Art Around the World

On October 25th, International Artists Day, in conjunction with Picasso’s birthday, celebrates the beauty and influence of art around the world. From cave paintings to modernism, art tells the story of people and culture. International Artists Day is a rapidly growing grassroots movement to pay tribute to any and all artists. Check out these MIT Press books featuring art and artists from around the world and be sure to visit your local art gallery or museum today.

 

Africa

Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers
By Kobena Mercer 

Migration, whether freely chosen or forcibly imposed, has been a defining feature of twentieth-century modernity...Whether manifested in the striking architectural innovations of Nigerian modernism in the 1920s or postmodern works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and black British filmmakers in the 1980s, the multidirectional appropriation and borrowing described in these essays give us new perspectives on twentieth-century art and modernity.

 

Asia

Contemporary Art in Asia
Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio, eds.

This book is the first anthology of critical writings to map the shift in both the nature and the reception of Asian art over the past twenty years. Offering texts by leading figures in the field (mostly Asian), and including more than fifty illustrations in color and black and white, it covers developments in East Asia (including China, Korea, and Japan), South Asia (including India and Pakistan), and Southeast Asia (including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand). 

 

Wenda Gu
Mark H. C. Bessire, ed.

Wenda Gu is one of the leading contemporary Chinese artists of his generation. Known by some as "the hair artist" and remembered by others as the artist whose monumental installation was violently destroyed by a Russian artist at the infamous "Interpol" exhibition (Stockholm, 1996).

 

Eastern Europe

Imagine No Possessions
By Christina Kiaer

Kiaer analyzes this Constructivist counterproposal to capitalism's commodity fetish by examining objects produced by Constructivist artists between 1923 and 1925.

 

Art Power
By Boris Groys

Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics…In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function.

 

Latin America

Mexican Modernity
By Rubén Gallo

In Mexican Modernity, Ruben Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artifacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics. 

 

North America

Move. Choreographing You
By Stephanie Rosenthal

Move. Choreographing You explores the interaction between visual art and dance since the 1960s. This beautifully illustrated book, published in connection with a major exhibition, focuses on visual artists and choreographers who create sculptures and installations that direct the movements of audiences--making them dancers and active participants.

 

And in celebration of Picasso's birthday and his contribution to the art world...

Myth and Metamorphosis
By Lisa Florman

[T]his book offers a radically different view of Picasso and the "classical"—a view that aligns his work much more closely with Surrealist, and specifically Bataillean, revisions of antiquity.

 

 

Undercover Surrealism
By Dawn Ades and Simon Baker

Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of [George Bataille’s] DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris.