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A survey of spectacular breadth, covering the history of decorative arts and design worldwide over the past six hundred years
Considers the future of conservation and its connection to the human sciences. This volume brings together the findings from a five-year research project that seeks to reimagine the relationship between conservation knowledge and the humanistic study of the material world. The project, "Cultures of Conservation," was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and included events, seminars, and an artist-in-residence. The effort to conserve things amid change is part of the human struggle with the nature of matter. For as long as people have made things and kept things, they have also cared for and repaired them. Today, conservators use a variety of tools and categories developed over the last one hundred and fifty years to do this work, but in the coming decades, new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges. Looking ahead to this moment from the perspectives of history, philosophy, materials science, and anthropology, this volume explores new possibilities for both conservation and the humanities in the rethinking of active matter.
"This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place, held at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery from September 14, 2018 through January 6, 2019"--Colophon.
All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.
The first comprehensive study of the most important ceramic innovation of the 19th century Colorful, wildly imaginative, and technically innovative, majolica was functional and aesthetic ceramic ware. Its subject matter reflects a range of 19th-century preoccupations, from botany and zoology to popular humor and the macabre. Majolica Mania examines the medium’s considerable impact, from wares used in domestic settings to monumental pieces at the World’s Fairs. Essays by international experts address the extensive output of the originators and manufacturers in England—including Minton, Wedgwood, and George Jones—and the migration of English craftsmen to the U.S. New research including information on important American makers in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia is also featured. Fully illustrated, the book is enlivened by new photography of pieces from major museums and private collections in the U.S. and Great Britain.
"Ritual and Capital is an expansive volume gathering a range of voices, accounts, and contributions across genres. The poems, essays, and artworks included in this anthology explore the habits and practices formed to subvert, subsist, and survive under capital. Is there refuge in ritual? How might ritual practices endow objects and artifacts with qualities that resist their assimilation within the market? What function can movement rituals have for embodying practices of healing and care? How does ritual strengthen and solidify communities? In what ways have ritual practices turned the landscape of the everyday into a playground for consumption, where ritual enables the reproduction of struc...
Today, China's classical antiquity is often studied through recovered artifacts, but before this practice became widespread, scholars instead reconstructed the distant past through classical texts and transmitted illustrations. Among the most important illustrated commentaries was the Sanli tu, or Illustrations to the Ritual Classics, whose origins are said to date back to the great commentator Zheng Xuan. Design by the Book, which accompanies an exhibition at Bard Graduate Center Gallery, discusses the history and cultural significance of the Sanli tu in medieval China. The Sanli tu survives in a version produced around 960 by Nie Chongyi, a professor at the court of the Later Zhou (951-960...
The Swedish toy industry has long produced vast quantities of colorful, quality wooden items that reflect Scandinavian design and craft traditions. This superbly illustrated book, including specially commissioned photography, looks at over 200 years of Swedish toys, from historic dollhouses to the latest designs for children. Featuring rattles, full-size rocking horses, dollhouses, and building blocks to skis, sleds, and tabletop games with intricate moving parts, Swedish Wooden Toys also addresses images of Swedish childhood, the role of the beloved red Dala horse in the creation of national identity, the vibrant tradition of educational toys, and the challenges of maintaining craft manufacturing in an era of global mass-production. Published in association with the Bard Graduate Center Exhibition Schedule: Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs (06/18/14-01/11/15) Bard Graduate Center March 2015 Stockholm Summer 2015
Examines the relationship between making objects and knowing nature in Europe from the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries