Twenty-five recent residential projects from around the United States take the concept of "green living" to the next architectural level. Going beyond the simple use of sustainable materials, these houses are designed to frame a very particular vision of nature for their owners that brings them as close as possible to nature while remaining indoors. Featured are dynamic designs by today's most energetic architectural firms including ARO, Tod Williams/Billie Tsien, Diller Scofidio + Renfro as well as up-and-coming smaller firms. Houses vary in scale, complexity, and site to give a broad survey of the potential of this cutting-edge approach. Show More Show Less.
American Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives in Recent Art features fourteen contemporary artists who live and work in the United States. The book's three major themes - Spiritual Expressions, Shared Concerns, and Historical Perspectives - are discussed in an insightful introductory essay by Jacquelyn Days Serwer, chief curator at the National Museum of American Art. Building on these themes, brief essays on each of the artists by Serwer and other members of the NMAA curatorial staff illuminate the chosen works in the context of the careers of these artists. Forty-one of their paintings, sculptures, and installations are illustrated in color, supplemented by eighty-six black-and-white reproductions.
Minimalism is arguably the most popular style of concert music that the late-twentieth century has produced, appealing to the widest possible audience - fans of rock, jazz and classical music. But the minimalist aesthetic has not been lacking in controversy. To its detractors, it is maddeningly repetitive and single-minded, no better than pop music masquerading as art. To its adherents, it is ecstatic and vibrant, combining classical, popular and non-Western elements to create a style that restores the severed link between composer and audience. The two best-known minimalist composers, Americans Philip Glass and Steve Reich, are world-famous figures. But they can only properly be understood in the context of their predecessors (La Mome Young and Terry Riley) and their successors (John Adams, Meredith Monk, and Europeans such as Michael Nyman, Louis Andriessen, and Arvo Part). This book, the first overview of minimalism aimed at a general public, traces the lives of the minimalist composers, discusses their most significant works, and examines the artistic milieu from which they emerged.
This groundbreaking text examines how artists on stage consciously perform age and aging. From Shakespeare to Beckett, dialogue and stage directions reveal varying understandings of age. Staging Age explores how performers respond to audience expectations, offering conscious--and unconscious--portrayals of the spectrum of age to their audiences. This essay collection is the first to address issues of age and performance in a variety of media, including theatre, film, and dance. --Book Jacket.
"Although modern African literature and music have become well known in the West, through the contributions of such famous authors as Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head and such popular musicians as King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the continent's vast body of modern visual arts has been little explored." "In New Currents, Ancient Rivers Jean Kennedy surveys African art of the last fifty years, offering an expansive perspective on the visual arts of the continent. Just as ancient rivers flow through the modern African landscape, so too do the rituals and traditions of the past run deeply through modern African art. The past is able to coexist in vibrant synthesis with the present largely because of a critical constant in African culture, the acceptance of change." "The culmination of twenty years' research, New Currents, Ancient Rivers is the largest survey of contemporary African art, presenting nearly 150 artists of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa--painters, sculptors, fiber artists, printmakers, and filmmakers. As Kennedy examines their artistic development, she shows the many ways the artists meld elements from modern life, the legacy of colonialism, foreign technology, the natural world, and the past to create art that may be divorced from the original purposes of ritual but that still embraces traditional rhythms. The author also briefly discusses the influence of the oral and literary traditions on the visual arts." "New Currents, Ancient Rivers is a tribute to the vitality and diversity of a continent and its peoples. This progressive book recognizes individual artists, many of whom are virtually unknown in Europe and the United States."--Jacket.
Nature framed by Eva Hagberg | Literally Just Books
