OPEN ACCESS OR BUST: A LIGHTNING POST

Ambassadors

 

For Day 2 of my CAA experience, I’m working at the Columbia College Graduate Admissions booth at the book fair. I’m stoked and totally prepared for questions like, “Are the kids in grad school cool?” “Do you learn a lot?” “Does grad school prepare you for the real world?” “Will you be rich, famous, or both after you finish?” But for the first hour, only two folks come by. “Can I have this pen?” a woman asks. The second is a tweed-vested middle-age dude with a goatee who walks up and is all, “let me fire this one at you.” (Okay.) “Is Columbia College Chicago related to Columbia University?” I look at him for a second. “I know two guys named Mike,” I tell him. “Do you think they’re related?” Well, I wish I’d actually thought of that, but I haven’t had my third cup of coffee yet. And also I have to say, they are pretty cool pens.

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OPEN ACCESS OR BUST: A LIGHTNING POST

  For Day 2 of my CAA experience, I’m working at the Columbia College Graduate Admissions booth at the book fair. I’m stoked and totally prepared for questions like, “Are …

Daniel Scott Parker MFA Poetry Daniel Scott Parker, danielsparker@gmail.com
600 S. Michigan Ave. Chicago, IL 60605

Forget Chocolates and Roses, I Want Artist Books

CAA Book and Trade Fair Exhibitors

I spent hours inside the CAA Book and Trade Fair which hosts more than 120 publishers, art materials manufacturers, and services in the arts. I explored their wares and projects. I perused through brilliantly orchestrated artist books. An illuminating and transformative experience, collecting artist books create an intimate opportunity to connect with cherished artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages. Since tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, I decided to give a very special person in my life the following treasures.

1.

Betye Saar, born in Los Angeles in 1926, emerged in the 1960s as a powerful figure in the redefinition of African American art. Over the past forty years, she has injected African American visual histories into mainstream visual culture by blending spiritual, political, and cultural iconography to create complex works with universal impact. This beautifully illustrated book accompanies an exhibition of Saar's work, showcasing the extraordinary depth and breadth of her achievement. It provides multiple vantage points from which to gain a richer understanding of Saar's career, American art of the 1960s, feminism, contemporary art, and California culture and politics.  Copub: University of Michigan Museum of Art

Betye Saar, born in Los Angeles in 1926, emerged in the 1960s as a powerful figure in the redefinition of African American art. Over the past forty years, she has injected African American visual histories into mainstream visual culture by blending spiritual, political, and cultural iconography to create complex works with universal impact. This beautifully illustrated book accompanies an exhibition of Saar’s work, showcasing the extraordinary depth and breadth of her achievement. It provides multiple vantage points from which to gain a richer understanding of Saar’s career, American art of the 1960s, feminism, contemporary art, and California culture and politics.

2.

Description Featuring over 200 color illustrations, the catalogue Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist accompanies the first full-scale survey of the work of Archibald Motley, on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from January 30, 2014, through May 11, 2014. Archibald John Motley, Jr. was an American painter, master colorist, and radical interpreter of urban culture. Among twentieth-century American artists, Motley is surely one of the most important and, paradoxically, also one of the most enigmatic. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1891, Motley spent the first half of the twentieth century living and working in a predominately white neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, just blocks away from the city’s burgeoning black community. During his formative years, Chicago’s African American population increased dramatically, and he was both a witness to and a visual chronicler of that expansion. In 1929 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which funded a critical year of study in France, where he painted Blues and other memorable pictures of Paris. In the 1950s, Motley made several lengthy visits to Mexico, where his nephew, the well-known novelist Willard F. Motley, lived. While there, Motley created vivid depictions of Mexican life and landscapes. He died in Chicago in 1981. Motley’s brilliant yet idiosyncratic paintings – simultaneously expressionist and social realist – have captured worldwide attention with their rainbow-hued, syncopated compositions. The exhibition includes the artist’s depictions of African American life in early-twentieth-century Chicago, as well as his portraits and archetypes, portrayals of African American life in Jazz Age Paris, and renderings of 1950s Mexico. The catalogue includes an essay by Richard J. Powell, organizer and curator of Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, as well as contributions from other scholars examining the life, work, and legacy of one of twentieth-century America's most significant artists.  Contributors. Davarian L. Baldwin, David C. Driskell, Oliver Meslay, Amy M. Mooney, Richard J. Powell, Ishmael Reed. Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University About The Author(s) Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. He teaches courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, and writes extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism. His books include African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond (with Virginia Mecklenburg), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, and Black Art: A Cultural History. He was Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin from 2007 until 2010.

Featuring over 200 color illustrations, the catalogue Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist accompanies the first full-scale survey of the work of Archibald Motley, on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from January 30, 2014, through May 11, 2014. Archibald John Motley, Jr. was an American painter, master colorist, and radical interpreter of urban culture. Among twentieth-century American artists, Motley is surely one of the most important and, paradoxically, also one of the most enigmatic.

3.

inda Haverty Rugg explores how nondocumentary narrative art films create alternative forms of collaborative self-representation and selfhood. Lively and accessible, Self-Projection sheds new light on the films of iconic directors and on art cinema in general, ultimately showing how film can transform not only the autobiographical act, but what it means to have a self.

Linda Haverty Rugg explores how nondocumentary narrative art films create alternative forms of collaborative self-representation and selfhood. Lively and accessible, Self-Projection sheds new light on the films of iconic directors and on art cinema in general, ultimately showing how film can transform not only the autobiographical act, but what it means to have a self.

I know that I will love them!

 

 

 

Forget Chocolates and Roses, I Want Artist Books

I spent hours inside the CAA Book and Trade Fair which hosts more than 120 publishers, art materials manufacturers, and services in the arts. I explored their wares and projects. I …

InterArts Janelle Dowell, janelle.dowell@loop.colum.edu
600 S. Michigan Ave. Chicago, IL 60605