Bookshelf

Authored by GC alumna Jeehy Kim, Ph.D. '15, Art History.

From the late nineteenth century, when Korean travellers brought Western photographic technology home from China, to modern times, photography has been interwoven into Korea’s political and cultural history. In Photography and Korea, the first history of Korean photography for a Western readership, Jeehey Kim presents multiple visions of the country, including the divided peninsula, Korea as imagined through foreign eyes, key Korean artists, Korean diasporas and local professional and vernacular photographers. Kim explores studio and institutional practices during the Japanese colonial period, and the divergence of practices after the division of Korea.

Author: Raffaele Bedarida, Ph.D. Art History, 2016 

This volume explores how Italian institutions, dealers, critics, and artists constructed a modern national identity for Italy by exporting – literally and figuratively – contemporary art to the United States in key moments between 1929 and 1969.

From artist Fortunato Depero opening his Futurist House in New York City to critic Germano Celant launching Arte Povera in the United States, Raffaele Bedarida examines the thick web of individuals and cultural environments beyond the two more canonical movements that shaped this project. By interrogating standard narratives of Italian Fascist propaganda on the one hand and American Cold War imperialism on the other, this book establishes a more nuanced transnational approach. The central thesis is that, beyond the immediate aims of political propaganda and conquering a new market for Italian art, these art exhibitions, publications, and the critical discourse aimed at American audiences all reflected back on their makers: they forced and helped Italians define their own modernity in relation to the world’s new dominant cultural and economic power.

Author: Suzaan Boettger, Ph.D. Art History '98

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success. Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work, it offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures.

Tracing the evolution of the Italian avant-garde’s pioneering experiments with art and technology and their subversion of freedom and control

In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies as both tools of artistic production and a means to reconceptualize the dynamic interrelation between individual freedom and collectivity. Arte Programmata traces the multifaceted practices of these groundbreaking artists and their conviction that technology could provide the conditions for a liberated social life.

Lindsay Caplan holds a Ph.D. in Art History from CUNY Graduate Center. 

Co-edited by Marie Warsh and Gillian Sneed (Ph.D. Art History, Graduate Center, 2019).

This collection of the correspondence between artist Rosemary Mayer and poet Bernadette Mayer occurs between the years of 1976 and 1980, a period of rich creativity in New York’s artistic avant-garde, and one which includes the development of major bodies of work by the two women.

Rosemary Mayer was creating sculptures, watercolours, books and “temporary monuments” from weather balloons and snow, while Bernadette Mayer was working on some of her best-known publications, including the book-length poem Midwinter Day and the poetry collection The Golden Book of Words.

Spanning the worlds of Conceptual art, Postminimalism, feminism, the New York School, Language poetry and more, these letters elucidate the bonds of sisterhood through intimate exchanges about art, relationships and everyday life.

Published on occasion of the touring exhibition ‘Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching’, 9 Sep 2021 – 9 Jan 2022, Swiss Institute of Contemporary art, New York; 5 March – 22 May 2022, Ludwig Forum Aachen; 11 Jun – 18 Sep 2022, Lenbachhaus, München; and 8 Oct 2022 – 15 Jan 2023, Spike Island, Bristol.

Co-published with Swiss Institute.

The Owls Are Not What They Seem is a selective history of modern and contemporary engagements with animals in the visual arts and how these explorations relate to the evolution of scientific knowledge regarding animals. Arnaud Gerspacher argues that artistic knowledge presents a valuable supplement to scientific knowledge when it comes to encountering and existing alongside nonhuman animals and life worlds.

Though critical of art works involving animals that are unreflective and exploitative, Gerspacher’s exploration of aesthetic practices by Allora & Calzadilla, Pierre Huyghe, Agnieszka Kurant, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Martin Roth, David Weber-Krebs, and others suggests that, alongside scientific practices, art has much to offer in revealing the otherworldly qualities of animals and forging ecopolitical solidarities with fellow earthlings. This book is part of the series Forerunners: Ideas First. 

Arnaud Gerspacher, Ph.D. Art History, 2017, is an adjunct professor at City College, CUNY.

With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects — those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel — and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany's multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than 30 German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German.  

With a title that echoes Peter Gay's 1978 collection of essays, Freud, Jews and Other Germans, this book, like Gay's, rejects the idea of “us” and “them” in German culture. Discussing artworks in a variety of media that both critique and expand notions of identity and community, Chametzky offers a counternarrative to the fiction of an exclusively white, Christian German culture, arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. He considers works that deploy critical, confrontational, and playful uses of language, especially German and Turkish; that assert the presence of “foreign bodies” among the German body politic; that grapple with food as a cultural marker; that engage with mass media; and that depict and inhabit spaces imbued with the element of time.  

American discussions of German contemporary art have largely ignored the emergence of non-ethnic Germans as some of Germany's most important visual artists. Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art fills this gap.  

Chametzky received a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center in 1991.

How wealthy American women — as consumers and as influencers — helped shape French couture of the late nineteenth century; lavishly illustrated.

French fashion of the late 19th century is known for its allure, its ineffable chic — think of John Singer Sargent's Madame X and her scandalously slipping strap. For Parisian couturiers and their American customers, it was also serious business. In Dressing Up, Elizabeth Block examines the couturiers' influential clientele — wealthy American women who bolstered the French fashion industry with a steady stream of orders from the United States. Countering the usual narrative of the designer as solo creative genius, Block shows that these women — as high-volume customers and as pre-Internet influencers — were active participants in the era's transnational fashion system.

Block describes the arrival of nouveau riche Americans on the French fashion scene, joining European royalty, French socialites, and famous actresses on the client rosters of the best fashion houses—Charles Frederick Worth, Doucet, and Félix, among others. She considers the mutual dependence of couture and coiffure; the participation of couturiers in international expositions (with mixed financial results); the distinctive shopping practices of American women, which ranged from extensive transatlantic travel to quick trips downtown to the department store; the performance of conspicuous consumption at balls and soirées; the impact of American tariffs on the French fashion industry; and the emergence of smuggling, theft, and illicit copying of French fashions in the American market as the middle class emulated the preferences of the rich. Lavishly illustrated, with vibrant images of dresses, portraits, and fashion plates, Dressing Up reveals the power of American women in French couture.

Winner of the Aileen Ribeiro Grant of the Association of Dress Historians; an Association for Art History grant; and a Pasold Research Fund grant.

Block received a Ph.D. in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2011.

Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick

While birth often brings great joy, making babies is a knotty enterprise. The designed objects that surround us when it comes to menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. This smart, image-rich, fashion-forward, and design-driven book explores more than eighty designs — iconic, conceptual, archaic, titillating, emotionally charged, or just plain strange — that have defined the relationships between people and babies during the past century. 

Each object tells a story. In striking images and engaging text, Designing Motherhood unfolds the compelling design histories and real-world uses of the objects that shape our reproductive experiences. The authors investigate the baby carrier, from the Snugli to BabyBjörn, and the (re)discovery of the varied traditions of baby wearing; the tie-waist skirt, famously worn by a pregnant Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy, and essential for camouflaging and slowly normalizing a public pregnancy; the home pregnancy kit, and its threat to the authority of male gynecologists; and more. Memorable images — including historical ads, found photos, and drawings — illustrate the crucial role design and material culture plays throughout the arc of human reproduction. 

The book features a prologue by Erica Chidi and a foreword by Alexandra Lange. 

Millar Fisher is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Amanda Wasielewski

The narrative of the birth of internet culture often focuses on the achievements of American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, but there is an alternative history of internet pioneers in Europe who developed their own model of network culture in the early 1990s. Drawing from their experiences in the leftist and anarchist movements of the '80s, they built DIY networks that give us a glimpse into what internet culture could have been if it were in the hands of squatters, hackers, punks, artists, and activists. In the Dutch scene, the early internet was intimately tied to the aesthetics and politics of squatting. Untethered from profit motives, these artists and activists aimed to create a decentralized tool that would democratize culture and promote open and free exchange of information.

Wasielewski received a Ph.D. in art history in 2019 from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Laurene Buckley

One of the first American artists to bring French Impressionism home to develop on native soil, Theodore Wendel is likely the last to have a monograph that records his remarkable career and stunning oeuvre. His portraits and still lifes, and especially his landscapes, not only exemplify the joyous palette and vigorous brushwork of the genre, but they also mirror the idyllic, transient beauty of rural hamlets along the Massachusetts coast — Gloucester and Ipswich, the dual epicenters of his distinguished career.

One of the original "Duveneck boys" who studied in Munich at the Royal Academy, Wendel followed his mentor to Florence and Venice; he later went on to Paris and ultimately joined a colony of young artists at Giverny. The scenes and subject matter in the works he completed there are among the earliest by an American artist to adopt and evolve Impressionist strategies. Upon his return to America, he spent the next decades rendering scenes of the farmland and coast north of Boston that contemporary critics acclaimed as some of the best they had seen. Yet despite his talent and the significant accolades earned during his career, in the near-century following his death the recognition of his achievements has faded. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to have the opportunity to remedy this situation with this monograph on the artist, Theodore Wendel: True Notes of American Impressionism.

Laurene Buckley's years of exhaustive research inform an engaging and detailed narrative of Wendel's time in Europe and his many years capturing the essence of the farms and fishing villages along the rural coast of Massachusetts. Thanks to her efforts, the book features many of his best works, a number of which are in private collections. An informative introduction by William H. Gerdts provides significant artistic context for Wendel and explains the artist's deft ability to draw the viewer into a scene.

Buckley received her Ph.D. in art history in 1996 from The Graduate Center.