Columbia University, Wallach Art Gallery,U.S. – förlag

Through essays, plates, and reproductions, the accompanying catalogue presents the range of photographs and other materials in the Community Service Society records. In the foreword, Maren Stange revisits her foundational study "Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950" in which she wrote extensively about the photographic practices of the Charity Organization Society and addressed the ongoing significance of the collection to the history of photography. Huffa Frobes-Cross provides a review of the extensive literature regarding the limitations of a progressive documentary tradition, including critiques during the 1970s and 1980s by Susan Sontag, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula, among others. This essay historicizes these arguments while taking into consideration the growing field of scholarship that has developed on photography of suffering, violence and poverty. Drew Sawyer's essay focuses on the visual culture of housing reform to highlight the heterogeneous and changing visual strategies of these two organizations at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, the essay deals with abundance of overlooked photographs of architecture in the archive. In doing so, it provides a corrective to scholarship and criticism that has focused on images of people and suffering rather than the built environment.

What can be said for the radical aesthetics and the performativity, whether visual or gestural, that have become central to the many progressive protests in recent years? The Protest and The Recuperation ponders that question with a survey of artistic perspectives on, and responses to, global protests that have taken place during the past decade from the Arab Spring through Covid-19, as well as the recuperative strategies of resistance.

Partisans of the Nude is a survey of genre art of the nude made by artists in areas that were formerly Ottoman but not yet Arab. Though spoken of as taboo and practically absent from Arab art production, the nude genre was important for early twentieth-century artists who sought to define their societies as post-Ottoman and cosmopolitan. Although recognized as foundational to Western art since Ancient Greece, the role the nude played in carving out an Arab art has been ignored by both nationalist histories and Orientalist narratives. By contrast, this book shows that art movements outside the West created their own, connected and commandeering modernity through the genre. It recontextualizes “postwar” and “Arab Spring” art by rooting it in the decolonizing and civic reinvention efforts of artists and activists who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political being.

Angela Su: Melencolia is published in conjunction with the artist's eponymously titled first solo exhibition in the Western Hemisphere. The richly illustrated book provides an overview of the artist's work since 2013 which includes installations, speculative docufiction videos, and drawings and hair embroideries of composite cyborgian bodies. The title is a tribute to Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melencolia I" (1514). In medieval philosophy, melancholy is associated with insanity, and late in the Renaissance it was also linked to creative genius. This print is a divining rod for understanding Su's varied practice. Weaving a spiritual dimension in works that veer into strange and uncomfortable spheres, she reenvisions interlocking symbolisms and expands into the mediums and realms drawn from the modern and contemporary archive.

Shifting Shorelines, published in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition, brings together historical and contemporary art, material culture, and environmental science to engage in an interdisciplinary critical dialogue. Through visual, ecological, and material evidence the authors demonstrate the various cycles of exploitation, damage, and reclamation. In so doing, the publication offers a counter reading of the received art historical narratives about the "scenic Hudson" - narratives overwhelmingly grounded on the work of white male artists - and aims for a rich and complex understanding of the legacy, lives, and livelihoods along the river informed by the voices and experiences of a broad range of creators. By focusing deeply on a specific place, this richly illustrated collection of essays offers a story of human and more-than-human history that reverberated across the country on other industrialized rivers such as the Mississippi, Ohio, and Columbia.

With the exception of Hagia Sophia, no Byzantine monument in the modern city of Istanbul can rival the former church of the monastery of the chora (Kariye Camii) in either the lavishness and splendor of its interior decoration, the upkeep of its grounds and garden, or, for that matter, the number of tourists from all over the world. Theodore Metochites, minister and subsequently prime minister of the Byzantine Empire, during a short period of cultural revival, undertook the rebuilding and renovation of the Kariye Camii. The greatest intellectual of his age, and thus knowledgeable and involved, he was wealthy and powerful and therefore in a position to assume the patronage of this church. Metochites early fourteenth–century rebuilding included the reconstruction of the naos dome; the pastophoria; the addition of a two-storied annex to the north, an inner and outer narthex to the west; and the parekklesion to the south.The monastery was dedicated to the Virgin, as Theodore Metochites indicated in a long poem he wrote to the Virgin: "To thee I have dedicated this noble monastery, which is called by thy precious name of Chora." Located at the edge of Constantinople near the Land Wall of Emperor Theodosius, the Kariye Camii gained in importance due to its proximity to the main imperial residence at the Blachernae Palace (mostly ruined). In addition to its architectural significance, the Kariye Camii also preserves one of the finest and most extensive cycles of Later Byzantine mosaic and fresco decoration recounting the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ.This catalogue brings together scholars who have studied aspects of the Kariye Camii's art, architecture, and history. Their essays and the extensive section of plates are meant as an introduction to the monument, allowing the reader to explore further its Byzantine and later story as well as the multifaceted story of its scholarly rediscovery and restoration in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

In the early 20th century, the Soviet architectural press became a forum for an extraordinary group of artists, designers, architects, and theorists to converge in debate over the shape of their present and future built environment. The visually stunning and rhetorically innovative publications include major contributions by many the most brilliant artists and graphic designers of the Russian and Soviet avant–garde: Aleksei Gan, Gustav Klutsis, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, the Stenberg brothers, Varvara Stepanova, and Solomon Telingater. Moreover, magazines such as Sovremennaia arkhitekura (Contemporary Architecture) and Stroitel'stvo Moskvy (Construction of Moscow) were the primary sites on which many of the most important architects of the period–Moisei Ginzburg, Ivan Leonidov, Konstantin Melnikov, and the Vesnin brothers–developed their ideas and projects.Richard Anderson and Kristin Romberg, both Columbia University doctoral candidates in art history are the co–curators of the exhibition and primary authors of the catalogue. Richard Anderson's essay, "The Journal States its Aims: Partisanship and the Party Line in the Soviet Architectural Press," concerns the material, cultural, and typographic production of three major Soviet architectural periodicals. Kristin Romberg in "From Veshch' to SA: Journal as Object" examines the tensions between autonomous art object and mass medium that are inherent in the evolution of the Soviet avant-garde journal as a form. The catalogue also contains a short introduction by Jean-Louis