With Contributions by Dorothy Allison, John Berger, Mark Doty, Mary Gordon, bell hooks, Alfred Kazin, August Wilson, and others For the contributors to Drawing Us In, visual art makes us see what we haven't seen before; it surprises, transforms, and comforts us. Dorothy Allison explains how a painting in a Baptist church taught her as a child that art connects people from disparate backgrounds. Alfred Kazin reflects on his wanderings around New York's museums as a teenager. Mary Gordon finds that Bonnard's still lifes put in perspective her mother's struggle with illness and aging. For anyone who has felt moved by the visual, this collection offers a delightful range of views on how and why art matters in our psychic, social, and political lives.

The works in The Drawing Book, by artists, architects, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers and thinkers of all descriptions, attest to the versatility and immediacy of drawing. From first thoughts to finely wrought, elaborate artworks, from the lightest sketch in pencil to bold, gallery-wall installations, the medium is shown as an essential vehicle for creativity. The recent prominence of artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, Ellen Gallagher, and a host of others who use drawing as a final means of expression, is addressed in both the works shown and essays by curators Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout, and art historian Charles Darwent. The Drawing Book takes us on a journey through five themes -- measurement, nature, the city, dreams, and the body. Each is richly illustrated with a diverse range of images, from the old masters -- Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Dürer -- through great Modernist pieces by Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, and on to the contemporary artists who are reviving drawing today. A new and unique approach to an age old medium.

Picasso's artistic inspiration takes hold of young Emma's faith imagination in this beautifully illustrated debut picture book about how we all see God differently. “This urge to draw something beyond spectacular would not leave my side. ‘What should I draw?’ I thought. I sat quietly, listening to my mind and heart. That's when I heard their whisper and I decided to draw God.” Emma tries again and again and again to draw God, but her classmates can’t see God in any of her drawings. Emma finally realizes that she doesn’t need their approval. “I knew I had drawn God. God knew I had drawn God, and maybe Picasso knew, too. That finally felt like enough.” But when Emma returns to school on the following Monday, something beyond spectacular happens. Drawing God is a story for children to discover what inspires their very own faith imagination and to realize the contagious faith that lives powerfully within them. Celebrate World Drawing God Day on November 7th. Visit www.drawing-god.com.

This book presents watercolor renderings along with a selection of the artifacts in the Index of American Design, a visual archive of decorative, folk, and popular arts made in America from the colonial period to about 1900. Three essays explore the history, operation, and ambitions of the Index of American Design, examine folk art collecting in America during the early decades of the twentieth century, and consider the Index's role in the search for a national cultural identity in the early twentieth-century United States.

Presents a comprehensive survey of the art of drawing, and asserts that drawing is far more than the sum of a work's materials, it is a powerful means of visual exploration.

Pindar's Eyes is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions between Greek lyric poetry and visual and material culture in the early fifth century BCE. Its aim is to open up analysis of lyric to the wider theme of aesthetic experience in early classical Greece, with particular focus on the poetic mechanisms through which Pindar's victory odes use visual and material culture to engage their audiences. Complete readings of Nemean 5, Nemean 8, and Pythian 1 reveal the poet's deep interest in the relations between lyric poetry and commemorative and religious sculpture, as well as other significant visual phenomena, while literary studies of his evocation of cultural attitudes through elaborate use of the lyric first person are combined with art-historical treatments of ecphrasis, of image and text, and of art's framing of ritual experience in ancient Greece. This specific aesthetic approach is expanded through fresh treatments of Simonides' and Bacchylides' own engagements with material culture, as well as an account of Pindaric themes in the Aeginetan logoi of Herodotus' Histories. These come together to offer not just a novel perspective on the relationship between art and text in Pindaric poetry, but to give rise to new claims about the nature of classical Greek visuality and ritual subjectivity, and to foster a richer understanding of the ways in which classical poetry and art shaped the lives and experiences of their consumers.

On 30 September 1938 Neville Chamberlain flew back to London from his meeting at Munich with the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. As he paused on the aircraft steps, he held aloft the piece of paper which bore both his and the Führer's signature, the promise that Britain and Germany would never go to war with one another again. He had returned bringing 'Peace with honour - Peace for our Time.' Drawing on a wealth of original archival material, David Faber sheds new light on this extraordinary story, tracing the key incidents leading up to the meeting at Munich and its immediate aftermath: Lord Halifax's ill-fated visit to Hitler; Chamberlain's secret negotiations with Mussolini, and the Berlin scandal that rocked Hitler's régime. He takes us to Vienna, to the Sudetenland, and to Prague. In Berlin, we witness Hitler inexorably preparing for war; and in London, we watch helplessly as Chamberlain makes one supreme effort after another to appease Hitler.

Mass Moralizing: Marketing and Moral Storytelling examines the narratives of today’s brand marketing, which largely focuses on creating an emotional attachment to a brand rather than directly promoting a product’s qualities or features. Phil Hopkins explores these narratives’ influence on how we think about ourselves and our moral possibilities, our cultural ideas about morality, and our relations to each other. He closely studies the relationship between three interrelated dynamics: the power of narrative in the construction of identity and world, the truth-telling pretenses of mass marketing, and the growth of moralizing as the primary moral discourse practice in contemporary consumer culture. Mass Moralizing scrutinizes the way marketing speaks to us in explicitly moralistic terms, significantly influencing how we think about ourselves and our moral possibilities.