New Books: Fine Arts (Art, Music, Theater)

The African diaspora has generated a wide array of artistic achievements. This book concentrates on how these works, often created during times of major social upheaval and transformation, use Black culture both as a subject and as context. From musings on 'the souls of Black folk' in late nineteenth-century art, to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the twenty-first century, this book examines the philosophical and social forces that have shaped a Black presence in modern and contemporary visual culture.

Addressing the maniacal, eccentric, and disorienting in artworks made between 1950 and 1980, Delirious situates a fascination with the absurd and irrational within the context of the violence and brutality witnessed during World War II as well as the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism in the 1950s. Skepticism of science and technology--along with fear of its capability to promote mass destruction--developed into a distrust of rationalism, which in the arts had the paradoxical result of extracting irrational effects from rational means.

Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and her tense experiences of racial discrimination and struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury. Tick's compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald's career in fresh and original detail.

At the dawn of the nineties, the British invasion of Broadway was in full swing. Musical spectacles dominated the box office. As American musical comedy made its grand return, plays, always an endangered species on Broadway, staged a powerful comeback. A different breed of producers rose up to challenge the grip theater owners had long held on Broadway, and corporations began to see how much money could be made from live theater. New York Post theater columnist Riedel draws on more than 150 insider interviews to celebrate the productions, artists, and movements that shaped Broadway in the 1990s.

Fielding over two hundred questions, distinguished teacher and performer Richard Miller tackles problems raised during hundreds of his master classes and pedagogy courses. He deliberately avoids abstract generalities, concentrating instead on specific, recurring questions: What are some good exercises to loosen or relax tension in the back of the tongue? Do you apply the same principles regarding breathing to a younger student that you do to older students? What is meant by voiced and unvoiced consonants? Is there a female falsetto? Through such specialized questions, Miller probes the very essence of artistic expression.

Examine any phase of America's history, and artisans are there: from the silversmith Paul Revere and the revolutionary carpenters and blacksmiths who hurled tea into Boston Harbor, to today's "maker movement." Craft has long been implicated in debates around equality, education, and class. Artisanship has often been a site of resistance for oppressed people, such as enslaved African-Americans whose skilled labor might confer hard-won agency under bondage, or the Native American makers who adapted traditional arts into statements of modernity. These artisans' stories speak to our collective striving toward a more perfect union.

In 1712, a young German composer followed his princely master to London and would remain there for the rest of his life. That master would become King George II and the composer was George Friedrich Handel. Handel, then still only twenty-seven and largely self-taught, would be at the heart of musical activity in London for the next four decades, composing masterpiece after masterpiece. Handel's story is one of music-making and musicianship, but also of courts and cabals, of theatrical rivalries and eighteenth-century society. It is also the story of some of the most remarkable music ever written, sung, and loved for 300 years.

Craft Across Continents offers an intriguing selection of over 50 works from Japanese and Western makers. Half of the volume focuses on pieces from Japan, and the other on creations from Europe and the U.S. Recently, 20+ pieces from Japan, an indigo resist-dyed wall hanging, multi-generational bamboo sculptures; as well as glass sculptures, Møhl's installation, Skibska's mobile, and Mason's glazed ceramic vessel have been added.

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art.

This surprising anthology pairs well-known authors with their (sometimes) unexpected forays into the world of the visual arts. Full-color reproductions illuminate the art of more than 200 writers--from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Jonathan Letham--as expressed via paint, graphite, and ink with varying degrees of skill and resolve.