Bøker av Rebecca Zorach

"There is no question that art has played a key role in constructing the public understanding of "America." Probing the intersection of art, nature, race, and place, Temporary Monuments examines how art and artists have responded to this legacy by imagining new ways of constructing notions of land, culture, and public space. Zorach demonstrates how art historical tropes play out through and against the construction of race in a series of real and conceptual spaces that are key to how we imagine this country. Ranging from the museum, the wild, and the monument to the garden, the home, and the border, Temporary Monuments incorporates memoir, historical narrative, literary analysis, and close looking at objects that date from significant moments in American history. Works by artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Dawoud Bey, George Catlin, Theaster Gates, Kerry James Marshall, Dylan Miner, Barnett Newman, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams help to pry open knotty questions about the relationship between the environment, social justice, history, and identity"--

How art played a central role in the design of America's racial enterprise--and how contemporary artists resist it. Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America's racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces--the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders--to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design. Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Zorach shows how contemporary artists--including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gaspar, Kerry James Marshall, Alan Michelson, Dylan Miner, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams--have mined the relationship between environment and social justice, creating works that investigate and interrupt White supremacist, carceral, and environmentally toxic worlds. The book also draws on poetry, creative nonfiction, hip-hop videos, and Disney films to illuminate crucial topics in art history, from the racial politics of abstraction to the origins of museums and the formation of canons.

Rebecca Zorach traces the little-told story of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, showing how its artistic innovations, institution building, and community engagement helped the residents of Chicago's South and West Sides respond to social, political, and economic marginalization.

Exhibition catalog that covers African American art on Chicago's south side in the 1960s and '70s.

In 1968, Chicago made headlines for the ferocity of its police response to protesters at the Democratic National Convention, prompting outrage in the art world. This book examines the creative tactics of the city's activist artists and their ways of addressing the broad definitions of the law.

Challenging long-held assumptions about reproductive imagery, this fascinating history will compel readers and scholars alike to think of reproductive prints as legitimate and valued creative acts.