Krannert Art Museum,US – förlag

An ancient time brought to life by textiles

While the monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt are more widely known, the simple pleasures of life as it was lived are better portrayed in textiles, which carried designs commemorating the joys of festivals, food, and dancing.  Weavings from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Egypt presents 103 full-color images of the astonishing textile collection of Rose Choron, featuring rare examples from Egypt’s Coptic Christians as well as the Islamic period.

Dating primarily from the third to seventh centuries, these hand-woven fabrics showcase colorful images of dancers, haloed saints with hands raised in prayer, and a plethora of flowers and animals evoking the bountiful ecology of the Nile Delta. Some display Arabic inscriptions celebrating divine power, and all offer insights into a lost world: people’s dress, their interior decoration, and their view of their relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds.

Eunice Dauterman Maguire explains the work by providing a rich historical and mythic context, as well as detailed technical explanations. This volume also features a preface by Rose Choron herself, explaining the origins of the collection and the source of her fascination with the textiles.

Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? is the first publication on the work of Zina Saro-Wiwa, a British-Nigerian video artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Occupying the space between documentary and performance, Saro-Wiwa's videos, photographs, and sound produced in the Niger Delta region of southeastern Nigeria from 2013–2015 explore folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food, and Nigerian popular aesthetics. Engaging Niger Delta residents as subjects and collaborators, Saro-Wiwa cultivates strategies of psychic survival and performance, testing contemporary art's capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism. Known for decades for corruption and environmental degradation, the Niger Delta is one of the largest oil producing regions of the world, and until 2010 provided the United States with a quarter of its oil. Saro-Wiwa returns to this contested region—the place of her birth—to tell new stories.Featuring a guest foreword by Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa; essays by Stephanie LeMenager, Amy L. Powell, and Taiye Selasi; an interview with the artist by Chika Okeke-Agulu; and recipes created by the artist.

The Strange Life of Objects provides the first critical overview of Annette Lemieux's dynamic and varied career. She first garnered attention on the newly global art scene of the 1980s. Since that time she has continued to produce work that grows in depth and resonance, proving herself an artist of lasting significance.Lemieux's early use of traditional techniques - painting, printing, casting, and photography - expanded to include found materials laden with cultural meanings and evocative of personal memories. Whatever the material, Lemieux masters and invents techniques and processes that correlate with states of mind. Major themes she returns to within our shifting political and cultural climate include the horror of war, the nature of time, the elusive truth of memory, the nature of ideas and art-making, and the relationship between personal experience and cultural history. A teacher and prolific artist, she lives and works in Boston where she is professor of the practice in studio arts at Harvard University.