Bøker av Damian Skinner

Since the late 1980s, American jeweler Keith Lewis (*1959) has been consistently tackling issues of Queer identity and politics in his figurative and narrative jewelry, including a groundbreaking series of memorial jewels addressing the impact of the AIDS crisis on himself and his community. Often witty, sometimes shocking, frequently erotic, and surprisingly moving, his jewelry is an act of remembering and witnessing, and a joyous assertion that desire and pleasure, wonderful ends in themselves, can collapse historical distance and connect the past and the present. Written by Damian Skinner and featuring four of Lewis's artist talks documenting key preoccupations and series, this monograph surveys a bold, provocative, and ambitious body of work that deserves to be widely known.

In Flux explains how jewellery contributed to the raucous, contradictory, and enthusiastic clamour for a new kind of society that made the 1960s and 1970s so extraordinary.

Emigré artist Theo Schoon was fascinating, unorthodox, controversial, pioneering, and at times reckless. His life intersected with important cultural periods and places, where what it meant to be modern in New Zealand were being debated and articulated in art, literature, music, and theater. The art he pioneered and promoted--Maori rock drawings, the drawings of a psychiatric patient, Maori moko and kowhaiwhai, the abstract patterns of geothermal activity in Rotorua--were decisive for many other New Zealand artists, including Gordon Walters. And his example, as an academically trained artist with a good knowledge of modern European art and a commitment to do whatever it took to pursue his artistic projects, was both an inspiring and a cautionary tale. Schoon's is a life less well known now than it deserves to be. This superb, highly illustrated biography by one of New Zealand's best art writers corrects that imbalance and examines Schoon's claims on the development of art and culture in Aotearoa in the 20th century.