OCAD U Library 2017 Summer: Collections

Architecture and Ritual explores how the varied rituals of everyday life are framed and defined in space by the buildings which we inhabit. It penetrates beyond traditional assumptions about architectural style, aesthetics and utility to deal with something more implicit: how buildings shape and reflect our experience in ways of which we remain unconscious.Whether designed to house a grand ceremony or provide shelter for a daily meal, all buildings coordinate and consolidate social relations by giving orientation and focus to the spatial practices of those who use them. Peter Blundell Jones investigates these connections between the social and the spatial, providing critical insights into the capacity for architecture to structure human ritual, from the grand and formal to the mundane. This is achieved through deep readings of individual pieces of architecture, each with a detailed description of its particular social setting and use. The case studies are drawn from throughout architectural history and from around the globe, each enabling a distinct theoretical theme to emerge, and showing how social conventions vary with time and place, as well as what they have in common. Case studies range from the Nuremberg Rally to the Centre Pompidou, and from the Palace of Westminster to Dogon dwellings in Africa and a Modernist hospital.In considering how all architecture has to mesh with the habits, beliefs, rituals and expectations of the society that created it, the book presents deep implications for our understanding of architectural history and theory. It also highlights the importance for architects of understanding how buildings frame social space before they prescribe new architectural designs of their own. The book ends with a recent example of user participation, showing how contemporary user interest and commitment to a building can be as strong as ever.

"This book is the first to explore handicrafting practiced by media fans, their online fan communities and the multiple meanings they create. Based on in-depth ethnographic research into fans on the online social network for knitters, crocheters and crafters, Ravelry, Brigid Cherry explores textile craft by fans as both an artistic practice and transformative fan work." - From the publisher.

"A model of excellence in the art of reference volume publishing... Every public and school library... should acquire this treasure. It will remain the standard for many years to come." --Dr. James A. Clifton, Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan University "This substantial reference remains one of the most elaborately illustrated books on Native Americans now in print... Highly recommended." --Library Journal This superb, fully illustrated reference offers the most up-to-date and essential facts on the identity, kinships, locations, populations and cultural characteristics of some 400 separately identifiable peoples native to the North American continent, both living and extinct, from the Canadian Arctic to the Rio Grande. The abundance of illustrations and photographs form an especially rich store of material describing the vast range of Native American material culture. The maps are valuable pictorial representations of major historical events. Population and settlement trends based on the most recent US Census paint detailed portraits of all officially recognized tribes. The book includes: More than 600 color and archival photographs Extensive visual coverage of tribal dress and cultural artifacts 46 maps, including prehistoric cultural and historic sites and tribe distribution maps, as well as maps showing movement of tribes and non-indigenous troops during conflicts More than 100 specially commissioned color illustrations. Comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date, Encyclopedia of Native Tribes of North America is an important and accessible record of the Native American peoples and an essential addition to all school and library collections.

Museums of all kinds - art, history, culture, science centers and heritage sites - are actively engaging with food through exhibitions, collections, and stories about food production, consumption, history, taste, and aesthetics. Food also plays a central role in their food courts, restaurants, cafes, gardens, and gift shops. Food and Museums is the first book to explore the diverse, complex relationship between museums and food. This edited collection features theoretical analysis from cultural historians, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and food studies scholars; interviews with museum professionals, artists and chefs; and critical case studies from a wide range of cultural institutions and museums to establish an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of the role of food in museums. Exploring the richness and complexity of sensory, cultural, social, and political significance of food today as well as in the past, the book demonstrates how food is changing the current museological landscape.A fascinating look at contemporary museums through the lens of food, this is an essential read for students and researchers in museum studies, food studies, cultural studies, and sensory studies as well as museum and food professionals.

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Little Mermaid (1839), a story about a girl from the sea who followed her dreams and suffered a disastrous fate on land, is known all over the world (particularly in its animated incarnation). But the familiar story is brought to new life in this gorgeous edition, a collaboration between the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and artist Yayoi Kusama. Paired with Hans Christian Andersen's original text, the densely patterned, undulating line drawings of Kusama's Love Forever series (2004-7) conjure up storms in the roiling waves of the ocean, the Little Mermaid's vast underwater kingdom and her longing to live in the human world. Kusama's fertile, endlessly repeating forms are an ideal match for the poetic and disturbing universe evoked in the fairy tale; the result is a true collaboration. Kusama's drawings both illustrate and interpret Andersen's story, bringing it to terrifying life, and Andersen's words lend narrative content to Kusama's landscapes of unblinking eyes, curling tendrils and disembodied profiles

"“Criticism is our censorship....” So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) wrote “Racontars de Rapin” only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained unpublished until 1951. Through discussions of numerous artists, both his contemporaries and predecessors, Gauguin unpacks what he viewed as the mistakes and misjudgments behind much of art criticism, revealing not only how wrong critics’ interpretations have been, but also what it would mean to approach art properly--to really look." - From the publisher.

This book examines the concepts of Post/Humanism and Transhumanism as depicted in superhero comics. Recent decades have seen mainstream audiences embrace the comic book Superhuman. Meanwhile there has been increasing concern surrounding human enhancement technologies, with the techno-scientific movement of Transhumanism arguing that it is time humans took active control of their evolution.  Utilising Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome as a non-hierarchical system of knowledge to conceptualize the superhero narrative in terms of its political, social and aesthetic relations to the history of human technological enhancement, this book draws upon a diverse range of texts to explore the way in which the posthuman has been represented in superhero comics, while simultaneously highlighting its shared historical development with Post/Humanist critical theory and the material techno-scientific practices of Transhumanism.

The textile and fashion industries globally produce millions of tons of solid waste every year through the many processes used - from yarn production, weaving, knitting, dyeing, and finishing, to apparel construction, quality inspection, and unsold goods - generating waste at each step. Typically, this waste is sent to landfills, incinerated or, at best, recycled in to low-quality fibres used for industrial applications. Scraps, timed to publish concurrently with Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum's exhibition of the same name, presents three designers' alternative approaches to the shockingly high human and environmental costs of textile industry waste. Inspired by the long tradition of using handcraft to give new life to scraps and cast-offs, each of the three featured designers - Christina Kim, Reiko Sudo and Luisa Cevese - takes an entirely different approach to contending with textile waste, but all make recycling an integral part of their design practice. The delicate beauty of the fabrics featured in Scraps ensure a seductive visual experience throughout the pages framing the exploration of sustainable design practices: using materials and resources efficiently, providing meaningful labour, sustaining local craft traditions and exploring new technologies as integral to the recycling process.

"A new book by influential urbanist Jane Jacobs, released in Jacobs' centenary, and showing her evolution as a writer and thinker. Vital Little Plans will bring together for the first time a selection of essays, articles, speeches and interviews by the late Jane Jacobs. These works shed light on the development of the ideas she made famous in her best-known works, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities, while expanding upon familiar themes with new insights. Some works also explore topics rarely directly addressed in her major works, from skyscrapers to feminism to universal health care to gentrification. Readers will find classics like her breakout article "Downtown Is for People" and a host of previously unpublished or obscure articles, speeches, and lectures that follow her entire career." - From the publisher

Aren't we all rendered speechless by the ultimate beauty that nature has to offer? Don't we all want to capture it and indulge in these images forever? To capture animals in all their glory in such a way that it shows every flamboyant, scintillating detail is a delicate art. This book gives an overview of the history, the myths and the symbolism, the process, the most wonderful collections and interiors, decorated as true Wunderkammers, and the craftsmen and artists from past and present who elevated taxidermy to fine art. AUTHOR: Jeroen Lemaitre (1987) is a young man from Leuven whose talent was discerned in 2014 by the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, a museum of the decorative arts and design in Paris. Since then, he has worked under the label of Animaux Speciaux (www.animauxspeciaux.be/artist/jeroen-lemaitre) progressing further with his creations using animals, insects and butterflies from the tropics. SELLING POINTS: * Weird and wonderful overview of the fine art of taxidermy, a world between reanimation and reincarnation * Responds to the growing interest in these cabinets of curiosity * In cooperation with the young talented Belgian, Jeroen Lemaitre 120 colour images