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In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion, Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political. Through captivating case studies of'subversive'artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives'worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred.

An intimate portrait of James Baldwin, offering a new understanding of his life and works as seen through his close relationships and private life James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a pivotal figure of the twentieth century, an influential author, intellectual, and activist who led a celebrated public life—and whose words and image and persona remain current in our culture. Baldwin's many incarnations—“son of Harlem,” “Black icon,” “great twentieth-century writer,” “race man,” “prophet,” “witness”—have reemerged in the digital age as Baldwin's work becomes a touchstone for a new generation. It is the private, vulnerable, and messier Baldwin—the man behind the prophet and the online meme—who is the focus of this book. Magdalena J. Zaborowska draws on Baldwin's archives and material legacy—from his unpublished papers to his books to his house in France—to offer a fresh look at the writer's understated and obscured private life. Taking a cue from Baldwin's own love of the blues, Zaborowska presents his biography as a series of tracks on a vinyl record, introducing, developing, and remixing the themes and relationships from his life. She recounts episodes from Baldwin's troubled childhood, his struggles with sexuality and gender, his intimate relationships, and the overlooked influence of women, Jews, and queers on his writing. This Life Album revolves around Baldwin's development of a unique worldview, “Black queer humanism,” premised on African diaspora aesthetics, resilience, joy, community, internationalism, activism, and justice.

This book presents both a historical survey and a critical re-evaluation of the contested and contingent nature of the medium of painting over the last 60 years. Offering a critical account of painting specifically, rather than art more generally, After Modernist Painting provides a timely exploration of what has remained a persistent and protean medium.Taking Clement Greenberg's “Modernist Painting” as its starting point, the book focuses on certain developments, including the relationship of painting to Conceptual Art and Minimalism, the pronouncement of painting's alleged death, its response to Installation Art's foregrounding of site, how painting both images and imagines the digital and how it continues to embody a particular set of ideas and responses to the world.Revised and expanded to reflect developments in the field since the first edition was published in 2013, After Modernist Painting addresses a range of global artists and painting practices – from the Dansaekhwa art movement in South Korea to the Conceptualism of Geta Bratescu in 1970s Romania. Essential reading for students on fine arts painting courses, the book is an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the themes and issues that have pertained to painting within the context of postmodernism and contemporary artistic practice, and also provides a valuable starting point for other, more specialized histories of particular painters.

Eugene O'Neill lived with the artist George Bellows in the early twentieth century; met Robert Henri, the leader of the future Ashcan School; and knew John Sloan, who etched O'Neill at the Lincoln Arcade studio on Upper Broadway. These visual artists made a profound impression on the future playwright, and when O'Neill began writing plays in 1913, he drew upon the images he had first seen on canvas or paper. This book presents the centrality of New York City on Eugene O'Neill's imagination--the notorious Tenderloin section, Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Fifth Avenue, and Gramercy Park--and it does so through the brushes, pens, plates, and stones of the Ashcan artists. The sixty images herein reveal the shared aesthetic sensibilities between all the respective artists and foreground the honest, unflinching, and simple beauty that O'Neill sought to portray in all of his dramatic works: from the early one-acts with the Provincetown Players, to the Broadway blockbusters in the 1920s, and culminating with the posthumously-produced plays he wrote in near seclusion to conclude his career.

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, 2nd Edition comprises contemporary texts by key authors and artists who are active in the interdisciplinary field of remix studies.As an organic international movement, remix culture originated in the popular music culture of the 1970s, and has since grown into a rich cultural activity encompassing numerous forms of media. The act of recombining pre-existing material continues to bring up pressing questions of authenticity, reception, authorship, copyright, and the techno-politics of media activism, especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence, which relies on remix methods and principles for content production. This book approaches remix studies from various angles, including sections on history, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and practice; and offers theoretical chapters alongside case studies of remix projects. This second edition includes ten new chapters, and nine revised chapters. Reprinted chapters from the first edition are updated with editorial prefaces. This volume offers in-depth insight for long-term relevance among the many interdisciplinary fields that rely on and also contribute to remix studies.This companion is a valuable resource for both researchers and remix practitioners, as well as a teaching tool for instructors using remix practices in the classroom.

This is an authoritative companion that is global in scope, recognizing the presence of African Diaspora artists across the world. It is a bold and broad reframing of this neglected branch of art history, challenging dominant presumptions about the field.Diaspora pertains to the global scattering or dispersal of, in this instance, African peoples, as well as their patterns of movement from the mid twentieth century onwards. Chapters in this book emphasize the importance of cross-fertilization, interconnectedness, and intersectionality in the framing of African Diaspora art history. The book stresses the complexities of artists born within, or living and working within, the African continent, alongside the complexities of Africa-born artists who have migrated to other parts of the world. The group of international contributors emphasizes and accentuates the interplay between, for example, Caribbean art and African Diaspora art, or Latin American art and African Diaspora art, or Black British art and African Diaspora art.The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in art history, the various branches of African studies, African American studies, African Diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and Latin American studies.