Since ’45 details the collision of American history and modern art. Since World War II, New York has been the indisputable center of the art world, and as Katy Siegel shows, it has had a profound influence on the preoccupations that contemporary art would come to have. Tracing art history over the past decades, she shows how anxieties over race, mass culture, the individual, suburbia, apocalypse, and nuclear destruction have supplanted the legacy of European artistic traditions. Siegel’s study encompasses a variety of works, including Rothko’s planes of color, Warhol’s serial silkscreens, Richard Prince’s cowboys, Robert Longo’s Men in Cities, Faith Ringgold’s Black Light, and Laurie Simmons’s dollhouses, and moves fluidly from discussions of artists’ works, art museums, and galleries to cultural influences and significant historical events. Rather than arguing on nationalist grounds or viewing American culture as representative of a now-devalued nation, Siegel explores how American culture dominated not only American artists but created conditions that now, after the full globalization of the art world, affect artists around the world. Since ’45 will interest all readers engaged in post-war and contemporary art in the United States and beyond.

Gwendolyn Wright’s USA is an engaging account the evolution of American architecture, from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first.

Eva Zeisel was one of the twentieth century's most influential ceramicists and designers of modern housewares. Her distinctive take on modern industrial design was inspired by organic form and brought beauty and playfulness to housewares, earning her designs a beloved place in midcentury homes. This richly illustrated volume—the first-ever complete biographical account of Zeisel's life and work—presents an extensive survey of every line she ever created, all captured in gorgeous new photography, plus 28 short essays from scholars, collectors, curators, and designers. The definitive book on the grande dame of twentieth-century ceramics, this is an essential resource for anyone who appreciates modern design.

The American Design Adventurecontinues the fascinating and detailed examination of industrial design begun by Arthur Pulos in American Design Ethic. The first volume discussed and illustrated the objects and artifacts, the major designers and schools of design from Colonial times to the 1940s. This second splendidly illustrated volume carries the story into the heroic era of American industrial design, from the 1940s to the 1970s. These were the decades of American industrial design's dominance, when special exhibitions and world fairs made design a subject of national pride. Big business realized the influence that trademarks, packaging, and corporate identity programs could have on their bottom line, and the world of fashion created a consumer demand for name brands and well designed products. Industrial design flourished under the capable hands of Raymond Loewy and Charles Eames, while corporations like IBM, RCA, Herman Miller, and Knoll were sponsors of the great American design adventure. The extraordinary collection of illustrations that Pulos has assembled documents all of these important design trends while evoking the nostalgia of the 50s and 60s when Pop and Rock held sway. Pulos probes all aspects of industrial designers and their work - in education and private corporations, in professional organizations and governmental agencies. He also covers prefabricated housing, graphics, manufactured products from the exotic to the pragmatic, and public systems from the sociopolitical to the economic.

A critic takes issue with the art world's romanticizing of networks and participatory projects, linking them to the values of a globalized, neoliberal economy. Over the past twenty years, the network has come to dominate the art world, affecting not just interaction among art professionals but the very makeup of the art object itself. The hierarchical and restrictive structure of the museum has been replaced by temporary projects scattered across the globe, staffed by free agents hired on short-term contracts, viewed by spectators defined by their predisposition to participate and make connections. In this book, Lane Relyea tries to make sense of these changes, describing a general organizational shift in the art world that affects not only material infrastructures but also conceptual categories and the construction of meaning. Examining art practice, exhibition strategies, art criticism, and graduate education, Relyea aligns the transformation of the art world with the advent of globalization and the neoliberal economy. He analyzes the new networked, participatory art world—hailed by some as inherently democratic—in terms of the pressures of part-time temp work in a service economy, the calculated stockpiling of business contacts, and the anxious duty of being a “team player” at work. Relyea calls attention to certain networked forms of art—including relational aesthetics, multiple or fictive artist identities, and bricolaged objects—that can be seen to oppose the values of neoliberalism rather than romanticizing and idealizing them. Relyea offers a powerful answer to the claim that the interlocking functions of the network—each act of communicating, of connecting, or practice—are without political content.

How does photography shape the way we see sculpture? In David Smith in Two Dimensions, Sarah Hamill broaches this question through an in-depth consideration of the photography of American sculptor David Smith (1906Ð1965). Smith was a modernist known for radically shifting the terms of sculpture, a medium traditionally defined by casting, modeling, and carving. He was the first to use industrial welding as a sustained technique for large-scale sculpture, influencing a generation of minimalists to come. What is less known about Smith is his use of the camera to document his own sculptures as well as everyday objects, spaces, and bodies. His photographs of his sculptures were published in countless exhibition catalogs, journals, and newspapers, often as anonymous illustrations. Far from being neutral images, these photographs direct a pictorial encounter with spatial form and structure the public display of his work. David Smith in Two Dimensions looks at the sculptorÕs adoption of unconventional backdrops, alternative vantage points, and unusual lighting effects and exposures to show how he used photography to dramatize and distance objects. This comprehensive and penetrating account also introduces SmithÕs expansive archive of copy prints, slides, and negatives, many of which are seen here for the first time. Hamill proposes a new understanding of SmithÕs sculpture through photography, exploring issues that are in turn vital to discourses of modern sculpture, sculptural aesthetics, and postwar art. In SmithÕs photography, we see an artist moving fluidly between media to define what a sculptural object was and how it would be encountered publicly.