Virtual Book Displays

The San Francisco Bay Area's art community was thriving until the Great Depression strangled commerce in the 1930s. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal art programs brought relief to many talented but financially strapped artists. Their legacy, and that of the New Deal, adorns the walls and halls of many public spaces throughout the region. Murals cover the lobbies of the Coit Memorial Tower, the Beach Chalet, and the Aquatic Park Bathhouse (today's San Francisco Maritime Museum) and decorate many public schools and post offices. Today, almost all of this wonderful art can be viewed by the public, free of charge.

Twenty-nineteen marks the 25th anniversary of Maestrapeace, the monumental mural that adorns two sides of the Women's Building in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood. Weaving in myriad female figures, historical and sacred, this public art work highlights women's accomplishments across time and continents, and envisions a world healed of injustices. This book allows readers to take an extended tour of the mural, revealing intricacies and nuances that may go unnoticed from a street-level view.

The boldly political mural projects of Diego Rivera and other leftist artists in San Francisco during the 1930s and early 1940s are the focus of Anthony W. Lee's fascinating book. Led by Rivera, these painters used murals as a vehicle to reject the economic and political status quo and to give visible form to labor and radical ideologies, including Communism. Several murals, and details of others, are reproduced here for the first time. Lee examines how mural painters struggled against those forces that threatened their practice: the growing acceptance of modernist easel painting, the vagaries of New Deal patronage, and a wartime nationalism hostile to radical politics.

With 600 stunning photographs, this comprehensive book showcases more than three decades of street art in San Francisco's legendary Mission District. Beginning in the early 1970s, a provocative street-art movement combining elements of Mexican mural painting, surrealism, pop art, urban punk, eco-warrior, cartoon, and graffiti has flourished in this dynamic, multicultural community. Essays and commentaries by insiders involved with the movement document the artistic, social, and political forces that have shaped Mission Muralismo.

The Chicano Civil Rights Movement (El Movimiento) of the 1960s and 1970s protested the social, political, and educational inequalities in Mexican American communities across the country, primarily in the Southwest. Chicana/Chicano muralists also took to the streets--with their art--creating works that expressed cultural pride, embodied political activism, and challenged the status quo. On walls of city buildings, housing projects, schools, and other community structures, they painted their interpretations of Chicana/o heritage and identity. In Los Angeles and its environs, Chicana/o murals reinvigorated and transformed communities, expanding into new genres and locations. This book tells the stories of eight Chicana/o murals from the 1970s to the 1990s.

The Wall of Respect was a revolutionary mural created by fourteen members of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) on the South Side of Chicago in 1967. This book includes photographs by Darryl Cowherd, Bob Crawford, Roy Lewis, and Robert A. Sengstacke, and gathers historic essays, poetry, and previously unpublished primary documents from the movement's founders that provide a guide to the work's creation and evolution. The Wall of Respect offers, in one keepsake-quality work, an unsurpassed collection of images and essays that illuminate a powerful monument that continues to fascinate artists, scholars, and readers in Chicago and across the United States.

Chicago is home to more intact African American street murals from the 1970s and '80s than any other U.S. city. Among Chicago's greatest muralists is the legendary William "Bill" Walker (1927-2011), compared by art historians to Diego Rivera and called the most accomplished contemporary practitioner of the classical mural tradition. Featuring forty-three color images of Walker's work, most long since destroyed or painted over, this handsome edition reveals the artist who was the primary figure behind Chicago's famed Wall of Respect and who created numerous murals that depicted African American historical figures, protested social injustice, and promoted love, respect, racial unity, and community change.

Diego Rivera's America revisits a historical moment when the famed muralist and painter, more than any other artist of his time, helped forge Mexican national identity in visual terms and imagined a shared American future in which unity, rather than division, was paramount.

Early in the Depression, Diego Rivera was commissioned by Edsel Ford to create a series of murals in the gallery of the Detroit Institute of Arts, giant frescos whose theme would be America's industrial might. This volume studies the astonishing results and gives us a remarkably close look at Diego and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Rivera's Detroit Industry murals are one of this country's greatest treasures. In addition to providing full coverage and analysis of the murals, the book includes chapters on the murals' planning and antecedents, Rivera's working methods (which can be read as a primer on frescos), Diego and Frida's lives for their nine months in Detroit, and the public's dramatic response to the strong socialist/communist themes in the works.

Among the Mexican muralists working in this country during the 1920s and 1930s, including the giants Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the paintings of José Clemente Orozco are arguably the strongest and most politically charged. All of Orozco's North American work is presented here, with discussions on his life and influences as well as his place among the other Mexican artists and his impact on the exuberant art of the 1960s and 1970s.

The beaux-arts mural movement in America was fueled by energetic young artists and architects returning from training abroad. They were determined to transform American art and architecture to make them more thematically cosmopolitan and technically fluid and accomplished. The Virgin and the Dynamo is the first book in almost a century to concentrate exclusively on the beaux-arts mural movement in the United States. Professor Van Hook explores different aspects of the mural movement, the concept and meaning of "decoration," the claim that murals are inherently democratic, the shift in preference from allegory to history, the gendered concept of modernity, the ideologies behind the iconography, and, finally, the decline of the movement when it began to be seen as old fashioned and anachronistic.

A photo-collage of past and present street visuals in Asia, Aestheticizing Public Space explores the domestic, regional, and global nexus of East Asian cities through their graffiti, street art, and other visual forms in public space. Attempting to unfold the complex positions of these images in the urban spatial politics of their respective regions, Lu Pan explores how graffiti in East Asia reflects the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The book situates itself in a contested dynamic relationship among human bodies, visual modernity, social or moral norms, styles, and historical experiences and narratives.

In Graffiti: Vandalism, Street Art and Cultural Significance, the authors present the experiences of five graffiti writers, exposing themes of resistance against societal rules. Next, the books examine an event that happened during a graffitti workshop with youths in a city in the South of Brazil. Next, the authors present a study on graffiti art in a skate park in Malta, with the goal of exploring some of the functions the artworks serve. The authors suggest that graffiti art in designated spaces could potentially reverse the association of graffiti with social unrest, fear, vandalism and crime. Following this, the book analyzes graffiti and street-art production of the extreme right-wing groups in Slovenia. The concluding study explores the efficiency of the laser cleaning of graffiti spray paints on different types of stone.

What is graffiti? And why have we, as a culture, had the urge to do it since 30,000 BCE? Artist Fiona McDonald explores the ways in which graffiti works to forever compel and simultaneously repel us as a society. When did graffiti turn into graffiti art, and why do we now pay thousands of dollars for a Banksy print when just twenty years ago, seminal graffiti artists from the Bronx were thrown into jail for having the same idea? Learn about more graffiti artists and rebels such as: the band Black Flag, Lee Quinones and Fab 5 Freddy, Dandi, Zephyr, Blek le Rat, Nunca, Keith Haring, and more!

An authoritative guide to the most significant artists, schools, and styles of street art and graffiti around the world. The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti is the definitive survey of international street art, focusing on the world's most influential urban artists and artworks. This book emphasizes urban art's powerful commitment to a spontaneous creativity that is inherently connected to the architecture of the metropolis.

The community murals those artists painted in the barrios of East Los Angeles were a powerful part of that cultural vitality, and these artworks have been an important feature of LA culture ever since. This book offers detailed analyses of individual East LA murals, sets them in social context, and explains how they were produced. The authors, leading experts on mural art, use a distinctive methodology, analyzing the art from aesthetic, political, and cultural perspectives to show how murals and graffiti reflected and influenced the Chicano civil rights movement.

Examining their social, political, and economic contexts, McKay shows how the murals of this period glorified Canada as a modern nation state, extolled the virtues of commerce and industry, inculcated conventions of gender and race, and shared the intensity of nationalistic sentiment that led to the work of the more renowned painters of Toronto's Group of Seven. This generously illustrated book reproduces seldom-seen works from across the country, many of which have been moved or destroyed, and includes a comprehensive listing of all works from the period, their original and present locations, and their state of preservation.

Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's African American churches and neighborhoods. Throughout, she reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery.

John Thomas Biggers (1924–2001) was one of the most significant African American artists of the twentieth century. He was known for his murals, but also for his drawings, paintings, and lithographs, and was honored by a major traveling retrospective exhibition from 1995 to 1997. He created archetypal imagery that spoke positively to the rich and varied ethnic heritage of African Americans, long before the Civil Rights era drew attention to their African cultural roots. His influence upon other artists was profound, both for the power of his art and as professor and elder statesman to younger generations.