Procession

This beautifully illustrated catalogue accompanies the first major museum retrospective of the painter Norman Lewis (1909Ð1979). Lewis was the sole African American artist of his generation who became committed to issues of abstraction at the start of his career and continued to explore them over its entire trajectory. His art derived inspiration from music (jazz and classical) and nature (seasonal change, plant forms, the sea). Also central to his work were the dramatic confrontations of the civil rights movement, in which he was an active participant among the New York art scene. Bridging the Harlem Renaissance, Abstract Expressionism, and beyond, Lewis is a crucial figure in American abstraction whose reinsertion into the discourse further opens the field for recognition of the contributions of artists of color. Bringing much-needed attention to LewisÕs output and significance in the history of American art, Procession is a milestone in Lewis scholarship and a vital resource for future study of the artist and abstraction in his period. Published in association with Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Exhibition dates: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia: November 13, 2015ÐApril 3, 2016 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth: June 4ÐAugust 21, 2016 Chicago Cultural Center: September 17, 2016ÐJanuary 8, 2017 Ê

On the morning of Sunday, June 23, 2002, 100 participants gathered at The Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan, along with a 12-person Peruvian brass band, and a horse, dogs, and numerous palanquins, atop which sat replicas of three masterpieces from the museum's collection--Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Duchamp's ready-made "Bicycle Wheel" and a Giacometti--and a living representative of contemporary art, Kiki Smith. Three hours later they ended their procession at the museum's new temporary home, in Queens. Along the way, which ran from 11 West 53 Street, over the Queensboro Bridge, and up Queens Boulevard, the procession absorbed 100 additional participants, and enacted a very public spectacle--part saint's day procession and part secular celebration--of the museum's historic move to MoMA QNS.

The pompa circensis, the procession which preceded the chariot races in the arena, was both a prominent political pageant and a hallowed religious ritual. Traversing a landscape of memory, the procession wove together spaces and institutions, monuments and performers, gods and humans into an image of the city, whose contours shifted as Rome changed. In the late Republic, the parade produced an image of Rome as the senate and the people with their gods - a deeply traditional symbol of the city which was transformed during the empire when an imperial image was built on top of the republican one. In late antiquity, the procession fashioned a multiplicity of Romes: imperial, traditional, and Christian. In this book, Jacob A. Latham explores the webs of symbolic meanings in the play between performance and itinerary, tracing the transformations of the circus procession from the late Republic to late antiquity.

Originally published: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1922.

Until now, scholarly analysis of Elizabethan processions has always regarded them as having been successful in their function as propaganda, and has always found them to have effectively 'won over' the common people - that group of the population at whom they were chiefly aimed. Both her Royal entries and progresses were regarded as effective public relations exercises, the population gaining access to the Queen and thus being encouraged to remain loyal subjects. This book represents a new approach to this subject by investigating whether this was actually the case - that is, whether the common people were actually won over by these spectacular rituals. By examining original documents that have thus far been ignored, as well as re-examining others from the perspective of the common people, the book casts a new light on Elizabethan processions.

Tess Garritsen calls this one "my favorite book of the year!" In 1176, King Henry II sends his daughter Joanna to Palermo to marry his cousin, the king of Sicily. Henry chooses Adelia Aguilar to travel with the princess and safeguard her health. But when people in the wedding procession are murdered, Adelia and Rowley must discover the killer's identity, and whether he is stalking the princess or Adelia herself.

An American Procession is a study, on the largest scale, of the major American writers at work during the historically and literarily crucial century that began in the early 1830s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a metaphysical revolution, and ended on the eve of the 1930s with the triumph of modernism and the critical recognition of the “postponed power” of those who had been modern before their time. These one hundred years encompassed a period of unprecedented expansion and promise in the United States, and the work of our novelists, essayists, poets, and historians was the mirror of the nation’s spirit. The thirty years preceding the Civil War produced the transcendental idealism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and the dark romanticism of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. In the years just after World War I, modernism reached its exemplary form in the work of Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald, and between the two wars emerged the great realists: Mark Twain, Henry James, Crane, and Dreiser. It is through an exploration of the lives and works of these writers—together with Emily Dickinson, William James, Henry Adams, and Faulkner—that Kazin maps out a great literary procession shaped by individual genius, by history, and by the implacable American sense of self. With each writer, Alfred Kazin illuminates for us the work, the influences that informed it, and its influence on the work of others. Each figure seems revitalized for us by Kazin’s acuity and powerful sympathy for his subject. An American Procession, with its intellectual energy, its clarity and breadth, is the brilliantly executed capstone of Kazin’s already illustrious career and will stand as the most important study of American literature in our time.