From the Japanese-American internment camps to the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, Ruth Asawa's life journey is one filled with challenges and obstacles turned into triumphs through perseverance and a unique vision. -- Provided by publisher

"The first biography of sculptor Chana Orloff, and the first to include stories from her unpublished "memoir," which focus on the artist's early life in Ukraine, her family's move to Palestine and Orloff's life there (1905-1910), and her subsequent years between Paris and Tel Aviv"--

A director reveals the original inspirations for his films, their history, his methods of work, and the problems of visual creativity

Katherine Dewey's expressive and elegantly detailed sculptures enchant all who see them. With the magical medium of polymer clay and this book, you can follow in her footsteps. Thorough instructions supported by more than 400 step-by-step color photos and 200 detailed drawings cover the entire process of sculpting realistic figures, from selecting clay and gathering essential tools to the basics of modeling the human figure, to incorporating poses, facial expressions, ethnic and gender subtleties, costumes, and painted finishing touches. Easy-to-read maps of the figure illustrate the landmarks of the body, while scale diagrams indicate the simple shapes hidden within the human form, as well as how to combine and model those shapes. For anyone who loves fantasy, romance, nature—or sophisticated crafting—this book is a must-have.

Artists around the world have lately been turning to their bookshelves for more than just a good read, opting to cut, paint, carve, stitch or otherwise transform the printed page into whole new beautiful, thought-provoking works of art. Art Made from Books is the definitive guide to this compelling art form, showcasing groundbreaking work by today's most showstopping practitioners. From Su Blackwell's whimsical pop-up landscapes to the stacked-book sculptures of Kylie Stillman, each portfolio celebrates the incredible creative diversity of the medium. A preface by pioneering artist Brian Dettmer and an introduction by design critic Alyson Kuhn round out the collection.

An extraordinary artist and designer: a fresh view of Harry Bertoia's entire body of work. Italian-born American Harry Bertoia (1915-78) was one of the most prolific and innovative artists and designers of the postwar period. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met future colleagues and collaborators, such as Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, he went on to make one-of-a-kind jewelry, design iconic chairs, create thousands of unique sculptures including large-scale commissions for significant buildings, and advance the use of sound as sculptural material. His work speaks to the confluence of numerous fields of endeavor but is united throughout by a sculptural approach to making and an experimental embrace of metal. Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life accompanies the first US museum retrospective of the artist's career to examine the full scope of his broad, interdisciplinary practice and features important examples of his furniture, jewelry, monotypes, and diverse sculptural output. Lavishly illustrated, the book offers new scholarly essays as well as a catalog of the artist's numerous large-scale commissions. It questions how and why we distinguish between a chair, a necklace, a screen, and a freestanding sculpture--and what Bertoia's sculptural things, when taken together, say about the fluidity of visual language across culture, both at midcentury and now.

Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) was an influential and award-winning sculptor, a beloved figure in the Bay Area art world, and a devoted activist who advocated tirelessly for arts education. This lushly illustrated book by collage artist Andrea D'Aquino brings Asawa's creative journey to life, detailing the influence of her childhood in a farming family, and her education at Black Mountain College where she pursued an experimental course of education with leading avant-garde artists and thinkers such as Anni and Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg. Delightful and substantial, this engaging title for young art lovers includes a page of teaching tools for parents and educators.

Sculpting the Self addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of self and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical and mystical thought. Alongside detailed analyses of three major Islamic thinkers (Mullā Ṣadrā, Shāh Walī Allāh, and Muhammad Iqbal), this study also situates their writings on selfhood within the wider constellation of related discussions in late modern and contemporary thought, engaging the seminal theoretical insights on the self by William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. This allows the book to develop its inquiry within a spectrum theory of selfhood, incorporating bio-physiological, socio-cultural, and ethico-spiritual modes of discourse and meaning-construction. Weaving together insights from several disciplines such as religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, and neuroscience, and arguing against views that narrowly restrict the self to a set of cognitive functions and abilities, this study proposes a multidimensional account of the self that offers new options for addressing central issues in the contemporary world, including spirituality, human flourishing, and meaning in life. This is the first book-length treatment of selfhood in Islamic thought that draws on a wealth of primary source texts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Greek, and other languages. Muhammad U. Faruque’s interdisciplinary approach makes a significant contribution to the growing field of cross-cultural dialogue, as it opens up the way for engaging premodern and modern Islamic sources from a contemporary perspective by going beyond the exegesis of historical materials. He initiates a critical conversation between new insights into human nature as developed in neuroscience and modern philosophical literature and millennia-old Islamic perspectives on the self, consciousness, and human flourishing as developed in Islamic philosophical, mystical, and literary traditions.

Enchanting, exquisitely detailed and full of personality, Katherine Dewey's animal sculptures delight all who see them. With the friendly medium of polymer clay and the step-by-step instructions in this book, you can achieve the same magical results! Inside, Katherine leads you through then utterly charming projects, such as a sweet little bluebird, a basset hound and a white-tailed fawn. And that's just the start! The "Making Changes" chapter will help you create your own original animal creations by changing poses, making realistic bases, and even modeling your animals to look like bronze, fade and other materials.

This translation of Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on the art of sculpting is presented as the author himself intended - as a practical sculpture manual meant to be read and utilized by practitioners of the craft. In recent times On Sculpture has been published and critiqued as an historical and literary document; Jason Arkles' translation instead offers commentary helpful for understanding the actual content of the work and its relation to contemporary studio practice. Additional illustrations and diagrams are included, detailing the construction and use of the 'diffinitore', Alberti's device for measuring the model that is the grandfather of all pointing machines in use today.