How can your institution do it and do it well? The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places. Museum consultant and exhibit designer Nina Simon weaves together innovative design techniques and case studies to make a powerful case for participatory practice. "Nina Simon's new book is essential for museum directors interested in experimenting with audience participation on the one hand and cautious about upending the tradition museum model on the other. In concentrating on the practical, this book makes implementation possible in most museums. More importantly, in describing the philosophy and rationale behind participatory activity, it makes clear that action does not always require new technology or machinery. Museums need to change, are changing, and will change further in the future. This book is a helpful and thoughtful road map for speeding such transformation." -Elaine Heumann Gurian, international museum consultant and author of Civilizing the Museum "This book is an extraordinary resource. Nina has assembled the collective wisdom of the field, and has given it her own brilliant spin. She shows us all how to walk the talk. Her book will make you want to go right out and start experimenting with participatory projects." -Kathleen McLean, participatory museum designer and author of Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions "I predict that in the future this book will be a classic work of museology." --Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums

    MRM5 includes expert advice from more than 60 acknowledged leaders in their disciplines. New with the 5th Edition are special teaching sections that challenge students and seasoned staff alike with questions about the process and procedures of accessioning and caring for objects. Contains bibliography, glossary and multiple sample forms. MRM5 continues a tradition of museum publishing that began with the inaugural edition in 1958.

    Clements Library.

    Why? The Best Art You've Never Seen restores to view 100 wonderful treasures of world art. Ranging from Peru to Papua New Guinea, it uncovers neglected wonders in offbeat corners of the world or locked away in the store rooms of the world's great museums. Some are hidden accidentally: by a rock-fall, a shift in a trade route, or through the drift of history. Others are hidden deliberately, buried as loot or destroyed by hate - like the fabulous Mount Kailash Temple in India. Many are hidden by changes of taste, marginalized because they don't fit into established ideas of art - works by artists such as Norman Rockwell, Nek Chand, and Niki de St Phalle. Other great works, like the the dazzling Très Riches Heures manuscript and the Mona Lisa, are being virtually hidden by the demands of conservation. And there are penty of treasures still waiting to be revealed - the Q'in Emperor's tomb or Leonardo's lost fresco The Battle of Anghiari.Author and former museum director Julian Spalding takes you into a world of beautiful and arresting artifacts and reveals their amazing stories. He sets forth a surprising and unfamiliar alternative canon of works that offers a fresh and controversial take on the world of art.

    by Simonetta Fraquelli ... [et al.] ; catalogue published by: Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, Kunsthaus Zürich]. - Zürich [etc.] : Kunsthaus Zürich [etc.], c2010. - 286 S. : Ill., z. T. farbig ; 28,5 cm

    In this beautiful book, one hundred of the greatest works from the collection, each by a different artist, are presented in chronological order, and accompanied by a lively, informative text and full-page color reproductions.From the earliest—a remnant of an Italian altarpiece dating from around 1265—to the most recent—Paul Cézanne’s great Bathers, of about 1894–1905—each painting has been carefully chosen for the unique significance it holds; whether representing a particular artist, place or time, or simply for its beauty and the pleasure it provides to the viewer. The painters featured here include some of the most famous names in European art—Duccio, Giotto, Dürer, Holbein, van Eyck, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Goya, Caravaggio, Claude, Poussin, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Turner, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Rousseau, and Van Gogh—and some of the most iconic paintings in the world—The Wilton Diptych, The Arnolfini Portrait, The Ambassadors, and Sunflowers.These selected highlights introduce some of the most inspiring paintings ever made. The reader can dip in to explore individual paintings, or read from cover to cover for a full survey.

    Born in poverty in Alabama, Dial has lived his entire life in the American South, and his art, informed by decades of struggle as a black working-class man, reveals a unique perspective on America's most difficult and pervasive challenges, such as its long history of race and class conflict, the war in Iraq, and the 9/11 tragedy. This monograph includes reproductions of 70 of Dial's large-scale paintings, drawings and found object sculptures spanning twenty years of his artistic career. Drawing inspiration from the rich symbolic world of the black rural South and with no formal education, Dial has developed a truly distinctive and original style. Incorporating salvaged objects in his work-from plastic grave flowers and children's toys to cow skulls and goat carcasses-he creates highly charged assemblages combined with turbulent fields of expressionistic painting. With commentary from historian David Driskell, cultural critic Greg Tate, and art historian Joanne Cubbs, this volume brings long-overdue recognition to Dial's remarkable career and offers audiences an unprecedented look into the creative world of this important artist.

    Each section begins with very simple observations — "This face doesn't look very African!" — and moves on to more complex questions such as "What do the decorations on the forehead and temples represent?" Written in everyday language for people with no art expertise or teaching experience, the book includes maps, color-coding, and thumbnail images to help readers situate each featured work of art. The explanations also include guidance on what's most appropriate for what age, from four to 14. There are invaluable tips for planning a visit to a museum, a thorough discussion of modern Western perceptions of world art, and help with the tricky terminology associated with this subject.

    It is the first reader to focus on LGBT issues and museums, and the first reader in nearly 15 years to collect articles which focus on women and museums. At last, students of museum studies, women's studies, LGBT studies and museum professionals have a single resource.The book is organised into three thematic parts, each with its own introduction. Sections focus on women in museum work, applications of feminist and LGBT theories to museum exhibitions, exhibitions and collections pertaining to women and individuals who are LGBT. The Case studies in a fourth part provide different perspectives to key topics, such as memorials and memorializing; modernism and museums; and natural history collections. The collection concludes with a bibliographic essay evaluating scholarship to date on gender and sexuality in museums.Amy K. Levin brings together outstanding articles published in the past as well as new essays. The collection's scope is international, with articles about US, Canadian, and European institutions. Gender, Sexuality and Museums: A Routledge Reader is an essential resource for those studying gender and sexuality in the museum.

    Born in Venice, Italy, Beato came of age in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. As a young apprentice in 1856, he photographed the sites of the Crimean War, thereby launching a long and remarkably adventurous career. Over the next half century he would follow in the wake of the British Empire: Egypt, Palestine, and Syria; India, where he photographed the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny; and China, where he chronicled the Second Opium War. He spent some thirty years in Japan and Burma, where he was among the first commercial photographers at the time that these countries were starting to open to the West.The text includes an engaging narrative of his life and entrepreneurial career and a thought-provoking essay on Beato and the photography of war. There is a generous selection of his photographs, including panoramas and hand-colored Japanese studies, along with captivating period ephemera, lithographs based on his work, and humorous caricatures of the artist.

    Representing Africa in American Art Museums is the first comprehensive book to focus on the history of African art in American art museums. Chronicling more than a century of building and presenting collections of African art in thirteen American art museums, from the late 1800s to the present, the book considers the art museum as a lens for understanding the shifting visions of African art that are manifested in institutional practices of collecting and display in the United States.Thirteen essays present the institutional biographies of African art collections in a selection of American art museums: the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Hampton University Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barnes Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indiana University Art Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the National Museum of African Art.Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke offer a review of the history of collecting and displaying African art in American museums and identify important issues that are raised by the essays: defining aesthetic criteria for African art and for its display; breaking free from the monolithic rubric of "primitive art"; broadening perceptions of what constitutes African art; and formulating a place for context and culture in understanding and presenting African art.Representing Africa in American Art Museums concludes with an afterword that anticipates the direction for the collecting and display of African art in the twenty-first century, including the ethics and legalities of collecting; the deconstruction of a singular and authoritative museum voice in interpreting works of art; the interests and engagement of local African American and African communities that have a stake in how collections are represented; and how, if, and where to include contemporary art from Africa in museum collections.

    This is essential reading for junior Egyptologists!

    Bunch III, historian, author and educator, founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, is one of the museum profession's leading writers and thinkers. In this collection of his work from the mid-1980s to the present, including new chapters written for this book, Bunch presents a personal and passionate view of American history, "the Gordian knot" of race relations, and the role of the museum in shaping the perspective of a nation.

    Seventy-five years later, its permanent collection contains numerous masterpieces of world art. This anniversary retrospective includes more than 300 large-scale plates and 50 text entries on individual works.

    Most scholarly interpretations of Maya art and culture have emphasized that this ancient civilization was oriented toward inland centers and preoccupied with the blood of royal lineage and ritual sacrifice. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries and developments in deciphering Maya glyphs, this groundbreaking volume presents a revisionist reading that shifts the emphasis of interpretation to the mythic power of the sea as the basis of a larger, deeper cultural narrative and history for the Maya.Surrounded by the sea in all directions, the Maya viewed water as a source of both life and danger. Through the artworks presented—including acknowledged masterpieces and many never before exhibited in the United States—readers will gain a new appreciation for water’s influence on Maya cosmology, its role in their interpretation of the supernatural, as well as its impact on Maya cross-cultural contacts, trading practices, and power dynamics. Essays by prominent scholars provide an interdisciplinary context for understanding Maya art as well as new interpretations of traditional iconography and symbolism.Accompanying a monumental exhibition comprising almost 100 artworks ranging from carved stone monuments to delicate jade sculptures, this compelling, richly illustrated publication will fundamentally transform the interpretation of Maya art.