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, An Indigenous Present presents an increasingly visible and expanding field of Indigenous creative practice.
It centers individual practices, while acknowledging shared histories, to create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration. An Indigenous Present foregrounds transculturalism over affiliation and contemporaneity over outmoded categories.
Black, Queer, & Untold
Jon Key (2024)
Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who got him. So he started asking himself questions:
What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer? A Queer graphic designer? Someone from the South? Could his identity be communicated through a poster or a book? How could identity be archived in a design canon that has consistently erased contributions by designers who were not white, straight, and male?
In Black, Queer, & Untold, acclaimed designer and artist Jon Key answers these questions and manifests the book he and so many others wish they had when they were coming up. He pays tribute to the incredible designers, artists, and people who came before and provides them an enduring, reverential stage – and in so doing, gifts us a book that takes its place among the creative arts canon. before and provides them an enduring, reverential stage – and in so doing, gifts us a book that takes its place among the creative arts canon.
Seed Pods of Democracy
Democracy Poster Project (2024)
The Democracy Poster Project explores the value of democracy and human rights through the visual art medium of posters, and proposes ways that design can act as a voice for participation in society. The Democracy Poster Project team (director Moon Jung Jang, along with curators Kyungwon Kim and Yumi Kang) contacted designers, illustrators, and visual artists around the world who have consistently expressed interest in issues of democracy and human rights, and who could disseminate these messages concisely and accurately through poster work.
In response, 51 participating artists (or teams of artists) crafted messages in different visual languages, producing 100 new posters and generating accompanying texts.
Participating artists acutely point out the reality of democracy’s retreat across various times and spaces and constantly ask questions about the causes. In addition, they address the core values of democracy such as equality, diversity of existence, and minority human rights, as well as structural discrimination and violence against women, the right to movement of the disabled, the right to work in a humane environment, and the right of refugees and immigrants to be respected. Their thoughts and expressions about resistance to the advancement of democracy and human rights, freedom through struggle, and methods for open empathy and solidarity continue to form complex and solid links.
Participating artists include designers and visual artists who represent the voice of the here and now through their various works and exhibitions at major art museums, including Karo Akpokiere, Kim Albrecht, Jonathan Barnbrook, Melinda Beck, Diana Ejaita, Mark Gowing, Guerrilla Girls, High on Type, Saki Ho, Minho Kwon, Sang Mun, This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll, Garth Walker, Kateryna Korolevtseva, Elaine Lopez, Studio Rejane Dal Bello, and others from around the world. Participants also include illustrators of social and cultural issues for influential media outlets and organizations such as The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Amnesty International.
In addition, the writings of invited authors Jung Keun-Sik, Kim Sang-kyu, Keiko Sei, and Ezio Manzini have also been compiled to ponder the questions “How do we represent issues of violence in movements for democracy and human rights?” “What does it mean to visually remember a history of violence by the state, and what are the possibilities and limitations of such visual expression?” “Where is activism currently taking place in visual culture and today?” and “What can design do for democracy?”
Posted in art, culture, design, exhibition, politics
The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, heather ahtone, Joy Harjo, and Shana Bushyhead Condill (2023)
The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans brings together works by many of today’s most boldly innovative Native American artists. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, one of the leading artists and curators of her generation, has carefully chosen some fifty works across a diversity of practices—including weaving, beadwork, sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, performance, and video—that share the common thread of the land.
Posted in art, culture, environment, exhibition, history, myth
Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us
Legacy Russell (2024)
In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.
Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed Jet magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights.
Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how a citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. And the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.
Through imagery, memory and technology Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.
Posted in art, culture, history, media, photography, politics, printmaking, semiotics, technology, theory
Contact: Art and the Pull of Print
Jennifer L. Roberts (2024)
In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today.
The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond.
National Gallery of Art video lecture series:
Jennifer L. Roberts on Printmaking
Posted in art, culture, design, history, language, media, printmaking, technology, theory
Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music
Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards (2023)
Henry Threadgill recalls his childhood and upbringing in Chicago, his family life and education, and his brilliant career in music. Here are riveting recollections of the music scene in Chicago in the early 1960s, when Threadgill developed his craft among friends and schoolmates who would go on to form the core of the highly influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM); the year and a half he spent touring with an evangelical preacher in the mid-1960s; his military service in Vietnam—a riveting tale in itself, but also representative of an under-recognized aspect of jazz history, given the number of musicians in Threadgill’s generation who served in the armed forces.
We appreciate his genius as he travels to the Netherlands, Venezuela, Trinidad, Sicily, and Goa enriching his art; immerses himself in the volatile downtown scene in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s; collaborates with choreographers, writers, and theater directors as well as an astonishing range of musicians, from AACM stalwarts (Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Leroy Jenkins), to Chicago bluesmen, downtown luminaries, and world music innovators; shares his impressions of the recording industry his perspectives on music education and the history of Black music in the United States; and, of course, accounts for his work with the various ensembles he has directed over the past five decades.
Pictures of the Floating World
Sarah E. Thompson (2022)
In this attractive volume, Sarah E. Thompson, curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, provides a highly readable overview of the cultural and artistic history of ukiyo-e, showcasing 120 exceptional prints from the museum’s world-class collection, by masters including Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. She explores each of the principal genres in turn: beauty and fashion, the kabuki theater, landscape, nature, history and literature, and fantasy.
Posted in art, culture, history, printmaking