Skin Ink Magazine August 2013 Yearbook

First published in 1923, this biography is widely regarded by many automotive historians as the finest and most dispassionate character study of Henry Ford ever written. Written by the Reverend Samuel S. Marquis, an Episcopalian minister who was also the head of the sociology department at Ford Motor Company, this collection of essays serves to analyze the “psychological puzzle such as the unusual mind and personality of Henry Ford presents.” A gripping read for history buffs and fans of historical biographies. “Students of Henry Ford should be delighted by this republication of Samuel S. Marquis’s shrewd evaluation of the legendary industrialist. A close friend and associate of Ford for many years, Marquis developed many compelling insights into the automobile maker’s character and personality. One comes away from this book with a much greater sense of what made Ford tick.”—STEVEN WATTS, Professor of History at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century “Marquis was the first Ford intimate to criticize the industrialist in print. Aware that he was treading on thin ice, Marquis recalled that Ford had told him that ‘the best friend one has is the man who tells him the truth.’ Hopefully, the clergyman remarked, ‘[he] will receive the critical portion of these pages in the same spirit.’ Ford emphatically did not...Marquis’s book would have been widely read had not the Ford organization been fairly successful in buying up copies and persuading book dealers not to sell it.”—DAVID L. LEWIS

Offering an incisive rejoinder to traditional histories of modernism and postmodernism, this original book examines the 1960s performance work of three New York artists who adapted modernist approaches to form for the medium of the human body. Finding parallels between the tactility of a drip of paint and a body’s reflexive movements, Elise Archias argues convincingly that Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934), Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939), and Vito Acconci (b. 1940) forged a dialogue between modernist aesthetics and their own artistic community’s embrace of all things ordinary through work that explored the abstraction born of the body’s materiality. Rainer’s task-like dances, Schneemann’s sensuous appropriations of popular entertainment, and Acconci’s behaviorist-inflected tests highlight the body’s unintended movements as vital reminders of embodied struggle amid the constraining structures in contemporary culture. Archias also draws compelling comparisons between embodiment as performed in the work of these three artists and in the sit-ins and other nonviolent protests of the era.

An NPR Best Book of the Year A New York Post Best Book of the Year A Times Thought Book of the Year An Irish Independent Best Book of the Year The captivating, untold story of Hermann Rorschach and his famous inkblot test In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind: a set of ten carefully designed inkblots. For years he had grappled with the theories of Freud and Jung while also absorbing the aesthetic movements of the day, from Futurism to Dadaism. A visual artist himself, Rorschach had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see. After Rorschach's early death, his test quickly made its way to America, where it took on a life of its own. Co-opted by the military after Pearl Harbor, it was a fixture at the Nuremberg trials and in the jungles of Vietnam. It became an advertising staple, a clich in Hollywood and journalism, and an inspiration to everyone from Andy Warhol to Jay Z. The test was also given to millions of defendants, job applicants, parents in custody battles, and people suffering from mental illness or simply trying to understand themselves better. And it is still used today. In this first-ever biography of Rorschach, Damion Searls draws on unpublished letters and diaries and a cache of previously unknown interviews with Rorschach's family, friends, and colleagues to tell the unlikely story of the test's creation, its controversial reinvention, and its remarkable endurance--and what it all reveals about the power of perception. Elegant and original, The Inkblots shines a light on the twentieth century's most visionary synthesis of art and science.

In a partnership spanning four decades, Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman have been the pre-eminent power couple of cutting-edge graphic art. From Raw magazine to the New York, where she serves as art editor, Mouly and Spiegelman have revolutionized the art. In Love with Art profiles the pair and interviews Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine and more.

In a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works illuminate the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in the formation of collective memory. This groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history. Emphasizing Black agency, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines both testimonial art by victims of the Nazi regime and creative works that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime period. Among these are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist Hans J. Massaquoi, the jazz fiction of African American novelist John A. Williams and Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist Maud Sulter. Bridging Black and Jewish studies, this book identifies the significance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.