Best of
Museums

2007

Keep Your Donors: The Guide to Better Communications & Stronger Relationships


Tom Ahern - 2007
    This practical and provocative book will show you how to master the strategies and tactics that make fundraising communications profitable. Filled with case studies and based in part on the CFRE and AFP job analyses, Keep Your Donors is your definitive guide to getting new donors--and keeping them--for many years to come.

Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863-1959


Bruce Altshuler - 2007
    It is the most important reference book available on the subject, and the only book available that charts these groundbreaking events in such detail and scope. Volume I opens with the revolutionary first Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863, and concludes with the multi-locational international exhibition 'The New American Painting,' organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958-59. SALON TO BIENNIAL depicts a wealth of rare documentary material and ephemera, including installation photographs, publications, and reviews of the period surrounding each exhibition. It is an exceptional sourcebook for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century art, exhibition design, or curatorial practice.

Nashville Portraits: Legends of Country Music


Jim McGuire - 2007
    Most of the big recording stars insist on using McGuire: Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Doc Watson, Dolly Parton, Carole King, Townes Van Zandt, John Hartford, Emmylou Harris and Reba McEntire, to name a few. Sixty of his these acclaimed portraits are slated for a two-year-long traveling museum exhibit that opens in Nashville in the Fall of 2007, sponsored by the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta. This book features the photos in beautiful duotones on heavy stock paper, each with a quote from one of the Nashville musicians talking about the beauty of McGuire's work. This landmark gift book will appeal to anyone who appreciates American artistry, whether or not they love country music.

Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops


Ginetta E.B. Candelario - 2007
    For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

Spirited Encounters: American Indians Protest Museum Policies and Practices


Karen Coody Cooper - 2007
    In response, due to public embarrassment and an awakening of sensitivities, museums began to change their methods and, additionally, laws were enacted in support of American Indian requests for change. The result is that American museums have revised their long-held practices due to American Indian protests. Spirited Encounters provides a foundation for understanding museums and looks at their development to present time, examines how museums collect Native materials, and explores protest as a fully American process of addressing grievances. Now that museums and American Indians are working together in the processes of repatriation, this book can help each side understand the other more fully.

Chihuly Bellagio [With DVD]


Dale Chihuly - 2007
    This unique project--Chihuly's interpretation of a garden of flowers--required more than 40,000 pounds of glass and a myriad of metal installation structures created specifically for the site. The sculpture flows across the ceiling of the hotel's main lobby. Chihuly reflects on the work: "Everything about the Fiori di Como was new--the scale, the armature, and the glass. First I had to develop the way the ceiling would look--the depth, new glass forms, the technique for holding the glass, all the safety issues involved." This clothbound book provides sixty-five detailed images of the creative process.

Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake


Philip Kitcher - 2007
    Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains virtually unread, except by scholarly specialists. Its linguistic novelties, apparently based on an immense learning that few can share, make it appear impenetrable.Joyce's Kaleidoscope attempts to dissolve the darkness and to invite lovers of literature to engage with Finnegans Wake. Philip Kitcher proposes that the Wake has at its core an age-old philosophical question, What makes a life worth living?, and that Joyce explores that question from the perspective of someone who feels that a long life is now ending. So the complex dream language is a way of investigating issues that are hard to face directly; the reader is invited to struggle with the novel's aging dreamer who seeks reassurance about the worth of what he has done and been. Joyce finds his way to reassurance. The sweeping music and the high comedy of Finnegans Wake celebrate the ordinary doings of ordinary people. With great humanity and a distinctive brand of humanism, Joyce points us to the things that matter in our lives. His final novel is a festival of life itself.From this perspective, the supposedly opaque, or nonsensical, language opens up as a rich source for the reader's reflections: though readers won't all approach it the same way, or with the same set of references, there is meaning in it for everyone. Kitcher's detailed study of the entire text brings out its musical resonances and its musical structures. It analyzes the novel overall while bringing deep insight to the reading of key individual passages. This engaging guide will aid readers not just to make sense of the novel, but to relish the remarkable accomplishment of Joyce's least appreciated work.

Ghost Diamond


Michael Broad - 2007
    The first title in a new series introduces a delightful new character to emerging readers — the intrepid and resourceful Agent Amelia, Secret Agent, who saves the world from evil geniuses and criminal masterminds thanks to her clever disguises, great gadgets (which sometimes work), and her brilliance at improvising in sticky situations.

Re-Enchantment


James Elkins - 2007
    Artists critical of religion can find voices in the art world, but religion itself, including spirituality, is taken to be excluded by the very project of modernism. The sublime, "re-enchantment" (as in Weber), and the aura (as in Benjamin) have been used to smuggle religious concepts back into academic writing, but there is still no direct communication between "religionists" and scholars. Re-Enchantment, volume 7 in The Art Seminar Series, will be the first book to bridge that gap.The volume will include an introduction and two final, synoptic essays, as well as contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers on religion and art including Boris Groys, James Elkins, Thierry de Duve, David Morgan, Norman Girardot, Sally Promey, Brent Plate, and Christopher Pinney.

The Museum Book: A Guide to Strange and Wonderful Collections


Jan Mark - 2007
    . . or two-headed sheep? Find out where the word "museum" comes from and what unusual items (unicorn horns? mermaids?) some early museums placed on view. Jan Mark’s humorous and conversational insights take readers through museums’ multifaceted history, while Richard Holland’s eye-catching mixed-media illustrations lend their own quirky flair. With vivid examples from all around the world, this wonderful book puts museums — and the many artifacts lovingly stored there — on display in a whole new light.

The Art of Gandhara in The Metropolitan Museum of Art


Kurt Behrendt - 2007
    This steady commerce provided the financial foundation for the sustained patronage of luxury goods as well as Buddhist monastic sites and devotional sculpture. Drawing on the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this book traces the complex and changing artistic tradition of Gandhara, from Northwest Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan in the 2nd century BC until the 8th century.This book also explores early urban material, international trade, and the emergence and development of Buddhist art in the region, specifically addressing the relic tradition, narrative art, and iconic representations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. The latest period of production is characterized by the fabrication of monumental imagery as well as the clay and stucco production of Afghanistan.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day: Ready-to-Read Level 1


Margaret McNamara - 2007
    Connor's students honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day with their own dreams and hopes in this Level 1 Ready-to-Read!The class imagines how to make the world a better place in this celebration of an important holiday.

Manual of Museum Learning


Barry Lord - 2007
    In The Manual of Museum Learning, seasoned museum professionals offer practical advice for creating successful learning experiences in museums and related institutions, including galleries, zoos, and botanic gardens, that can attract and intrigue diverse audiences. Based on an understanding of museum learning as an experience that occurs within a personal, social, and physical context, it explores why, for whom, and how these contexts can be orchestrated in museum galleries with optimal results.

Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions


Kathleen McLean - 2007
    Overview articles by the editors plus 29 other articles describe a variety of experiments dating from the 1970s to the present—from comment books to sticky notes, video kiosks to blogs. For professional and student alike, Visitor Voices offers inspiration, food for thought, and practical advice.

Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the Past


Xavier BrayAnn Dumas - 2007
    Presenting Impressionist works by artists including Manet, Monet, Degas, Bazille, Cassatt, and Cézanne alongside those of Raphael, El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, and others, the book shows that while the Impressionists moved toward modernity and spontaneity, they remained conscious of and interested in the traditions, techniques, and subject matter of their predecessors. Essays by leading scholars reveal the ways Impressionists drew inspiration from earlier artists from periods ranging from the Italian Renaissance through the early 19th-century Classical and Romantic traditions. A detailed chronology and fascinating comparisons of landscapes, portraits, nudes, still lifes, and genre paintings provide readers with new opportunities to understand the work of both the Impressionists and Old Masters.

Transforming Museum Volunteering: A Practical Guide for Engaging 21st Century Volunteers


American Association for Museum Volunteers - 2007
    AAMV is affiliated with the American Association of Museums, U.S. Federation of Friends of Museums, and World Federation of Friends of Museums. The American Association for Museum Volunteers: Promotes professional standards of museum volunteerism Provides an online forum for the exchange of ideas and information Offers opportunities for continuing education through panel discussions and workshops at local, regional, and national conferences Encourages volunteers and volunteer program managers to become familiar with projects and programs both locally and nationally Informs and represents volunteers in advocacy for tax benefits and other legislation at local and national levels Accomplishes these goals in cooperation with museum directors, paid staff, and boards of trustees For more information about AAMV, its board of directors, programs, publications, and services, visit www.aamv.org. A membership application is on page 123 of this book or you may join AAMV on its website.