An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.

"Jack Beal first attained prominence in the early 1960s when he was one of the first American artists to renounce abstract expressionism for realist painting, feeling that he was raising rather than lowering the stakes of his art by doing so. Since then the artist has, in author Eric Shanes's words, "mined a rich vein of representation, which has usually demonstrated a fine sense of observation, an inventive painterliness, an acute responsiveness to shape and pattern, the ability to create dynamic compositional structures, and always the willingness to take artistic risks rather than languish in a single mode of picture making. Moreover, in his best works, Beal's pushing of representational forms to their interface with abstraction has been responsible for the creation of some of the most striking and unusual images of the period."" "Jack Beal, the first monograph on this leading American artist, surveys his entire oeuvre to date, including paintings, murals, drawings, and prints, beginning with what he himself regards as his first important picture, The Saw (1964)." "Beal's increasing desire "to make the world inside the canvas nearly as real as the world beyond it," to make the pictorial space as believable as real space, coincided with a decision to tackle narrative in his work - an unfashionable stance and another way of raising the stakes of his art. This combination resulted in a painting of a mythological subject which was also, perhaps more significantly, his first major treatment of the reclining female nude, Danae I of 1965. Through the next decade Beal painted a series of nudes that includes many of his most important paintings; the series concluded and culminated in a second treatment of Danae in 1972. Usually these nudes are set amid complex patterns and shapes including both setting and still-life details." "Beal's oeuvre also includes still-lifes done for their own sake; portraits; landscapes; allegories, such as a series on the Virtues and Vices; and a group of murals on the history of labor commissioned by the United States government's General Services Administration to adorn the new Labor Department Building in Washington - the first such project sponsored by the federal government since the great spate of commissions during the 1930s. Through all the artist's work run his passionate moralism and sensuality, which combine with a consummate grasp of his craft to provide works that resonate with visual poetry and emotional density." "Shanes concludes his survey of Jack Beal's life and work: "He has been responsible for a serious body of work, and at his best he has created images of complexity and feeling, pictures that have certainly placed representationalism back on the agenda of serious art....And in his best paintings he has given us rich images that enjoy the power equally to delight us visually, move us emotionally, and stimulate us intellectually."" "Jack Beal reproduces all of the artist's most important works, including sixty-four in full color, conveying a range and balance of colors of extraordinary freshness and richness. They are accompanied by a major essay written by Shanes, a bibliography, biographical outline, lists of exhibitions and public collections, and index."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Performance Review, the first monograph by North Carolina-based artist, educator and activist Endia Beal, brings together work from first-hand experiences that highlight the realities and challenges for women of color in the corporate workplace. Beal's widely-published videos and photographic series, including "Am I What You're Looking For?" "Office Scene," "Can I Touch It?" and "9 to 5" are presented in a book sequence that highlights the ambitions, challenges and negotiations that women of color navigate within the workplace.Beal's signature directness and visual intelligence engages viewers of varying generations and backgrounds in dialogues that accept there is much to questions we push forward during the social evolutions of our time.The book includes an introduction by Beal's contemporary and colleague Whitney Richardson, former producer and writer for The New York Times "Lens" photography column among other roles, and now Global Events Manager for The New York Times in London.

"Traces the career of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral (born 1932). Drawing on techniques like plaiting and wrapping and materials such as horsehair and gold leaf, Amaral's transformative woven sculptures result from a lifetime of experimentation. This book provides new scholarship by contextualizing Amaral's work within contemporary and fiber arts"--