The goal is to record most books written or edited by the Gwen Frostic School of Art faculty. There is a WMU Authors section in Waldo Library, where most of these books can be found.
With a few exceptions, we do not have the rights to put the full text of the book online, so there will be a link to a place where you can purchase the book.
If you are a faculty member and have a book you would like to include in the WMU book list, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu
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Inventing the World: How Art Creates Reality
Paul Solomon
Inventing the World: How Art Creates Reality demonstrates to readers how art has been central to culture throughout human history. The book emphasizes the events, artists, and cultural milestones that have most influenced life in the United States as we know it today. The book narrates the compelling story of how artists have created the world we live in. The story unfolds in 12 chapters of text illustrated with over 200 photographs and embedded with videos that feature the lives and works of contemporary and historical artists. Cross-disciplinary in nature, readers are challenged to make connections between the arts and social, religious, technological, scientific, and political topics. Dedicated chapters examine storytelling, spectacle, immigration and identity, the intersections of art and science, art as a social tool, and much more. Featuring meaningful examples that epitomize the power of art in our everyday lives, Inventing the World is an ideal textbook for courses and programs in the humanities and art.
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Ergo Sum: A Crow a Day
Karen Bondarchuk
Ergo Sum: A Crow a Day is a visual chronicle of a daughter's experience of her mother's decline with Alzheimer's disease. By creating a drawing each day for a year, the artist Karen Bondarchuk attempted to both signify and substantiate the days that her mother, Yvonne, no longer seemed to comprehend. The images display an emotional range--from humorous and quirky to confused, doleful, and chaotic--that invokes the constellation of feelings one often encounters in dealing with a loved one in cognitive decline. This book contains full color reproductions of all 365 drawings and an essay by the artist.
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The Windows of Kanley Memorial Chapel
Sherwood Snyder
An alumnus of Western Michigan University who in 1957 designed one of Kanley Memorial Chapel’s 72 student-designed stained glass windows embarked on a project last year to identify all the artists who created them so many years ago.
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Joseph De Luca: Selected Works: Five Decades (Drawings, Paintings, Constructions)
Joseph De Luca and Anne Leonardi
Subtitle from cover.
Catalog of a retrospective exhibition held in Gallery Fifty of Building Fifty at the Grand Traverse Commons in Traverse City, Michigan. "Three dimensional constructions and other works executed [from 1958-2010] were added to give the catalog greater continuity"--P. iii. -
Wearing Wealth and Styling Identity: Tapis from Lampung, South Sumatra, Indonesia
Mary Louise Totton
Located between the two maritime routes connecing East and West Asia, Sumatra, the fabled Isle of Gold, was for centuries the source for much of the world's pepper. In the southern tip of Sumatra, the peoples of Lampung, or "Pepperland," poured the profits of their trade into ceremonial materials and adornments. The ornate tubular sarongs known as tapis were hand-woven from cotton and silk threads, colored with ancestral dye recipes, embellished with gold- and silver-wrapped threads, embroidered with silk or pineapple fiber threads, and appliqued with mirrors and mica. These sumptuous garments communicated a family's global contacts, social station, and clan identity. Mary-Louise Totton writes about the history, materials and techniques, content and imagery, and present-day contexts of these extraordinary textiles.
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Fiber Face: Cross-Cultural Batik Collaborations, Indonesia 2008
Agus Ismoyo, Nia Fliam, and Mary-Louise Totton
"In essence our world cultures are one and have arisen from the strength of the mind and the spirit of humankind and are based on the philosophies and cosmologies that are their roots. Ancient traditional cultures give evidence of this process and are roadmaps for the future." —Nia Fliam and Agus Ismoyo Isnugroho This team of artists has been working across visible and invisible boundaries since 1985 when they established their fine-art batik studio, Brahma Tirta Sari, in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. Nia, an American educated at Pratt Institute of New York, and Ismoyo, educated in an Indonesian industrial academy, translate the name of their studio to mean "creativity as the source of all knowledge."[1] In 2005 they created a "culture house," Babaran Segaragunung, to support their exploration of traditional cultures. We are very proud to have Nia and Ismoyo as artists-in-residence at Western Michigan University during the 2007-2008 school year—funded by the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence program, the Haenicke Institute for Global Education, and the Frostic School of Art. Nia and Ismoyo are both artists and cultural explorers. Their art expresses their deep understanding of traditional Indonesian batik—once a royal art form intertwined with ancient philosophies about life and creative process. Their contemporary fine art textiles are intricate and time intensive. They have exhibited in many prestigious exhibitions around the world, and worked with many distinguished curators. Since 1994 they have researched, taught, and worked in collaboration with Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, Indonesian street youths, and various African, Asian and Australian artists.
[1] Brahma, is the Hindu world creator deity and as the chief priest is the best source of knowledge, Tirta is the name of a sacred water source, and Sari, translates as essence.
*from WMU Frostic School of Art website.
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The Museum Experience - Midwest
Scott Douglass and Cat Crotchett
The Museum Experience is now available by regions of the country and can be bundled with new copies of the text at no extra charge! This practical handbook will enrich any student's museum visit, providing everything from a primer on museum etiquette to preparation tips on how to make the visit more constructive. Individual museums within the region are discussed including a review of its background, collection, and highlights. A handy appendix lists by state prominent museums throughout the U.S.
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Moped Army
Paul Sizer, Daniel R. Kastner, Simon King, and Jane Irwin
In the world of 2277, a girl named Simone is caught between her rich entitlement culture friends in the upper city and the gangs of moped riders who roam and patrol the lower city. She must decide in which world she wants to truly live and survive.
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Anglo-Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage
C. R. Dodwell
This book is concerned with the pictorial language of gesture revealed in Anglo-Saxon art, and its debt to classical Rome. The late Reginald Dodwell, an eminent art historian, notes a striking similarity of both form and meaning between Anglo-Saxon gestures and those in illustrated manuscripts of the plays of Terence, which, he argues, reflect actual Roman stage conventions. The extensively illustrated volume illuminates our understanding of the vigor of late Anglo-Saxon art and its ability to absorb and transpose continental influence.