A Game for Dancers examines the difficulties American modern dancers faced as the Cold War took hold and the genre became institutionalized after its pioneering phase. It draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the interconnections between art and politics while paying close attention to modern dance's ambivalent relationship to the market. At the heart of the book is an inquiry into modernism itself, and how dancers struggled with modernist ideas of abstraction and autonomy while rarely questioning them. Crucial, too, is the issue of embodiment, which appeared to answer modernist skepticism of representation and aid modern dance's elusive pursuit of independence. Subjects include modernist dance theory, the emergence of new constituencies including African-American choreographers, and the work of Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais, whose objectivism was declared a new modern dance vanguard in the 1950s.

Adam Elsheimer is first recorded in 1600 and by 1610 he was dead. But, rather like Giorgione, who had died young in Venice 100 years earlier, Elsheimer was influential on the coming century to a degree out of all proportion to his brief career and small oeuvre. He developed a wonderful mastery of light, a dramatic chiaroscuro that gave new depth to his subject-matter, and a rather less definable poetic feeling that gives a very special savor to all his painting. “What is remarkable about this volume is the number of quality reproductions of the artist's work that can be seen together for the first time. This collection of paintings demonstrates more comprehensively than ever before Elsheimer's extraordinary intuition for light and atmosphere” (Antiques Magazine).

This handsome volume presents 161 pairs of matching before and after photographs of Pittsburgh. A treasury of images for those who remember the old Pittsburgh, those who are curious about its past, and anyone interested in Pittsburgh's fascinating evolution from \u201csmoky city\u201d to the city it is today.

America was once full of small, lively places that produced things. But then factories closed, mills shut down, mines quit hiring. Steelworkers, textile workers, automakers, and coal miners were laid off, phased out, downsized, outsourced, given the axe, or otherwise told to get lost. Once proud towns gave way to vacant storefronts, empty streets, and wounded people struggling with anger and bitterness. Through words and pictures After the Smoke Clears takes readers into the communities of Homestead and Braddock, Pennsylvania; Lewiston, Maine; Matewan, West Virginia; and Flint, Michigan. Each of these company towns had staked its fortune to a single industry. And each has suffered for it. Steve Mellon focuses on the human face of that suffering. Again and again, men and women fighting to make ends meet freely admit that the blows to their sense of self and sense of community were more hurtful than the economic damage caused by the departure of the mill or mine or plant. As he explores the complex relationship between work, loss, and identity, Mellon offers thought-provoking reflections on the hidden costs of economic policies and business decisions made by multinational corporations to abandon the small towns that made them strong.

The National Gallery of Ireland was founded in 1854 and has since acquired an extraordinary collection of masterpieces by artists such as Caravaggio, Lanfranco, Poussin, Rubens, Uccello, Velázquez, and Vermeer, as well as British artists such as Gainsborough and Reynolds and the leading lights of Irish art, from James Barry to Jack Yeats. The Gallery has expanded steadily, benefiting from the royalties to the works of George Bernard Shaw and from numerous generous donations by figures such as Lane, Milltown, Beit, Mahon, and Chester Beatty. The story of the Gallery, with all its tribulations and struggles, good and bad luck, good and bad judgement, all its personalities, is told for the first time. It displays the breadth and depth of the collection, but it also reveals much about the rebirth of a nation and changing attitudes to art over time.

The first volume cataloging the Irish painters in the National Gallery of Ireland covers more than 220 paintings from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, including figures such as George Barret, James Barry, Hugh Douglas Hamilton, William Hickey, Nathaniel Hone, Charles Jervas, James Latham, Thomas Roberts, and Martin Archer Shee. All of the paintings are illustrated in excellent color reproductions. These paintings are not only of intrinsic interest but provide important insights into the social, political, cultural, and environmental history of eighteenth-century Ireland.

In Tunnels Portuguese photographer Andri Principe explores the boundaries of knowing oneself and others through themes such as isolation and absence. By photographing people from behind, while hiding or through windows, Principe captures images that deal with issues such as loneliness and the difficulty of communicating, while also reflecting on the limits of the photographic medium.

Dying for a Laugh looks at the evolution of the contemporary disaster film from the 1970s to the present. Ken Feil argues that contemporary camp culture has influenced and reformed the conventions of the 1970s disaster film, in both its production and reception. The book chronicles how the genre rose to prominence, sank into critical and popular disrepute, and became unintentionally campy. Through close readings of films including The Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm, Ghostbusters, Independence Day, and Mars Attacks!, along with film reviews, entertainment reports and publicity materials as evidence, Feil shows that the renewal of the disaster genre in the 1990s hinged on self-parody, ironic self-consciousness, and state-of-the-art effects. Feil also looks at the impact of 9/11 on the genre's campy, sadistic pleasures through movies such as The Sum of All Fears, The Core, and The Day After Tomorrow. This analysis of "high concept camp" draws from diverse methodologies and theories, such as historical reception, textual analysis, neoformalism, political economy, genre analysis, feminism, and queer theory.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholarly interest in ceramics is at an all-time high. As a vehicle for much-needed synthesis, Ceramics in America is an interdisciplinary annual journal that examines the role of historical ceramics in the American context. Intended for collectors, historical archaeologists, curators, decorative arts students, social historians and contemporary potters, every issue features a variety of ground-breaking scholarly articles, new discoveries in the field, and book and exhibition reviews for this diverse audience. The 2005 issue of Ceramics in America will feature a diverse lineup of articles and new discoveries. Of particular interest will be articles covering early American stoneware from Baltimore and Richmond, Virginia. Of interest to both ceramic collectors and social historians is an article reviewing ceramics related to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Echo and Reverb is the first history of acoustically imagined space in popular music recording. The book documents how acoustic effects-reverberation, room ambience, and echo-have been used in recordings since the 1920s to create virtual sonic architectures and landscapes. Author Peter Doyle traces the development of these acoustically-created worlds from the ancient Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus to the dramatic acoustic architectures of the medieval cathedral, the grand concert halls of the 19th century, and those created by the humble parlor phonograph of the early 20th century, and finally, the revolutionary age of rock 'n' roll. Citing recordings ranging from Gene Austin's 'My Blue Heaven' to Elvis Presley's 'Mystery Train,' Doyle illustrates how non-musical sound constructs, with all their rich and contradictory baggage, became a central feature of recorded music. The book traces various imagined worlds created with synthetic echo and reverb-the heroic landscapes of the cowboy west, the twilight shores of south sea islands, the uncanny alleys of dark cityscapes, the weird mindspaces of horror movies, the private and collective spaces of teen experience, and the funky juke-joints of the mind.

This inspired collection of over sixty original paintings, stone carvings and woodcut prints by Greg Tricker portrays the human suffering, exultation, compassion and joy of the life of St Francis; with their visionary quality, they present a fresh contemporary image of St Francis. Greg Tricker travelled to Assisi to research St Francis, drawing inspiration from the small church of San Damiano where the saint prayed and the square of San Rufino where he preached; and by walking through the beautiful olive groves and hills that surround Assisi.The plates, many of which have not been seen before, are complemented by a lively text on the historical background and life of St Francis by artist and teacher Johannes Steuck, and a spirited introduction by writer and philosopher Jeremy Naydler.

Drawing on his background as an ethnomusicologist as well as years of experience as an accomplished jazz musician, Paul Austerlitz argues that jazz-and the world-view or consciousness that surrounds it-embodies an aesthetic of inclusiveness, reaching out from its African American base to embrace all of humanity. Fans and musicians have made this claim before, but Austerlitz is the first to provide a scholarly basis for it. He examines jazz in relation to race and national identity in the U. S. and then broadens his scope to consider jazz within the African diaspora and in very different transnational scenes, from the Dominican Republic to Finland. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book explores jazz in an extraordinary range of contexts. One of the central chapters is devoted to the history of the groundbreaking Latin jazz band of Machito and his Afro-Cubans, who were inspired by the dancing of both Harlemites and Jewish mamboniks, while the final chapter includes an extensive interview with the seminal drummer Milford Graves, one of Austerlitz's mentors, who holds that music profoundly influences our biorhythms and indeed shapes our thoughts.

Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer reintroduces the work of an important artist who had been relegated to virtual anonymity after his untimely death in 1944. As both a biography of Swank (1890-1944) and an analysis of his work, the book focuses on his essential contribution to the modernist movement and positions Swank alongside contemporaries Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. In 1930, at age forty, Luke Swank was selling cars in his hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Just two years later, his five-part photo mural “Steel Plant” was featured in Murals by American Painters and Photographers, the first show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to include photography. Although Swank’s images share stylistic similarities with many of the modernists, they also reveal his unique visual poetry. His compositional exploration, technical virtuousity, and use of intense highlight and shadow and geometric forms and lines affirm his contributions to the modernist movement and the emerging art of photography.

New York has appeared in more movies than Michael Caine, and as a result of overfamiliarity, the City poses a problem for critics and casual moviegoers alike. Audiences mistake the New York image of skyscrapers and glitter for the real thing, but in fact the City is a network of small villages, each with its unique personality. Street Smart offers a novel approach to understanding the cultural influences of New York's neighborhoods on the work of four quintessentially New York filmmakers: Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. The city's diverse economic and ethnic enclaves, where people live, work, shop, worship, bank, and go to school, often have little relationship to the concept of New York City created by the movies. Their New York, however, is as real as the smell of fried onions in the stairwell of an apartment building, and it is this New York, not the movie New York, that has left its impression on their films. Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee's imaginations have been shaped by their neighborhoods, not the New York of the movies. In turn, these directors have used their own life experiences to shape their films. Richard A. Blake examines their home villages -- from Flatbush and Fort Green in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan -- to enrich our critical understanding of the films of four of America's most accomplished contemporary filmmakers.

This collection of seventeen essays explores the dramatic changes in Western conceptions of the body, encompassing the cultural shifts that occurred across Empire, religion and science, from antiquity to the eighteenth century.