A guide for reading and gifting for art, architecture, design, and visual culture readers
It’s our mission to publish books at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design that challenge and empower our readers. To help you uncover your next big idea, we’ve crafted a guide for reading and gifting that’s bursting with titles that exemplify the MIT Press: intellectual daring content, rigorous scholarly standards, a rich interdisciplinary focus, and beautiful distinctive designs.
Read on to discover new art, architecture, design, and visual culture books, and explore even more big ideas in our full guide.
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Monumental Graffiti: Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City by Rafael Schacter
What is graffiti—vandalism, ornament, art? What if, rather than any of those things, we thought of graffiti as a monument? How would that change our understanding of graffiti, and, in turn, our understanding of monument? In Monumental Graffiti, curator and anthropologist Rafael Schacter focuses on the material, communicative, and contextual aspects of these two forms of material culture to provide a timely perspective on public art, citizenship, and the city today. He applies monument as a lens to understand graffiti and graffiti as a lens to comprehend monument, challenging us to consider what the appropriate monument for our contemporary world could be.
Tony Smith Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné Volume 1 edited by James Voorhies and Sarah Auld with Joan Pachner and Christopher Ketcham
Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné: Sculpture, with more than 500 full-color illustrations, is the first in a multi-publication project to reveal the depth and complexity of Smith’s oeuvre while positioning its transdisciplinary nature in dialogue with contemporary voices. Often made of steel and painted black, Smith’s large-scale sculptures demonstrate a committed experimentation in how geometric shapes can be modeled into holistic sculptural compositions. The ever-shifting qualities of his imposing works engage spectators in phenomenological experiences that continually change in relation to motion, position, sightline, and perspective, amid a panoply of shapes that generate and regenerate anew with each incremental shift in viewpoint.
A Book about Ray by Ellen Levy
Ray Johnson (1927-1995), a.k.a. “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” was notorious for the elaborate games he played with the institutions of the art world, soliciting their attention even as he rejected their invitations. In A Book about Ray, Ellen Levy offers a comprehensive study of the artist who turned the business of career-making into a tongue-in-cheek performance, tracing his artistic development from his arrival at Black Mountain College in 1945 to his death in 1995. Levy describes Johnson’s practice as one that was constantly shifting—whether in tone, in its address to potential audiences, or among three primary artistic modes: collage, performance, and correspondence art.
Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing by Elizabeth L. Block
In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant it could affect one’s place in society. After the Civil War, hairdressing was a growing profession and the hair industry a mainstay of local, national, and international commerce. In Beyond Vanity, Elizabeth L. Block expands the nascent field of hair studies by restoring women’s hair as a cultural site of meaning in the early United States. With a special focus on the places and spaces in which the industry operated, Block argues that the importance of hair has been overlooked due to its ephemerality as well as its misguided association with frivolity and triviality. As Block clarifies, hairdressing was anything but frivolous.