American Encounters is a long-awaited dynamic new narrative of the history of American art that focuses on historical encounters among diverse cultures, upon broad structural transformations such as the rise of the middle classes and the emergence of consumer and mass culture, and on the fluid exchanges between “high” art and vernacular expression. The text emphasizes the intersections among cultures and populations, as well as the influences, borrowings, and appropriations that have enriched and vitalized our collective cultural heritage. There was a readily perceived need for an up-to-date survey of American art that addressed the thematic, cultural, and historical concerns of the field in the 21st century. American Encounters offers a new narrative of American art organized around the theme of cross-cultural exchanges. It locates America at the cross-roads of cultural encounters between Asia, Africa, Europe, and the New World, for over five centuries. The authors do not treat traditions separately, rather they explore how peoples and cultures encounter and influence each other and then evolve based on an exchange of ideas, materials etc.

American Encounters

Arts & Photography

Miller, Angela L.

Berlo, Janet C.

Wolf, Bryan

Roberts, Jennifer L.

History & Criticism

Pearson

Robert Smithson (1938-1973), an artist of paramount importance in postwar America, created radical new perspectives for landscape architecture, photography, art criticism, and site-specific installation. His Spiral Jetty-a 1,500-foot-long coil of rock built in 1970 at the edge of the Great Salt Lake-is widely appreciated as one of the most significant art projects of the twentieth century. Less well known is the connection between the Jetty and the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, location of the completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. The link between these two monuments is but one facet of an entire complex of historical reference and reflection that structures Smithson's work. Mirror-Travels encompasses the full span of Smithson's career, offering a close analysis of the artist's working model of history and featuring comprehensive case studies of three of his most influential works: "The Monuments of Passaic," "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," and the Spiral Jetty. Incorporating abundant new material from Smithson's personal papers and library, Jennifer Roberts offers surprising new interpretations about the artist and his responses to the social, ideological, and material contradictions of his time.

Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History

Yale University Press

The first comprehensive overview of Jasper Johns’s work in an innovative medium that the artist has singlehandedly redefined over the course of four decades Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is arguably the most important living American artist, and his work is central to any history of postwar art. With extensive new scholarship based on original research and interviews with the artist, Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Monotypes provides the definitive account of his groundbreaking work in an intrinsically subversive medium situated between painting, drawing, and printmaking. Susan Dackerman and Jennifer L. Roberts examine Johns’s innovative use of the printing press to create alterity, overturning monotype’s long-standing reputation for subjectivity. Featured in this volume are all 143 monotypes Johns made between 1954 and June 2015, most of them published here for the first time. Each work is generously illustrated in color and accompanied by complete cataloguing information, including technical specifications, provenance, exhibition history, and bibliographic references.

Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Monotypes

Dackerman, Susan

Individual Artists

Other Distribution

Transporting Visions follows pictures as they traveled through and over the swamps, forests, towns, oceans, and rivers of British America and the United States between 1760 and 1860. Taking seriously the complications involved in moving pictures through the physical world―the sheer bulk and weight of canvases, the delays inherent in long-distance reception, the perpetual threat to the stability and mnemonic capacity of images, the uneasy mingling of artworks with other kinds of things in transit―Jennifer L. Roberts forges a model for a material history of visual communication in early America. Focusing on paintings and prints by John Singleton Copley, John James Audubon, and Asher B. Durand―which were designed with mobility in mind―Roberts shows how an analysis of such imagery opens new perspectives on the most fundamental problems of early American commodity circulation, geographic expansion, and social cohesion.

Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America

University of California Press

Contact: Art and the Pull of Print (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts)

Princeton University Press

Revealing rarely seen work alongside her iconic looped-wire sculptures, this catalogue celebrates Ruth Asawa’s unique vision and intimate subject matter.\nKnown for her intricate and distinct artistic language, Asawa produced numerous sculptures, drawings, and prints that are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Her works on paper and “continuous” looped-wire sculptures suggest a field of fluctuating positive and negative forms, a means of reshaping how we perceive the world. Personal motifs reappear throughout in the most comprehensive look at the artist’s oeuvre to date––ceramic casts of faces of her family, friends, and neighbors; the carved front door Asawa and her family made for their home; and drawings of her children, grandchildren, and husband sleeping––all providing an expansive look into the artist’s life.\nA document of the breathtaking and surprising exhibition Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, organized by Helen Molesworth, this book records and expands upon the show, offering new insight from writers and curators with a selection of sixty-four works from Asawa’s spectacular oeuvre. With an introduction by Molesworth, this book features focused texts from Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau.

Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible

YAU, John

Fer, Briony

Asawa, Ruth

Erickson, Ruth

Best, Makeda

Davis, Taylor

David Zwirner Books

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Books by Roberts, Jennifer L.