The Life and Art of Anne Eisner: An American Artist Between Cultures

(Officina Libraria, 2020)

By Christie McDonald

A biography of Anne Eisner: from her early years and art in New York to the Ituri Forest in the Congo with Patrick Putnam, and back again.

This biography traces Anne Eisner's life and art between cultures: from her early years and artistic career in New York, through living at the edge of the Ituri Forest in the ex-Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), to her return to New York.

Eisner came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, with the struggle among artists and intellectuals to combat fascism and create a better world. Leaving behind a successful career as a painter, Anne followed anthropologist Patrick Putnam, with whom she fell in love, to the multi-cultural community of Epulu. As an American woman and painter, her focus on cultural and aesthetic values, her belief in freedom and equality, brought an eccentric perspective to the colonial context. Unanticipated challenges forced her to think about who she was, as she agreed to marry under unfamiliar conditions, became one of the mothers, hosted researchers and tourists, and attempted to care for Putnam in his tragic decline. That her art sustained her throughout as a discipline (sketching, drawing, painting) reveals to what extent Anne was able to express joy in creativity; the beauty of her art testifies to its transformative power.

Women and Jews in the Sachsenspiegel Picture-Books

(Brepols Publisher, 2019)

By M. H. Caviness and C. G. Nelson

A Germanist and an art historian examine the pictures and text in the four densely illustrated manuscripts of the Sachsenspiegel that were produced in the century following its composition by Eike von Repgow. This is the first extensive study of these famous picture books in English. Using critical frameworks based on performative and feminist theory, the authors give detailed consideration to the social differences reshaped and maintained by text and image. Although Eike’s project, realized in the early 1220s, was concerned with peaceful interaction between diverse groups, including Slavic Wends as well as Germans, and with the provision of guardians for the young, the handicapped and the judicially impaired, his text is open to subversion by the images. Changing emphases in the pictures accord with changing attitudes to women and Jews in the period of production of these works, between c. 1300 and 1360. A burgeoning book culture in the fourteenth century carried Eike’s law into the town halls at a time when the German cities were increasingly Christianized; market churches were constructed in the judicial and economic hub even as Synagogues disappeared from town centres during the pogroms. The market complex became part of the material culture of the law.

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post Slavery Subjects

(Duke University Press Books, 2010)

By Christina Sharpe

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Museums and Public Art: A Feminist Vision

By Hilde Hein

As professor of Philosophy at Holy Cross College, Hilde Hein expanded her study and teaching of Aesthetics to include museums, and then feminist theory and public art. The essays assembled in this book reflect the blending of these topics over a period of several decades. Some of the essays have been previously published; others were presented as public lectures. Combining analysis and advocacy, the book proposes that museums follow a trajectory taken by public art, replacing veneration of the heroic with respectful appreciation of the transient and variable. "Add women and stir" is not good enough.

Frida Kahlo (Critical Lives Series)

(Reaktion Books, London and University of Chicago Press, 2013)

By Gannit Ankori

Frida Kahlo is a legendary figure in modern art: images of and by Kahlo, both photographs and self-portraits, are recognized world-wide. This book explores the life and art of Frida Kahlo, cutting through ‘Fridamania’ to look closely at the myths, contradictions and ambiguities that riddle her story. Based on detailed analyses of the artist’s paintings, drawings, diary, personal letters, photographs, medical records and first-hand interviews with her surviving relatives and friends, Gannit Ankori examines Kahlo’s life, illuminating the reasons for her posthumous iconic status, and assessing her critical impact on contemporary art and culture.
Throughout Kahlo’s life she was emphatically of her time, deeply immersed in the political, social, scientific and cultural issues that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Yet as this book reveals Kahlo was also ahead of her time. Many of the themes with which she engaged through her paintings – related to gender, cross-dressing, identity politics, the body, religion – were considered marginal during her lifetime, but are central concerns in the twenty-first century, decades after her death. Kahlo’s art conjures up timeless issues that relate to the human condition and which transcend any biography. 
For anyone interested in Kahlo, this is an original and succinct account of the life, work, and artistic legacy of a hugely popular artist.

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora

(Berghahn Books, 2013)

By Ping-Ann Addo

Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation— fonua—which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the “multi-territorial nation,” the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.