New Books in Art

Today’s book is: Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration (Common Threads Press, 2024), by Dr. Isabella Rosner, which considers how for centuries, people have stitched in good times and in bad, finding strength in the needle moving in and out of fabric. Stitching Freedom explores the embroidery made in prisons and mental health hospitals — those who have embroidered to d

How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused? Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art (Fordham University Press, 2023) by Dr. Danielle Taschereau

The Study of Photography in Latin America: Critical Insights and Methodological Approaches (University of New Mexico Press, 2023) provides an insider's perspective to the study of photography. Nathanial Gardner provides readers with a carefully structured introduction that lays out his unique methodology for this book, which features over eighty photographs and the insights from si

Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888-1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources,

Adam Kabat’s The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan (Columbia UP, 2023) is an in-depth introduction to the rich and ribald world of kibyōshi, a short-lived (1778-1807) subgenre of books combining text and illustration on the same page, much like comic books and manga today. This book presents a selection of five kibyōshi in which monst

This book analyses the way that changes in the comics industry, book trade and webcomics distribution have shaped the publication of long-form comics. The US Graphic Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2022) pays particular attention to how the concept of the graphic novel developed through the twentieth century. Art historians, journalists, and reviewers debated whether it was possible for a com

Never before have comics seemed so popular or diversified, proliferating across a broad spectrum of genres, experimenting with a variety of techniques, and gaining recognition as a legitimate, rich form of art. Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures (UP of Mississippi, 2016) examines this trend by taking up philosopher Umberto Eco's notion of the open wor

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Marilyn Stendera, co-author (with Emily Hughes) of Heidegger’s Alternative History of Time (Routledge, 2024). Dr Stendera’s work focuses mainly on the phenomenological tradition, especially its intersections with philosophy of cognition and mind. She is particularly interested in time, including its role in cognition, its relationship to power

Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Oliver Wunsch traces thes

Zenithism (1921-1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2023) is the first-ever English language anthology of zenithism – an eclectic avant-garde movement that operated in the Yugoslav region between 1921 and 1927. The founder of Zenithism – poet Ljubomir Micić – envisioned the movement as a fusion of futurism, dada, constructivism, expressionism, an