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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
Hailed as "an eloquent and seemingly unsilenceable voice of freedom" by The New York Times, Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir that presents a remarkable history of China over the last hundred years while also illuminating his artistic process. Once an intimate of Mao Zedong and the nation's most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as "Little Siberia," where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist--and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. Ai Weiwei's sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his life story and that of his father, whose creativity was stifled. At once ambitious and intimate, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.
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8THS GRAPH BEVELED RULER 18 INCH
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Affinities: A Journey Through Images from the Public Domain Review
A remarkable collection of over five hundred images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, an online journal and not-for- profit project dedicated to exploring curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas, this volume has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogs, and ship logs to primers on Victorian magic. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence that unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads--hatching eggs paired with early Burmese world maps, marbled endpapers meet tattooed stowaways, and fireworks explode beside deep sea coral.
At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. A compelling art object and visual experience in its own right, this collection provides a launchpad for further exploration and inventive engagement across all forms of visual culture and expression.
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Africa's Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat
A major new history of how African nations, starting in the 1960s, sought to reclaim the art looted by Western colonial powers
For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa's Struggle for Its Art, Bénédicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history. One of the world's foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage, Savoy investigates extensive, previously unpublished sources to reveal that the roots of the struggle extend much further back than prominent recent debates indicate, and that these efforts were covered up by myriad opponents. Shortly after 1960, when eighteen former colonies in Africa gained independence, a movement to pursue repatriation was spearheaded by African intellectual and political classes. Savoy looks at pivotal events, including the watershed speech delivered at the UN General Assembly by Zaire's president, Mobutu Sese Seko, which started the debate regarding restitution of colonial-era assets and resulted in the first UN resolution on the subject. She examines how German museums tried to withhold information about their inventory and how the British Parliament failed to pass a proposed amendment to the British Museum Act, which protected the country's collections. Savoy concludes in the mid-1980s, when African nations enacted the first laws focusing on the protection of their cultural heritage. Making the case for why restitution is essential to any future relationship between African countries and the West, Africa's Struggle for Its Art will shape conversations around these crucial issues for years to come.- Please log in to review this product
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel
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Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night
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Art of Arousal
This irresistible volume presents 130 of the most engagingly erotic paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings from diverse eras and cultures, coupled with revealing commentaries about their sexual and aesthetic content. In its organization, The Art of Arousal traces the course of a sensual relationship. It begins by examining the elements of eroticism, and then progresses from flirtation and seduction through kisses and other foreplay before ultimately arriving at consummation and blissful exhaustion.
The irrepressible Dr. Ruth explores every element of sexuality in these provocative works of art, including the pleasures of looking, creative fantasizing, and the effects on male and female pleasure of the various positions depicted. All the art in this book has been chosen to meet two essential criteria: everyone portrayed must be having a good time, and each image must satisfy the high aesthetic standards of Dr. Ruth and an art historian friend, who writes with witty scholarship about the artistic aspects of these works.
Now available in a revised edition that includes delightful new works by contemporary artists, The Art of Arousal is a stimulating gift for art lovers.
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Art of Junji Ito: Twisted Visions
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Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
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Avedon 100
Avedon 100 includes a foreword by Larry Gagosian, texts by Derek Blasberg and Jake Skeets, and an essay by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.
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Banksy
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Be-Spoke: Revelations from the World's Most Important Fashion Designers
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Beginner’s Guide to Oil Painting
The Easy Way to Get Started with Oil Painting
Craig Stephens has a simple motto for painting: With a brush, some paints and a willingness to learn, anyone can do it. With that mindset, Craig takes his most essential lessons, boils them down to their basics and teaches you everything you need to know to start oil painting, without any fuss or highbrow. Thanks to his experience teaching painting to high school students for over two decades, Craig is an expert at helping those with no experience pick up a brush and make beautiful art they are proud of. With his direction, you'll create dynamic, vivid paintings and learn to capture your world in ways you never thought possible. Each project in this book is designed to highlight the important elements of using oil paints, helping you to practice new skills and get comfortable with the medium. And thanks to Craig's helpful step-by-step directions that pair a picture with each stroke, you'll get great results. Hone your color-mixing eye as you blend the vibrant greens and subtle yellows in the Freshly Cut Avocado piece. Practice painting unique textures, like the small craters in the Simplified Strawberry or the glossy skin on the Smooth and Shiny Plum. Learn all the ways to capture natural light, like transparency in a glass of Refreshing Lemon Water or dazzling reflections on a Chrome Coffee Creamer. Oil painting is a timeless art form, and with Craig as your teacher, you'll create 22 beautiful pieces for your walls and learn all the foundational skills you need to enjoy this hobby for years to come.- Please log in to review this product
Black Artisan Sketch Book
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Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance
Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence's art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city's powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that "divine" poet.
This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten.
The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli's Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli's metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli's Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation.
A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticelli's Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli's art helped bring it about--and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.
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British Surrealists
Honored for their idiosyncratic and imaginative works, the surrealists marked a pivotal moment in the history of modern art in Britain-- pioneering the Surrealist movement between World War I and II. Many artists banded together to form the British Surrealist Group, while others carved their own, independent paths.
Here, best-selling author and surrealist artist Desmond Morris--one of the last surviving members of this important art movement--draws on his personal memories and experiences to present the intriguing life stories, complex love lives, and groundbreaking works of this wild and curious set of artists. From the rebelliousness of Leonora Carrington to the beguiling Eileen Agar and the "brilliant" Ceri Richards, Morris brings his subjects' triumphs as well as their shortcomings to the fore.
Laced with his inimitable wit, and profusely illustrated by images of the artists and their artworks, Morris's vivid account reflects the movement's strange, rebellious, and imaginative nature. Featuring thirty- four surrealists--some famous, some now largely forgotten--Morris's intimate book takes us back in time to a generation that allowed its creative unconscious to drive their passions in both art and life.
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CANVAS CLASSIC 14X18
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CANVAS CLASSIC 16X20
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Chinese Art since 1970
The Sigg Collection is recognized as the most important and comprehensive collection of Chinese art today. It was acquired by M+, a new museum of visual culture in Hong Kong, in 2012 from the Swiss businessman, diplomat, and art collector Uli Sigg. The collection consists of 1,510 works of contemporary Chinese art, dating from the 1970s to the present and ranging across all media. It offers a unique insight into the remarkable flowering of experimental artistic practices in China during this time--a period of unprecedented social and economic change in the country that saw artists devise new, sometimes radical, approaches to artmaking, formulating new connections between art and society, and developing ground-breaking conceptual methodologies.
Published to coincide with the presentation of the M+ Sigg Collection at the opening of the M+ building, Chinese Art Since 1970 features more than 600 works by more than 300 artists represented in the collection, among them Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, and Geng Jianyi. After introductory essays by Pi Li and Uli Sigg, an illustrated chronology spanning the years 1972 to 2020 highlights important social events, exhibitions, and artistic movements to establish a context for the discussion of the featured artists and their work that follows. Punctuating this discussion are contributions from renowned art historians, curators, and critics together with in-depth explanations of key concepts and events, from Cynical Realism to the seminal exhibition China/Avant-Garde. Through the medium of the world's pre-eminent collection of contemporary Chinese art, this volume offers an unparalleled introduction to one of the most culturally dynamic periods in modern Chinese history.
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CLAY MARBLEX 5 LB #X25
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Cocktails with a Curator
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Color: A Master Class
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Concrete Dragon
China is now home to some of the world's tallest skyscrapers and biggest shopping malls; the longest bridges and largest airport; the most expansive theme parks and gated communities and even the world's largest skateboard park. And by 2020 China's national network of expressways will exceed in length even the American interstate highway system. China's construction industry, employing a workforce equal to the population of California, has been erecting billions of square feet of housing and office space every year. But such extensive development has also meant demolition on a scale unprecedented in the peacetime history of the world. Nearly all of Beijing's centuries-old cityscape has been bulldozed in recent years, and redevelopment in Shanghai has displaced more families than 30 years of urban renewal in the United States. China's cities are also rapidly sprawling across the landscape, churning precious farmland into a landscape of superblock housing estates and single-family subdivisions laced with highways and big-box malls. In a mere generation, China's cities have undergone a metamorphosis that took 150 years to complete in the United States.
The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World sheds light on this extraordinary chapter in world urban history. The book surveys the driving forces behind the great Chinese building boom, traces the historical precedents and global flows of ideas and information that are fusing to create a bold new Chinese cityscape, and considers the social and environmental impacts of China's urban future. The Concrete Dragon provides a critical overview of contemporary Chinese urbanization in light of both China's past as well as earlier episodes of rapid urban development elsewhere in the world especially that of the United States, a nation that itself once set global records for the speed and scale of its urban ambitions.
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