This book reflects on the motivations of creative practitioners who have moved out of cities from the mid-1960s onwards to establish creative homesteads. The book focuses on desert exile painter Agnes Martin, radical filmmaker and gardener Derek Jarman, and iconoclastic conceptual artist Chris Burden, detailing their connections to the cities they had left behind (New York, London, Los Angeles). Sarah Lowndes also examines how the rise of digital technologies has made it more possible for artists to live and work outside the major art centers, especially given the rising cost of living in London, Berlin, and New York, focusing on three peripheral creative centers: the seaside town of Hastings, England, the midsized metro of Leipzig, Germany, and post-industrial Detroit, USA.

During the 1960s & 1970s, Amsterdam was a nexus of intense art activities, drawing artists from all over the world. 'In & Out Of Amsterdam' presents more than 120 works - including works on paper, installations, photographs & films - by artists who were part of this remarkable creative culture.

Insightful and interdisciplinary, this book considers the movement of people around the world and how contemporary artists contribute to our understanding of it In this timely volume, artists and thinkers join in conversation around the topic of global migration, examining both its cultural impact and the culture of migration itself. Individual voices shed light on the societal transformations related to migration and its representation in 21st-century art, offering diverse points of entry into this massive phenomenon and its many manifestations. The featured artworks range from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, and sound art, and their makers--including Isaac Julien, Richard Mosse, Reena Saini Kallat, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Do Ho Suh, among many others--hail from around the world. Texts by experts in political science, Latin American studies, and human rights, as well as contemporary art, expand upon the political, economic, and social contexts of migration and its representation. The book also includes three conversations in which artists discuss the complexity of making work about migration. Amid worldwide tensions surrounding refugee crises and border security, this publication provides a nuanced interpretation of the current cultural moment. Intertwining themes of memory, home, activism, and more, When Home Won't Let You Stay meditates on how art both shapes and is shaped by the public discourse on migration.

In these days of an aging traditional audience, shrinking attendance, tightened budgets, increased competition, and exponential growth in new types of communication methods, America’s house museums need to take bold steps and expand their overall purpose beyond those of the traditional museum. They need not only to engage the communities surrounding them, but also to collaborate with visitors on the type and quality of experience they provide. This book is a groundbreaking manifesto that calls for the establishment of a more inclusive, visitor-centered paradigm based on the shared experience of human habitation. It draws inspiration from film, theater, public art, and urban design to transform historic house museums while providing a how-to guide for making historic house museums sustainable, through five primary themes: communicating with the surrounding community, engaging the community, re-imagining the visitor experience, celebrating the detritus of human habitation, and acknowledging the illusion of the shelter’s authenticity. Anarchist's Guide to Historic House Museums offers a wry, but informed, rule-breaking perspective from authors with years of experience and gives numerous vivid examples of both good and not-so-good practices from house museums in the U.S.

Through its examination of five quite different art events in cities across Europe, Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe offers a compelling exploration of how public art takes place in the modern city. Roughly tracing a central horizontal trajectory from the western to the eastern edges of the continent, Nicolas Whybrow considers the Folkestone Triennial in the UK, Sculpture Projects Münster in Germany, the Venice Biennale in Italy, Belgrade's Mikser Festival in Serbia and the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey. Writing within the context of a thirty-year international 'biennial boom', Whybrow interrogates the extent to which biennial events and their artworks seek to engage with the socio-cultural and political complexity of cities, in particular the work that is involved in this relationship. With its focus on Europe, he also tells a composite story of continental difference at a moment of high tension, centering on issues of migration, political populism and uncertainty around the future form of the European Union.

Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorises artists’ responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centres. This book is the first to analyse artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. How do artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviours, actions, and constructions in and on the actually existing conditions of the street? What does it mean for artists—the very symbol of freedom of personal expression—to shut down space? To refuse entry? To block others’ passage? The late critical geographer Neil Smith’s influential writing on the revanchist city is used as a theoretical frame for understanding how contemporary artists engender the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces. Each chapter is a case study that analyses artworks that have taken the form of walls and barricades in China, USA, UK, Ukraine, and Mexico. In doing so, the author draws upon diverse fields including art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies to situate the art in a broader context of the humanities with the aim of modelling interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. Collectively these case studies reveal how artists’ local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come. By using plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art history, performance studies, visual culture, and visual studies; especially in relation to those interested in conceptual practices, performance art, site-specificity, public art, political activism, and socially engaged art. Cultural geographers and urban theorists interested in the social and political ramifications of temporary and everyday urbanism will also find the analysis of artworks relevant to their own studies.

Jim Ottewill’s exploration of UK club culture and the urban landscapes that have housed it returns in a newly remixed form. Out of Space plots a course through the different UK towns and cities where club culture has found a home. From Glasgow to Margate via Manchester, Sheffield and unlikely dance music meccas such as Coalville and Todmorden, this book maps where electronic music has thrived, and where it might be headed next. This extended version features a new chapter exploring hidden histories and untold stories within Birmingham’s nocturnal scene to provide more insights into the past, present and future of electronic music culture.

"Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 offers students and readers an introduction to recent art"--

This collection explores critical and visual practices through the lens of interactions and intersections between pattern and chaos. The dynamic of the inter-relationship between pattern and chaos is such as to challenge disciplinary boundaries, critical frameworks and modes of understanding, perception and communication, often referencing the in-between territory of art and science through experimentation and visual scrutiny. A territory of 'pattern-chaos' or 'chaos-pattern' begins to unfold. Drawing upon fields such as visual culture, sociology, physics, neurobiology, linguistics or critical theory, for example, contributors have experimented with pattern and/or chaos-related forms, processes, materials, sounds and language or have reflected on the work of other artists, scientists and scholars. Diagrams, tessellations, dust, knots, mazes, folds, creases, flux, virus, fire and flow are indicative of processes through which pattern and chaos are addressed. The contributions are organized into clusters of subjects which reflect the interdisciplinary terrain through a robust, yet also experimental, arrangement. These are 'Pattern Dynamics', 'Morph Flux Mutate', 'Decompose Recompose', 'Virus; Social Imaginary' and 'Nothings in Particular'.