University of Maryland Baltimore County, Fine Arts Gallery – förlag

The all-American spirit of midcentury modernism, in three US State Department-sponsored exhibitionsThis revelatory volume recovers and presents the history of three exhibitions organized by the US State Department’s Traveling Exhibition Service almost 70 years ago: Contemporary American Textiles, curated by Florence Knoll, Contemporary American Wallpapers, curated by Tom Lee, and Containers & Packaging, curated by Will Burtin. These exhibitions were made for presentation in West German schools, museums and trade fairs, and through the Amerika Haus program. By joining consumer choice with political choice, the State Department tried to convince West Germans and other Europeans that the United States, its system of government and its capitalist values offered more and better lifestyle choices than those of the Soviet bloc. This book is both an exhibition catalog and a reader. It restores the spirit of these three exhibitions to the public memory and challenges the idea that design has little political purpose. By piecing together primary sources found within archival collections, libraries and special collections, the book reveals how the State Department deliberately employed design, a process that binds people to daily life, to embody a connection between a rhetoric of political freedom and capitalist values of consumer freedom. Considering these exhibitions and their showcased objects, characteristically associated with midcentury modernism, A Designed Life suggests that, even now, the Cold War affects our lives, habits and culture.Designers and curators include: Anni Albers, Evelyn Anselevicius, Richard Lee Brecker, Will Burtin, Serge Chermayeff, Morton and Millie Goldsholl, Elizabeth Gordon, Eszter Haraszty, Peter Harnden, Ilonka Karasz, Katzenbach and Warren Inc., Juliet Kepes, Florence Knoll, Walter Landor, Laverne Originals, Tom Lee, Dorothy Liebes, Raymond Loewy, Jack Masey, George Nelson, Walter Paepcke, Annemarie Henle Pope, Noémi Raymond, Bernard Rudofsky, Herwin Schaefer, Saul Steinberg, Angelo Testa and the Tilletts.

On artist Rosy Keyser’s dynamic and sculptural paintingsThis book surveys the paintings of New York–based artist Rosy Keyser (b. 1974), which are constructed from such ordinary materials as linen, canvas, aluminum, paint, gravel and sawdust, evoking the raw energy of action painting and Art Brut.

Fifty years of DeVane's energetic, interactive sculptures, paintings and works on paperMaryland-based artist Oletha DeVane (born 1952) has long been a prominent presence in the Baltimore-area art scene, working in all media, including public sculpture. Spectrum of Light and Spirit documents the first full retrospective of her work, from early paintings to video artworks and interactive sculpture.Among the works presented here is a large-scale carved sculpture, N’Kisi Woman—Universal N’Kisi (2021–22); nkisi is a Kongo cultural figure invested with sacred energy. The work reflects DeVane’s fascination with how materials convey meaning and reemerge as myths and memories.“Oletha DeVane is a wayfinder and a storyteller,” says the retrospective’s curator, Lowery Stokes Sims. “Over the last five decades as she has traveled in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, she has been inspired by the stories and characters she encounters, bringing the unexpected to light, while finding new nuances in the old and familiar, and unexpected correlations among those varied cultures.”

The origami-and-lace-inspired practice of a longtime MICA professor and fiber artistDutch artist Annet Couwenberg (born 1950) makes textiles and sculptural objects inspired by Elizabethan collars using lace as a primary material. This is Couwenberg’s first major English-language monograph and presents a wide range of her projects from the past decade.

This volume is the first to examine the portrait photographs of this esteemed husband-and-wife team. The artists' portraits--like their radical landscapes and city-scenes--are powerfully evocative, boldly subverting our expectations of the discipline of portraiture: Rather than capturing the visual essence of a sitter, they reveal identity to be multifarious, transitive and culturally and historically bound. They capture their subjects in ways that transform, enhance and accentuate social and cultural meaning, doing so with the full complicity and respect of the people they photograph. Robbins and Becher spend weeks living with each community they document. They immerse themselves in the stories of its citizens and history, interviewing residents, participating in their customs, photographing them at work, play and home. Most important, they allow their subjects to represent themselves--not only as they would like to been seen, but in ways that illuminate their complex humanity.

Through five photographic styles—commercial product shot, scientific photo, portrait and epic narrative—New York artist Dana Hoey documents a world of primitive living conditions, under five different weather conditions: ash, freeze, thaw, flood and drought. Instruments of survival, such as the flashlight and the compass, populate these extreme situations.

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Few expressions in the culture of human thought have the iconic stature, and emotive power, that the word “evolution” entails. Though commonly relegated to modern-day science, the concept of evolution is ingrained in representations of life and nature in the visual arts, and artists and scientists have much to share on the meaning of human origin, human existence and human fate. The present volume documents an online symposium, Visual Culture and Evolution, in which a distinguished panel of artists, curators, scientists, historians, educators, media theorists and critics participated in a lively, informative conversation on the interface of art and science. Opening interviews by bio-artist Eduardo Kac and Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson set the stage for an engaging debate on this perennial topic.