Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the out-set that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) — but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters — some kids who have it, some who... (more)

The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life

The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life

Art made to attach to buildings or to be given away? Wearable art for street demonstrations or art that sets up a booth at a trade show? This is the art of the interventionists, who trespass into the everyday world to raise our awareness of injustice and other social problems. These artists don't preach or proselytize; they give us the tools to form our own opinions and create our own political actions. The... (more)

Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, And the Paranormal (Issues in Cultural Theory)

Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, And the Paranormal (Issues in Cultural Theory)

by Lynne Tillman, Marina Warner, Spencer Finch, Jeremy Blake

As technology has burgeoned in recent years, so have ghosts in the machine, or so the 29 artists featured here suggest. All use existing gadgets--photography, film, video, radio, Internet, and digital media--to explore age-old questions about parallel worlds and the paranormal. Photography has a long history with this topic--from the infamous Cottingham fairy photographs through studio spiritualist images to more... (more)

Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility

Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility

by Robert Storr

In a time which one critic characterized recently as "the era of the curator," it is not only relevant but absolutely necessary to thoroughly question the current state of curatorial practice, its professional values, and the assumptions implicit in them. "Curating Now" gathers together the thoughts of a diverse group of internationally recognized, influential curators, comments presented for the benefit and... (more)

Churches, Communities, and Children: Italian Immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York, 1880-1945Mary Elizabeth Brown

Churches, Communities, and Children: Italian Immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York, 1880-1945

by Mary Elizabeth Brown

The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

by Thomas J. Brown

In his intriguing examination of Civil War remembrance as a public art, Thomas Brown uses civic monuments, ceremonial oratory, historical reenactment, and other forms of commemoration to explore how Americans have addressed issues of nationhood, race relations, gender, and cultural continuity in periods of social and economic upheaval. Drawing on the latest scholarship, Brown provides an informative narrative... (more)

Bomb after Bomb: A Violent Cartography

by Elin O'Hara Slavick

Bomb After Bomb , by Elin O'Hara Slavick, with a foreword by radical historian Howard Zinn, includes 48 color plates of Slavick's drawing series Protesting Cartography: Places The United States Has Bombed. Working from military surveillance imagery, aerial photographs, battle plans, maps and mass media sources, using gouache, ink, watercolor, graphite and other media on paper, Slavick renders bombed sites as... (more)

Sarah Mceneaney

by Elyse Gonzales, Eileen Neff, Rob Nixon, Claudia Gould, Sarah McEneaney

A painter diarist, Sarah McEneany brandishes a strong outsider undercurrent in her treatment of herself, her home and studio, and her Philadelphia neighborhood. With a naïve verisimilitude, she accounts for every detail in a colorful manner, but leaves her paintings flat and fantastical in the manner of the Persian, Indian, and Early Renaissance art that inspires her. Florine Stettheimer, Reginald Marsh, and Frida... (more)

I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagons Black World

by Trevor Paglen

They’re on the shoulder of all military personnel: patches that symbolize what a soldier’s unit does. But what happens if it’s top secret? Shown here for the first time, these sixty patches reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names (“Goat Suckers,” “None of Your Fucking Business,” “Tastes Like Chicken”) and illustrated with occult symbols and... (more)

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Black Hole

by Charles Burns