John Beardsley

The first major monograph on a multifaceted self-taught artist whose work ranges from painting and sculpture to performance and sound. Lonnie Holley s work has captivated audiences. 'Lonnie Holley has held a cult status among the art cognoscenti for a long time as a visual artist and performer.' New York Times. Lonnie Holley s widely admired practice spans painting, drawing, assemblage sculpture, and performance that combines experimental music and poetry. After decades of making art, he is now getting the recognition he richly deserves. The artist s first sculptures were carved tombstones for his nieces who perished in a house fire in 1979. Over the following years, he devoted himself to making sculptures that populated his property near Birmingham, a large all-encompassing outdoor installation that was eventually destroyed in 1997. The artist s work continued unabated as he began to gain recognition and exhibit his work in the South and throughout the US. In his first major monograph, every facet of his practice is explored. Holiday considers Holley s art and music as interconnected components of the artist s overall creative vision. Beardsley focuses on the artist s Birmingham roots connecting the cultural firmament of that city with other major creative communities in Alabama, most notably Boykin, more popularly known as Gee s Bend, home of the famous quilters.

A fascinating new look at an extraordinary artist whose deafness led to an acute visual awareness and near photographic memory Self-taught artist James Castle (1899–1977) is primarily known for soot and saliva drawings of meticulously rendered domestic interiors and farm scenes, along with fantastical figures, animals, and architectural constructions made of cardboard and stitched paper. Castle was born into a family of homesteaders in Idaho, and his visual world comprised variations of seemingly ordinary subjects: rural landscapes, houses, barns, and outbuildings; interiors with closed and open doors, beds, bureaus, tile floors, and minutely patterned wallpaper; and color copies of illustrated advertisements for food, fuel, and matches. Castle was a deaf artist who by most accounts never learned to read, write, or speak. In this remarkable book, author John Beardsley discusses how these limitations led to the development of an extraordinary memory, an ability that enabled him to create a large number of distinctly intelligent artworks. Beardsley follows Castle’s work as if through a series of rooms (a “Memory Palace”)—interiors, exteriors, objects, books, and words—reproducing many previously unknown works and referencing other documents made available for the first time from the James Castle Collection and Archive.Published in association with the James Castle Collection and Archive

For centuries, travel was an important part of a gardener's initial and continuing professional training. Educational journeys to parks and gardens at home and abroad were consistently recorded in lengthy reports and articles for professional journals. The travel report by Hans Jancke (1850-1920), a court gardener who served the Prussian kings in Potsdam, Germany, is typical of this genre. Jancke's manuscript, which until now remained unpublished, describes his 1874-1875 apprenticeship at Knowsley, the seat of the Earl of Derby near Liverpool, England. Containing extensive plant lists and detailed descriptions of the horticultural regimens observed in the estate's kitchen gardens and greenhouses, the text is augmented by several measured drawings executed by Jancke. These illustrations include the hothouses used for fruit forcing, vegetable production, and exotic ornamentals, as well as a site plan based on Jancke's own survey data. Professionally focused travel journals of gardeners and garden artists were for a long time ignored as sources to be taken seriously in historical research. But Jancke's eyewitness account, especially as it documents an intense scientific curiosity, demonstrates the potential of these texts for illuminating the more technical and practical aspects of the history of the garden arts.

This book begins with an enlightening introduction tracing the historical roots of art in the landscape: Stonehenge, Indian mounds, cliff dwellings, park design from 18th-century England to modern-day golf courses. The opening chapter deals with such innovative artists as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, and Christo, who in the 1960s began to free their art from the confines of tradition by constructing monumental sculptures in the environment. The following chapters discuss their predecessors, peers, and successors, including Constantin Brancusi, Herbert Bayer, Richard Long, James Turrell, and many others. The final four chapters (chapter 7 is entirely new) explore at length the increasing involvement of artists in land reclamation and urban design, featuring projects by Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Mel Chin, Maya Lin, and many others.