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A bold reappraisal of Land art through the pioneering work of 12 women sculptors Using materials such as earth, wind, water, fire, wood, salt, rocks, mirrors and explosives, American artists of the 1960s began to move beyond the white cube gallery space to work directly in the land. With ties to Minimal and Conceptual art, these artists placed less emphasis on the discrete object and turned their attention to the experience of the artwork—however fleeting or permanent that might be—foregroundin...

Stone Talks brings together poems and four talks/essays by noted poet Alyson Hallett on the subject of stones, rocks, somatics and our relationship with our environment. The book invites us to listen again to the world around us - the world of rocks and trees and sky and stars and sea that we participate in and that participates in us. It reawakens a childlike curiosity in us, makes connections that we had forgotten, and gives us permission to experience the world in an embodied and vibrant wa...

The challenge posed by art in its encounter with natural landscape has evolved astonishingly in recent times. Our awareness of a persistent crisis that spreads like a thick stain between spaces and species is accompanied by a dark vision of the territories ravaged by the human productive machine that the capitalist system has made grow. In this scenario of altered balances, of incessant disappearances, the idea of this book is presented as a travel blog through the history of the natural territo...

A MOVING POEM THAT ECHOES THE LOVE PALESTINIANS HAVE FOR THEIR OLIVE TREES AND THEIR DEEP CONNECTION TO THEIR LAND FEATURES SEVENTEEN MAJOR PALESTINIAN ARTISTS Rest in My Shade is a poetic story about displacement, identity and loss recited by an ancient olive tree. It is illustrated with olive trees created in various media by Palestinian artists living around the world.

The definitive rock art book on Painted Bluff, Alabama Containing more than 130 paintings and engravings, Painted Bluff is perhaps the most elaborate prehistoric pictograph site east of the Mississippi River. Positioned at several levels on a dramatic sandstone cliff along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, the spectacular paintings and engravings depict mythical creatures, dancing humans, and mystical portals. The Cosmos Revealed: Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alaba...

This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects—dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands—that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered “ecological.” The pattern of Ruisdael’s reworking each environment and associated phenomena shows him as laboring over these themes. His work across media conveys something of his demanding and methodical proce...

Holly Gordon and Ward Hooper have worked independently as artists for decades. In 2014 they embarked on an artistic collaboration exploring Long Island's communities, coastlines, and landmarks. Hooper's paintings and Gordon's photographs reimagine an iconic but rapidly changing place in America, one marked by beauty/grit, quiet/bustle, rural/industrial, heritage/change, and wealthy/working class tensions. They also explore preconceptions about relationships, aging, and infirmity. Taken together,...

In 1933, the Banff School opened in the stunning surroundings of Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies. From its beginnings offering a single drama course, it has since grown into the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, a renowned cultural destination. Uplift traces its first four decades as it generated ideals of culture and liberal democratic citizenship intrinsic to the development of modern Canada. In an era of unstable cultural policy and state support, Uplift draws welcome attentio...

Wrapping historic structures in silvery fabric and blue cable - a famous tradition for Christo and Jeanne-Claude In the summer of 1995, the Reichstag building in Berlin was transformed into an immense sculptural experience by Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude along with a team of hundreds. Wrapping historic structures in silvery fabric and blue cable has become a famous tradition for Christo and Jeanne-Claude: landscape projects in the USA, Japan, and Australia and urban projects such as the Po...

What is the responsibility, or the task of the arts as we face environmental crisis?Ecologies in Practice is an edited collection of dynamic and multi-formatted contributions that explore the ways in which cultural production informs perceptions, communications, and knowledge of environmental distress in a Canadian context, pointing to the significance of the arts in the creation and sharing of crucial counter narratives and alternative possibilities. Ecologies in Practice identifies the arts as...

Hailing from the cultural realm of India, the mandala signifies in its original sense a sacred circle. It serves as a meditation aid and at the same time reflects an ancient symbolism of strictly geometric basic forms accompanied by an interpretation of its sacred content. As an expression of the awareness of higher affinities, the symmetrically arranged geometry can be found in a variety of pictorial works and the architecture of various epochs and cultural realms, for example in medieval book...

Listening After Nature examines the constructions and erasures that haunt field recording practice and discourse. Analyzing archival and contemporary soundworks through a combination of post-colonial, ecological and sound studies scholarship, Mark Peter Wright recodes the Field; troubles conceptions of Nature; expands site-specificity; and unearths hidden technocultures. What exists beyond the signal? How is agency performed and negotiated between humans and nonhumans? What exactly is a field re...

Art and science – they may seem like opposites, but throughout history there have been visionaries who have brought together these contrasting subjects. The Art of Science explores the work of 40 such artists and artist-scientists, uncovering how these innovators have designed futuristic technology centuries ahead of its time, investigated time and space through abstract art, and created sculpture informed by NASA technology. An expertly curated selection of artists from many different culture...

A photographic study of the land that served as the main testing site for American nuclear devices for four decadesMore nuclear bombs have been detonated in America than in any other country in the world. Between 1951 and 1992, the Nevada National Security Test Site was the primary location for these activities, withstanding more than a thousand nuclear tests that left swaths of the American Southwest resembling the moon. In The Nevada Test Site, renowned American photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 19...