Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries. The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

Offering a conceptual framework for teaching the visual arts (K-12 and higher education) from a cultural standpoint, the author discusses visual culture in a democracy.

As if John Berger's Ways of Seeing was re-written for the 21st century, Alexis L. Boylan crafts a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture in this concise introduction. The visual surrounds us, some of it invited, most of it not. In this visual environment, everything we see--art, color, the moon, a skyscraper, a stop sign, a political poster, rising sea levels, a photograph of Kim Kardashian West--somehow becomes legible, normalized, accessible. How does this happen? How do we live and move in our visual environments? This volume offers a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture, outlining strategies for thinking about what it means to look and see--and what is at stake in doing so.

From Drawing to Visual Culture takes a sweeping view of the role of visual art in Canadian education, from its roots as industrial drawing in the early nineteenth century to its important but often ambiguous position in contemporary schools. Art education and cultural history scholars consider practices in public schools, post-secondary schools, and non-school settings. The essays, many illustrated, range from focused surveys of particular eras or regions, to theoretically based analyses of movements or trends, to case studies that examine art education theory and practice in specific times and places. Contributors show that the nature and character of art education in Canada reflects the influence of ideas and practices in art and education and their interaction with various aspects of culture, language, religion, government, and geography. Contributors include F. Graeme Chalmers (British Columbia), Roger Clark (Western Ontario), Robert Dalton (Victoria), Suzanne Lemerise (Quebec à Montreal), E. Lisa Panayotidis (Calgary), Leah Sherman (Concordia), J. Craig Stirling (independent scholar and researcher, Montreal), Wendy Stephenson (PhD candidate, British Columbia), William Zuk (Manitoba).

Drawing on interviews, responses to questionnaires, and oral histories by U.S.

This is the first book to offer a systematic account of the concept of opacity in the aesthetic field. Engaging with works by Ernie Gehr, John Akomfrah, Matt Saunders, David Lynch, Trevor Paglen, Zach Blas, and Low, the study considers the cultural, epistemological, and ethical values of images and sounds that are fuzzy, indeterminate, distorted, degraded, or otherwise indistinct. Rethinking Art and Visual Culture shows how opaque forms of art address problems of mediation, knowledge, and information. It also intervenes in current debates about new systems of visibility and surveillance by explaining how indefinite art provides a critique of the positivist drive behind these regimes. A timely contribution to media theory, cinema studies, American studies, and aesthetics, the book presents a novel and extensive analysis of the politics of transparency.

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis calls "visuality" is the visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. In this book, Davis provides a systematic analysis of visuality and describes how it comes into being as a historical form of vision. Expansive in scope, A General Theory of Visual Culture draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides penetrating new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual culture is not always wholly visible). The book uses examples from a variety of cultural traditions, from prehistory to the twentieth century, to support a theory designed to apply to all human traditions of making artifacts and pictures--that is, to visual culture as a worldwide phenomenon.

Art is a multi-faceted part of human society, and often is used for more than purely aesthetic purposes. When used as a narrative on modern society, art can actively engage citizens in cultural and pedagogical discussions. Convergence of Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Global Civic Engagement is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly material on the relationship between popular media, art, and visual culture, analyzing how this intersection promotes global pedagogy and learning. Highlighting relevant perspectives from both international and community levels, this book is ideally designed for professionals, upper-level students, researchers, and academics interested in the role of art in global learning.

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing re-examines the early graphic practice of the preeminent northern Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640) in light of early modern traditions of eloquence, particularly as promoted in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Flemish, Neostoic circles of philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Focusing on the roles that rhetorical and pedagogical considerations played in the artist’s approach to disegno during and following his formative Roman period (1600–08), this volume highlights Rubens’s high ambitions for the intimate medium of drawing as a primary site for generating meaningful and original ideas for his larger artistic enterprise. As in the Lipsian realm of writing personal letters – the humanist activity then described as a cognate activity to the practice of drawing – a Senecan approach to eclecticism, a commitment to emulation, and an Aristotelian concern for joining form to content all played important roles. Two chapter-long studies of individual drawings serve to demonstrate the relevance of these interdisciplinary rhetorical concerns to Rubens’s early practice of drawing. Focusing on Rubens’s Medea Fleeing with Her Dead Children (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), and Kneeling Man (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), these close-looking case studies demonstrate Rubens’s commitments to creating new models of eloquent drawing and to highlighting his own status as an inimitable maker. Demonstrating the force and quality of Rubens’s intellect in the medium then most associated with the closest ideas of the artist, such designs were arguably created as more robust pedagogical and preparatory models that could help strengthen art itself for a new and often troubled age.

The role of representation in the production of technoscientific knowledge has become a subject of great interest in recent years. In this book, sociologist and art critic Kathryn Henderson offers a new perspective on this topic by exploring the impact of computer graphic systems on the visual culture of engineering design. Henderson shows how designers use drawings both to organize work and knowledge and to recruit and organize resources, political support, and power. Henderson's analysis of the collective nature of knowledge in technical design work is based on her participant observation of practices in two industrial settings. In one she follows the evolution of a turbine engine package from design to production, and in the other she examines the development of an innovative surgical tool. In both cases she describes the messy realities of design practice, including the mixed use of the worlds of paper and computer graphics. One of the goals of the book is to lay a practice-informed groundwork for the creation of more usable computer tools. Henderson also explores the relationship between the historical development of engineering as a profession and the standardization of engineering knowledge, and then addresses the question: Just what is high technology, and how does its affect the extent to which people will allow their working habits to be disrupted and restructured? Finally, to help explain why visual representations are so powerful, Henderson develops the concept of "metaindexicality"—the ability of a visual representation, used interactively, to combine many diverse levels of knowledge and thus to serve as a meeting ground (and sometimes battleground) for many types of workers.