Best of
Material-Culture

1998

Dating Fabrics - A Color Guide: 1800-1960


Eileen Jahnke Trestain - 1998
    Over 1,000 color fabric swatches are listed in this handy, easy-to-use reference guide. You'll be able to identify fabric dating from the pre-1830 era through the Second World War. Match your antique fabric by selecting a suspected time period and comparing colors and prints.

African-American Art


Sharon F. Patton - 1998
    African-American Art provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African-American experience. Here, Patton discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art, sculptures, paintings, and photography during the 1800s. She also examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism during the 1960s and 70s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 90s. New evidence suggests different ways of looking at African-American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Here, Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.

Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers


M. Ruth Little - 1998
    4 maps.

Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds


Ruth B. Phillips - 1998
    These thoughtful, engaging essays provide a comparative perspective on the history, character, and impact of tourist art in colonized societies in three areas of the world: Africa, Oceania, and North America. Ranging broadly historically and geographically, Unpacking Culture is the first collection to bring together substantial case studies on this topic from around the world.

The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience


Celeste Olalquiaga - 1998
    Proposing instead that kitsch is the product of a larger sensibility of loss, Celeste Olalquiaga shows how it enables the momentary re-creation of experiences that exist only as memories or fantasies. Simultaneously exposing and celebrating this process, Olalquiaga gives us a bold, trenchant analysis of what and how we see when we look at kitsch.