Arts Fine Arts

Artisan Entrepreneurship analyses handicraft enterprise using different approaches at an individual, group and societal point of view, providing a better understanding about how these workers contribute to societal wellbeing and aid cultural heritage preservation for future generations.

Fine Arts continues Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys's playful and dystopic approach to depicting the human condition. The artist duo became watercolorists for the project, harping back to an early amateur pictorial tradition while basing their picture making on a range of quotidian and historical images culled from the Internet. Deadpan images of the banal and the fanciful accompany the grievous and the tragic, without comment. Nostalgia and innocence are dimly stirred and questioned. Although the genre of the watercolorist, and its association with pastoral and colonialist scenes, may be considered outdated, the contemporary mode of sourcing the images implies that these pictures might not be matters of the past. This book brings together the collection of over ninety watercolors in a glossy format reminiscent of a picture book or auction house catalogue. Copublished with CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; MoMA PS1, New York; and Raven Row, London, on the occasion of the eponymous traveling exhibition in 2015.

Judith Nasby, founding director and curator of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, animates the story of the gallery from its humble beginnings in the hallways of a university campus in 1916 to its latest incarnation as the internationally recognized Art Gallery of Guelph. The book is beautifully illustrated with eighty images of artworks in the permanent collection, beginning with the gallery's first acquisition, Tom Thomson's 1917 masterpiece The Drive, the last large canvas he painted before his tragic death. As curator, Nasby oversaw the creation of one of the most comprehensive sculpture parks in Canada and the amassing of a permanent collection of some nine thousand artworks. In The Making of a Museum Nasby reveals how the museum developed its internationally recognized collection of contemporary Inuit drawings and wall hangings that toured four continents. She discusses the development of the collection's specializations in contemporary works by Canadian silversmiths; historical European etchings; Woodland and Northeastern Indigenous beadwork; and others that arose from curatorial collaborations, such as molas by Kuna women artists from Panama and contemporary paintings and indigenous woodcuts from Chongqing, China. Nasby recounts her long career as founding director and curator, peppering the hundred-year history of cultural development on the University of Guelph campus and in the city with humorous anecdotes and personal insights to reveal how arts institutions can be created through dedication, serendipity, and perseverance.

The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746) by Charles Batteux was arguably the most influential work on aesthetics published in the eighteenth century. It influenced every major aesthetician in the second half of the century: Diderot, Herder, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and others either adopted his views or reacted against them. It is the work generally credited with establishing the modern system of the arts: poetry, painting, music, sculpture and dance. Batteux's book is also an invaluable aid to the interpretation of the arts of eighteenth century. And yet there has never been a complete or reliable translation of The Fine Arts into English. Now James O. Young, a leading contemporary philosopher of art, has provided an eminently readable and accurate translation. It is fully annotated and comes with a comprehensive introduction that identifies the figures who influenced Batteux and the writers who were, in turn, influenced by him. The introduction also discusses the ways in which The Fine Arts has continuing philosophical interest. In particular, Young demonstrates that Batteux's work is an important contribution to aesthetic cognitivism (the view that works of art contribute importantly to knowledge) and that Batteux made a significant contribution to understanding the expressiveness of music. This book will be of interest to everyone interested in the arts of the eighteenth century, French studies, the history of European ideas, and philosophy of art.

A successfully managed project is a carefully planned and organized effort. A critical and essential skill for any art service manager is project management—the ability to organize resources--labor, budgets, materials-- and handle constraints so that a project’s goals are successfully accomplished. Fine Art Movement and Storage: Project Management for the Visual Arts is a practical handbook for developing and managing multi-faceted projects from the project manager’s point of view, including estate moves, exhibition planning for preparators, storage setup, planning and maintenance, storage movement and planning, collection relocations, traveling exhibitions, art fairs, and the prioritizing of overlapping projects. It covers complex and advanced project management issues such as: Identifying your stake holders and foreseeing potential stake holder conflicts, Identifying the project’s goals and parameters, Outlining goals for initial and follow-up site visits, Guidelines for conducting a site visit, Planning for art and material staging, Estimating and quoting time, labor, and materials, Understanding and estimating hard and soft costs in your budget, Planning for contingencies, Developing budgets and timelines, Scheduling overlapping tasks, Creating daily goal sheets and project punch lists, Training and staffing your crew, Assigning crew leaders, Delegating project responsibilities, Managing quality control and industry standards, Understanding project completion, post completion, and follow up, and Managing multiple projects. Over 50 graphics help to make this a book you’ll use every day. Every art institution, art service company and individual that manages projects or anticipates a project will need and want to have access to this book as a resource, as a reference and as a training tool.

With this publication, produced in conjunction with the largest expansion in the history of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the full scope of the museum's outstanding American art collection is represented for the first time. Following an introduction tracing the history of American art at this encyclopedic museum--a state-supported, privately endowed institution--readers will discover lively and generously illustrated essays about selected paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by many of America's leading artists: John James Audubon, Thomas Hart Benton, Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, John Singleton Copley, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Willson Peale, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, William Wetmore Story, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James McNeill Whistler. Also included are decorative objects by well-known artisans and firms, such as John Henry Belter, the Goddard-Townsend group, Herter Brothers, Paul Revere, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Organized in chronological sections ranging from the colonial era to the mid-twentieth century, this long-awaited book examines a noteworthy collection through a variety of interpretive lenses--aesthetic and cultural--for the benefit of a broad readership. Published by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in association with the University of Virginia Press

'Art Practice as Research' presents a compelling argument that the creative and cultural inquiry undertaken by artists is a form of research. The text explores themes, practice, and contexts of artistic inquiry and positions them within the discourse of research.