American Arts and Crafts

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(essay by Craig Owens

Since the late 1970s, Allan McCollum (b. 1944, Los Angeles, lives in New York) has addressed the production, distribution, acquisition, display, and reading of the artwork. His constant use of strategies of multiplication, his examination of the museum as a discursive agent, and his recurrent interest in notions of display, as well as his attempt to find a generic form for any purpose, were entirely reconfigured by this displacement of context. Working with regional museums, heterogeneous audiences, and references ranging from palaeontology to mineralogy, McCollum has built a very strong and intriguing body of works that has remained, in large part, unknown to (or at least unseen by) the art world.

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Linn Howard and Mary Jane Pool

The annual installation of the Christmas tree at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is an event cherished by visitors and scholars alike. The Baroque base of the majestic tree supports a landscape in which vivid eighteenth-century Neapolitan creche figures reenact the events of Christ's Nativity. Magi, dressed in sumptuous robes, are surrounded by their retainers and animals. Exotic travelers, townspeople, and shepherds throng to Bethlehem to view the Christ Child lying in the manger. Above the infant and the graceful figures of Mary and Joseph, a glory of angels hovers in adoration. The tradition of re-creating the events at the manger became a national passion in eighteenth-century Naples. Leading artists were commissioned to create extravagant panoramas containing hundreds of figures, many shown dressed in current fashion and attending to their trades. They offer a wealth of information about the costumes and customs of the day. Loretta Hines Howard gave her collection of creche figures, including the magnificent group called the Adoration of Angels, to the Metropolitan Museum in 1965. For many years she installed it personally, and now her work is being carried on by her daughter, Linn Howard. Together with Mary Jane Pool, noted author and long-time editor-in-chief of House and Garden magazine, Linn Howard tells about the Neapolitan tradition of creche making, and about the Metropolitan's collection in particular. The authors also provide a fascinating glimpse into the care and conservation of the figures; thumbnail biographies of the artists to whom particular figures can be attributed; a glossary; and the story of how Loretta Hines Howard began her collecting. A special feature of the book is "The Christmas Story," in which the Gospels are illustrated with pictures of the creche. The magnificent photography that makes this book a work of art was created especially for it by Elliott Erwitt, whose work can be found in major galleries and museums around the world. The Angel Tree: A Christmas Celebration is truly a book for the entire family, a joyous retelling of the story of the Nativity.

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Mark Richard Leach and Barbara J. Bloemink

This volume presents two decades of Michael Lucero's glazed ceramic, bronze, and mixed media sculptures, including such series as the Dreamers, Pre-Columbus, New World, and Reclamations. While at first glance his work appears to be a vigorous example of contemporary ceramic sculpture with a background in 1960s California art and a foreground in New York eclecticism, in fact his figurative forms borrow liberally and wittily from the history of art of various cultures, including pre-Columbian, Native American, European, Afro-Carolinian, and the vernacular and popular media. The imagery that slides in and out of the complex glazes of this master of the ceramic medium is art about art and about self. The consistent strength of the work comes from a fusion of ceramic tradition with sculptural innovation, and from a combination of extraordinarily fine technique, keen wide-ranging intelligence, and the resonance brought to bear by past associations, cultures, and use.

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organized by Helen Molesworth and Bryan Barcena

Born in Calabria, Italy, in 1942, Anna Maria Maiolino is one of the leading artists of her generation. Her work reflects the major cultural and political realities of postwar Europe and South America as well as issues of patriarchy, feminism, and immigration. This book presents her prints, drawings, sculpture, photography, video, and performance pieces. From her early woodcuts, which spoke directly to the tense political atmosphere of her adopted country of Brazil, to her introspective works on paper-every aspect of Maiolino's incredibly diverse and accomplished career is presented in exquisite illustrations and with a series of informed and provocative essays. Exhibition: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, United States (04.08.-27.11.2017).