PUBLICATIONS

Public perception of Native American art and culture has often been derived from misunderstandings and misinterpretations, and from images promulgated by popular culture. Typically, Native Americans are grouped as a whole and their art and culture considered part of the past rather than widely present. 

Shapeshifting challenges these assumptions by focusing on the objects as art rather than cultural or anthropological artifacts and on the multivalent creativity of Native American artists. The approach highlights the inventive contemporaneity that existed in all periods and continues today. More than 75 works in a wide range of media and scale are organized into four thematic groups: changing—expanding the imagination; knowing—expressing worldview; locating—exploring identity and place; and voicing—engaging the individual. The result is a paradigm shift in understanding Native American art.

• Hardcover
• 248 pages
• Publication date: February 7, 2012

Karen Kramer Russell is curator of Native American art and culture at the Peabody Essex Museum and president of the Native American Art Studies Association.

Are you interested in making a positive social impact? In his book "Society Driven Design" Judah Armani explains the role of design in community development and the designer's role in social change.

Based on Armani's decades-long experience in social innovation, the book offers a framework for cultivating the conditions for social change. Armani is a designer and educator who draws from almost twenty years of co-creating with people who are homeless, incarcerated, or on probation. He believes that everyone has the potential to make better choices, and he sees the design process as a powerful tool for empowerment. His book is a reflection of his journey, and with it, he aims to empower a broader community to make better choices through design.

• Publisher: BIS Publishers (October 15, 2024)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 200 pages
• Item Weight: 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions: 5.85 x 0.89 x 8.25 inches

An unprecedented visual history of African women told in striking and subversive historical photographs--featuring an Introduction by Edwidge Danticat and a Foreword by Jacqueline Woodson.

Most of us grew up with images of African women that were purely anthropological--bright displays of exotica where the deeper personhood seemed tucked away. Or they were chronicles of war and poverty--“poverty porn.” But now, curator Catherine E. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870–1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. These images tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods.

Featuring works by celebrated African masters, African studios of local legend, and anonymous artists, The African Lookbook captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across centuries. McKinley also features photos by Europeans--most starkly, striking nudes--revealing the relationships between white men and the Black female sitters where, at best, a grave power imbalance lies. It’s a bittersweet truth that when there is exploitation there can also be profound resistance expressed in unexpected ways--even if it’s only in gazing back. These photos tell the story of how the sewing machine and the camera became powerful tools for women’s self-expression, revealing a truly glorious display of everyday beauty.

Visit the world’s most comprehensive and compelling museum in a single book – the ultimate gallery in your own home

Housing the finest art collection ever assembled, this classic format of Phaidon’s bestselling The Art Museum offers the ultimate museum experience without the boundaries of space and time. The rooms and galleries that live within this volume display more than 1,600 artworks, expertly selected from the original collection, including paintings, sculpture, textiles, photographs, installations, performances, videos, prints, ceramics, manuscripts, metalwork, and jewelwork.

The artworks included were carefully selected by a team of 28 curators, critics, art historians and artists who contributed their expertise to create this revolutionary 'virtual' museum. These experts came from such institutions as: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The British Museum, London; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu; the University of California, Berkley; LaTrobe University, Melbourne; the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London; and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Works originate from the Palaeolithic era to the present and come from all around the globe and include both iconic and lesser-known pieces. This extraordinary book takes the reader on a tour around the world and through the ages, presenting the finest examples of human creativity within its covers – a dream museum without the boundaries of walls.

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 305 × 238 mm (12 × 9 3/8 in)
• Pages: 584 pp
• Illustrations: 1640 illustrations

The Berlin Painter and His World: Athenian Vase-Painting in the Early Fifth Century B.C., by curator J. Michael Padgett, et. al., is the catalogue to the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2017.

The Berlin Painter was the name given by British classicist and art  historian Sir John Beazley to an otherwise anonymous Athenian red-figure  vase-painter. The artist’s long career extended from about 505 B.C.  well into the 460s, and his elegant renderings of daily life and  mythological stories offer invaluable insight into the social,  political, religious, and artistic workings of early 5th-century Athens.

• Hardcover
   

The Centaur's Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum (October 11, 2003 to January 18, 2004).

This landmark book is the first to investigate representations of these human animals in early Greek art (ca. 850-450 B.C.). The Centaur's Smile discusses the oriental antecedents of these fantastic creatures, examining the influence of Egyptian and Near Eastern models on the formation of Greek monsters in the early Archaic period. Essays also explore the nature and origin of horse-men (centaurs and satyrs) and the ways in which they are represented in early Greek art. Furthermore, the book surveys the broader range of Greek composite creatures and discusses their evolving forms and changing roles and meaning. Over one hundred exquisite objects-all beautifully reproduced in color-are described and analyzed in detail. Among the featured works are reliefs and statuettes in stone, bronze, and terracotta; jewelry and metalwork in gold, silver, and electrum; engraved sealstones in rock crystal, jasper, and cornelian; and painted ceramic vases from Athens, Corinth, Rhodes, Miletus, Cyprus, and Etruria.

• Softcover

The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980, by curator Katherine A. Bussard, et. al., is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2015.

American cities underwent seismic transformations in the 1960s and '70s, from shifting demographics and political protests to reshaping through highways and urban renewal. Amid this climate of upheaval, photographers, architects, activists, performance artists, and filmmakers turned conditions of crisis into sites for civic discourse and artistic expression. The book explores photographic and cinematic responses to the changing fabric of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles that contributed to a reconsideration of cities in popular media and urban policy during this period. 

Featuring contributions from more than 20 noted scholars in fields including art history, urban planning, architecture, and cultural studies, this is the first publication to address an important shift in photographic, cinematic, and planning practices based on close observations of streets, neighborhoods, and seminal events in the country’s three largest cities. 

• Hardcover
• More than  200 illustrations 

The Eternal Feast: Banqueting in Chinese Art from the 10th to the 14th Century,  by curator Zoe S. Kwok, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2019 - February 2020.  

The book brings to life the art of the feast during three transformative Chinese dynasties, the Song, Liao, and Yuan, which together enjoyed a thriving economy, cultural flourishing, and the intermingling of foreign and native traditions. Focusing on a rare group of surviving paintings from the period—along with ceramic, lacquer, metal, and stone objects as well as textiles—the exhibition reveals feasts to be singularly positioned to illuminate one of the most enduring and significant facets of the Chinese tradition: the continuum between life and the afterlife. 

The exhibition features 50 objects arranged in sections that focus on ladies banqueting in the past, gentlemen feasting in the present, and dining in the afterlife. Several other aspects of elite feasting—including costume, cuisine, music, and dance, as well as burial customs, architecture and gardens, artistic patronage, and painterly practice—are also explored, offering a window into life, death, and art during a time period whose cultural influence extends in China to the present day. 

• Hardcover

The Itinerant Languages of Photography is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum September 2013-January 2014.

While photographs have been exchanged, appropriated, and mobilized in different contexts since the 19th century, their movement is now occurring at an unprecedented speed. The Itinerant Languages of Photography examines photography’s capacity to circulate across time and space as well as across other media, such as art, literature, and cinema. Taking its point of departure from Latin American and Spanish photographic archives, the volume offers an alternative history of photography by focusing on the transnational dimension of technological traffic and image production at a time when photography is at the center of current debates on the role of representation, authorship, and reception in a global contemporary culture.Featuring a wide-range of photographs—images that converse across temporal, political, and cultural boundaries by artists such as Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcelo Brodsky, Joan Colom, Marc Ferrez, and Joan Fontcuberta—the book argues that the photographic image comes into being only as a consequence of reproduction, displacement, and itinerancy.

• Hardcover

The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris  examines the historic and artistic importance of the works housed  in the École and pays homage to Homer, the great source that inspired  them. The lavishly illustrated book includes illuminating texts by prominent French scholars and a preface by George Steiner on the reception of Homer in France.

• Hardcover 

The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time, giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings, Joel Smith argues, are simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory.

In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs, architects, propagandists, and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers’ aims in isolation, Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building’s shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph comes to be coauthored by history, growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.

• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches
• Softcover

Wesleyan Poetry Series

A profound and uplifting meditation on the meanings of race and belonging in America

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2012)

Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley's the new black integrates powerful ideas about "blackness," past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago—for example, the election of an African American president—will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. 

All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades—changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to "laugh to keep from crying." They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures. 

Check for the online reader's companion at http://http://thenewblack.site.wesleyan.edu.

• Publication date: March 15, 2012
• Paperback

The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership, by Michael Coe, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum December 1995 - June 1996.

Between 1400 and 400 BC, in what is  now Mexico and Central America, the Olmec people created a magnificent  culture, one too often overshadowed by those of the Maya and the Aztec.  The exhibition featured over 250 Olmec works of art - ceramic, jade and  stone - and their images are captured in this book. Essays by prominent  scholars offer interpretations of such topics as the power of objects  within the context of the Olmec ritual system. These identify and  illustrate the fundamental themes of Olmec small-scale sculpture, the  sacred role of the maize in Olmec ideology, and the relationship of  Olmec culture to later civilizations. An illustrated glossary of motifs  and symbols is provided to clarify the often highly abstract style and  encoded iconography of the Olmec. The book also includes precise  mineralogical descriptions of the lithic materials they used.  

• Hardcover

As featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Curbed, Teen Vogue, CNN Style, and domino

Visit the world’s greatest museum without leaving your home through this imaginary art museum – a visually spectacular survey of world art for middle-grade readers, curated in collaboration with a global team of experts and educators

This imaginary art museum is an educational and inspiring experience without the constraints of space and time. Discover beautiful reproductions from pre-history to the present, arranged in easy-to-navigate, color-coded wings, galleries, and rooms, each with an informative narrative guide. Marvel at its remarkable range of styles and mediums – from classic to contemporary, and from paintings and sculptures to photographs and textiles. With a fold-out museum map and floor plans to follow, and interactive cross-referencing activities, this museum-in-a-book spotlights the iconic and important works and movements in art history and provides the perfect introduction to the history of human creativity.

Curated in collaboration with the team of experts and educators behind Phaidon’s groundbreaking global bestseller The Art Museum, which won acclaim from the New York Times, The Times, NPR, Vogue, and more – and a starred Library Journal review. Every single piece in this book was selected to illustrate important historical, cultural, and artistic facts, not only in order to give children a comprehensive foundation in world art history, but to also share with them the idea that art history is a culmination of 40,000 years of people sharing themes, ideas, techniques and incredible creativity across time and space. With its lavish page size and over 300 wonderfully diverse artworks, this book is the ultimate resource for all art-hungry children and their parents.

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 305 × 250 mm (12 × 9 7/8 in)
• Pages: 232 pp
• Illustrations: 310 illustrations

Titus Kaphar’s moving screenplay Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024) tells the story of a father and son who reunite after years of estrangement, and follows their choices as to how to make peace with the past. Featuring hundreds of film stills and paintings, this book documents the development of Kaphar’s movie from script to screen.

This book provides a behind-the-scenes view of the debut feature film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, by renowned artist and director, Titus Kaphar. The film follows Tarrell, a successful Black painter, who reunites with his estranged father, La’Ron. Having endured years of La’Ron’s addiction and abuse as a child, the trauma of Tarrell’s past reverberates throughout his life and art. Facing his newly sober father, Tarrell must reconcile himself with his childhood and determine how to move forward. With poignant performances by André Holland, Andra Day, John Earl Jelks, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Exhibiting Forgiveness masterfully depicts the cycle of abuse and comments on the power dynamics of the contemporary art world.

Juxtaposing a marked-up script with film stills, this publication captures the transformation of Exhibiting Forgiveness into a feature film. It also illustrates fifteen paintings that Kaphar created for the movie to showcase Tarrell’s vibrant artistic practice.

Publication date: Nov 19, 2024

• Publisher: Gagosian
• Publication date: 2024
• Contributor: Titus Kaphar
• Designer: Graphic Thought Facility, London
• Printer: Pureprint Group, Uckfield, England
• Distributor: Rizzoli International Publications, New York
• Format: Softcover
• Dimensions: 9 3/4 × 11 3/4 inches (24.8 × 29.8 cm)
• Pages: 268
• Language: English

Edited by Toyin Falola

This book captures the full essence of Victor Ekpuk’s work as an artist of global reputation, a master of mysterious scripts, ancient signs and symbols. His messages, encrypted in nsibidi and other symbols and signs, find expressions in paintings, illustrations, cartoons and murals. In this book, twelve talented authors reflect on the artist, his background, the foundation of his creativity, and the interpretations of his symbolic messages. Essays by: Amanda Carlson Ph.D, Sylvester Ogbechie Ph.D, Smooth Ugochukwu Ph.D, Dele Jegede (Professor Emeritus), Allyson Purpura Ph.D, Andrea Frohne Ph.D, Moyo Okediji Ph.D, Dr. Imo Nse Imeh, Kunle Filani Ph.D, Dr. Ukpong Onoyom, Toyin Falola Ph.D, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, Aderonke Adesanya Ph.D, and Dr. Christopher Adejumo. Victor Ekpuk is a Nigerian-American artist. He obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from University, Ife, Nigeria in 1989. 

His work explores the human condition, drawing upon a wide spectrum of meaning that is rooted in African and global contemporary art discourses. Ekpuk’s works have been exhibited at Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, The Tang museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, 12th Havana Biennial, Dakar Biennial, Hood Museum, Krannert Art Museum, Fowler Museum, Museum of Art and Design, Newark Museum, The World Bank, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the 1st Johannesburg Biennial. His artworks are in collections of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, Brooks Museum, The World Bank, Newark Museum, Hood Museum, Krannert Art Museum, United States Art in Embassies Art Collection. In 2016, Ekpuk designed trophies for The Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art’s first African Art Awards, one of which was awarded to Yinka Shonibare, MBE. In 2017 he completed a large-scale centerpiece mural at the North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as a mural at the Memphis Brooks Museum.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pan-African University Press; First Edition (January 1, 2018)

Yearning to Breathe Free - Jews in Gilded Age America is composed of twenty scholarly essays and works as a companion book to "By Dawn's Early Light - Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War"

Edited by Adam D. Mendelsohn and Jonathan D. Sarna 

With a foreword by sponsor Leonard L. Milberg, Class of 1953, Princeton

• Published by Princeton University Library, 2022
• Hardcover
• 715 pages 
• 97 illustrations, color and black and white

Yearning to Breathe Free - Jews in Gilded Age America is composed of twenty scholarly essays and works as a companion book to "By Dawn's Early Light - Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War"

Edited by Adam D. Mendelsohn and Jonathan D. Sarna 

With a foreword by sponsor Leonard L. Milberg, Class of 1953, Princeton

• Published by Princeton University Library, 2022
• Softcover
• 715 pages 
• 97 illustrations, color and black and white
• Softcover version does not have a dust jacket