Bøker utgitt av Bard Graduate Center

New modes of displaying and viewing African art and material culture. At the heart of SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power & Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa is a design-focused question of how to present historical and contemporary works alongside one another. Through the use of a long wall designed by the architectural firm AD-WO for the 2023 exhibition, Bard Graduate Center invited visitors and interlocutors to engage with African art in a variety of ways. As part of the exhibition, the department of public humanities and research at BGC worked with curator Drew Thompson to craft a vigorous and lively series of public programs, inviting guests to create their own sightlines. Participants mary adeogun, JJJJJerome Ellis, Jessica Lynne, Annissa Malvoisin, Maaza Mengiste, and Okwui Okpokwasili offered their vantage points, illuminating various aesthetic, functional, and symbolic uses of the metalworks on view, and highlighting the modes of historical analysis and storytelling behind the contemporary works. This book gathers those sightlines with photographs of the exhibition installation and other illustrations selected by the authors. An introductory essay by curator Thompson grapples with current debates on the display of historical and contemporary art of Africa and the Black diaspora. Exhibition designers and curatorial advisers Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood present a visual essay on the inspiration for and the ideas behind their long-wall display. The book also features an interview between Admassu, Thompson, and Wood. SIGHTLINES marks a different approach to scholarship around exhibitions in two immediate ways. First, it showcases how visitors engaged with the exhibition through its design and display of objects. Second, it provides an opportunity to highlight the kinds of research and cultural insights that a collaborative and design-focused curatorial approach provides. The publication is the first Bard Graduate Center book to explore the visual and material culture of Africa and the Black diaspora, delving into the history of the metalworks as well as larger debates on collecting practices, museum display, gallery education, and provenance.

Highlights ways of thinking and doing that connect philosophical generality to socio-material idiosyncrasy, encouraging care for all types of objects, from famous works of art to items like plastic bags. What Are Objects? opens with an object biography, composed in the form of an interview between the concept and author, in a playful attempt at "object whispering." From there, Ann-Sophie Lehmann presents five object biographies that explore the life of flax-a material intertwined with human history, particularly storytelling. A third essay connects Richard Tuttle's collection of everyday things, Hannah Arendt's ecological philosophy, and an object taxonomy developed by the early modern inventor Christoph Weigel to explore the philosophical dimensions and potential effects of object biographical thinking. This BGCX title grew from visits to Bard Graduate Center, particularly in response to the exhibition Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object?, while Lehmann was a fellow and lecturer in 2021-22.

This volume charts alternative courses through history via the physical conditions and artisanal ecologies in which cultural artifacts were created in Europe from roughly 1400 to 1700. Maker Space: Creative Environments in Early Modern Europe asks how spatial considerations initiated, supported, and thwarted creative activities and highlights points of intersection and overlap across practices that we otherwise tend to think of as separate. Scholars have long had an interest in, for instance, the workshop, laboratory, studiolo, or Kunstkammer as distinct places of production-named coordinates that situate social and technical actions in a defined context. The essays in this volume use the less fixed notion of space to break open such typologies, emphasizing the fluid, improvisational, and idiosyncratic aspects of creative work. They demonstrate how the ever-shifting array of tools, materials, environmental conditions, and bodies involved in artisanal production redirects our attention to the shared conditions that unite various enterprises of intellection, imagination, experimentation, and making. The book comprises a series of short case studies and extended meditations on particular sites where the work of the mind and hand coincided, from mines, arsenals, theaters, and imagined hermitages to tailors' shops, artists' workshops, the home, and even the space of a chemist's notebook. This format of short and long essays animates the story of early modern making and thinking practices at various scales. The specifics of these case studies move us away from either totalizing or categorical views that would gloss over the fluid, messy, and insistently material conditions of daily work-that is, the raw material of history. These essays also suggest fundamental shared concerns-from environmental and moral control to the conditions necessary for the mental demands of making-that supersede distinct makers or creative practices.