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This catalogue accompanies an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, curated by Roger Benjamin and coordinated by Andrew C. Weislogel, associate curator and master teacher at the Johnson Museum.
An enthralling Arabian Nights-style fantasy perfect for fans of Bradley Beaulieu and N. K. Jemisin. Eiren, the youngest daughter of the Aleynian royal family, has been living in exile in the deep desert of their kingdom. When the invading force from Ambar captures her family and demands that Eiren alone return with the Ambarians to their distant, mountainous lands, she agrees for the sake of her people. Gentle, perceptive, and able to sense the thoughts and feelings of those around her, Eiren is a storyteller—and unsure why the Ambarians have chosen her instead of her more brazen siblings. As she grows closer to the masked and enigmatic Gannet, one of her captors, on the journey to Ambar, Eiren learns that her special gifts mark her as an icon—the rare, living embodiment of a god. Gannet, too, is an icon, and when he awakens more abilities within her, Eiren discovers a bitter truth: She is host to Theba, the goddess of destruction. A dark and dangerous force, Theba awakens similar appetites in Eiren. But there’s more the Ambarians aren’t telling her, and secrets Eiren has to uncover for herself. To know the truth of why she was taken from her home, Eiren must become one of the monsters from her stories, whether she wants to or not.
Isolated in the remote Egyptian desert, at the base of Mount Sinai, sits the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in the Christian world. The Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine at Sinai holds the most important collection of Byzantine icons remaining today. This catalogue, published in conjuction with the exhibition Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from November 14, 2006, to March 4, 2007, features forty-three of the monastery's extremely rare--and rarely exhibited--icons and six manuscripts still little-known to the world at large. The exhibition and catalogue bring to life the central role of the icon in Byzantine religious practices. Themes include the icon's status as holy object, the ways in which the icon sanctified the place of worship, and the monks' quest for the holy. The Greek Orthodox monastery at Mount Sinai not only functioned as a major pilgrimage site for centuries but was also a cultural crossroads at the center of the shifting sands of ecclesiastical and secular politics. The accompanying essays explore how the monastery's contact with the outside world, through pilgrimage, resulted in aesthetic exchanges between the monastery and Coptic, Crusader, and Islamic art; and between the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities in Europe.
This updated and expanded collection spans the career of renowned American photographer Michael Childers, including many photographs published for the first time. Working mostly with black-and-white film, Childers has captured the icons and legends of popular culture and the art world for decades. His stunning portraits include Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, Clint Eastwood, Catherine Deneuve, Rock Hudson, and Carol Channing. Several portraits are of special importance because they were taken early in the actors' careers, before they became celebrities: Sissy Spacek, Demi Moore, Mel Gibson, John Travolta, Richard Gere, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Equally important are portraits of the great film-industry legends who helped establish and build the stars' careers, including film directors Billy Wilder and John Schlesinger and costume designer Edith Head. In addition to stars of the film world, Childers has produced portraits of contemporary artists, architects, writers and musicians, including a series of photographs of Andy Warhol in his New York studio and Paris apartment, and a series of David Hockney in his Hollywood and London studios.
"This publication accompanies the exhibition Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 5 through September 18, 2016."
Byzantine and Russian Orthodox icons are perhaps the most enduring form of religious art ever developed--and one of the most mysterious. This book provides an accessible guide to their story and power. Illustrated mostly with Cretan, Greek, and Russian examples from the British Museum, which houses Britain's most important collection, the book examines icons in the context of the history of Christianity, as well as within the perspective of art history.
In the early 1970s at Papunya, a remote settlement in the Central Australian desert, a group of Indigenous artists decided to communicate the sacred power of their traditional knowledge to the wider worlds beyond their own. Their exceptional, innovative efforts led to an outburst of creative energy across the continent that gave rise to the contemporary Aboriginal art movement that continues to this day. In their new book, anthropologist Fred Myers and art critic Terry Smith discuss six Papunya paintings featured in a 2022 exhibition in New York. They draw on several discourses that have developed around First Nations art—notably anthropology, art history, and curating as practiced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous interpreters. Their focus on six key paintings enables unusually close and intense insight into the works’ content and extraordinary innovation. Six Paintings from Papunya also includes a reflection by Indigenous curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist, who reflects on the nature and significance of this rare transcultural conversation.
The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape—its arms stretching heavenward, its silhouette often resembling a human—has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The largest and tallest cactus in the United States, it is both familiar and an object of fascination and curiosity. This book offers a complete natural history of this enduring and iconic desert plant. Gathering everything from the saguaro’s role in Sonoran Desert ecology to its adaptations to the desert climate and its sacred place in Indigenous culture, this book shares precolonial through current scientific findings. The saguaro is charismatic and readily accessible but also decidedly different from other desert flora. The essays in this book bear witness to our ongoing fascination with the great cactus and the plant’s unusual characteristics, covering the saguaro’s: history of discovery, place in the cactus family, ecology, anatomy and physiology, genetics, and ethnobotany. The Saguaro Cactus offers testimony to the cactus’s prominence as a symbol, the perceptions it inspires, its role in human society, and its importance in desert ecology.
