New Books in Art

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Emily Wallace, author and illustrator of the new book Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South (University of Texas Press, 2019).Road Sides pays homage to popular travel guides with its short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet containing a brief contextualizing essay followed by a feature of a specific location, business, or product. “A” is for Architecture, a tribute to buildings in the shape of foods one might find on the highway; “B” is for Billboards, their ubiquity and creativity and sometimes, as in the case of the “South of the Border” billboards, racial insensitivity.Road Sides is clearly aimed at a general audience of readers with its journalistic style of participant observation and whimsical illustrations, but Wallace makes use of her folklore training and scholarly connections in both the historical contextualizing of automobile culture and the critical lens with which she points out the good, the bad, and the ugly of Southern history and practice.While Road Sides is certainly a celebration of Southern foodways, it is not without criticism. A thread runs throughout the book that there is not a single story of Southern road travel. Wallace is careful to remind readers that before the civil rights era, there are two very distinct experiences for black and white Southerners, and after the ostensible end of racial segregation in public spaces, a third story emerges that changes the experience for all travelers.Wallace addresses these disparate narratives most directly in “D” for Directions, focusing on the Negro Motorist Green-Book that ran counter to the Official Automobile Blue Book for white travelers, and in V for Vacancy, about the black-owned hotels that catered to black travelers.Similarly, in a chapter about the crossroads general store, Wallace reminds readers that Emmett Till was murdered after an encounter with white people in such a store. What emerges from this wide-ranging investigation is an story of innovation, both technological and entrepreneurial, about the creative minds who came up with a new product or process or marketing strategy to adapt to a world that is changed irrevocably by car travel.Emily Wallace is a writer and illustrator with a masters in folklore who serves as art director & deputy editor of Southern Cultures Quarterly at UNC-Chapel Hill, and has written and illustrated work for other publications including The Washington Post, Southern Living, The Oxford American, and GOOD. In 2015, Wallace was nominated for a James Beard Award in humor writing.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Today I talked to Laurie Olin about his book Be Seated (ORO Editions, 2017). Olin’s interest in public outdoor seating in parks and civic spaces revolves around two poles: the first is a concern for aspects of the ordinary in our settings and actions, the apparatus and effects of the quotidian in our individual lives and experience; the other is the utility of public seating in the conduct and potential of our role as citizens and the establishment of place and community. A not inconsiderable aspect of both is the engendering of pleasure. In a democracy we are expected to fulfill two potentials – those of private citizen and contributing member of a community. When sitting on a bench or chair in a park or plaza we inevitably participate in the life of a particular space, city, and society while simultaneously pursuing our own life with its demands and aspirations. Chairs and benches in their many varieties and situations are the setting (pun intended) for profoundly simple, albeit important, and largely unnoticed aspects of our lives.Laurie Olin is a distinguished teacher, author, and one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today. From vision to realization, he has guided many of OLIN’s signature projects, which span the history of the studio from the Washington Monument Grounds in Washington, DC to Bryant Park in New York City. His recent projects include the AIA award-winning Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

For centuries, wherever Thai Buddhists have made their homes, statues of the Buddha have provided striking testament to the role of Buddhism in the lives of the people. The Buddha in Lanna: Art, Lineage, Power, and Place in Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) offers the first in-depth historical study of the Thai tradition of donation of Buddha statues.Drawing on palm-leaf manuscripts and inscriptions, many never previously translated into English, the book reveals the key roles that Thai Buddha images have played in the social and economic worlds of their makers and devotees from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries.Author Angela S. Chiu introduces stories from chronicles, histories, and legends written by monks in Lanna, a region centered in today’s northern Thailand. By examining the stories’ themes, structures, and motifs, she illuminates the complex conceptual and material aspects of Buddha images that influenced their functions in Lanna society.Buddha images were depicted as social agents and mediators, the focal points of pan-regional political-religious lineages and rivalries, indeed, as the very generators of history itself. In the chronicles, Buddha images also unified the Buddha with the northern Thai landscape, thereby integrating Buddhist and local conceptions of place.By comparing Thai Buddha statues with other representations of the Buddha, the author underscores the contribution of the Thai evidence to a broader understanding of how different types of Buddha representations were understood to mediate the “presence” of the Buddha.The Buddha in Lanna focuses on the Thai Buddha image as a part of the wider society and history of its creators and worshippers beyond monastery walls, shedding much needed light on the Buddha image in history. With its impressive range of primary sources, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Buddhism and Buddhist art history, Thai studies, and Southeast Asian religious studies.Olivia Porter is a PhD candidate at Kings College London. Her research focuses on Tai Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar and its borders. She can be contacted at: olivia.c.porter@kcl.ac.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

For centuries artists and designers have recorded places, people, and life in travel sketchbooks. Over a period of fifty years, Laurie Olin, one of America’s most distinguished landscape architects, has recorded aspects of France: its cities and countryside, streets and cafes, ancient ruins, vineyards, and parks—from humble to grand, things that interested his designer’s eye—taking the time to see things carefully. Paris in its seasons, agriculture in Provence and Bordeaux, trees, dogs, and fountains, all are noted over the years in watercolor or pen and ink.Originally intended for the pleasure of merely being there as well as self-education, Olin's France Sketchbook (ORO Editions, 2020) offers a selection from his many sketchbooks is accompanied by transcriptions of notes and observations, along with introductory remarks for the different regions included: Paris, Haute Loire, Provence, Haute Provence, Normandy, Aquitaine, and Entre des Meures.Laurie Olin is a distinguished teacher, author, and one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today. From vision to realization, he has guided many of OLIN’s signature projects, which span the history of the studio from the Washington Monument Grounds in Washington, DC to Bryant Park in New York City. His recent projects include the AIA award-winning Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How did Buddhist women access religious experience and transcendence in a Confucian patriarchal system in imperial China? How were Buddhist practices carried out in the intimate settings of a boudoir?In Dr. Yuhang Li’s recent monograph, Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press), the answers to these questions can be found in creative usages of “women’s things” and the female body.Dr. Li shows in this book that through expressive depictions of Guanyin, or the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara in various media such as painting and embroidery, and through embodiments of the deity via jewelry and dance, Buddhist women in Ming-Qing China were able to forge personal connections with the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Dr. Li argues that this connection was made possible through “mimetic devotion,” which allowed the faithful devotees to use their own bodies and material things to “become” the feminized form of the popular Buddhist deity.Yuhang Li is an assistant professor of Chinese art in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional networks of Buddhism connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and Imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In the middle of the twentieth century, a newspaper photographer who went by the name of Weegee took memorable pictures of New York City’s street life that appeared everywhere from tabloid newspapers to seminars on the history of photography. Christopher Bonanos’ book Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous (Henry Holt and Company, 2018), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, tells the story of his life from his childhood as an immigrant street kid on the Lower East Side to his years photographing murder scenes to his experiments with caricatures of celebrities. As Bonanos observes, Weegee “very early on grasped that the distinction between high culture and low culture was growing blurry.” Out of that insight he made a career and a body of work that tell us a lot about New York City, its journalism, and photography.Robert W. Snyder, professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers-University-Newark and Manhattan Borough Historian, is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York. He can be reached at rwsnyder@newark.rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies (Penn State University Press), Christian Kleinbub challenges the notion that Michelangelo, renowned for his magnificent portrayals of the human body, was merely concerned with “superficial” anatomy—that is, the parts of the body that can be seen from the outside.Providing a fresh perspective on the artist’s portrayals of the human figure, Kleinbub investigates what he calls the artist’s “inner anatomical poetics,” revealing the Michelangelo’s beautiful bodies as objects of profound intellectual and spiritual significance.In so doing, Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies illuminates how Renaissance discourses on anatomical organs and organ systems informed the artist’s figures, linking the interior experiences of his subjects to physiological processes associated with sex, love, devotion, and contemplation, among other thoughts and feelings. The book’s case studies cover the full range of Michelangelo’s prodigious output—including such iconic works as the Sistine Ceiling, Dying Slave, and Last Judgment—and reconstructs what the artist knew of internal anatomy and how he projected that knowledge into his most important works.Drawing upon theological, poetic, philosophical, and scientific texts, the book shows how Michelangelo created a context-dependent, adaptable practice that could be adjusted according to the needs of an individual situation or commission and manipulated to embody, literally and figuratively, a variety of meanings.Deeply researched and convincingly argued, this study heralds a significant shift in thinking about the Italian Renaissance body as it pertains not only to the work of Michelangelo but also to the era as a whole.Christian K. Kleinbub is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at The Ohio State University and CoDirector of the New Foundation of Art History.Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In this episode, we talk with Michael Gubser about the pioneering art historian Alois Riegl, one of Eisler’s teachers in Vienna and a major influence on his thought. Then we look at Eisler’s first work on the history of religions, World Mantle and Heavenly Canopy, a massive two-volume study of ancient cosmology published in 1910. In the second half, we turn to Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism, larger questions about the figure of Orpheus and the idea of a widespread cult devoted to his worship in the ancient world, and even larger questions about what we can learn from “outdated” scholarship.Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb CrawfordAdditional voices: Brian EvansMusic: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra.Guests: Michael Gubser (James Madison University) Vladimir Marchenkov (Ohio University School of Interdisciplinary Arts) and Radcliffe G. Edmonds, III (Paul Shorey Professor of Greek and Chair of the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College)Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.Special thanks to the Warburg Institute and the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford.Bibliography and Further Reading--Edmonds, Radcliffe G. Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.--Eisler, Robert. Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism. London: J. M. Watkins, 1921.———. Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes. [World Cloak and Heavenly Canopy: Investigations into the Ancient Worldview through the History of Religions].Two Volumes. Munich: Oscar Beck, 1910. --Gubser, Michael. Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Detroit: Wayne State Press, 2006.--Marchenkov, Vladimir. The Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music. Hillsdale, NY : Pendragon Press, 2009.Follow us on Twitter: @averysquarepegAssociate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at collinb1@ohio,edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2019), Ana María Reyes examines the ways Colombian artist Beatriz González and Argentine-born art critic Marta Traba railed against international forms of modernism and promoted low brow or even provincial forms of art in the period of the Colombian National Front’s coalition government (1958-1974). In doing so, Reyes situates art in a pivotal moment in Colombian history where efforts to end political violence through compromise and power-sharing also led to the ushering of modernizing projects promoted initially under President Alberto Lleras Camargo. Reyes shows that art became under the purview of elites seeking to project Colombia as a modern, internationalist nation. González, on the other hand, increasingly questioned and challenged elite efforts to present modernism as the epitome of high art and culture in Colombia. In doing so, Reyes wholeheartedly adopted her role as a provocateur as a way to resist U.S. cultural interference and to preserve the marginal voices so often derided by urban elites in Bogotá. Through an examination of art, Reyes offers a refreshing perspective on the ways taste became politicized in mid-twentieth century Colombia.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Photographs play a hugely influential but largely unexamined role in the practice of landscape architecture and design. Through a diverse set of essays and case studies, this seminal text unpacks the complex relationship between landscape architecture and photography. It explores the influence of photographic seeing on the design process by presenting theoretical concepts from photography and cultural theory through the lens of landscape architecture practice to create a rigorous, open discussion.Beautifully illustrated in full color throughout, with over 200 images, Anne Godfrey's Active Landscape Photography: Theoretical Groundwork for Landscape Architecture (Routledge, 2020) covers a variety of topics: the diversity of everyday photographic practices for design decision making, the perception of landscape architecture through photography, transcending the objective and subjective with photography, and deploying multiplicity in photographic representation as a means to better represent the complexity of the discipline. Rather than solving problems and providing tidy solutions to the ubiquitous relationship between photography and landscape architecture, this book aims to invigorate a wider dialogue about photography's influence on how landscapes are understood, valued and designed. Active photographic practices are presented throughout for professionals, academics, students and researchers.Anne Godfrey is an award winning professor of landscape architecture in both teaching and research at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art