Böcker utgivna av The University of Chicago Press

The latest volume in the Metropolitan Museum Journal series. Founded in 1968, the Metropolitan Museum Journal is a blind, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published annually that features original research on the history, interpretation, conservation, and scientific examination of works of art in the Museum's collection. Its scope encompasses the diversity of artistic practice from antiquity to the present day. The Journal encourages contributions offering critical and innovative approaches that will further our understanding of works of art.

"Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction. Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them"--

"Tracy Fuad's second collection of poems, PORTAL, documents a life in which even the most intimate experiences are mediated by the flattening interface of technology and a world in which language is no longer produced solely by humans but by artificial intelligences as well. The poems circle the topics of replication, reproduction, and inheritance, and the way these processes are born out in language, history, and biology. In these poems, a baby is born; the world shrinks into tiny pockets under the new logic of contagion; two people are wed; the roses which washed up ashore centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. All of this is set against a backdrop of ecological ruin, of decimated chestnut trees and a beached baby whale. The collection mirrors the restless spirit of the present, shifting between voices and forms. At times the poems take the form of experimental essays, and elsewhere the sonnet is reimagined and reinvented as a disembodied voice from the distant future. A portal can be a way out or a way in-or a website at the center of many networked websites. These poems take delight in the strangeness of contemporary life, even as they grieve something intangible which has been lost"--

"This book traces the history of botanical illustration in the premodern Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to many practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The material is remarkable and varied, and the author draws on a vast range of manuscript material across Europe and the Mediterranean, over a long span of time. Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons assembles ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Eastern Mediterranean. The author reveals how many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations and manuscript culture actually appear in premodern manuscripts. Consequently, he demonstrates that the distinctions between pre- and early modern botanical illustration center more on the advent of print, and the narrowing of the range of accepted forms of illustration, than on the novel invention of critical and observational practices exclusive to modernity. Griebeler's emphasis on continuity, intercultural collaboration, and the gradual transformation of Mediterranean traditions of critical botanical illustration persuasively counters previously prevalent narratives of rupture and Western European exceptionalism in the histories of art and sciences"--