Fine Art

 S'abadeb---The Gifts: Pacific Coast Salish Art and Artists

S'abadeb is the Lushootseed term for gifts and involves a principle at the heart of Salish culture: reciprocity, in both the public and private domains. S'abadeb capture the essence of Coast Salish culture through its artistry, oral traditions, and history. The book was published in conjunction with the first extensive exhibition of the arts and culture of the indigenous peoples of Washington State and British Columbia. (Seattle Art Museum in association with the University of Washington Press)


The circus is a world where reality and flights of fancy merge into magical performances of movement, of carefully choreographed yet venturous dances with gravity, animals, and fellow performers.

A significant addition to the literature of the circus, telling a story that has long been missing from the history of American art. Donna Guftafson chronicles the history of the American circus and examines both how and why the circus came to be an ideal subject for American art. (MIT Press)

"Representations of Black Americans in the media and in popular culture have, over time, both reinforced and thwarted their social, political,economic, and cultural aspirations. The link between visual and political representation is reflected in the works [in this gallery edition]" (Lowrey Stokes Sims).

The African American artists represented in this beautiful, large-format art book, include Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Edmonia Lewis, Batye Saar, and Augusta Savage. (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery).

In the foreword to this wonderful book, Neal Benezra, Director of the San Fransico Museum of Modern Art, tells us that science is a way of making sense of the world, but also a means of making it available to and through the senses.

The photographs collected in Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible 1840-1900, are stunning representations which convey the fascinating and beautiful intersection of these parallel impulses. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with Yale University Press)

Explorations of contempoary art have focused on issues of identity and race for some time but few studies juxtapose historical and contemporary frameworks. Black Womanhood examines an especially charged icon---the Black female body---and contemporary artists' interventions upon historical images of Black women as exotic Others, erotic fantasies, and super-maternal Mammies. Edited by Barbara Thompson, Black Womanhood startles, confounds, and challenges readers and audience to reconsider commonplace ideas and perceptions.



Additional fine arts books:

Japanese paintings from the Henricksen Collection (Cornell University Press)

Andy Warhol: the last Decade (Delmonico Books)

Joaquin Torres-Garcia: Constructing abstraction with wood  (Yale University Press)