In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chicago witnessed a remarkable flourishing of visual arts associated with the Black Arts Movement. From the painting of murals as a way to reclaim public space and the establishment of independent community art centers to the work of the AFRICOBRA collective and Black filmmakers, artists on Chicago's South and West Sides built a vision of art as service to the people. In Art for People's Sake Rebecca Zorach traces the little-told story of the visual arts of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, showing how artistic innovations responded to decades of racist urban planning that left Black neighborhoods sites of economic depression, infrastructural decay, and violence. Working with community leaders, children, activists, gang members, and everyday people, artists developed a way of using art to help empower and represent themselves. Showcasing the depth and sophistication of the visual arts in Chicago at this time, Zorach demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics and artistic practice in the mobilization of Black radical politics during the Black Power era.

Occasionally there appears a book which expresses clearly and forcibly what a large number of people have been feeling more or less inarticulately for a long time. Such a book is "Art for Life's Sake," a book of broad scope, of careful logic, of informational value, and of high ideals. It shows the relation of art to life in the past and how it may be more closely and helpfully united with real life in the present. The author skillfully satirizes the so-called artists who believe in Art only for Art's sake. The ultimate aim of the book is to "further the getting together of each and all, no matter what may be their specialized work, in an organized cooperation, animated by the ideal of individual and collective betterment." Thus the book is seen to have a broad message for the general reader, as well as a special message for the artist in colors, stone, metal, wood or other medium. To the latter he holds up a high standard, saying; "Hence the proud distinction of the artist proper, if he understand himself aright and be rightly understood, is to hold aloft the ensign to humanity, pointing the way to nearer and nearer approaches toward perfection." It is impossible in a brief review to further suggest the character of the subject matter of a book such as this, but the reader may be assured that his ideas about art will be clarified and his efforts toward human betterment will be given renewed impulse by close study of the chapters of this book. --Manual Training Magazine, Volume 14

Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history, but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folk’s Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers - and their connection to handwork, local history, and place - fed the public’s nostalgia for a simpler past. The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism – and the art market that once sustained it – had reached a crisis. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form. Generously illustrated, For Folk’s Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, a new brand of middle-class collector, and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia’s most important art institutions.

In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation. With depictions of tropical scenery and landscapes situated throughout the African diaspora, performances staged in tropical settings, and bodily expressions of tropicality during Carnival, artists such as Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, and Maya Angelou developed what Noël calls “tropical aesthetics”—using art to name and reclaim spaces of Black sovereignty. As a unifying element in the Caribbean modern art movement and the Harlem Renaissance, tropical aesthetics became a way for visual artists and performers to express their sense of belonging to and rootedness in a place. Tropical aesthetics, Noël contends, became central to these artists’ identities and creative processes while enabling them to craft alternative Black diasporic histories. In outlining the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the artistic and cultural practices of Black modernist art, Noël recasts understandings of African diasporic art.

Pioneering work by the great modernist painter, considered by many to be the father of abstract art and a leader in the movement to free art from traditional bonds. 12 illustrations.

A collection of Christian art from every region of the world celebrating Christ's early ministry, Christ as a teacher, the last days of his life, the Crucifixion and the days after - Images of God - Images and Christianity.