“Visual culture is central to meaning making, and meaning making is central to the production of knowledge. The books we publish at the MIT Press probe the ways that visual culture is inscribed with power, and they unflinchingly examine what is at stake in that power. They amplify understudied subjects; they advance the field through inclusive contributions to knowledge; and they reveal how what we see — and what remains hidden from view — is related to equity and justice. Our readers know that visual culture is never neutral.”
—Victoria Hindley, Design and Visible Tradition, Acquisitions Editor
Black Elegies by Kimberly Juanita Brown is an unflinching examine of black grief as a type of elegy. Brown asks: How do you mourn these you aren’t speculated to see? And the place does the grief go? She exhibits us that grief is all over the place: “It spills out of photographs and modulates music. It hovers in the tenor and tone of cinematic performances. It resides in the body like an inspired concept, waiting for its articulation.”
In Monumental Graffiti, curator and anthropologist Rafael Schacter focuses on the fabric, communicative, and contextual elements of graffiti and monuments to offer a well timed perspective on public artwork, citizenship, and town at present. Making use of monument as a lens to grasp graffiti, and graffiti as a lens to grasp monument, he challenges readers to contemplate what the suitable monument for our modern world might be.
Ray Johnson (1927–1995), aka “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” was infamous for the flowery video games he performed with artwork world establishments, soliciting their consideration at the same time as he rejected their invites. In A Ebook about Ray, Ellen Levy affords the primary complete examine of the artist who turned the enterprise of career-making right into a tongue-in-cheek efficiency, tracing his inventive growth from his arrival at Black Mountain School in 1945 to his demise in 1995.
For many of contemporary historical past, artmaking was pitted in opposition to caretaking. However in San Francisco within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, a gaggle of artists gathered round Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) started to reject this dominant narrative. In Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mom at Midcentury, Jordan Troeller analyzes how their labor as moms fueled their labor as artists, redefining key aesthetic issues of their period, together with autonomy, medium specificity, and originality.
To be taught extra about these new releases and different books from the MIT Press, go to mitpress.mit.edu.
