"Taboo: The Art of Tiki" is at once a curatorial flourish and a cultural document: a small, handsome volume that archives a particular late-20th-century fascination with Pacific iconography as refracted through the sensibilities of Lowbrow and pop-surrealist artists. Edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten, and credited with contributions from figures … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra
Masters: Earthenware arrives not as a dry handbook but as a museum catalogue written in the idiom of the studio. Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra, the volume assembles compact, richly illustrated mini-retrospectives that together argue for earthenware as a lively, experimental, and emotionally capacious medium rather than a mere step on … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret
Gilles Néret’s compact monograph—published in Taschen’s widely circulated Basic Art series under the title Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns—functions less as a revisionist manifesto than as a lucid, image-forward argument for a familiar claim: that Manet inaugurates modern painting by refusing the consolations of academic narrative and classical imitation. The central … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
Earth Fire Soul is less a conventional catalogue and more a sustained meditation on making. The book stages Korean ceramics as a living conversation among three inevitable forces — the clay (earth), the kiln (fire), and the human presence that lends works their inward breath (soul). Organized around the masterpieces held by the National Museum … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
Night of the Tiki arrives as a small, smartly produced argument in the idiom of the coffee-table book: it stakes a curatorial claim with images, short essays, and selection rather than a long, linear history. What it proposes—clearly, and with a kind of tasteful provocation—is that postwar American “Tiki” is neither mere kitsch nor purely … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Potter’s Studio Handbook by Kristin Müller
Kristin Müller’s Potter’s Studio Handbook is the sort of practical-intellectual hybrid that appears, at first glance, to belong strictly to the bench: measured lists, sequences of photographs, and angled hands shaping clay. Read closely, however, it reveals itself as a small pedagogical manifesto — a sustained argument about how technique, habit, and deliberate constraints generate … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Potter’s Studio Handbook by Kristin Müller
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott
The Penland Book of Ceramics reads like a field diary kept at the intersection of craft pedagogy and artistic confession. Edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott and assembled from the teaching tradition of the Penland School of Crafts, this handsome volume (Lark Books, 2003) aims not simply to catalogue techniques but to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab-Built Ceramics by Coll Minogue
Coll Minogue’s Slab-Built Ceramics presents itself — and persuades — as more than a how-to manual: it is a meditation on process, an argument about the expressive possibilities lodged in a single, humble slab of clay. Read as a craft text, it is pedagogically rigorous; read as an artist’s tract, it is provocatively poetic. Read … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab-Built Ceramics by Coll Minogue
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
Maureen Mills’s Surface Design for Ceramics reads like a compact manifesto for the small, concentrated art of ornamentation — not a polemic but a pedagogy: a careful, image-rich argument that the surface of a vessel is not mere decoration appended to a form but an active partner in meaning-making. Presented as one of the practical … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
Gene McHugh’s 500 Paper Objects performs the deceptively ambitious work of making a single, humble material speak with the variety and insistence of a chorus. Arranged as a dense visual catalogue rather than a sustained monograph, the book stages paper not as a passive substrate but as an active agent: folded, torn, cast, burned, layered, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
The New Renaissance Mindset 