"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable participants to grasp and reinforce what is important to their cognitive world."—Publishers Weekly"Homo Aestheticus offers a wealth of original and critical thinking. It will inform and irritate specialist, student, and lay reader alike."—American AnthropologistA thoughtful, elegant, and provocative analysis of aesthetic behavior in the development of our species—one that acknowledges its roots in the work of prior thinkers while opening new vistas for those yet to come. If you're reading just one book on art anthropology this year, make it hers."—Anthropology and Humanism
Former high desert rancher Ellen Waterston writes of a wild, essentially roadless, starkly beautiful part of the American West. Following the recently created 750-mile Oregon Desert Trail, she embarks on a creative and inquisitive exploration, introducing readers to a "trusting, naïve, earnest, stubbly, grumpy old man of a desert" that is grappling with issues at the forefront of national, if not global, concern: public land use, grazing rights for livestock, protection of sacred Indigenous ground, water rights, and protection of habitat for endangered species.Blending travel writing with memoir and history, Waterston profiles a wide range of people who call the high desert home and offers fresh perspectives on nationally reported regional conflicts such as the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. Walking the High Desert invites readers—wherever they may be—to consider their own beliefs, identities, and surroundings through the optic of the high desert of southeastern Oregon.
For nearly five decades, Jacob Lawrence has been widely regarded as America’s most important black artist. His work is known throughout the world for its depiction of the black American experience from the Civil War to the civil rights movement and beyond. But Lawrence’s paintings are more than a chronicle of this history. He has created a uniquely American vision that affirms the place of all individuals in our society and honors the struggle for independence. Jacob Lawrence has given us powerful, lasting images which, when seen as a whole, constitute a narrative of epic proportions.This major book celebrates the creative genius of Jacob Lawrence. It is the most comprehensive survey ever made of his work and traces his developments as an artists as well as places his work within the tradition of American modernism. In this context it examines for the first time works he has completed since 1974, when he was honored with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art.The paintings reproduced here illustrate a broad array of moods and subjects. Representing each of the artist’s significant periods, they range from fond portraits of Harlem street life in the 1930s to angry depictions of racial injustice during the 1960s, from images of people working in harmony to bleak depictions of civilization shattered by nuclear war. Yet together they reveal an essential unity in Lawrence’s work. His distinctive cubist-expressionist style and his basic humanist credo remain intact throughout fifty years of changing artistic fashion.The artist’s life encompasses a broad spectrum of experience that formed the character of three American generations. He was raised in the Depression, and his first art training was through social programs under FDR’s New Deal. In the late 1930s he was employed as a painter by the WPA, then served in the Coast Guard in World War II.From the start of his career, he achieved success and recognition in the competitive world of New York artists and galleries, all the time maintaining a powerful representational style that went counter to prevailing forces of Abstract Expressionism.Ellen Wheat examines Jacob Lawrence’s life as an integrated whole. She discusses the cultural and political grounding of 1930s Harlem, effects on artists of the Depression and New Deal, art in New York, all in relations to Lawrence’s long-standing commitment to depicting the history of black Americans and to the narrative series format he adopted to convey it. Among other subjects, he has dealt with Toussaint L’Ouverture, Harriet Tubman, the community of Harlem, the American South, Nigeria, civil rights, and John Brown. Wheat also documents and analyzes developments in the artist’s technique and style in relation to the work of some of his teachers and peers (Charles Alston, Claude McKay, Romare Bearden) and those who influenced his work (Orozco, Albers, Grosz, Giotto).Throughout these pages Lawrence speaks of his work and development in the first person. The author draws on her numerous interviews with the artist since 1982, as well as other sources. This chronological overview of Lawrence’s career is enhanced by over 150 illustrations of his work, 85 in color, and a generous selection of photos that place him in his studio, in the art world at large, and among his friends and colleagues.
Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called "art," and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species' four-million-year evolutionary history.This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from a biobehavioral or ethical viewpoint. It is shown to be a biological necessity in human existence and fundamental characteristic of the human species.In this provocative study, Ellen Dissanayake examines art along with play and ritual as human behaviors that "make special," and proposes that making special is an inherited tendency as intrinsic to the human species as speech and toolmaking. She claims that the arts evolved as means of making socially important activities memorable and pleasurable, and thus have been essential to human survival.Avoiding simplism and reductionism, this original synthetic approach permits a fresh look at old questions about the origins, nature, purpose, and value of art. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and integrates a number of divers fields: human ethology; evolutionary biology; the psychology and philosophy of art; physical and cultural anthropology; "primitive" and prehistoric art; Western cultural history; and children's art. The final chapter, "From Tradition to Aestheticism," explores some of the ways in which modern Western society has diverged from other societies--particularly the type of society in which human beings evolved--and considers the effects of the aberrance on our art and our attitudes toward art.This book is addressed to readers who have a concerned interest in the arts or in human nature and the state of modern society.
"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable participants to grasp and reinforce what is important to their cognitive world."—Publishers Weekly"Homo Aestheticus offers a wealth of original and critical thinking. It will inform and irritate specialist, student, and lay reader alike."—American AnthropologistA thoughtful, elegant, and provocative analysis of aesthetic behavior in the development of our species—one that acknowledges its roots in the work of prior thinkers while opening new vistas for those yet to come. If you're reading just one book on art anthropology this year, make it hers."—Anthropology and Humanism
When geologist Chuck Fipke discovered diamonds on the Barren Grounds near Yellowknife in Canada's Arctic, international mining companies almost immediately began to stake claims to the minerals: pure "ice" diamonds untainted by bloodshed and war.These diamond lands are home to the Dene, Native peoples who have hunted, fished, and lived on these grounds since time immemorial. To mine these lands required the agreement of the First Nations, the Inuit, the mining company, and two levels of government. Ellen Bielawski was part of the negotiation team that painstakingly put together a deal to satisfy all involved, and Rogue Diamonds is her provocative and insightful telling of this intense time. From closed-door meetings in town to sacred ceremonies on the land, Bielawski weaves a thought-provoking story.
To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for the joint evolutionary origin of art and intimacy, what we commonly call love.It all begins with the human trait of birthing immature and helpless infants. To ensure that mothers find their demanding babies worth caring for, humans evolved to be lovable and to attune themselves to others from the moment of birth. The ways in which mother and infant respond to each other are rhythmically patterned vocalizations and exaggerated face and body movements that Dissanayake calls rhythms and sensory modes.Rhythms and modes also give rise to the arts. Because humans are born predisposed to respond to and use rhythmic-modal signals, societies everywhere have elaborated them further as music, mime, dance, and display, in rituals which instill and reinforce valued cultural beliefs. Just as rhythms and modes coordinate and unify the mother-infant pair, in ceremonies they coordinate and unify members of a group.Today we humans live in environments very different from those of our ancestors. They used ceremonies (the arts) to address matters of serious concern, such as health, prosperity, and fecundity, that affected their survival. Now we tend to dismiss the arts, to see them as superfluous, only for an elite. But if we are biologically predisposed to participate in artlike behavior, then we actually need the arts. Even -- or perhaps especially -- in our fast-paced, sophisticated modern lives, the arts encourage us to show that we care about important things.
The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape.In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.
To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for the joint evolutionary origin of art and intimacy, what we commonly call love.It all begins with the human trait of birthing immature and helpless infants. To ensure that mothers find their demanding babies worth caring for, humans evolved to be lovable and to attune themselves to others from the moment of birth. The ways in which mother and infant respond to each other are rhythmically patterned vocalizations and exaggerated face and body movements that Dissanayake calls rhythms and sensory modes.Rhythms and modes also give rise to the arts. Because humans are born predisposed to respond to and use rhythmic-modal signals, societies everywhere have elaborated them further as music, mime, dance, and display, in rituals which instill and reinforce valued cultural beliefs. Just as rhythms and modes coordinate and unify the mother-infant pair, in ceremonies they coordinate and unify members of a group.Today we humans live in environments very different from those of our ancestors. They used ceremonies (the arts) to address matters of serious concern, such as health, prosperity, and fecundity, that affected their survival. Now we tend to dismiss the arts, to see them as superfluous, only for an elite. But if we are biologically predisposed to participate in artlike behavior, then we actually need the arts. Even -- or perhaps especially -- in our fast-paced, sophisticated modern lives, the arts encourage us to show that we care about important things.
The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape.In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.
In this provocative, closely argued book, Ellen Handler Spitz explores three principal psychoanalytic approaches to art. The first considers the relations between an artist’s life and work; the second focuses on the work of art itself; and the third encompasses the intricate relations between a work of art and its audience or beholders. To illustrate her theoretical discussion, Spitz draws on a variety of art forms, including painting, sculpture, literature, music, and dance. “No one who is concerned with the psychoanalytic study of art can afford to neglect [this book]; no one who cares about the art of psychoanalysis should ignore it.”—Aaron H. Esman, M.D., Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association “This book … should prove fascinating to all who are concerned with works of art as expressions of the human mind and heart.”—Shehira Davezac, Hospital and Community Psychiatry “This book is highly recommended to all who enjoy the multiple applications of analytic thought to extend our senses.”—Jay Lefer, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis Ellen Handler Spitz holds degrees in art history, aesthetics, and education from Barnard College, Harvard University, and Columbia University. She was trained as a special candidate at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Columbia University.
A highly important figure in the late eighteenth-century British art world, John Raphael Smith was the most robust and prolific printmaker of his time. Smith not only produced nearly 400 prints—about 130 of his own design and the others by such noted British artists as Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, and Joseph Wright of Derby—he was also appointed "Mezzotinto Engraver" to the Prince of Wales and became an impresario of the print-publishing trade. This book is the first full-length study for nearly a hundred years of Smith’s remarkable career in printmaking. Ellen D’Oench investigates how Smith conducted his engraving and publishing business and what his prints, drawings, and paintings reveal about the culture and morality of the society that viewed them. She includes a chronological catalogue raisonné with newly discovered works, an inventory of his firm’s publications, and a catalogue of prints reproduced from his own original work. Along with full biographical information on Smith and his activities as an artist and publisher, D’Oench pays close attention to the contemporary art market, its operation, and the placement of Smith’s products within it. She details Smith’s fascination with female genre subjects and his use of printed images to both exploit and critique his culture’s manners and morals. Historians of paintings and prints, social and cultural historians, and scholars of women’s history will all find in this book an array of delightful illustrations and interesting material. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art
Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856-1940), daughter of the famous suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, played an essential role in the winning of woman suffrage in the United States. This powerfully written book is both a biography of Harriot Blatch and a new appraisal of the winning and aftermath of the American woman suffrage movement.Harriot Blatch’s dedication to the realization of woman suffrage, marked by a concern for social justice and human liberty, closely paralleled that of her mother. However, says Ellen DuBois, Blatch was also very much her own woman. For almost two decades, she put an ocean’s distance between her mother and herself, marrying an Englishman, raising a daughter in England, and absorbing the new political currents of Fabian socialism that helped her see the possibilities of a modern women’s rights movement. After her mother’s death in 1902, Blatch returned to the United States. There she expanded suffragism’s class basis, encouraged a more lively activist style, and brought a genuine political sensibility to the movement. And though she devoted herself to enfranchisement, she also envisioned feminism going further to encompass economic power and independence for women as well. DuBois tells the story of Blatch’s life and work, in the process reinterpreting the history and politics of the American suffrage movement and the consequences for women’s freedom.
Mention a name from a beloved childhood picture book—Madeline, Corduroy, Peter Rabbit, Max and his “wild things”—and most adults can recollect a bright image, fragments of a story, the timbre of a certain reading voice, the sensation of being held, and best of all being together with someone and enveloped in fantasy. Why do picture book images shown to us as young children linger in our minds? How do picture books shape our lives early on and even later into adulthood? This book takes up such questions. It explores the profound impact of the experience of reading to children. Ellen Handler Spitz reveals how classic picture books transmit psychological wisdom, convey moral lessons, shape tastes, and implant subtle prejudices.Each chapter of the book discusses well-known children’s books—Goodnight Moon, Babar, Little Black Sambo, to name a few—that deal with a theme of importance to young children. These include bedtime, separation, loss, and death; curiosity, disobedience, and punishment; and identity and self-acceptance. Focusing on the relationship between a child and an adult reader, Spitz explains the notion of “conversational reading” and emphasizes the mutual benefits of dialogue and intimacy. This book not only gives parents, grandparents, teachers, therapists, and scholars a new understanding of the meaning of picture books, it also empowers adults to interpret and choose future cultural experiences for their children.
Sparsely settled mountain areas of the world, such as Colorado’s Front Range, give an impression of wild, untouched, and unchanging nature. Yet in many cases mountain rivers that appear to be pristine natural systems actually have been impaired as a result of human activities. In this timely and accessible book, Ellen Wohl documents two hundred years of land-use patterns on the Front Range and their wide-ranging effects on river ecosystems. If we hope to manage river resources effectively and preserve functioning river ecosystems, the author warns, we must recognize how beaver trapping, placer mining, timber harvesting, flow regulation, road and railroad construction, recreation, cattle grazing, and other human activities have impaired rivers--and continue to do so. The rivers of the Colorado Front Range are representative of mountain rivers throughout the world: land-use patterns affecting their form and function are little-recognized or -understood. This book fills an important gap with a clear and comprehensive explanation of how rivers are changed by human activity and includes a generous selection of striking historical and contemporary photographs, maps, and diagrams.
This important and accessible book surveys the history and present condition of river systems across the United States, showing how human activities have impoverished our rivers and impaired the connections between river worlds and other ecosystems.Ellen Wohl begins by introducing the basic physical, chemical, and biological processes operating in rivers. She then addresses changes in rivers resulting from settlement and expansion, describes the growth of federal involvement in managing rivers, and examines the recent efforts to rehabilitate and conserve river ecosystems. In each chapter she focuses on a specific regional case study and describes what happens to a particular river organism—a bird, North America’s largest salamander, the paddlefish, and the American alligator—when people interfere with natural processes.
A compelling study of “new sincerity” as a powerful cultural practice, born in perestroika-era Russia, and how it interconnects with global social and media flows The global cultural practice of a “new sincerity” in literature, media, art, design, fashion, film, and architecture grew steadily in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Cultural historian Ellen Rutten traces the rise and proliferation of a new rhetoric of sincere social expression characterized by complex blends of unabashed honesty, playfulness, and irony. Insightful and thought provoking, Rutten’s masterful study of a sweeping cultural trend with roots in late Soviet Russia addresses postsocialist, postmodern, and postdigital questions of selfhood. The author explores how and why a uniquely Russian artistic and social philosophy was shaped by “cultural memory, commodification, and mediatization,” and how, under Putin, “new sincerity” talk merges with transnational pleas to “revive sincerity.” This essential study stands squarely at the intersection of the history of emotions, media studies, and post-Soviet studies to shed light on a new cultural reality—one that is profoundly affecting creative thought, artistic expression, and lifestyle virtually everywhere.
This third and final volume in the Black Artists in America series features work from the transitional moment of the late 1970s to the dawn of the twenty-first century In the 1980s and 1990s, Black artists in the United States who came of age during the civil rights activity of the preceding decades began experimenting with new media and innovative approaches to artmaking, often as a way of questioning long-held inequities in the art world and in American society. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Glenn Ligon, Faith Ringgold, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others created works that celebrated their racial identity and fought exclusion and prejudices in the establishment. This book considers the ways that the artists of this generation challenged cultural, environmental, political, racial, and social issues of the last decades of the twentieth century. Black Artists in America: From the Bicentennial to September 11 is the final volume in the three-volume series that traces how Black artists have responded to the social issues of their time. Beautifully illustrated with 150 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, this volume completes the story of a century of artmaking. Published in association with the Dixon Gallery and Gardens Exhibition Schedule: Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA (October 5, 2025–January 11, 2026) Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN (January 25–March 29, 2026)
Making the Big Move to the Big Apple Just Got Easier Moving to New York City and its neighboring areas can be overwhelming and expensive. What you need is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the diverse neighborhoods, cultures, and lifestyles-not to mention the entertainment options, trends, and hidden gems that are the heartbeat of your new home. In Relocating to New York City and Surrounding Areas, Revised and Updated 2nd Edition, you get an insider's view of New York plus all the practical information you need to make your transition smooth and more affordable, including: -How to find a place to live-fast, and in a neighborhood you'll love -Where to look for a job -How much it costs to live in the city and its environs-Where to find the best restaurants and entertainment in town -How to get around New York -How to move, ship, and store your stuff easily and affordably Not just a neighborhood directory for newcomers, this is also a bible for those already living here, offering advice on the best schools, bargain shopping, discount tickets, and free events. Whether you're planning a move or already here, you'll want to keep this definitive guide in reach for the handy checklists, savvy tips, website listings, and fresh advice. Bursting with up-to-date statistics on every neighborhood and information on everything from post offices and grocery stores to health clubs and theaters, Relocating to New York City and Surrounding Areas will help you negotiate the city like a local on your very first day. Learn about New York's hottest neighborhoods Greenwich VillageSoHo East Village Morningside Heights Park Slope Williamsburg Cobble Hill Brooklyn Heights Dumbo Astoria
We Love Each Other, But...offers simple, practical tips that will help you restore and strengthen a relationship that has gone off track. It lays out the nuts and bolts of building relationships so they continue to be gratifying over the long haul. Dr. Ellen Wachtel shows how, even when you feel like giving up on a relationship or marriage, you can recapture why you fell in love in the first place. Dr. Wachtel promises that there is more and suggests simple ways to keep vitality in relationships. In fact, she shows you and your partner how you can stay interested in each other for the rest of your lives.
