Exhibition Titles
Today Renaissance-era prints are typically preserved behind glass or in solander boxes in museums, but these decorative objects were once a central part of everyday life. Altered and Adorned is a delightful, surprising look at how prints were used: affixed on walls; glued into albums, books, and boxes; annotated; hand-colored; or cut apart.
This handsome volume introduces readers to the experimental world of printmaking in the mid-15th and 16th centuries and the array of objects it inspired, from illustrated books, sewing patterns, and wearable ornaments to printed sundials and anatomical charts. It features many never-before-published treasures from the Art Institute of Chicago's rich permanent collection, along with essays on the ways prints functioned--in some cases as three-dimensional and interactive works--and how their condition communicates their use.
In the past, masters of penmanship advertised their copperplate skills by shaping their calligraphy and flourishes into elaborate pictorial designs. Now the art of the flourish is back! With her fresh approach to this age-old art form, Schin will take you confidently through each step, from choosing your pen, nib, and ink, to creating calligraphic animals that express your own imagination and artistry. The basic steps for the strokes are simple, but as you learn each new pattern and stroke, you'll watch your drawings develop into ever more complex and beautiful compositions.
By following the step-by-step instructions, you can create stunning drawings of a pigeon, swan, crane, rooster, jellyfish, goldfish, peacock, parrot, owl, raccoon, elephant, puppy, rabbit, fox, and zebra. Each exercise includes a photo of the animal, followed by an illustration and written guidance for each numbered step. You'll find helpful tips and encouragement throughout. At the back, a gallery showcase provides examples of Schin's own artwork to inspire you in your own flourishing pursuits.
Whether you're a designer, calligrapher, doodler, or just picked up a pen, this guide to drawing with flourishes will enlighten and inspire.
Developed by English handwriting masters in the 18th century, copperplate calligraphy is admired for its fluidity and beauty. It is the most popular style for social correspondence, invitations, and other communications requiring an elegant hand.
In this practical manual, a noted calligraphy teacher offers a comprehensive, step-by-step guide for the student. Beginning with a brief but fascinating history of copperplate, she moves quickly to an in-depth examination of the alphabet, numbers, and punctuation. Each letter is demonstrated stroke by stroke with a clear explanation.
Readers will also find detailed discussions of writing in color, using the proper paper, and learning how to retouch, correct, and crop. Ms. Winters then shows how copperplate can be used to write a simple paragraph, a short quotation, or poetry, and explains how to use the script commercially for addressing envelopes and writing name cards and invitations. With this easy-to-follow manual and some practice, calligraphers will be able to create copperplate scripts with the rhythm, grace, and ease of the great writing masters.
This comprehensive history and instruction manual contains, in one volume, thirteen significant medieval scripts, with a history of the evolution of the alphabets, and fascinating background material on the scribes, their world, and how writing styles changed over a thousand years. Moreover, it is the only modern book that provides clearly described, brilliantly photographed, and accurately reproduced examples of both major and minor hands along with explicit directions for writing them.
The author -- a professional calligrapher of medieval styles, as well as illuminator, writer, and teacher -- presents a spirited historical account of thirteen important writing styles developed from about the fourth century to the end of the fifteenth. These include Roman Rustic, Uncial, Carolingian Minuscule, Early Gothic, Luxeuil Minuscule, Gothic Littera Bastarda, and seven other distinctive hands. The text explains how and why different styles evolved, why certain devices, codes, and abbreviations were used, and how form and function interacted.
In addition to fascinating facts about the origin and development of medieval scripts, Medieval Calligraphy also shows you how to duplicate medieval techniques with modern writing tools. Thorough instructions and sharply detailed, full-page photographs of the original alphabets explain pen angles and stroke sequences for each letter and capital. By carefully studying and practicing the techniques described, calligraphers will be able to master some of history's most interesting and influential scripts. Mr. Drogin has rounded out the book with helpful lists of suppliers of tools and materials, American and European sources for facsimiles and books, calligraphic societies, a bibliography, index, and more.
"The law of harmony in flourishing is the same as in love. As long as everything goes along smoothly, harmony prevails. But as soon as some rival crosses the pathway, especially in a diagonal way, there is likely to be trouble in camp. Therefore see that the lines run nearly parallel or cross nearly at right angles."
With the charm of words like these, this pleasantly old-fashioned manual inculcates a fine art that has been virtually lost: the art of ornate pictorial calligraphy, or flourishing.
A good pen, this book, and practice are all you need to create your own magnificent swirls, delicately shaded curves, harmoniously crisscrossing lines, from which birds, rabbits, deer, ribbons, and other images gracefully emerge. Complete instructions lead you from proper positioning and basic exercises to finished flourishes of increasing complexity.
Frequent helpful hints encourage calligraphers to cultivate grace, harmony, and symmetry by means of diligence, patience, and perseverance. The approach is quaintly traditional, the results delightful. Over 150 lovely examples of flourishes form in themselves a wonderful collection of ornate pictorial calligraphy.
With this unique manual and ample practice, you will help keep alive a glorious decorative art. As this book belongs to the Dover Pictorial Archive series, its royalty-free illustrations may also be applied to a multitude of graphic arts and design purposes.
A powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale about the fluidity of racial identity, Nella Larsen's Passing continues to resonate today.
Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to "pass" as a white woman. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, and is simultaneously allured and repelled by Clare's risky decision to engage in racial masquerade for personal and societal gain. After frequenting African American-centric gatherings together in Harlem, Clare's interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for Irene's black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling.
This edition features a new introduction by Emily Bernard and notes by Thadious M. Davis.
Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.
This book is the first full-length study of the Nova Reperta (New Discoveries), a renowned series of prints designed by Johannes Stradanus during the late 1580s in Florence. Reproductions of the prints, essays, conversations from a scholarly symposium, and catalogue entries complement a Newberry Library exhibition that tells the story of the design, conception, and reception of Stradanus's engravings.
Renaissance Invention: Stradanus's "Nova Reperta" seeks to understand why certain inventions or novelties were represented in the series and how that presentation reflected and fostered their adoption in the sixteenth century. What can Stradanus's prints tell us about invention and cross-cultural encounter in the Renaissance? What was considered "new" in the era? Who created change and technological innovation?
Through images of group activities and interactions in workshops, Stradanus's prints emphasize the importance of collaboration in the creation of new things, dispelling traditional notions of individual genius. The series also dismisses the assumption that the revival of the wonders of the ancient world in Italy was the catalyst for transformation. In fact, the Latin captions on the prints explain how contemporary inventions surpass those of the ancients. Together, word and image foreground the global nature of invention and change in the early modern period even as they promote specifically Florentine interests and activities.
This Is What Democracy Looked Like, the first illustrated history of printed ballot design, illuminates the noble but often flawed process at the heart of our democracy. An exploration and celebration of US ballots from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this visual history reveals unregulated, outlandish, and, at times, absurd designs that reflect the explosive growth and changing face of the voting public. The ballots offer insight into a pivotal time in American history--a period of tectonic shifts in the electoral system--fraught with electoral fraud, disenfranchisement, scams, and skullduggery, as parties printed their own tickets and voters risked their lives going to the polls.
An epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power -- and how it transformed America.
In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women--Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more--who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.