The Story Of Yales Great Museum

A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction explores Bridget Riley's longstanding relationship with the United States, beginning in 1965 with the inclusion of her works in the pivotal exhibition, The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Accompanying the exhibition catalogue are essays by Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani and Rachel Stratton, along with an original reflection by the artist.

"Glass can be decorative or utilitarian, and its forms often reflect technological innovations and social change. Drawing on an insightful selection from the Yale University Art Gallery and other collections at Yale, American Glass illuminates the vital and often intimate roles that glass has played in the nation's art and culture. Spectacularly illustrated, the publication showcases eighteenth-century mold-blown vessels, nineteenth-century pressed glass, innovative studio work, and luminous stained-glass windows by John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, the latter reproduced as a lush gatefold. These are considered alongside beguiling objects that broaden our expectations of glass and speak to the centrality of the medium in American life, including one of the oldest complex microscopes in the United States, an early Edison light bulb, glass-plate photography, jewelry, and more. With an essay on the history of collecting American glass and discussions of each object that present new scholarship, this engaging book tells the long and rich history of glass in America--from prehistoric minerals to contemporary sculptures"--Dust jacket front flap.

The captivating tale of the plans and personalities behind one of New York City's most radical and recognizable buildings Considered the crowning achievement of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is often called iconic. But it is in fact iconoclastic, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding metropolis and setting a new standard for the postwar art museum. Commissioned to design the building in 1943 by the museum's founding curator, Baroness Hilla von Rebay, Wright established residence in the Plaza Hotel in order to oversee the project. Over the next 17 years, Wright continuously clashed with his clients over the cost and the design, a conflict that extended to the city of New York and its cultural establishment. Against all odds, Wright held fast to his radical design concept of an inverted ziggurat and spiraling ramp, built with a continuous beam--a shape recalling the form of an hourglass. Construction was only completed in 1959, six months after Wright's death. The building's initial critical response ultimately gave way to near-universal admiration, as it came to be seen as an architectural masterpiece. This essential text, offering a behind-the-scenes story of the Guggenheim along with a careful reading of its architecture, is beautifully illustrated with more than 150 images, including plans, drawings, and rare photographs of the building under construction.

An innovative and lavishly illustrated account of the art, writings, and global influence of one of the 19th century's most influential thinkers This book presents an innovative portrait of John Ruskin (1819-1900) as artist, art critic, social theorist, educator, and ecological campaigner. Ruskin's juvenilia reveal an early embrace of his lifelong interests in geology and botany, art, poetry, and mythology. His early admiration of Turner led him to identify the moral power of close looking. In The Stones of Venice, illustrated with his own drawings, he argued that the development of architectural style revealed the moral condition of society. Later, Ruskin pioneered new approaches to teaching and museum practice. Influential worldwide, Ruskin's work inspired William Morris, founders of the Labour Party, and Mahatma Gandhi. Through thematic essays and detailed discussions of his works, this book argues that, complex and contradictory, Ruskin's ideas are of urgent importance today. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (September 5-December 8, 2019)

A personal look at the buildings that define Yale University through the eyes of alumni. "The Stones of Yale is a delight--fresh and highly observant. I will be turning to its pages again and again, I have no doubt."--David McCullough Artist Adam Van Doren wanted to know how Yale University's buildings made people feel to live and to study in them. He spoke to alumni as diverse as actor Sam Waterston, the writer Christopher Buckley, Yale librarian Judith Schiff, former NFL great Calvin Hill, architect Cesar Pelli, among others, about their experiences and illustrates this book in gorgeous watercolor paintings of the buildings of Yale that interest him most. Rather than an architectural analysis of buildings, Van Doren explores the visceral experience of seeing them and being inside them. This is one-of-a-kind approach that will interest anyone who's felt the intangible power of a building and a place.