Portland Art Museum,U.S. – förlag

Artists in late 19th-century France produced some of Europe's most celebrated and revolutionary works of art. Among those innovators are Edgar Degas, Jean-Louis Forain, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who captured the renowned dancers of Paris in paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculptures, creating potent icons of a unique time, place, and culture. Each sought to portray rapidly changing urban life, concentrating on the human figure in its social context. The dancer proved to be a fruitful subject for their investigations of modernity.Degas focused on the artifice of the performance and the harsh daily life of the dancer. Drawing on his background as a newspaper illustrator, Forain's vignettes focus on backstage flirtations between social unequals, especially their exploitative aspects. By contrast, Lautrec's paintings, prints, and posters of celebrity dancers reveal his uncritical acceptance of the sexual commerce that was part of the popular entertainment scene of Montmartre.

The Artist's Touch, the Craftsman's Hand presents a selection of the most historically important and visually compelling Japanese prints from a collection of more than 2,500 works spanning the late 17th century to the present day. Many are extremely rare and almost all appear here in an English-language publication for the first time. Noteworthy areas of interest include early actor prints, dating back to the first decade of the 18th century; works by Suzuki Harunobu, the master associated with the origins of full-color printing in 1765; the deluxe, privately printed surimono of the early 19th century; painterly landscapes of the early 20th century, including a series that documents the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923; and contemporary prints, ranging from Op Art and Abstract Expressionism to lyrical evocations of an imagined past.Essays include an overview of the illustrated works and articles on Harunobu, prints of kabuki actors and their fans, and the cultural meanings in still-life surimono.

A richly illustrated reflection on a century of Black queer art and culture featuring seven essays from leading scholars.

The word ecstasy derives from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to put out of place.” It passed into English through the Old French extasie, which roughly translates as “rapturous.” Ecstasy, today, can be understood as a form of transcendence, often through an indiscriminate combination of extremes. Art’s truest depictions of ecstasy exist in the muddled territory between exaltation and despair. Transcendence highlights visual representations of Black queer ecstasy in a variety of media from the last one hundred years that challenge its absence from the historical record. Centering Blackness and queerness creates the conditions to investigate the potential of queer perspectives around the paradoxes of pleasure and pain, excess and lack, and autonomy and dependence.

This catalogue features seven essays by preeminent scholars of Black LGBTQ art and culture, each based on one of the volume’s subthemes: Portraiture; Beyond Figuration; Dance and Movement; Spirituality; Sex and Sensuality; Black Queer Futures; and Altered States. Together these themes represent the foundations of queer experiences and offer readers a space to engage with artwork and ephemera that highlight an ecstatically abundant past and advocate for a more inclusive and equitable future.

Blue Sky: The Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts at 40 is the first comprehensive publication to document and situate Portland's nonprofit Blue Sky Gallery within the national photography scene, charting its four-decade history from upstart artists' collective to mature nonprofit photographic space. Founded in 1975, before photography was embraced widely as a meaningful fine art form, Blue Sky's founders endeavored to bring the most dynamic contemporary photographers working in the United States, and eventually throughout the world, to the Northwest. The Center's early support of now-renowned photographers, including Nan Goldin, John Divola, Mark Klett, Robert Frank, and Larry Sultan, established Blue Sky as a preeminent West-Coast venue. The gallery remains a vital location where emerging photographers engaging with twenty-first century technologies continue to find their voices and eager audiences.