"Offers a singularly courageous, personal account of learning how to pour the poetics of space into the art of life." -- Geografishe Annales B: Human Geography

A book of art projects from around the world used to teach geography to primary, intermediate, and secondary students.

Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the "place" of art, and often the art itself results from these conflicts of geography and culture. Addressing an important approach to art history, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's book offers essays that focus on the intricacies of accounting for the geographical dimension of art history during the early modern period in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Toward a Geography of Art presents a historical overview of these complexities, debates contemporary concerns, and completes its exploration with a diverse collection of case studies. Employing the author's expertise in a variety of fields, the book delves into critical issues such as transculturation of indigenous traditions, mestizaje, the artistic metropolis, artistic diffusion, transfer, circulation, subversion, and center and periphery. What results is a foundational study that establishes the geography of art as a subject and forces us to reconsider assumptions about the place of art that underlie the longstanding narratives of art history.

Contemporary American society, with its emphasis on mobility and economic progress, all too often loses sight of the importance of a sense of “place” and community. Appreciating place is essential for building the strong local communities that cultivate civic engagement, public leadership, and many of the other goods that contribute to a flourishing human life. Do we, in losing our places, lose the crucial basis for healthy and resilient individual identity, and for the cultivation of public virtues? For one can’t be a citizen without being a citizen of some place in particular; one isn’t a citizen of a motel. And if these dangers are real and present ones, are there ways that intelligent public policy can begin to address them constructively, by means of reasonable and democratic innovations that are likely to attract wide public support? Why Place Matters takes these concerns seriously, and its contributors seek to discover how, given the American people as they are, and American economic and social life as it now exists—and not as those things can be imagined to be in some utopian scheme—we can find means of fostering a richer and more sustaining way of life. The book is an anthology of essays exploring the contemporary problems of place and placelessness in American society. The book includes contributions from distinguished scholars and writers such as poet Dana Gioia (former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, urbanist Witold Rybczynski, architect Philip Bess, essayists Christine Rosen and Ari Schulman, philosopher Roger Scruton, transportation planner Gary Toth, and historians Russell Jacoby and Joseph Amato.

This extraordinary book is borne of loss: the loss of love, of certainty and assuredness, of knowing where we are or who we are, of beauty and youth, of health, of life itself, of privacy, and of roles and of knowing. When someone or something we love leaves us, we suddenly walk alone into new territory without them. We become strangers in new lands, places where the landscape is unalterably changed, where the center of gravity has somehow faltered and become weak, making us feel as if we might fall off the surface of the earth. Sometimes, that moment of loss defines the rest of our lives, becoming a center to our compass forever. This unique book is a guidebook, an atlas of those experiences of loss and grief, a map for living through and into change and impermanence, to moving on anew. You are the navigator through the three main sections: Embrace what is: walk into your new landscape Honor what was: be grateful for your old landscape Love what will be: live into your future landscape Illustrated throughout with art submitted from around the world, this book is an atlas of experience, utilizing map imagery and the richly metaphoric, evocative, and functional language of geography to help you place yourself on your own journey, to find your way through helpful exercises and an empathetic, expert guide.

As he spends hours studying his father's world map, a young boy escapes the hunger and misery of refugee life. Based on the author's childhood in Kazakhstan, where he lived as a Polish refugee during World War II.