This unique book combines two catalogs in one. Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry represents the best of two juried exhibitions held at the Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio.

Beads have long been worn as jewelry, but in Bead International 2008 contemporary bead artists are shaking things up. From fine jewelry to loom weaving to sculpture, the sixty-eight pieces by fifty-one artists in this collection represent some of the most innovative and well-executed art in the modern beading world. Considering any pierced object to be a bead, pieces range in style from the traditional to the whimsical as they incorporate a variety of colors and materials. This vibrant collection will spark the reader’s creativity and broaden his or her perspective.

When the age-old art form of basketry is combined with contemporary visions and techniques, the result is the striking Beyond Basketry, a collection of sixty-five artworks created by forty-two artists from across the United States. The artworks represented in these beautiful color photographs will challenge the reader’s ideas of what constitutes a basket. All artworks are vessels made of woven materials, but the pieces explore a variety of sizes, colors, shapes, and techniques

Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door examines the thirty-eight-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (born in Knoxville, 1901; died in Paris, 1979) and writer James Baldwin (born in New York, 1924; died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1987) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped each other’s creative output and worldview. This full-color publication documents the groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) and is drawn from the KMA’s extensive Delaney holdings, from public and private collections around the country, and from unpublished photographs and papers held by the Knoxville-based estate of Beauford Delaney. This book seeks to identify and disentangle the skein of influences that grew over and around a complex, lifelong relationship with a selection of Delaney’s works that reflects the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney’s life. While no other figure in Beauford Delaney’s extensive social orbit approaches James Baldwin in the extent and duration of influence, none of the major exhibitions of Delaney’s work has explored in any depth the creative exchange between the two.
            The volume also includes essays by Mary Campbell, whose research currently focuses on James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney within the context of the civil rights movement; Glenn Ligon, an internationally acclaimed New York-based artist with intimate knowledge of Baldwin’s writings, Delaney’s art, and American history and society; Levi Prombaum, a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who did his doctoral research at University College London on Delaney’s portraits of James Baldwin; and Stephen Wicks, the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator, who has guided the KMA’s curatorial department for over 25 years and was instrumental in building the world’s largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney’s art at the KMA.
 

Caroline Vaughan’s photographs offer inspired and surprising visions of landscapes, still lifes, and the human form. In Borrowed Time, her images of nature and people, sometimes surreal and often arresting, follow each other to create a visual poem of opposition and likeness, physical beauty and balance. Compelling the viewer’s attention with delicate rich tones and meticulous technique, she holds the viewer’s gaze even when her subject is difficult. Most highly acclaimed for her psychologically complex but subtle portraits of family, friends, loved ones, and strangers, Vaughan’s work, though widely published and displayed, is collected here for the first time.

In the early 1940s as the conflict between the Axis and the Allies spread worldwide, the U.S. State Department turned its attention to Axis influence in Latin America. As head of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller was charged with cultivating the region’s support for the Allies while portraying Brazil and its neighbors as dependable wartime partners. Genevieve Naylor, a photojournalist previously employed by the Associated Press and the WPA, was sent to Brazil in 1940 by Rockefeller’s agency to provide photographs that would support its need for propaganda. Often balking at her mundane assignments, an independent-minded Naylor produced something far different and far more rich—a stunning collection of over a thousand photographs that document a rarely seen period in Brazilian history. Accompanied by analysis from Robert M. Levine, this selection of Naylor’s photographs offers a unique view of everyday life during one of modern Brazil’s least-examined decades.
Working under the constraints of the Vargas dictatorship, the instructions of her employers, and a chronic shortage of film and photographic equipment, Naylor took advantage of the freedom granted her as an employee of the U.S. government. Traveling beyond the fashionable neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, she conveys in her work the excitement of an outside observer for whom all is fresh and new—along with a sensibility schooled in depression-era documentary photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, as well as the work of Cartier-Bresson and filmmaker Serge Eisenstein. Her subjects include the very rich and the very poor, black Carnival dancers, fishermen, rural peasants from the interior, workers crammed into trolleys—ordinary Brazilians in their own setting—rather than simply Brazilian symbols of progress as required by the dictatorship or a population viewed as exotic Latins for the consumption of North American travelers.
With Levine’s text providing details of Naylor’s life, perspectives on her photographs as social documents, and background on Brazil’s wartime relationship with the United States, this volume, illustrated with more than one hundred of Naylor’s Brazilian photographs will interest scholars of Brazilian culture and history, photojournalists and students of photography, and all readers seeking a broader perspective on Latin American culture during World War II.

Genevieve Naylor began her career as a photojournalist with Time, Fortune, and the Associated Press before being sent to Brazil. In 1943, upon her return, she became only the second woman to be the subject of a one-woman show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She served as Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal photographer and, in the 1950s and 1960s became well known for her work in Harper’s Bazaar, primarily as a fashion photographer and portraitist. She died in 1989.