Essays

At an elevation of 14115 feet, Pikes Peak is the southernmost of Colorado's famous "Fourteeners." The monolith of rare pink granite juts up out of the Front Range of the Rockies seven miles west of Colorado Springs. A natural "weather maker," its unmatched profile protects the city from prevailing winds, and the crags often seem to reach up to snag the rain or snow-soaked clouds and hold them at bay. Mesmerized by the way the sun played on and over the mountain¿particularly at dawn and dusk¿I quickly fell into a love affair with "America's Mountain." This book is my tribute to Colorado, to Pikes Peak, and to the skies above the Front Range.

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Eric Gill (1882-1940) is well known as a sculptor, wood and stone carver, letter, engraver, typeface designer, and graphic artist. But he was also a radical religious and social philosopher-a Christian revolutionary-for whom "life was more than art," because it was the highest art, the art of being human. Thus his interests were never theoretical and his view of life was holistic, involving the whole person in a unity of art, work and spiritual values. A convert to Catholicism in 1913, Gill brought to the movement of social and aesthetic renewal founded by Ruskin and William Morris a sensibility sharpened both by Non-conformism and by the enthusiastic acceptance of Thomism. After World War I, Gill helped create the Ditching Guild, and independent society of Roman Catholics bound together by common faith and common ideas about work and human society. In 1924, Gill moved with his family and a few friends, now under the rule of third-order Dominicans, to Capel-y-ffin, in South Wales. Here the task of integrating human work and religious life in a craft community continued, and here, too, Gill began to write, at first short pieces, then longer essays. In 1928, he moved back to Buckinghamshire, where he lived until his death. A Holy Tradition of Working is an anthology drawn from the full prophetic range of Gill's concerns. The topics covered include: First Things; What is Man?; What is Art?; The Four Causes; Of Work and Responsibility; Of Beauty; Of Imagination; Property, Ownership and Holy Poverty; and A Vision of Normal Society. Brian Keeble writes "There can be no mistaking the directional impulse in Gill's thought; it is heavenward, Not so much a heaven 'up there' as one with a more local habitation; the kingdom of heaven within which is the kingdom proper to man, that is, man the maker, one who is uniquely fitted, being created in His image, to 'collaborate with God'..."

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The third in a trilogy of collected pieces of reportorial nonfiction, personal essays, and profiles from Toby Thompson, Fired On joins Thompson's Riding the Rough String and Metroliner in charting one of the most respected careers in American letters. For more than forty years, Thompson has been preoccupied with western art and those who create it. From early works by Carl Bodmer, Paul Kane, Charles M. Russell and Fredrick Remington to modern masters like Russell Chatham and T.C. Cannon, in Fired On Thompson considers three centuries' worth of art across western America. In the process and in aggregate, he finally paints a larger portrait of the place and its inhabitants. This anthology includes pieces previously published as well as essays written specifically for this collection.

The overarching aim of When We Pray is to explore the connections between prayer, meditation, and aesthetic experience in ways that are both insightful and practical. Each of the eight essays takes the reader on an exploration of topics such as: the role of imagination in prayer and manifestation, the aesthetic aspects of enlightenment, the role of signs and symbols in the spiritual life, and more. As you explore these topics you are also invited to feast your eyes upon professional illustrations created by the author himself. When We Pray is a total package experience that features insightful, thought-provoking essays that are accompanied by beautiful, well-crafted imagery.

«... Quand on descend aujourd'hui dans les caveaux du Panthéon, dès que s'est ouverte la lourde porte, on trouve tout de suite devant soi l'endroit où le cercueil de Victor Hugo repose, tel qu'il fut apporté là, le jour de son inoubliable convoi. C'est-à-dire qu'on ne s'est point occupé, depuis, de lui bâtir un tombeau. Il est toujours dans une situation provisoire ; il s'attarde sur des tréteaux...»

Viet Ve Nuoc My 2019 is a compilation of selected short stories in Vietnamese from various writers who participate in the 2019 Writing on America contest, organized annually by Viet Bao Daily News.

Arts Features International, July-September 2019, Facing the Future issue was first published in ebook after the Global Climate Strike, in September 2019.ContentsRuth Skilbeck Editorial Will the Future be Utopian–or Dystopian? Essay and photographs of the Global Climate School Strike, Newcastle, 20 September 2019…7Michael Gormly Critical thinking quickly sorts out denialist nonsense Essay and Photographs of the Global Climate School Strike, Newcastle, 20 September 2019…14Deborah Van Heekeren Disconnectivity poem & artwork…22Ruth Skilbeck Felena Springs utopian speculative fiction story…25Simon Albert (The University of Queensland), Alistair Grinham (The University of Queensland), Badin Gibbes The University of Queens- land), Javier Leon (University of the Sunshine Coast), John Church (CSIRO). Sea-Level Rise has Claimed Five Whole Islands in the Pacific: first scientific evidence (from The Conversation 2016)…28Jeremy Gluck On Digital Art and Culture essay & text based artworks…34Anthony Sawrey A Thousand Miles Beyond: The Equine Paintings of Hugh Sawrey. Book extract with artworks by Hugh Sawrey…48Suellen Symons White Cockatoos. Facebook photograph & post…70Frontline Action on Coal Facebook posts and photographs of a small community Global Climate Strike near Adani mine, Queensland…24;72Contributors’ notes…77

The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art.<BR><BR> Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harry Henderson, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O’Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

Charles Baudelaire's flâneur, as described in his 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life," remains central to understandings of gender, space, and the gaze in late nineteenth-century Paris, despite misgivings by some scholars. Baudelaire's privileged and leisurely figure, at home on the boulevards, underlies theorizations of bourgeois masculinity and, by implication, bourgeois femininity, whereby men gaze and roam urban spaces unreservedly while women, lacking the freedom to either gaze or roam, are wedded to domesticity. In challenging this tired paradigm and offering fresh ways to consider how gender, space, and the gaze were constructed, this book attends to several neglected elements of visual and written culture: the ubiquitous male beggar as the true denizen of the boulevard, the abundant depictions of well-to-do women looking (sometimes at men), the popularity of windows and balconies as viewing perches, and the overwhelming emphasis given by both male and female artists to domestic scenes. The book's premise that gender, space, and the gaze have been too narrowly conceived by a scholarly embrace of Baudelaire's flâneur is supported across the cultural spectrum by period sources that include art criticism, high and low visual culture, newspapers, novels, prescriptive and travel literature, architectural practices, interior design trends, and fashion journals.

Recommended by Ms. Magazine as an August 2019 featured title!"To enter Berry Grass’ Hall of Waters is to agree to a deep-sea excavation through baths that are simultaneously familiar yet foreign. Grass is your guide—pen light in hand, illuminating darknesses that cause the light to refract back upon the reader and author. In Missouri, there are no natural lakes—instead, they are created by dam construction; the water cutting a swath through the trees. The springs, however, are believed to be true blue, as Grass says, 'And it’s all so healthy, isn’t it? So restorative? To soak in our nature’s superior water and pretend that superiority is therefore our nature. To pretend that the concept of natural is natural.' Hall of Waters is an examination of how America loves to be undisturbed after claiming what it believes to be theirs, and how Grass finds a way to reclaim identity while still carrying traces of the fountains of the past."––Brian Oliu, author of So You Know It’s Me"We forget that one product of fire’s burning is water. And Berry Grass’ searing and far-seeing, tetrahedral and tenderhearted micro memoirs set in the osmotic membrane of the Middle Border, Hall of Waters, re-minds us of these fused and confused outcomes at the core of the combustion of cognition. There is nothing I can think of akin to the elemental chemistry of this book. It is sublime, yes, but in its exquisitely rendered prose it rewrites (and rights) the valences that bond us to the place of place and the us of us. This water is 'hard' water indeed, but in the dissolved solids one finds a balm, a welling, a source, and a baptism all drenched and drenching in liquid fire."––Michael Martone, Author of The Moon Over Wapakoneta and BroodingHALL OF WATERS is an attempt to demythologize the rural American Midwest through the specific example of the author’s hometown, Excelsior Springs, MO. Through lyric essay & memoir, the book seeks to examine & undercut the inherent settler white supremacy of the Midwestern small-town, to deromanticize the nostalgia for land & place that is the hallmark of Midwestern art, & to think about what it was like growing up queer & trans in such a toxic environment.excerpts appear at: The Wanderer Tiny MagPhoebe Journal Diagram The Fanzine The Map is Not

In Robyn Horn's thirty years as a wood sculptor, her work has evolved from small, lathe-turned objects to ten-foot-high redwood compositions like her Already Set in Motion #1170, which graces a garden at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In creating these forms that rise from the earth at improbable angles, Horn's primary tool is the chainsaw, and yet a tenderness for her medium reveals itself in the delicate balance of planes that allows her sculptures to both loom and flow, visually indicating that they are precarious when in fact they are sturdy.<BR><BR> The essays and images in The Sculpture of Robyn Horn sketch the industrious career of this Little Rock, Arkansas-based sculptor, illuminating her attention to geometry, physics, and the philosophy of design, and exploring the context and origin of the various series—Geodes, Millstones, Standing Stones, and Slipping Stones, among others—that characterize her body of work.