You Are an Artist


Book Description

“There are more than 50 creative prompts for the artist (or artist at heart) to explore. Take the title of this book as affirmation, and get started.” —Fast Company More than 50 assignments, ideas, and prompts to expand your world and help you make outstanding new things to put into it Curator Sarah Urist Green left her office in the basement of an art museum to travel and visit a diverse range of artists, asking them to share prompts that relate to their own ways of working. The result is You Are an Artist, a journey of creation through which you'll invent imaginary friends, sort books, declare a cause, construct a landscape, find your band, and become someone else (or at least try). Your challenge is to filter these assignments through the lens of your own experience and make art that reflects the world as you see it. You don't have to know how to draw well, stretch a canvas, or mix a paint color that perfectly matches that of a mountain stream. This book is for anyone who wants to make art, regardless of experience level. The only materials you'll need are what you already have on hand or can source for free. Full of insights, techniques, and inspiration from art history, this book opens up the processes and practices of artists and proves that you, too, have what it takes to call yourself one. You Are an Artist brings together more than 50 assignments gathered from some of the most innovative creators working today, including Sonya Clark, Michelle Grabner, The Guerrilla Girls, Fritz Haeg, Pablo Helguera, Nina Katchadourian, Toyin Ojih Odutola, J. Morgan Puett, Dread Scott, Alec Soth, Gillian Wearing, and many others.




Creation


Book Description

**SELECTED AS A BEST ART BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE SUNDAY TIMES** 'Stonard traverses the sweep of human history, moving between cultures and hemispheres ... His book consists of myriad flashes of brilliance and inventiveness' LITERARY REVIEW 'A worthy and richly illustrated successor to Ernst Gombrich's fabled The Story of Art' SUNDAY TIMES 'This bountifully illustrated book is a history of connections ... Lucid and thoughtful' COUNTRY LIFE _____________________________________ A fully illustrated, panoramic world history of art from ancient civilisation to the present day, exploring the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse. Fifty thousand years ago on an island in Indonesia, an early human used red ochre pigment to capture the likeness of a pig on a limestone cave wall. Around the same time in Europe, another human retrieved a lump of charcoal from a fire and sketched four galloping horses. It was like a light turning on in the human mind. Our instinct to produce images in response to nature allowed the earliest Homo sapiens to understand the world around them, and to thrive. Now, art historian John-Paul Stonard has travelled across continents to take us on a panoramic journey through the history of art – from ancient Anatolian standing stones to a Qing Dynasty ink handscroll, from a drawing by a Kiowa artist on America's Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting and on to Rachel Whiteread's House. Brilliantly illustrated throughout, with a mixture of black and white and full colour images, Stonard's Creation is an ambitious, thrilling and landmark work that leads us from Benin to Belgium, China to Constantinople, Mexico to Mesopotamia. Journeying from pre-history to the present day, it explores the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse, and asks how – and why – we create.




Creation


Book Description

A book of breathtaking scope, in which the mystery of how the world began infolds in an epic narrative that sets the Gods against the world's great artists, their rivals in creative energy. Despite the best efforts of scientists, theologians and aestheticians, creation and creativity both remain mysterious. How did our world begin? Where do we come from? And how can we understand or describe that obscure source we call imagination, from which works of art emerge? Peter Conrad’s book investigates these mysteries, in a survey of cultural history that begins with the differing accounts of creation and advances to our own world, where creativity seems to have warped into a fierce delight in destruction. He describes the long illness and eventual demise of the Christian God, and shows how artists and scientists were ready and eager to take over a creative role that was once a heavenly prerogative. At the same time, he probes the creative impulse of writers, painters and musicians, celebrating the audacity of the restless, rebellious beings who first questioned the limits placed on thoughts and dreams, supplemented nature with their own creations, and came to be known as artists.







Gaps and the Creation of Ideas


Book Description

Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist’s Book is a portrait of the space between things, whether they be neurons, quotations, comic-book frames, or fragments in a collage. This twenty-year project is an artist’s book that juxtaposes quotations and images from hundreds of artists and writers with the author’s own thoughts. Using Adobe InDesign® for composition and layout, the author has structured the book to show analogies among disparate texts and images. There have always been gaps, but a focus on the space between things is virtually synonymous with modernity. Often characterized as a break, modernity is a story of gaps. Around 1900, many independent strands of gap thought and experience interacted and interwove more intricately. Atoms, textiles, theories, women, Jews, collage, poetry, patchwork, and music figure prominently in these strands. The gap is a ubiquitous phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of neuroscience, rabbinic thinking, modern literary criticism, art, popular culture, and the structure of matter. This book explores many subjects, but it is ultimately a work of art.




BAG


Book Description

From 1968 to 1972, St. Louis was home to the Black Artists' Group (BAG), a seminal arts collective that nurtured African American experimentalists involved with theater, visual arts, dance, poetry, and jazz. Inspired by the reinvigorated black cultural nationalism of the 1960s, artistic collectives had sprung up around the country in a diffuse outgrowth known as the Black Arts Movement. These impulses resonated with BAG's founders, who sought to raise black consciousness and explore the far reaches of interdisciplinary performance--all while struggling to carve out a place within the context of St. Louis history and culture.A generation of innovative artists--Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Emilio Cruz, to name but a few--created a moment of intense and vibrant cultural life in an abandoned industrial building on Washington Avenue, surrounded by the evisceration that typified that decade's "urban crisis." The 1960s upsurge in political art blurred the lines between political involvement and artistic production, and debates over civil rights, black nationalism, and the role of the arts in political and cultural struggles all found form in BAG. This book narrates the group's development against the backdrop of St. Louis spaces and institutions, examines the work of its major artists, and follows its musicians to Paris and on to New York, where they played a dominant role in Lower Manhattan's 1970s "loft jazz" scene. By fusing social concern and artistic innovation, the group significantly reshaped the St. Louis and, by extension, the American arts landscape.







Marking Time


Book Description

"A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art. As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century."




Life as Art


Book Description

Life as Art brings the resources of contemporary aesthetics since Nietzsche to bear on the problems of how one integrates the aesthetic emphases of meaning, liberation, and creativity into one’s daily life. By linking together the aesthetic and ethical accounts of critical theorists, phenomenologists, and existentialists into a coherent view on the artful life, Life as Art shows the ways in which much of contemporary Continental theory has been concerned with alternative ways of constructing one’s own life. Seen as a unified phenomenon, life as art signifies an active attempt to create a life which bears the resistance, openness, and creativity found in artworks.




The Arts and the Creation of Mind


Book Description

Learning in and through the visual arts can develop complex and subtle aspects of the mind. Reviews in: Journal of aesthetic education. 38(2004)4(Winter. 71-98), available M05-194.