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Steward of the Land: Selected Writings of Nineteenth-Century Horticulturist Thomas Affleck (The Hill Collection: Holdings of the LSU Libraries)
by Lake Douglas Thomas AffleckIn the first collection of published writings of Thomas Affleck (1812--1868), Lake Douglas re-establishes the reputation of a tireless agricultural reformer, entrepreneur, and horticulturist. Affleck's wide range of interests -- animal husbandry, agriculture, scientific farming, ornamental horticulture, insects, and hydrology, among others -- should afford him a celebrated status in several disciplines; yet until now his immense contributions remained largely unheralded. Steward of the Land remedies this oversight with a broad, annotated selection of Affleck's works, rightfully placing him alongside his better-known contemporaries Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted.After immigrating to the United States from Scotland in 1832, Affleck witnessed the burgeoning American expansion and its major advances in agriculture and technology. He worked as a journalist for the influential Western Farmer and Gardener, covering Ohio, Kentucky, and the Mississippi River Valley. Affleck moved to Mississippi in 1842 to manage his new wife's failing plantation; there, he created one of the first commercial nurseries of the South while writing prolifically on numerous agrarian topics for regional periodicals and newspapers. From 1845 to 1865 he edited Affleck's Southern Rural Almanac and Plantation and Garden Calendar, published in New Orleans. Following a postwar move to Brenham, Texas, he published letters and essays about rebuilding that state's livestock herds and rejuvenating its agricultural labor forces.Steward of the Land includes excerpts from dozens of Affleck's articles on subjects ranging from bee keeping to gardening to orchard tending. This valuable single-volume resource reveals Affleck's astonishing breadth of horticultural knowledge and entrepreneurial sagacity, and his role in educating mid-nineteenth-century readers about agricultural products and practices, plant usage, and environmental stewardship. Never before collected or contextualized, Affleck's writings provide a firsthand account of the advancement of agricultural techniques and practices that created a new environmental awareness in America.
Stewards of Memory: The Past, Present, and Future of Historic Preservation at George Washington's Mount Vernon
by Carol Borchert CadouMount Vernon, despite its importance as the estate of George Washington, is subject to the same threats of time as any property and has required considerable resources and organization to endure as a historic site and house. This book provides a window into the broad scope of preservation work undertaken at Mount Vernon over the course of more than 160 years and places this work within the context of America’s regional and national preservation efforts. It was at Mount Vernon, beginning with efforts in 1853, that the American tradition of historic preservation truly took hold. As the nation’s oldest historic house museum, Mount Vernon offers a unique opportunity to chronicle preservation challenges and successes over time as well as to forecast those of the future. Stewards of Memory features essays by senior scholars who helped define American historic preservation in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Carl R. Lounsbury, George W. McDaniel, and Carter L. Hudgins. Their contributions—complemented by those of Scott E. Casper, Lydia Mattice Brandt, and Mount Vernon’s own preservation scholars—offer insights into the changing nature of the field. The multifaceted story told here will be invaluable to students of historic preservation, historic site professionals, specialists in the preservation field, and any reader with an interest in American historic preservation and Mount Vernon. Support provided by the David Bruce Smith Book Fund and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.
Stewards of the Nation's Art
by Andrea Geddes PooleBetween 1890 and 1939, the groups of men involved in running Britain's four main public art galleries - the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the National Portrait Gallery - were embroiled in continuous power struggles. Stewards of the Nation's Art examines the internal tensions between the galleries' administrative directors, the aristocrats dominating the boards of trustees, and those in the Treasury who controlled the funds as well as board appointments.Andrea Geddes Poole uses meticulous primary research from all four of these institutions to discuss changing ideas about class, education, and work during this period. The conflicts between aristocratic trustees and administrative directors were not only about the running of the galleries, but also reflected the era's strain between aristocratic amateurs and nouveau riche professionals. Stewards of the Nation's Art is an absorbing study that explores the extent to which the aristocracy was able to hold on to cultural power in an increasingly professional and meritocratic age.
Stewardship of the Built Environment
by Robert A YoungWhen we think of green building, we tend to picture new construction. But Robert A. Young argues that the greenest building is often the one that has already been built. In Stewardship of the Built Environment, he shows how retrofitting existing structures holds untapped potential for achieving sustainable communities. Stewardship of the Built Environment explores the social, environmental, and economic benefits of reuse-from the societal value of reusing existing buildings to financial incentives available for refurbishment. Readers will become familiar with essential terminology; sustainability and historic preservation metrics; government oversight processes; and opportunities for smart growth afforded by rehabilitation. This knowledge is key to preserving the past while building a sustainable future.
Stick
by Jeffrey MetznerIn this box of note cards you'll find masterpieces by Leonardo Da Vinci, Gustave Klimt, Norman Rockwell, and more reinterpreted entirely with stick figures. Artists designers, museum fans-or anyone with a funny bone and a keen eye-will appreciate these great moments in art.
Stick It!
by Bridget DoveDiscover just how much fun these seemingly boring squares of coloured paper can truly be! Post-it notes are found in offices and homes all over the world and they are much more versatile than you may first think. In Stick It! Bridget Dove offers the latest take on the increasingly popular paper-craft trend - which taps into the theme for mindful craft - in this fabulously innovative book. The projects are divided into three categories - Wall Art, Origami and Decorations - and with 40 imaginative ideas ranging from a colourful lampshade to a beautiful scene of a tree with falling `leaves', and from sticky origami flowers and boxes to a graphic table runner, there is something to suit everyone. Bridget gives clear, easy instructions and with step-by-step illustrations, you can indulge your creativity, whatever your ability.
Stick It!: 40 Creative Ways To Have Fun With Sticky Notes
by Bridget DoveDiscover just how much fun these seemingly boring squares of coloured paper can truly be! Post-it notes are found in offices and homes all over the world and they are much more versatile than you may first think. In Stick It! Bridget Dove offers the latest take on the increasingly popular paper-craft trend - which taps into the theme for mindful craft - in this fabulously innovative book. The projects are divided into three categories - Wall Art, Origami and Decorations - and with 40 imaginative ideas ranging from a colourful lampshade to a beautiful scene of a tree with falling `leaves', and from sticky origami flowers and boxes to a graphic table runner, there is something to suit everyone. Bridget gives clear, easy instructions and with step-by-step illustrations, you can indulge your creativity, whatever your ability.
Stickley Craftsman Furniture Catalogs
by Gustav Stickley L. Stickley594 illustrations, including 277 photos, of authentic, prized, Craftsman furniture as shown in two catalogs -- circa 1910 -- by foremost manufacturers. Numerous settles, rockers, armchairs, bookcases, plus many other kinds of pieces. Captions.
Stickwork
by Patrick DoughertyUsing minimal tools and a simple technique of bending, interweaving, and fastening together sticks, artist Patrick Dougherty creates works of art inseparable with nature and the landscape. With a dazzling variety of forms seamlessly intertwined with their context, his sculptures evoke fantastical images of nests, cocoons, cones, castles, and beehives. Over the last twenty-five years, Dougherty has built more than two hundred works throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia that range from stand-alone structures to a kind of modern primitive architecture every piece mesmerizing in its ability to fly through trees, overtake buildings, and virtually defy gravity. Stickwork , Dougherty's first monograph, features thirty-eight of his organic, dynamic works that twist the line between architecture, landscape, and art. Constructed on-site using locally sourced materials and local volunteer labor, Dougherty's sculptures are tangles of twigs and branches that have been transformed into something unexpected and wild, elegant and artful, and often humorous. Sometimes freestanding, and other times wrapping around trees, buildings, railings, and rooms, they are constructed indoors and in nature. As organic matter, the stick sculptures eventually disintegrate and fade back into the landscape. Featuring a wealth of photographs and drawings documenting the construction process of each remarkable structure, Stickwork preserves the legend of the man who weaves the simplest of materials into a singular artistic triumph.
Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy
by Steven PeacockUniquely placed to explore the worldwide phenomenon of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the book offers the first full-length study of Larsson's work in both its written and filmed forms.
Stiegler for Architects (Thinkers for Architects)
by David CapenerIn the late 1970s Bernard Stiegler was arrested for armed robbery and imprisoned. Whilst on hunger strike he was given his own cell where, in solitude, he began to study philosophy until his release in 1983. By 1993, under the supervision of Jacques Derrida, he completed his PhD, which was published a year later as Volume 1 of the Technics and Time series. Stiegler went on to become one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century.Stiegler for Architects is the first introduction to the key concepts and ideas of Bernard Stiegler that are relevant to architects. The book asks to what extent it might be possible to have a right to the city in our age of contemporary algorithmic technology. The book begins with a hypothesis: The philosophy of Bernard Stiegler provides an adequate methodology by which we might understand the effects of contemporary digital technology. Second, the fundamental basis of Stiegler’s philosophy is introduced—human evolution is not possible apart from technology. Third, the book introduces how his work might be used to think about the city in our contemporary technological age.The book concludes that the question of the extent to which the right to the city is possible in our contemporary technological age is a question of the extent to which it is possible to prescribe a therapeutics that is capable of being a cure—one that acts across the multiple scales upon which algorithmic technologies operate. This book is essential reading for any architect or designer who is interested in how contemporary digital technology affects everyday life in the city, or anyone wrestling with Stiegler’s ideas.
Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (Perspectives on Sensory History)
by Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig KoslofskyThe early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world. By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, wounds and scars, this volume shows that early modern markers of skin and readers of marked skin did not think about different kinds of cutaneous signs as separate from each other. On the contrary, Europeans described Indigenous tattooing in North America, Thailand, and the Philippines by referring their readers to the tattoos Christian pilgrims received in Jerusalem or Bethlehem. When explaining the devil’s mark on witches, theologians claimed it was an inversion of holy marks such as those of baptism or divine stigmata. Stigma investigates how early modern people used permanent marks on skin to affirm traditional roles and beliefs, and how they hybridized and transformed skin marking to meet new economic and political demands.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Xiao Chen, Ana Fonseca Conboy, Peter Erickson, Claire Goldstein, Matthew S. Hopper, Katrina H. B. Keefer, Mordechay Lewy, Nicole Nyffenegger, Mairin Odle, and Allison Stedman.
Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India
by Susan SeizerA study of the lives of popular theater artists, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage is the first in-depth analysis of Special Drama, a genre of performance unique to the southernmost Indian state of Tamilnadu. Held in towns and villages throughout the region, Special Drama performances last from 10 p. m. until dawn. There are no theatrical troupes in Special Drama; individual artists are contracted "specially" for each event. The first two hours of each performance are filled with the kind of bawdy, improvisational comedy that is the primary focus of this study; the remaining hours present more markedly staid dramatic treatments of myth and history. Special Drama artists themselves are of all ages, castes, and ethnic and religious affiliations; the one common denominator in their lives is their lower-class status. Artists regularly speak of how poverty compelled their entrance into the field. Special Drama is looked down upon by the middle- and upper-classes as too popular, too vulgar, and too "mixed. " The artists are stigmatized: people insult them in public and landlords refuse to rent to them. Stigma falls most heavily, however, on actresses, who are marked as "public women" by their participation in Special Drama. As Susan Seizer's sensitive study shows, one of the primary ways the performers deal with such stigma is through humor and linguistic play. Their comedic performances in particular directly address questions of class, culture, and gender deviations--the very issues that so stigmatize them. Seizer draws on extensive interviews with performers, sponsors, audience members, and drama agents as well as on careful readings of live Special Drama performances in considering the complexities of performers' lives both on stage and off.
Stik
by StikThe first collected volume of work from feted street artist Stik, fully illustrated and beautifully presented"Social change IS what art does. I don't know what else there is, to be honest. Social change seems to me the primary function of art. I feel that's my duty. That's why I'm here. That's what art is supposed to do." --STIK Stik first came to notoriety as an underground street artist who painted life-size stick figures during the night around London's East End. As a firm believer in the right to protest, the freedom of speech, and basic human rights, Stik has now painted murals in cities, towns, and villages all over the world, focusing his work in communities that face repression and disenfranchisement. Having gained an international following, Stik credits his audience with the intelligence to fill in the emotional details of his work, which always consists of just six lines and two dots. Each piece is a meditation. This is the first collected volume of his work to date. It reveals the political and artistic inspiration behind the work of one of the street art community's most brilliant and inspiring artists.The first edition includes an exclusive limited edition lithographic print inside the book, in either blue or orange.From the Hardcover edition.
Still Foolin' 'Em: Where I've Been, Where I'm Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys?
by Billy Crystal<P>Hilarious and heartfelt observations on aging from one of America's favorite comedians as he turns 65, and a look back at a remarkable career in this New York Times bestseller. <P>Billy Crystal is turning 65, and he's not happy about it. With his trademark wit and heart, he outlines the absurdities and challenges that come with growing old, from insomnia to memory loss to leaving dinners with half your meal on your shirt. In humorous chapters like "Buying the Plot" and "Nodding Off," Crystal not only catalogues his physical gripes, but offers a road map to his 77 million fellow baby boomers who are arriving at this milestone age with him. He also looks back at the most powerful and memorable moments of his long and storied life, from entertaining his relatives as a kid in Long Beach, Long Island, his years doing stand-up in the Village, up through his legendary stint at Saturday Night Live, When Harry Met Sally, and his long run as host of the Academy Awards. Readers get a front-row seat to his one-day career with the New York Yankees (he was the first player to ever "test positive for Maalox"), his love affair with Sophia Loren, and his enduring friendships with several of his idols, including Mickey Mantle and Muhammad Ali. He lends a light touch to more serious topics like religion ("the aging friends I know have turned to the Holy Trinity: Advil, bourbon, and Prozac"), grandparenting, and, of course, dentistry. As wise and poignant as they are funny, Crystal's reflections are an unforgettable look at an extraordinary life well lived.
Still Friends: 25 Years of the TV Show That Defined an Era
by Saul AusterlitzTwenty-five years on from when it first aired, Still Friends is an entertaining, fascinating and deeply researched behind-the-scenes look at the success of the hit show, Friends, featuring exclusive interviews with the show's creators, cast members and industry insiders. In September 1994, six friends sat down in their favourite coffee shop and began bantering. A quarter of a century later, new fans are still finding their way into the lives of Rachel, Ross, Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe, and thanks to a combination of talented creators, its intimate understanding of its youthful audience, and its reign during network television's last moment of dominance, Friends has become the most influential and beloved show of its era. Noted pop culture historian Saul Austerlitz is here to tell us how it happened. Utilizing exclusive interviews with creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman, executive producer Kevin Bright, director James Burrows, and many other producers, writers, and cast members, Still Friends tells the story of Friends' creation, its remarkable decade-long run, and its astonishing Netflix-fuelled afterlife. Readers will learn how the show was developed and cast, written and filmed. They'll be reminded of episodes like the one about the trivia contest, the prom video, and the London trip. And, of course, the saga of Ross and Rachel. They'll also discover surprising details: that Monica and Joey were the show's original romantic couple, how Danielle Steel probably saved Jennifer Aniston's career, and why Friends is still so popular today. On the 25th anniversary of this truly groundbreaking show, it's clear that Friends has a legacy that has endured beyond wildest expectations. And in this hilarious, informative, and entertaining book, readers will now understand why.As published in the US as Generation Friends.
Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch
by Alexandra JacobsA New Yorker Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year: A “genuinely irresistible” biography of Broadway legend Elaine Stritch (Buffalo News).A New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceStill Here is the first full telling of Elaine Stritch’s life. Rollicking but intimate, it tracks one of Broadway’s great personalities from her upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to her fateful move to New York City, where she studied alongside Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, and Harry Belafonte. We accompany Elaine through her jagged rise to fame, to Hollywood and London, and across her later years, when she enjoyed a stunning renaissance, punctuated by a turn on the popular television show 30 Rock. We explore the influential—and often fraught—collaborations she developed with Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, and above all Stephen Sondheim, as well as her courageous yet flawed attempts to control a serious drinking problem. And we see the entertainer triumphing over personal turmoil with the development of her Tony Award–winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, which established her as an emblem of spiky independence and Manhattan life for an entirely new generation of admirers.Following years of meticulous research and interviews, Alexandra Jacobs conveys the full force of Stritch’s sardonic wit and brassy charm while acknowledging her many dark complexities—and creates a portrait of a powerful, vulnerable, honest, and humorous star of stage and screen.“Studded with juicy anecdotes.” —The Washington Post“Provides a marvelous trip back in time to a Broadway that’s gone forever . . . compulsively readable.” —The Wall Street Journal“A chronicle of one impossible brilliant actor and the community around her, this biography provides a thoroughly entertaining and vividly drawn picture of show business in the 20th century.” —The New York Times Book ReviewIncludes photographs
Still Life Painting Atelier
by Michael FrielThe equivalent of a foundation course in traditional oil painting for beginning to intermediate level artists, this in-depth book uses the still life as a practical way to master oil techniques. The still life is a practical, forgiving genre as it does not require the likeness of a portrait or the accurate proportions of the figure and, unlike the landscape, it doesn't change with the weather. Instead, it gives aspiring artists ample time to study and the opportunity to look closer. It can be used as a purely formal subject for drawing and painting techniques, or a platform for emotional expression using personal symbolism and imagery. However, though the still life is used throughout as a teaching tool, this is first and foremost a book about oil painting. It begins with simple compositions that build to more complex arrangements. Starting with essential information on how to best set up your studio--including lighting, equipment, materials (paints, solvents, brushes, mediums), and preparing your canvas and paper for oil painting--Still Life Painting Atelier then offers concrete lessons in a logical progressive sequence, with step-by-step illustrations, finished paintings, diagrams and tips. Chapters cover: * How to address composition through thumbnail sketches and line drawings * Using underpainting to study the characteristics of light and shade * The basics of color theory and color mixing * How to use a variety of brushes to create sharp and soft edges * Techniques that are helpful when painting metal and glass * How to apply glazing and scumbling to bring luminosity and texture
Still Life Painting Studio: Gouache Painting Techniques to Capture the Beauty of Everyday Objects
by Elizabeth MayvilleA concise guide to putting more life into your still-life paintings with the vibrant colors of gouache. With clear information and beautiful illustrations, this short, simple guide to creating still-life pictures with gouache provides both easy-to-follow techniques and inspiration for artists of any skill level. You&’ll learn how to expand your palette with the bold options offered by this opaque watercolor paint, as well as finding tips for composing a scene and creating effects with cross painting, stippling, and more.
Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television
by Richard DienstTelevision can be imagined in a number of ways: as a profuse flow of images, as a machine that produces new social relationships, as the last lingering gasp of Western metaphysical thinking, as a stuttering relay system of almost anonymous messages, as a fantastic construction of time. Richard Dienst engages each of these possibilities as he explores the challenge television has posed for contemporary theories of culture, technology, and media.Five theoretical projects provide Still Life in Real Time with its framework: the cultural studies tradition of Raymond Williams; Marxist political economy; Heideggerian existentialism; Derridean deconstruction; and a Deleuzian anatomy of images. Drawing lessons from television programs like Twin Peaks and Crime Story, television events like the Gulf War, and television personalities like Madonna, Dienst produces a remarkable range of insights on the character of the medium and on the theories that have been affected by it.From the earliest theorists who viewed television as a new metaphor for a global whole, a liberal technology empty of ideological or any other content, through those who saw it as a tool for consumption, making time a commodity, to those who sense television's threat to being and its intimate relation to power, Dienst exposes the rich pattern of television's influence on philosophy, and hence on the deepest levels of contemporary experience.A book of theory, Still Life in Real Time will compel the attention of all those with an interest in the nature of the ever present, ever shifting medium and its role in the thinking that marks our time.
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
by Mark DotyMark Doty's prose has been hailed as "tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene" (The New York Times Book Review) and "achingly beautiful" (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Still Life with Tornado
by A. S. King<P>A heartbreaking and mindbending story of a talented teenage artist's awakening to the brokenness of her family from critically acclaimed award-winner A.S. King. <P>Sixteen-year-old Sarah can't draw. This is a problem, because as long as she can remember, she has "done the art." She thinks she's having an existential crisis. And she might be right; she does keep running into past and future versions of herself as she wanders the urban ruins of Philadelphia. Or maybe she's finally waking up to the tornado that is her family, the tornado that six years ago sent her once-beloved older brother flying across the country for a reason she can't quite recall. <P>After decades of staying together "for the kids" and building a family on a foundation of lies and domestic violence, Sarah's parents have reached the end. Now Sarah must come to grips with years spent sleepwalking in the ruins of their toxic marriage. As Sarah herself often observes, nothing about her pain is remotely original--and yet it still hurts. <p>Insightful, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful, this is a vivid portrait of abuse, survival, resurgence that will linger with readers long after the last page. </p>
Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum
by Fernando Domínguez RubioHow do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still. As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.
Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum
by Fernando Domínguez RubioHow do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still. As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.
Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum
by Fernando Domínguez RubioHow do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still. As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.