Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader


Book Description

Together with the Olympics, world's fairs are one of the few regular international events of sufficient scale to showcase a spectrum of sights, wonders, learning opportunities, technological advances, and new (or renewed) urban districts, and to present them all to a mass audience. Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader breaks new ground in scholarship on world's fairs by incorporating a number of short new texts that investigate world's fairs in their multiple aspects: political, urban/architectural, anthropological/ sociological, technological, commercial, popular, and representational. Contributors come from eight different countries and represent affiliations in academia, museums and libraries, professional and architectural firms, non-profit organizations, and government regulatory agencies. In taking the measure of both the material artifacts and the larger cultural production of world's fairs, the volume presents its own phantasmagoria of disciplinary perspectives, historical periods, geographical locales, media, and messages, mirroring the microcosmic form of the world's fair itself.




The Day Lincoln Was Shot


Book Description

The Day Lincoln Was Shot is a gripping, minute-by-minute account of April 14, 1865: the day President Abraham Lincoln was tragically assassinated. It chronicles the movements of Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth during every movement of that fateful day. Author and journalist Jim Bishop has fashioned an unforgettable tale of tragedy, more gripping than fiction, more alive than any newspaper account. First published in 1955, The Day Lincoln Was Shot was a huge bestseller, and in 1998 it was made into a TNT movie, with Rob Morrow as Booth.




The House that Herman Built


Book Description




Cellblock Visions


Book Description

Filled with quotes from men and women prisoners and Kornfeld's own anecdotes, Cellblock Visions shows how these artists, most of them having no previous training, turn to their work for a sense of self-worth, an opportunity to vent rage, or a way to find peace. We see how the artists deal with the cramped space, limited light, and narrow vistas of their prison studios, and how the security bans on many art supplies lead them to ingenious resourcefulness, as in extracting color from shampoo and weaving with cigarette wrappers. Kornfeld covers the traditional prison arts, such as soap carving and tattoo, and devotes a major section to painting, where we see miniatures depicting themes of alienation and escape, idyllic landscapes framed by bars, portraits of women living in a fantasy world, large canvasses filled with erotic and religious symbolism and violent action. The brief, vivid biographies of each artist portray that individual's experience of crime, prison, and art itself.




As Radical, as Mother, as Salad, as Shelter


Book Description

"In light of recent political shifts across the globe, have you sensed a change in the position of the art institution vis-à-vis political activism? Can an art institution go from being an object of critique to a site for organizing? How? Should the art institution play this kind of role? What other roles can or should it play? What other institutions, curators, or publics do you look to in formulating your own institution's position? Recent controversies over curatorial choices have foregrounded the different ways in which institutions envision their audience(s). In your experience, is this process changing? How should it proceed? How can an institution address the dichotomy between art as cultural entertainment and art as political inquiry? What is the role of the curator in mediating this? How does this compare to the artist's role? How can art institutions be better?"--Back cover.




World of Fairs


Book Description

In the depths of the Great Depression, when America's future seemed bleak, nearly one hundred million people visited expositions celebrating the "century of progress." These fairs fired the national imagination and served as cultural icons on which Americans fixed their hopes for prosperity and power. World of Fairs continues Robert W. Rydell's unique cultural history—begun in his acclaimed All the World's a Fair—this time focusing on the interwar exhibitions. He shows how the ideas of a few—particularly artists, architects, and scientists—were broadcast to millions, proclaiming the arrival of modern America—a new empire of abundance build on old foundations of inequality. Rydell revisits several fairs, highlighting the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial, the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, the 1935-36 San Diego California Pacific Exposition, the 1936 Dallas Texas Centennial Exposition, the 1937 Cleveland Great Lakes and International Exposition, the 1939-40 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, and the 1958 Brussels Universal Exposition.




Fair America


Book Description

Since their inception with New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in the mid-nineteenth century, world's fairs have introduced Americans to “exotic” pleasures such as belly dancing and the Ferris Wheel; pathbreaking technologies such as telephones and X rays; and futuristic architectural, landscaping, and transportation schemes. Billed by their promoters as “encyclopedias of civilization,” the expositions impressed tens of millions of fairgoers with model environments and utopian visions. Setting more than 30 world’s fairs from 1853 to 1984 in their historical context, the authors show that the expositions reflected and influenced not only the ideals but also the cultural tensions of their times. As mainstays rather than mere ornaments of American life, world’s fairs created national support for such issues as the social reunification of North and South after the Civil War, U.S. imperial expansion at the turn of the 20th-century, consumer optimism during the Great Depression, and the essential unity of humankind in a nuclear age.




Encyclopedia of World's Fairs and Expositions


Book Description

This encyclopedia contains individual histories of each of the nearly 100 World's Fairs and expositions held in more than 20 countries since 1851. This revised and updated second edition of the book originally published as ""A Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions"" in 1990 includes new entries, including essays on the World's Fairs that will be held in Zaragoza, Spain, in 2008 and in Shanghai, China, in 2010. Many of the original essays have been revised and expanded. The topics covered include goods, tourism, architecture, art and culture, and ""exhibition fatigue.""Each fair history includes its own annotated bibliography which provides, when possible, the location of relevant primary sources and comments on the quality of secondary sources. Several appendices provide information on the Bureau of International Expositions, as well as fair statistics, fair officials, fairs that did not qualify for inclusion, and fairs that were planned but never held. The book includes a foreword by Vicente G. Loscertales, the secretary general of the Bureau of International Expositions.




The Robert Lehman Collection


Book Description

Robert Lehman, one of the foremost art collectors of his generation, embraced traditional and modern masters. This work catalogues 130 nineteenth- and 20th-century paintings that are part of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. It includes paintings by Ingres, Theodore Rousseau, and Corot among other early 19th-century artists. In addition to a group of early German drawings, this collection includes a Saint Paul from a series associated with Jan van Eyck and the famous Scupstoel from the circle of Rogier van der Weyden. It discusses all drawings, placing each in its art historical setting and complementing it with comparative illustrations of related works.




The 1933 Chicago World's Fair


Book Description

Chicago's 1933 world's fair set a new direction for international expositions. Earlier fairs had exhibited technological advances, but Chicago's fair organizers used the very idea of progress to buoy national optimism during the Depression's darkest years. Orchestrated by business leaders and engineers, almost all former military men, the fair reflected a business-military-engineering model that envisioned a promising future through science and technology's application to everyday life. But not everyone at Chicago's 1933 exposition had abandoned notions of progress that entailed social justice and equality, recognition of ethnicity and gender, and personal freedom and expression. The fair's motto, "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms," was challenged by iconoclasts such as Sally Rand, whose provocative fan dance became a persistent symbol of the fair, as well as a handful of other exceptional individuals, including African Americans, ethnic populations and foreign nationals, groups of working women, and even well-heeled socialites. Cheryl R. Ganz offers the stories of fair planners and participants who showcased education, industry, and entertainment to sell optimism during the depths of the Great Depression. This engaging history also features eighty-six photographs--nearly half of which are full color--of key locations, exhibits, and people, as well as authentic ticket stubs, postcards, pamphlets, posters, and other it