Routledge Focus on Art History and Visual Studies presents short-form books on varied topics within the fields of art history and visual studies.
By Matthew Reynolds
March 07, 2024
The first scholarly monograph devoted exclusively to this vital work of contemporary public art, this book examines Maya Lin’s Confluence Project through the lens of environmental humanities and Indigenous studies. Matthew Reynolds provides a detailed analysis of each earthwork, along with a ...
By Robert Hobbs
January 29, 2024
Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book breaks new ground by considering how Robert Motherwell’s abstract expressionist art is indebted to Alfred North Whitehead’s highly original process metaphysics. Motherwell first encountered Whitehead and his work as a philosophy graduate student ...
By Erin C. Devine
October 05, 2023
Precisely 30 years after the debut of her provocative photo-portraits, this book chronicles the early career of Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat. In its first 20 years, Neshat’s work weaved viewers into complex readings of women and power in Iran. Yet her images also drew criticisms of ...
By Max Ryynänen, Jozef Kovalčik
August 23, 2023
This book seeks to understand culture through the lens of scenes, analyzing them aesthetically and culturally as well as understanding them through the frameworks of gender, social networks, and artworlds. It is common to talk about the cultural and intellectual scenes of early twentieth-century ...
By Francis Halsall
May 16, 2023
Using five case studies of contemporary art, this book uses ideas of systems and dispersion to understand identity and experience in late capitalism. This book considers five artists who exemplify contemporary art practice: Seth Price; Liam Gillick; Martin Creed; Hito Steyerl; and Theaster Gates....
By Myron Beasley
March 29, 2023
This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora. In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others’ specific locales. The focus...
By Leisa Rundquist
January 09, 2023
This book is the first to examine Henry Darger’s conceptual and visual representation of “girls” and girlhood. Specifically, Leisa Rundquist charts the artist’s use of little girl imagery—his direct appropriations from mainstream sources as well as girls modified to meet his needs—in contexts that ...
By Max Ryynänen
April 11, 2022
This book builds a new understanding of the body and its relationship to images and technology, using a framework where novel writings of pragmatist somaesthetics and phenomenology meet new research on bodily reactions. Max Ryynänen gives an overview of the topic by collecting the existing ...
By Uroš Čvoro
February 01, 2022
At a time of dramatic struggles over monuments around the world, this book examines monuments that have been erected in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) since 1996. Examining the historical precedents for the high rate of monumentbuilding, and its links to ongoing political instability ...
Edited
By Pedro Amado, Ana Catarina Silva, Vítor Quelhas
November 12, 2021
This book presents an overview of the convergence of traditional letterpress with contemporary digital design and fabrication practices. Reflecting on the role of letterpress within the emergent hybrid post-digital design process, contributors present historical and contemporary analysis, grounded...
By Timothy Stott
July 02, 2021
This book studies R. Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and similar world games, past and present. Proposed by Fuller in 1964 and first played in colleges and universities across North America at a time of growing ecological crisis, the World Game attempted to turn data analysis, systems modelling, ...
By Jessica Holtaway
February 16, 2021
This book explores how contemporary art can alter the ways in which we visualise and conceptualise the world and the social relations that shape it. Drawing from the writings of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it spotlights the concept of ‘world-forming’ and the political significance of art-making and...