A revelatory history of the first artist collective in the United States and its effort to reshape nineteenth-century art, culture, and politics The American Pre-Raphaelites founded a uniquely interdisciplinary movement composed of politically radical abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. Active during the Civil War, this dynamic collective united in a spirit of protest, seeking sweeping reforms of national art and culture. Painting Dissent recovers the American Pre-Raphaelites from the margins of history and situates them at the center of transatlantic debates about art, slavery, education, and politics. Artists such as Thomas Charles Farrer and John Henry Hill championed a new style of landscape painting characterized by vibrant palettes, antipicturesque compositions, and meticulous brushwork. Their radicalism, however, was not solely one of style. Sophie Lynford traces how the American Pre-Raphaelites proclaimed themselves catalysts of a wide-ranging reform movement that staged politically motivated interventions in multiple cultural arenas, from architecture and criticism to collecting, exhibition design, and higher education. She examines how they publicly rejected their prominent contemporaries, the artists known as the Hudson River School, and how they offered incisive critiques of antebellum society by importing British models of landscape theory and practice. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of archival material, Painting Dissent transforms our understanding of how American artists depicted the nation during the most turbulent decades of the nineteenth century.

During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some of China's elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, painting titles, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions--some transparent, others deliberately concealed.

A revelatory history of the first artist collective in the United States and its effort to reshape nineteenth-century art, culture, and politics The American Pre-Raphaelites founded a uniquely interdisciplinary movement composed of politically radical abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. Active during the Civil War, this dynamic collective united in a spirit of protest, seeking sweeping reforms of national art and culture. Painting Dissent recovers the American Pre-Raphaelites from the margins of history and situates them at the center of transatlantic debates about art, slavery, education, and politics. Artists such as Thomas Charles Farrer and John Henry Hill championed a new style of landscape painting characterized by vibrant palettes, antipicturesque compositions, and meticulous brushwork. Their radicalism, however, was not solely one of style. Sophie Lynford traces how the American Pre-Raphaelites proclaimed themselves catalysts of a wide-ranging reform movement that staged politically motivated interventions in multiple cultural arenas, from architecture and criticism to collecting, exhibition design, and higher education. She examines how they publicly rejected their prominent contemporaries, the artists known as the Hudson River School, and how they offered incisive critiques of antebellum society by importing British models of landscape theory and practice. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of archival material, Painting Dissent transforms our understanding of how American artists depicted the nation during the most turbulent decades of the nineteenth century.

"The most important study of art in California, particularly in terms of avant-garde activity around mid-century, that I am aware of."--Paul Karlstrom, Smithsonian Institution

Art, Politics and Dissent provides a counter history to conventional accounts of American art. Close historical examinations of particular events in Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s are interwoven with discussion of the location of these events, normally marginalized or overlooked, in the history of cultural politics in the United States during the postwar period.

"The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington"--Colophon.

Over the last three decades, a new generation of conceptual artists has come to the fore in the Arab Middle East. As wars, peace treaties, sanctions, and large-scale economic developments have reshaped the region, this cohort of cultural producers has also found themselves at the center of intergenerational debates on the role of art in society. Central to these cultural debates is a steady stream of support from North American and European funding organizations—resources that only increased with the start of the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s. The Politics of Art offers an unprecedented look into the entanglement of art and international politics in Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman to understand the aesthetics of material production within liberal economies. Hanan Toukan outlines the political and social functions of transnationally connected and internationally funded arts organizations and initiatives, and reveals how the production of art within global frameworks can contribute to hegemonic structures even as it is critiquing them—or how it can be counterhegemonic even when it first appears not to be. In so doing, Toukan proposes not only a new way of reading contemporary art practices as they situate themselves globally, but also a new way of reading the domestic politics of the region from the vantage point of art.