Art - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry

Thu, 15 May 2008

Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry (2008)

Edited by Andrea R. Lewis

This unique book combines two catalogs in one. Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry represents the best of two juried exhibitions held at the Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio.

Beads have long been worn as jewelry, but in Bead International 2008 contemporary bead artists are shaking things up. From fine jewelry to loom weaving to sculpture, the sixty-eight pieces by fifty-one artists in this collection represent some of the most innovative and well-executed art in the modern beading world. Considering any pierced object to be a bead, pieces range in style from the traditional to the whimsical as they incorporate a variety of colors and materials. This vibrant collection will spark the reader’s creativity and broaden his or her perspective.

When the age-old art form of basketry is combined with contemporary visions and techniques, the result is the striking Beyond Basketry, a collection of sixty-five artworks created by forty-two artists from across the United States. The artworks represented in these beautiful color photographs will challenge the reader’s ideas of what constitutes a basket. All artworks are vessels made of woven materials, but the pieces explore a variety of sizes, colors, shapes, and techniques.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Bead+International+2008+%26+Beyond+Basketry.
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Edna Boies Hopkins

Sat, 01 Dec 2007

Edna Boies Hopkins (2007)
Strong in Character, Colorful in Expression

By Dominique H. Vasseur

Edna Boies Hopkins (1872–1937) is best known for her floral woodblock prints that range from delicate Japanese-inspired stylizations to boldly colored and progressively modernist works. In her brief twenty-year career, Hopkins produced seventy-four known woodblock prints, including figurative work and landscapes as well as floral compositions. This catalogue raisonné is the first in-depth study of this once well-known American artist. It illustrates all of Hopkins’s known prints, related drawings, and studies.

Born in Hudson, Michigan, Hopkins attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1895 to 1898. In 1899 she took classes with the influential artist Arthur Wesley Dow, an advocate of Japanese art. Following her marriage in 1904, Hopkins and her husband settled in Paris, where they remained until the outbreak of World War I. After returning to America, Hopkins became part of a small group of artists in Provincetown, whose innovations in woodblock printmaking have come to be known as the Provincetown print or the white line woodcut. In 1917, a visit to the Cumberland Falls region of Kentucky provided the inspiration for some of Hopkins’s most important prints which predate the work of American regionalist painters and printmakers by a decade or more.

In addition to the catalogue raisonné, Edna Boies Hopkins includes much new biographical research along with a census of her prints and a comprehensive list of her exhibitions.

Exhibition Dates
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH,
December 14, 2007–March 2, 2008

Springfield Museum of Art,
Springfield, OH, beginning March 2008

Provincetown Art Association and Museum,
Provincetown, MA, beginning June 2008

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Edna+Boies+Hopkins.
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Rookwood and the American Indian

Tue, 23 Oct 2007

Rookwood and the American Indian (2007)
Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Gardner Collection

By Anita J. Ellis and Susan Labry Meyn

The nation’s premier private collection of Rookwood art pottery featuring American Indian portraiture is on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum from October 2007 to January 2008. Rookwood and the American Indian: Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Gardner Collection is a remarkable exhibition catalogue that will be of interest well beyond the exhibition because of its unique subject matter. Fifty-two pieces produced by the Rookwood Pottery Company are showcased, many accompanied by black-and-white photographs of the American Indians portrayed by the ceramic artist. In addition, the catalogue includes a brief biography of each artist as well as curators’ comments about the Rookwood pottery and the Indian apparel seen in the portraits.

The catalogue also presents two essays. The first, “Enduring Encounters: Cincinnatians and American Indians to 1900,” by ethnologist and co-curator Susan Labry Meyn, describes American Indian activities in Cincinnati from the time of the first settlers to 1900 and relates these events to national policy, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Rookwood and the American Indian, by art historian Anita J. Ellis, concentrates on Rookwood’s fascination with the American Indian and the economic implications of producing that line.

Rookwood and the American Indian blends anthropology with art history to reveal the relationships between the white settlers and the Native Americans in general, between Cincinnati and the American Indian in particular, and ultimately between Rookwood artists and their Indian friends.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Rookwood+and+the+American+Indian.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Claim to the Country

Mon, 02 Jul 2007

Claim to the Country (2007)
The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd

By Pippa Skotnes

In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction and the death of their language, several San men and women told their stories to two pioneering colonial scholars in Cape Town, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. The narratives of these San (or Bushmen) were of the land, the rain, the history of the first people, and the origin of the moon and stars. These narratives were faithfully recorded and translated by Bleek and Lloyd, creating an archive of more than 13,000 pages including drawings, notebooks, maps, and photographs. Now residing in three main institutions—the University of Cape Town, the South African Museum, and the National Library of South Africa—this archive has recently been entered into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Lavishly illustrated, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek, created, compiled, and introduced by Pippa Skotnes, presents in book form and on an accompanying DVD all the notebook pages and drawings that comprise this remarkable archive. Contextualizing essays by well-known scholars, such as Nigel Penn, Eustacia Riley, and Anthony Traill, and a searchable index for all the narratives and contributors are included.

Through this remarkable collection, we can better understand what it means that the people who lived in southern Africa long before any new arrivals settled the country no longer survive through their language or culture of intellectual traditions, but only as text on a page. The Bleek-Lloyd archive is the San's surviving claim to the country.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Claim+to+the+Country.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve

Tue, 15 Nov 2005

Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve (2005)

By Ricky Clark

Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve includes early quilts brought from Connecticut to the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio and contemporary quilts, including one by a conservative Amish woman and another inspired by Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Ricky Clark, one of Ohio's foremost quilt historians, has assembled exquisite examples of calamanco, "T" quilts, and borderless pieced quilts to show the influence of Connecticut aesthetics and history on the making of early quilts in this region. Rich in color, detail, and inventiveness, and often beautifully designed, the quilts of this region commemorate community history, from town fundraisers of the 1890s to a quilt designed by a Lake Erie shipbuilder. Sections of the book include quilts made during the Civil War and for postwar veterans' organizations as well as military and presidential quilts that relate to the history of the Western Reserve.

Quilt design in Ohio has been celebrated in biennial exhibits, round-robin quilts, and most recently proudly painted on barns in rural Ohio. Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve, lavishly illustrated with forty color photos of quilts, launches the Ohio Quilt Series. A welcome addition to Ohio's cultural legacy, this book will interest the wider world of quilt and textile enthusiasts and historians.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Quilts+of+the+Ohio+Western+Reserve.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Bringing Modernism Home

Thu, 17 Feb 2005

Bringing Modernism Home (2005)
Ohio Decorative Arts, 1890–1960

By Carol Boram-Hays

Ohio enjoys a rich artistic heritage: its inhabitants have made significant contributions in the arts; its schools have produced artists of international acclaim; and its companies have employed progressive manufacturing techniques and pioneering materials in the production of their wares. Ohio's artistic tradition is especially impressive in the area of the decorative arts from the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The state's economic boom at that time was due, in part, to innovative designs developed by companies working together with artists.

Bringing Modernism Home: Ohio Decorative Arts, 1890–1960 showcases this important contribution. It investigates Ohioans' influence in bringing international vanguard movements-such as Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, and Biomorphism-out of art galleries and museums and into the domestic realm.

Carol Boram-Hays discusses a variety of media and forms, including glass, ceramics, enameling, furniture design, metalwork, and jewelry. The book is lavishly illustrated with examples of work from more than 120 artists and companies. Although twentieth-century decorative arts have been the subject of increasing interest in both the public and private sectors, Bringing Modernism Home is the first publication to examine the wide range and superb quality of works produced by Ohio artists and companies.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Bringing+Modernism+Home.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Pictorial Victorians

Mon, 11 Oct 2004

Pictorial Victorians (2004)
The Inscription of Values in Word and Image

By Julia Thomas

The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres-illustration and narrative painting-that blurred the line between the visual and textual.

Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.

Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe¿s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Pictorial+Victorians.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

American Pantheon

Sun, 04 Jul 2004

American Pantheon (2004)
Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol

Edited by Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma

Like the ancient Roman Pantheon, the U.S. Capitol was designed by its political and aesthetic arbiters to memorialize the virtues, events, and persons most representative of the nation's ideals—an attempt to raise a particular version of the nation's founding to the level of myth.

American Pantheon examines the influences upon not only those virtues and persons selected for inclusion in the American pantheon, but also those excluded. Two chapters address the exclusion of slavery and African Americans from the art in the Capitol, a silence made all the more deafening by the major contributions of slaves and free black workers to the construction of the building. Two other authors consider the subject of women emerging as artists, subjects, patrons, and proponents of art in the Capitol, a development that began to emerge only in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Rotunda, the Capitol's principal ceremonial space, was designed in part as an art museum of American history—at least the authorized version of it. It is explored in several of the essays, including discussions of the influence of the early-nineteenth-century Italian sculptors who provided the first sculptural reliefs for the room and the contributions of the mid-nineteenth-century Italian American artist Constantino Brumidi, to the mix of allegory, mythology, and history that permeates the space and indeed the Capitol itself.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/American+Pantheon.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors

Wed, 12 Nov 2003

Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors (2003)

Edited by Jennifer L. Howe

In the early 1850s three British expatriates—Henry Lindley Fry, his son William Henry Fry, and Benn Pitman—settled in Cincinnati and launched one of the most important manifestations of Aesthetic movement furniture in the United States, the Cincinnati art-carved furniture movement. By the early 1870s the Frys began offering private instruction in woodcarving, and Pitman initiated classes at the School of Design (later the Art Academy of Cincinnati).

The majority of the woodcarving students were affluent women seeking suitable artistic pastimes, although some students enrolled to learn a marketable skill. The Frys and Pitman and their female students gained national acclaim and recognition for their woodcarving through their display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. National art journals featured Cincinnati woodcarving throughout the late 1870s and the 1880s and published articles by Pitman, a prolific writer and philosopher of the movement.

Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors is the first book devoted to the study of this nationally significant artistic movement. Edited by Jennifer L. Howe, with contributions by noted scholars, Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors situates the movement within the context of the city's rich cultural heritage, documents the careers of the Frys and Pitman in England and America, explores their domestic and ecclesiastical interior commissions, and examines the central role women played in this movement.

The book includes a catalog of the Cincinnati Art Museum's impressive holdings of Cincinnati art-carved furniture. An appendix presents biographical information on more than one thousand of the Frys' and Pitman's woodcarving students, and numerous color plates and period photographs.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Cincinnati+Art-Carved+Furniture+and+Interiors.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Wyeth People

Tue, 14 Oct 2003

Wyeth People (2003)

By Gene Logsdon

Wyeth People is the story of one writer's search for the meaning of artistic creativity, approached from personal contact with the work of one of the world's great artists, Andrew Wyeth.

In the 1960s, just beginning his career as a writer, Gene Logsdon read a magazine article about Andrew Wyeth in which the artist commented at length on his own creative impulse. What he said seemed so true and right and so directly applicable to writing as well as to painting that the young writer was transfixed.

He was resolved to talk to Andrew Wyeth, even though warned that the artist could be as elusive as a wild rabbit. Not quite by accident, the writer and the painter met in a roadside diner, and what happened from then on is what Wyeth People is about-an effort to explain a famous artist, his work, and the people who love it, by an intrigued outsider.

Wyeth People is the result of Gene Logsdon's search to find the colorful people Wyeth painted and to interview them. Originally published in 1969, Wyeth People describes how the author solved the mystery of the creative impulse, at least to his own satisfaction. It is reprinted here in paperback for the first time.

As Logsdon writes: “The story of my search for why I (and millions of other people) find Wyeth’s art among the greatest that human culture has produced, is ongoing. I may never fully end my quest. But this I know. I was lucky enough to have participated in some small way in the cultural process by which an artist and his work became a classic part of American tradition.

That I was able to talk to people like Karl Kuerner and Forrest Wall produced in me the same kind of knowledge and exhilaration that I would gain if I were viewing Michelangelo’s David and David came alive and spoke to me.”

Swallow Press welcomes the opportunity to bring this remarkable book back into print.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Wyeth+People.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.