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What historical factors transformed American politics into the institution we know today? This in-depth look at America's party system traces its efficacy, sustainability, and popularity through six influential presidencies spanning 1790 to the present day.Did President Obama's election serve as the impetus to the development of a seventh political party system? This compelling text sheds light on the American political process as seen through the lens of six pivotal presidencies that shaped Ame...

The gnarled branches of a beautiful old plum tree reach toward the sky. A mushroom hunter searches for morels among rolling hills. A small boat is tossed among the tumultuous waves of an angry sea. Striding Lines, an homage to Wisconsin artist and quilter Rumi O'Brien, presents these striking images of her work and many more, accompanied by descriptions that share the stories of each piece in the artist's own words. Each quilt represents a moment, often autobiographical, crafted with whimsy, rev...

The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed. Cherise Smith analyzes their complex engagements with issues of identity through close readings of a significant performance, or series of performances, by each artist. She examines Piper’s public embodiment of the Mythic Being, a working-class black man, during the early 1970s; Antin’s full-time existence as...

A mold-breaking memoir of Asian American identity, political activism, community, and purpose. Not Yo’ Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto—artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who...

There was a craze for all things Japanese in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries that brought a correspondingly radical shift in Western art, dubbed japonisme. Leading artists, including Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, were inspired by Japanese art and culture to create works of singular beauty. This lavishly illustrated publication explores this extraordinary moment of cross-cultural exchange by presenting a selection of major paintings, prints, drawings, and decorative arts fro...

Keiko Hara offers a detailed exploration of the prolific artist's unwavering commitment to painting, and her unique form of Japanese woodblock printmaking. Rich with metaphorical imagery, Hara's visual universe encompasses references to water, fire, skies, and verdant lands, all the while investigating the poetics of space. Born during the Second World War in North Korea to Japanese parents, Hara moved to Japan in 1945 and was raised and educated there. As a young woman, she attended art school...

Takuichi Fujii (1891–1964) left Japan in 1906 to make his home in Seattle, where he established a business, started a family, and began his artistic practice. When war broke out between the United States and Japan, he and his family were incarcerated along with the more than 100,000 ethnic Japanese located on the West Coast. Sent to detention camps at Puyallup, Washington, and then Minidoka in Idaho, Fujii documented his daily experiences in words and art. The Hope of Another Spring reveals the...

Chiura Obata (1885-1975) was one of the most significant Japanese American artists working on the West Coast in the last century. Born in Okayama, Japan, Obata emigrated to the United States in 1903 and embarked on a seven-decade career that saw the enactment of anti-immigration laws and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. But Obata emerged as a leading figure in the Northern California artistic communities, serving not only as an influential art professor at UC Ber...

A groundbreaking examination of how the act of drawing was a vital component of Ruth Asawa’s multifaceted art “A revelatory exhibition. . . . [A] fine exhibition catalog.”—Nancy Princenthal, New York Times, “Critic’s Pick”   Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), widely known for her looped-wire sculptures, was an inveterate drawer. She filled sketchbook after sketchbook and even stated that drawing was central to her sculpture. This volume is the first to consider the significance of drawing in Asawa’s o...

Written intimately and in the first person, Persimmon and Frog reveals a less familiar story from World War II. Born in America to immigrant farmers, Kimura was visiting Japan as a 10-year-old when the US entered the war. She was stranded in Japan and spent her preteen and adolescent years in that foreign country, an American who looked completely Japanese. She went to school, absorbing Japanese aesthetics and the solace of art making. After the war, Kimura returned to the US. Relearning English...