Over the past three decades, Ralph T. Coe has traveled extensively throughout the United States and Canada to assemble this collection of Native American art, one of the finest in private hands today. Immersed in the cultures of Native America, he has come to know artists and artisans, traders, dealers, and shop proprietors, selecting the very best they have to offer. The Ralph T. Coe Collection includes representative pieces from most Native American geographic regions and historical periods, beginning with objects dating back to the fourth millennium B.C. Many examples-men's shirts with ermine fringe, weapons, and button blankets-evoke the heroic lifestyle of the past, while small objects, such as tipi and kayak models, dolls, and tiny moccasins, speak to a more intimate significance. Ritual objects imbued with spiritual meaning-masks and katsinas, tablitas and medicine bundles-as well as utilitarian objects, such as pottery and baskets, also have a strong presence. This catalogue tells the stories of nearly two hundred of these objects, combining art history with personal reminiscence, and reveals the role Coe has played in bringing about awareness of the artistic heritage of Native America.-- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

This is a new release of the original 1940 edition.

Additional keywords : optical painting, perceptual abstraction.

An examination of the interplay between cultural context and artistic practice in the work of Robert Smithson. Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and thoroughly than any time before or since. In Robert Smithson, Ann Reynolds elucidates the complexity of Smithson's work and thought by placing them in their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival materials that Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1987. The archive provides Reynolds with the remnants of Smithson's working life—magazines, postcards from other artists, notebooks, and perhaps most important, his library—from which she reconstructs the physical and conceptual world that Smithson inhabited. Reynolds explores the relation of Smithson's art-making, thinking about art-making, writing, and interaction with other artists to the articulated ideology and discreet assumptions that determined the parameters of artistic practice of the time. A central focus of Reynolds's analysis is Smithson's fascination with the blind spots at the center of established ways of seeing and thinking about culture. For Smithson, New Jersey was such a blind spot, and he returned there again and again—alone and with fellow artists—to make art that, through its location alone, undermined assumptions about what and, more important, where, art should be. For those who guarded the integrity of the established art world, New Jersey was "elsewhere"; but for Smithson, "elsewheres" were the defining, if often forgotten, locations on the map of contemporary culture.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, this book examines the development of the Op Art movement, its cultural context, and its widespread impact on advertising, fashion and film-making. It includes works by Josef Albers, Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely.

This catalogue includes 139 Native North American works of art that represent many peoples and a variety of materials and functions, presented here for their aesthetic value.-- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

An examination of the pervasive anxiety about and fixation with time seen in 1960s art. In the 1960s art fell out of time; both artists and critics lost their temporal bearings in response to what E. M. Cioran called "not being entitled to time." This anxiety and uneasiness about time, which Pamela Lee calls "chronophobia," cut across movements, media, and genres, and was figured in works ranging from kinetic sculptures to Andy Warhol films. Despite its pervasiveness, the subject of time and 1960s art has gone largely unexamined in historical accounts of the period. Chronophobia is the first critical attempt to define this obsession and analyze it in relation to art and technology. Lee discusses the chronophobia of art relative to the emergence of the Information Age in postwar culture. The accompanying rapid technological transformations, including the advent of computers and automation processes, produced for many an acute sense of historical unknowing; the seemingly accelerated pace of life began to outstrip any attempts to make sense of the present. Lee sees the attitude of 1960s art to time as a historical prelude to our current fixation on time and speed within digital culture. Reflecting upon the 1960s cultural anxiety about temporality, she argues, helps us historicize our current relation to technology and time. After an introductory framing of terms, Lee discusses such topics as "presentness" with repect to the interest in systems theory in 1960s art; kinetic sculpture and new forms of global media; the temporality of the body and the spatialization of the visual image in the paintings of Bridget Riley and the performance art of Carolee Schneemann; Robert Smithson's interest in seriality and futurity, considered in light of his reading of George Kubler's important work The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things and Norbert Wiener's discussion of cybernetics; and the endless belaboring of the present in sixties art, as seen in Warhol's Empire and the work of On Kawara.