Hiram Powers: Life
Title | Hiram Powers: Life PDF eBook |
Author | Richard P. Wunder |
Publisher | |
Pages | 426 |
Release | 1991 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN |
A detailed account of the life and career of Hiram Powers (1805-73), the first American-born sculptor to win international fame. Drawing mainly on his correspondence, volume one focuses on the artist's life; and volume two consists of a catalogue of his work and contains more than 225 illustrations. Corrects numerous errors of fact that have been perpetuated about Powers.
The Water Dancer
Title | The Water Dancer PDF eBook |
Author | Ta-Nehisi Coates |
Publisher | One World |
Pages | 434 |
Release | 2019-09-24 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0399590609 |
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom. “This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen. Praise for The Water Dancer “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone
Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves
Title | Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves PDF eBook |
Author | Kirk Savage |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 291 |
Release | 2018-07-31 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0691184526 |
A history of U.S. Civil War monuments that shows how they distort history and perpetuate white supremacy The United States began as a slave society, holding millions of Africans and their descendants in bondage, and remained so until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once slaves themselves. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves explores how the history of slavery and its violent end was told in public spaces—specifically in the sculptural monuments that came to dominate streets, parks, and town squares in nineteenth-century America. Looking at monuments built and unbuilt, Kirk Savage shows how the greatest era of monument building in American history took place amid struggles over race, gender, and collective memory. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves probes a host of fascinating questions and remains the only sustained investigation of post-Civil War monument building as a process of national and racial definition. Featuring a new preface by the author that reflects on recent events surrounding the meaning of these monuments, and new photography and illustrations throughout, this new and expanded edition reveals how monuments exposed the myth of a "united" people, and have only become more controversial with the passage of time.
A Measure of Perfection
Title | A Measure of Perfection PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Colbert |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Pages | 474 |
Release | 1997 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780807846735 |
Despite its widespread popularity in antebellum America, phrenology has rarely been taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon. Charles Colbert seeks to redress this neglect by demonstrating the important contributions the theory made to artistic developmen
Haunted Visions
Title | Haunted Visions PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Colbert |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Pages | 332 |
Release | 2011-05-10 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0812204999 |
Spiritualism emerged in western New York in 1848 and soon achieved a wide following due to its claim that the living could commune with the dead. In Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art, Charles Colbert focuses on the ways Spiritualism imbued the making and viewing of art with religious meaning and, in doing so, draws fascinating connections between art and faith in the Victorian age. Examining the work of such well-known American artists as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, William Sydney Mount, and Robert Henri, Colbert demonstrates that Spiritualism played a critical role in the evolution of modern attitudes toward creativity. He argues that Spiritualism made a singular contribution to the sanctification of art that occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The faith maintained that spiritual energies could reside in objects, and thus works of art could be appreciated not only for what they illustrated but also as vessels of the psychic vibrations their creators impressed into them. Such beliefs sanctified both the making and collecting of art in an era when Darwinism and Positivism were increasingly disenchanting the world and the efforts to represent it. In this context, Spiritualism endowed the artist's profession with the prestige of a religious calling; in doing so, it sought not to replace religion with art, but to make art a site where religion happened.
Masters of American Sculpture
Title | Masters of American Sculpture PDF eBook |
Author | Donald M. Reynolds |
Publisher | |
Pages | 284 |
Release | 1993 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN |
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the National Sculpture Society, this important history traces America's rich heritage of figurative sculpture from the Columbian exposition of 1893 to the present. Illustrated with outstanding examples of American figurative sculpture of the last century, this volume begins with an analysis of the influence of the Beaux-Arts tradition on the creation of the great public monuments of the young republic. With this background, the book moves on to survey important categories of sculpture chronologically. Equestrian monuments and countless tributes to war heroes are surveyed in one category. In another important grouping, author David Martin Reynolds surveys portrait sculpture. He also includes a section on medallic art, a category usually neglected in sculpture surveys. In another innovation, Dr. Reynolds devotes a chapter to American Indians, both as widely favored subjects for sculpture and as sculptors themselves. Not neglecting genre, the author deals extensively with the large group of sculptors who concentrated on animals. Finally he surveys the figurative tradition in the twentieth century and speculates on future trends in sculpture. Donald Martin Reynolds teaches at the School of Architecture, Columbia University, in New York City and is the author of many articles and books on sculpture, including Monuments and Masterpieces, which was favorably reviewed in the New York Times Book Reviews. 210 illustrations
Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture
Title | Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture PDF eBook |
Author | Donald M. Reynolds |
Publisher | Garland Publishing |
Pages | 504 |
Release | 1977 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN |