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The result of a collaborative, multiyear project, this groundbreaking book explores the interpretive worlds that inform religious practice and derive from sensory phenomena. Under the rubric of "making sense," the studies assembled here ask, How have people used and valued sensory data? How have they shaped their material and immaterial worlds to encourage or discourage certain kinds or patterns of sensory experience? How have they framed the sensual capacities of images and objects to license a range of behaviors, including iconoclasm, censorship, and accusations of blasphemy or sacrilege? Exposing the dematerialization of religion embedded in secularization theory, editor Sally Promey proposes a fundamental reorientation in understanding the personal, social, political, and cultural work accomplished in religion’s sensory and material practice. Sensational Religion refocuses scholarly attention on the robust material entanglements often discounted by modernity’s metaphysic and on their inextricable connections to human bodies, behaviors, affects, and beliefs.
Based on her critically acclaimed exhibition, Major Arcana collects the work of photographer Frances F. Denny, who traveled around the U.S. photographing and interviewing a diverse group of people who identify as witches. This book is an exploration of contemporary witchery told through striking photographs and short, inspiring essays written by the “Terry Gross of witches,” Pam Grossman, and the subjects themselves. From occultists and Neo-pagans, to herbalists and Wiccan High Priestesses, Denny’s portraits capture the face of modern American witchcraft and challenge our assumptions about who and what a witch really is.
A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University’s venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum
A fascinating exploration of how photography, graphic design, and popular magazines converged to transform American visual culture at mid-century This dynamic study examines the intersection of modernist photography and American commercial graphic design between 1930 and 1960. Avant-garde strategies in photography and design reached the United States via European émigrés, including Bauhaus artists forced out of Nazi Germany. The unmistakable aesthetic made popular by such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue—whose art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman, were both immigrants and accomplished photographers—emerged from a distinctly American combination of innovation,...
Providing a lively snapshot of the state of art and social justice today on a global level, Entry Points accompanies the inaugural Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, launched at The New School on the occasion of the center’s twentieth anniversary. This book captures some of the most significant worldwide examples of art and social justice and introduces an interested audience of artists, policy makers, scholars, and writers to new ways of thinking about how justice is defined, advanced, and practiced through the arts. In so doing, it assembles some of the latest scholarship in this field while refining our vocabulary for speaking about social justice, social engagement, community...
Change is Required: Preparing for the Post-Pandemic Museum is a book about the future of American museums. Like other institutions, museums and zoos, historic sites, gardens, and arboreta, were powerfully affected by the nested crises of the pandemic. These unprecedented crises challenged American museums. Adapting to novel circumstances and uncertainty became the order of the day; improvisation in policy and practice the new norm. Amidst upheavals and disruptions, a number of American museums have charted new directions for themselves and their communities. Many museums have taken a decisive turn to digital programming. Others have taken a turn toward community, developing new kinds of coll...